PNAS article on Health Policy Trials (during the Pandemic)

The latest issue of PNAS has this interesting article on how, during the pandemic, the policies we implemented were, at best, "educated guesses".  Next time we must learn to actually do science during the pandemic itself.  A sample:

Experts and others had strong opinions on how to respond as COVID-19 spread to all corners of the world, but these were educated guesses at best. Authorities at every level—countries, provinces, states, regions, districts, and towns—acted vigorously, but variably (3), on a wide range of policy questions (see Table 1). Some locked down briefly, some, for long periods, and others, not at all. Travel restrictions, school closures, the allocation of scarce COVID-19 medical resources ranging from tests to intensive care to vaccines—each were instituted differently from one jurisdiction to another with little consistent reason, and then relaxed or reversed, often as incoherently as they had been introduced. The world’s response to the pandemic was essentially a potpourri, the equivalent of exposing the world’s population to a massive, uncontrolled cluster trial without systematic and detailed outcome assessment.

Table of health policies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic:

Cheers, 

Colin