The black boxes of the pandemic

With the Covid-19 pandemic, epidemiological models have emerged from the shadows of research laboratories to guide governments around the world in organising their health response to the crisis. The models play a prescriptive role in the implementation of health measures. Faced with the unknown, they propose to geometrise what apparently has no form, no structure, no body, no behaviour and no boundaries: the pandemic event. Their challenge is, so to speak, to bend the hazards of contagion in all these dimensions, in order to detach them from the ignorance of the causes that determine them. Modelling aims to give the pandemic phenomenon the features of a law of nature and a social determinism. The heuristic dynamic that it engages in thus contributes to the construction of a social and political representation of the pandemic. This article analyses the obstacles that arise around modelling and the black box effects it generates.