Adam Kucharski

But actually, it's much more about that balancing act that we have to perform.

Yeah, I think, I mean, those kind of situations are enormously talented, both in terms of evidence generation and communication, and then obviously the political decision making that comes off the back of it.

I think in many of those situations, I found it useful to...

kind of convert, in some cases, uncertainty around the exact estimate to just kind of broadly what situation we're in.

So for example, when I think it was the Delta variant emerged, and we did a lot of the work identifying the early advantage it had.

And it really wasn't, you know, was it 30%?

Was it 40%?

Was it 60%?

But essentially, all of those were a big problem.

And it's kind of arguing like, is this, you know, is this a disaster or just a catastrophe or just very, very bad?

And it's like, from a policy, you don't need to kind of

necessarily communicate you can just say like we're very confident that it's going to take off a couple of things I think that jumped out for me I think one was

the need to triangulate across data sources.

I think sometimes people have this idea of science that you go out and you run a study and that study gives you the answer or it doesn't give you the answer.

And there were quite a few of the early skepticism was saying, well, actually this study wasn't definitive and this study wasn't definitive.

But once you start to look at all of those, you start to look at the evacuations flights, you start to look at the testing data and the contact tracing and the big testing of some of the cruise ships,

you start to look at the clinical data, all of those signals start to drag you in the same way.

And again, each bits of those evidence on their own might have problems, but you can start to bring together and draw that into a conclusion.

I think we saw that across the pandemic, that if you view it very much as like, I'm going to get the perfect study and it's going to give me the answer, you'll struggle.

But often you can actually find a lot of complementary data sources that all, for variants or a lot of that early severity, were all pointing in the same direction.