Adam Kucharski

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.

I found it a lot easier to communicate if talking to the media, to be able to say, look, this is the paper that's out.

This is what it means.

This is the evidence.

I always find it quite uncomfortable having to communicate things where there was, you know, you knew there were reports behind the scenes, but you couldn't actually articulate.