This isn’t true of some of the other non-pharmaceutical interventions used to combat Covid: closing schools and banning indoor dining and entertainment are extremely costly, and while the big shift to remote work has brought benefits as well as costs, it’s had wrenching economic consequences for urban downtowns and transit systems. Yet for the most part we’re also having to make do with “a collection of evidentiary bits and pieces” to arrive at such decisions.
As someone who has been struggling since starting to write about the pandemic 10 months ago with how to weigh that evidence, I can attest that there’s no simple answer. Relying on scientific journals to sort things out tends to disappoint. As has been made clear by decades of often-contradictory published studies on whether consuming this, that or the other food or beverage is likely to make you live longer or die young, many top journals have a bias for bold and surprising study results over judiciously expressed uncertainty.
Since April, the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Research Compendium hosted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has provided a happy corrective by evaluating the strengths and limitations of hundreds of Covid-related studies, and developments elsewhere in scientific publishing suggest that such open peer review will become more common. Haber and five other researchers have also recently organized a systematic review of Covid-19 policy evaluation studies to determine whether they at least “meet basic requirements for study design.” And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after often being muzzled by President Donald Trump’s administration, already seems to be returning to its proper role as expert and mostly independent weigher of evidence.
None of that, though, can remove the uncertainty and error inherent in figuring out what to do about a fast-moving disease. At the moment, governments are beginning to announce new rounds of school shutdowns, non-essential business closures and other tough measures to combat the spread of a new SARS-CoV-2 variant that seems to be a lot more contagious than the old one. Can they be sure this is the right approach? No, not yet at least.
It’s quite clear that reducing people’s contacts with other people slows the spread of the disease, but the question of which policies most efficiently accomplish this has generated a cacophony of answers. A group of mostly Vienna-based researchers published an effectiveness ranking of Covid-19 government interventions in November that put canceling small gatherings first and closure of educational institutions second, but the evaluation for the Johns Hopkins research compendium offered a long list of reasons why the conclusions could be off.
In conjunction with the arrival of seemingly very effective vaccines, though, there is at least a logic to taking drastic measures aimed at slowing the spread of a more-contagious SARS-CoV-2 variant until a big enough share of the population is vaccinated that it slows down automatically. Waiting for certainty isn’t really practical in a pandemic.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of The Myth of the Rational Market.