The efficacy of scientific diagrams during the COVID-19 pandemic: processes of visual translation and dynamics of online diffusion

The outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic in 2020 led to an immediate and unprecedented media coverage of scientific and health issues. Experts and scientists were called upon to urgently communicate to citizens the extent of the danger and the measures required to contain it. They thus conceived and developed visual artifacts which could efficiently communicate scientific content to a wider public. This paper specifically examines the scientific chart that dominated the political and national health discourse particularly during the two weeks between March 8th and 21st 2020, and was linked to the slogan “Flatten the curve”. Long circulating in the narrow field of epidemiology, the diagram suddenly spread across the Internet and spilled over onto other media, subject to the progressive variations that made it less ambiguous and increasingly comprehensible to a wider audience. Its evolution, acceptance and circulation on the social networks offer an opportunity to observe how public opinion was formed around constellations of scientists working actively online. It furthermore makes it possible to observe the development of a language that oscillates dynamically between the verbal and the visual, building a common imagery that was used to support the rhetoric of political language. The scientific image is thus observed as effective, to the extent to which it prompts not only knowledge, but action as well, acquiring a performativity that projects it into a strategic-political dimension.