Adam Kucharski

I mean, I think essentially countries have to take that threat, as the evidence suggests.

But I think particularly as countries lifted measures, that was often just done in quite an ad hoc way.

And we could have done much more kind of staging.

In the UK, there were some early studies, for example, of can we use rapid tests so people test themselves every day rather than quarantining for like a week or two.

And then in practice, a lot of people just didn't bother anymore.

But apart from that, I think there's a lot of these debates we're still having, and we probably could have got better answers for that with some higher quality studies.

So not necessarily even an RCT, just making use of what we had with more observations.

I think that's a really good question.

It's kind of how, I guess, how personality and politics and all these things.

And I think there's been good reviews of evidence showing that the overstated certainty just undermines trust and confidence, whether it's kind of vaccines or other things.

So saying, yeah, this is 100% safe, there's absolutely no risk.

And if there's even a tiny risk, you then kind of undermine that.

Yeah, one of the challenges with kind of that over-certainty, I think particularly once you make that public statement, it's very hard to back that.

And we saw that with some of the airborne, some even health organisations say it's not airborne, fact.

It's very difficult to then walk that back.

But I think it's fine in line because you don't just want to say we have no idea.

you want to try and communicate the way of the evidence.

I think some countries did that better than others, particularly on their, you know, Denmark, Singapore, spring to mind on their reopening, where they said, this is the data we're looking at to do this, that might change.

And this is kind of how we have to work things through.

But I think one of the difficulties, I think, because any emergency that goes on for that long is, you know, you have some people who have very loudly said something's, you know, 100 times less severe than it is.