counting, monitoring, and enacting the pandemic (cf. Day, Lury, and Wakeford 2014) . The challenges and choices of enumerating the pandemic -also addressed and problematized as an "infodemic" (World Health Organization 2020), in which the authority of knowledge produced by public institutions is put into question -do not only affect lay people. Competing ways of counting and acting upon COVID-19 data have also foregrounded professional and expert disagreements and uncertainties (Ruppert, Isin,

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... nd Bigo 2019) as a critical challenge for the management of the pandemic. Incidence rates in particular, often expressed as the number of cases per 100,000 over a seven-day period, have come to be seen as a key metric for worldwide monitoring and comparison, for instance, in European politics and media coverage (e.g., in The Economist's [2021] section "Tracking the coronavirus across Europe"). The result, or at least an intended promise, of such a metric has been to offer a standardized mechanism through which people are able to respond accordingly: adapting their behavior in light of the numbers. A popular slogan also emerged in the early stages of the pandemic: Flatten the Curve! instructing people Datafication: Operations, Logics, and Critiques Rephrasing Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier's definition of datafication, José van Dijck notes that datafication is the "transformation of social action into online quantified data" predicated on "real-time tracking and predictive analysis" (van Dijck 2014, 198). In this, datafication is cast as a "legitimate means to access, understand, and monitor people's behaviour" (2014, 198, author's emphasis) online. Van Dijck, writing in 2014, discusses datafication in the context of social media, focusing on a roster of platforms, now commonplace, from Facebook to YouTube. Real-time tracking of user activity on these "data-intensive" platforms (Gerlitz and Helmond 2013, 1349), ensures all manner of comments, likes, tags, uploads, edits, and other similar interactions are recorded. Following the logic of the "Like economy" (2013, 1349), datafication provides an opportunity to capture, and increasingly extract, forms of value from users.