Adam Kucharski

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.

But I think what that did is it created this impression that particularly epidemiology was driving the decision making.

lot more than it perhaps was in reality because so much of that was being made public and a lot more of the evidence around education or economics was being done behind the scenes.

I think that created this kind of asymmetry in public perception about how that was feeding in.

It's really hard as well as a scientist when you've got journalists asking you how to run the country to work out those steps of, am I describing

evidence behind what we're seeing am i describing the evidence about different interventions or am i proposing you know to some extent my value system on what we do and i think all of that in in very kind of intense times um can be very easy to get blurred together in in public communication i think we saw a few examples of that where you know things were being the follow the science on policy type angle where actually once you get into what you're prioritizing within a society quite rightly you've got other things beyond just the epidemiology driving that