MAY 29, 2020
COVID-19’S IMPACT has been swift, widespread, and devastating. Never have so many clinicians devoted themselves so resolutely, at significant personal risk, to care for people with a single disease that is not yet in the textbooks. Never have so many scientists worked so fast to generate and summarize research findings in real time. Never have policymakers struggled so hard to apply a complex and contested evidence base to avert an escalating crisis.
And yet, as I write from Oxford, the United Kingdom’s daily death toll remains in the hundreds despite weeks of lockdown. In this country at least, we are failing. One of the many issues thrown up by the current confusion is the relationship between research and policy. A leitmotif in the UK government’s announcements, in particular, is the claim that they are “following the science.” One policy delay after another-testing at ports and airports, quarantining of arrivals from known hotspots, closing schools, banning large gatherings, social distancing, lockdown, controlling outbreaks in care homes, widespread testing, face coverings for the lay public-has been endorsed by the government and its formal advisory bodies only on the grounds that “the evidence base is weak” or even that “the evidence isn’t there.” The implication is that good policy must wait for good evidence, and in the absence of the latter, inaction is best.