Adam Kucharski

And I think ever in science, it certainly shifted a lot of my thinking about what's possible and even how we should think about these kinds of problems.

But also on the other hand, I think where people might have been more familiar with seeing science kind of progress a bit more slowly and reach consensus around somebody's health issues, having that emerge very rapidly can present challenges.

And even we found with some of the work we did on alpha and then the delta variants, and it was the early quantification of these.

So really the big question is, is this thing more transmissible?

Because at the time, countries were thinking about control measures, thinking about relaxing things.

And you've got this just enormous social, economic, health decision-making based around, essentially, is it a lot more spreadable or is it not?

And you only had these fragments of evidence.

So I think for me, that was really an illustration of the sharp end.

And I think what we ended up doing with some of those was rather than arguing over a precise number, something like delta,

Instead, we kind of looked at, well, what's the range that matters?

So in the sense of arguing over whether it's 40% or 50% or 30% more transmissible is perhaps less important than being it's substantially more transmissible and it's going to start going up.

Is it going to go up extremely fast or just very fast?

That's still a very useful conclusion.

I think what often created some of the more challenges, I think the things that kind of on reflection people looking back,

pick up on are where there was probably you know overstated certainty we saw that around some of the airborne spread for example you know stated as a fact by in some cases some organizations I think in you know in some situations as well governments had a constraint and presented it as scientific you know so the UK for example would say testing isn't useful

And what was happening at the time was there wasn't enough tests.

So it was more a case of they can't test at that volume.

But I think blowing between what the science was saying and what the decision making.

And I think also one thing we found in the UK was we made a lot of the epidemiological evidence available.

I think that was really, I think, something that was important.