So can you start by saying your name and your current affiliation?
Sure. My name is Petherick and I'm a department, a lecturer at the school.
Thanks very much. And without telling me your entire life story.
But just to give a little bit of your background.
Can you tell me just roughly from how you first got interested in sciences, which I understand you studied first to how you got to where you are now?
Yeah. Curious path. So my undergrad degree was Natural Sciences at Cambridge.
And I would never have imagined at that stage of life teaching politics.
Certainly. Certainly not in a public policy school.
And I at Cambridge, you start off doing all of the different natural sciences and you sort of whistle them down.
In my final year, I did population modelling and evolutionary genetics, which sounds completely disconnected to my job now,
except when it came to COVID and then actually being able to understand that world,
even though it's obviously moved on and I need to do it, undergrad level has been very, very helpful.
And then from undergrad, I did actually mean to do a Ph.D. in these subjects, but I became a journalist.
I was offered a job first in San Francisco, getting meant to do the Ph.D. in evolutionary genetics,
but then worked for the economist in the nature covering science.
Then out of the blue was asked to be a correspondent for The Economist in South America.
And I thought, Why not? I'm at the time I was about 26, 27 and I mortgage no kids.
Let's do it. And then I, I became dissatisfied with what I guess political correspondence,
considered evidence with my natural science brain and applied to come here for graduate school, basically in the politics department.
So not even comfortable about Nick at that stage. You didn't do the master's in public policy.
You did. You did. I did. The Mphil in comparative government, which is a two year.
Yes, nicely data driven course. And then I did the speech at the Dphil and kept the same supervisor.
He's been a huge influence on me and his son, Tim Power, who is now head of social sciences.
Back then he was just doing Brazilian politics. So hadn't.
Yes. So you've moved between research and journalism.
How do you think that those two professions complement one another?
But it's an interesting question. So.
I mean, it depends how you do research. The research I do today feels very much like a more thorough job of the journalism I used to do.
But if you work for me particularly, you cover science and you cover it for someone like nature,
it's very much a case of reporting on truth seeking, right?
As though it's a first cut of of what we know of the present day.
And I feel like particularly The Cove, it work or in general, the kind of work that often gets done in a school of public policy,
school of government is trying to get at that just you have months and big datasets
to answer the questions instead of a few days and the right people to call.
That's is. So what kinds of questions really drive you?
Gosh. Wow, what a big one. All kinds of questions, honestly.
All kinds of questions. When I was an undergrad, I used to go to lectures from all subjects.
Really? Really. I would go to anthropology, lectures, everything.
But I think it was the way of answering questions.
I felt like science taught you the best way to answer questions, at least that we figured out so far.
And one year of my undergrad, I did History in Philosophy of Science, which is affectionately known as his [INAUDIBLE].
And then people who did that course and I think I just it's hard to I am very probably curious about the world.
I'm fascinated by. Why people are the way they are, why decisions get made, even though collectively they can seem bonkers.
Um. Why even, you know, animals evolve the way they do and.
Yeah. I hope I just keep trying to answer questions that I find interesting.
It's there's very few questions I find uninteresting about the world at large.
That sounds like a great start period. So let's just move on to be more specific.
Can you remember where you were, what you were doing when you first heard that there was something happening in China that might be worrying?
I think like most people, it was probably around. Early January, late December, around New Year's Eve.
And again, it didn't seem like it was necessarily going to be a big deal at that time.
And you sort of keep your eye on it. So when I was in South America, I had to report on swine flu.
And most people I spoke to at the time, experts said this is going to be huge.
Mexico's economy is going to be completely destroyed. And, of course, it wasn't nearly as big as we thought.
So I think I even actually went to Brazil around Valentine's Day for a week, and I was beginning to get nervous.
That week I was in Brazil. That was when things started to be happening in Italy, in Iran.
Just the beginning. And when I got back, I thought, Phew, I better not travel again.
But still, even the last week of term Hillary, Tim, early March,
I remember it felt day by day like the order of magnitude of importance of this thing was just exploding quite literally.
I think, you know, I had all these other plans of what I was going to do and teaching and all the rest of it.
And it just for the following term, I was going to go to a Jamie Cullum concert of sorts,
and you just realise each day your view of what was possible shrank by almost 50% per day.
That's how it felt. Yeah.
So it was when it hit to you, it was that patch where you realised it was going to be global.
Mm hmm. So at what point did you and your colleagues decide that this was something that you,
your your research team here and your colleagues here could actually do something about and pivot your research in that direction.
So the project is really originally all down to Tom Hale, and Tom and I teach in Hillary time.
We teach the politics course that all the master students you have to take.
He does the international relations bit, which is at the end and I do the comparing inside countries back to the beginning.
And we were we run seminars every Friday and that last Friday of the issue we were supposed to be discussing was the Greek sovereign default.
And it just seemed so out of place. And it's so obviously we you just couldn't keep the conversation on it.
Equally, we have incredible students here.
So you have our typical student who's been out in the world for about two decades doing things in terms of public public policy.
And so I remember one of my students in that seminar that last Friday of ten, um, I was a bit annoyed about because he wrote to me saying,
I'm going to leave halfway through because I've got to go and test something about kind of online teaching or online meetings.
And I thought to myself it had to be doing my seminar clearly.
And then it turned out it was for the World Health Organisation, not some cute project for teaching here and he was a consultant for the W.H.O.
And so it was really in that moment of confusion about.
Um, I guess what was going on with the exams that were coming up for students?
Well, you know, the feeling that we couldn't really stick with the agenda for what we were teaching in the course.
The the idea, I think, crystallised that we don't really know what governments are doing and nobody does.
And what is quite unique about this community and the school is our students.
We have about 100 and somewhere between 220, 150 master's students each year.
And they tend to come from 50, 60, 70 countries.
And if you are trying to have a community that can understand intelligently public policy announcements.
But in any of the world's official languages, this is probably one of the best in the world to start with.
And so, yeah, that was Friday seminars.
And then I got a call from Tom on Monday and yeah, we met on a video call, which I don't think we've ever done before at that point.
And yeah, the idea was born, he'd been cooking up the, the bare bones of it over the weekend.
So what was the idea? Tell me about it. The idea was just a very simply start recording what governments were doing.
And at that time there wasn't much in place.
There was the Italian lockdown. That was the way you had lockdown and there was stuff going on in Iran.
But it was at that particular juncture where there was a sense that it was going to be global.
Now, the challenge was if you were recording public policies, how do you do it before you really know what they're going to be?
And so our original coding scheme simply said, well, let's come up with the main areas of closure policy, so schools, transport and so on.
And let's have the simplest possible ordinal scale to measure strength of policy.
So nothing recommended closure required closure.
And we had an indicator for some sort of public health campaign.
And that was how the track is started, recorded on Excel spreadsheets, which seems a very long time ago now.
And then over time we have expanded that. So we now got more than 20 indicators and far more nuanced ways of coding the strength of policy.
So let's give it its name. It's called the Oxford COVID 19 government government response track and response track of this.
It's very hopeful that after the Oxford bit, the rest is an alphabet code.
And you talked about the involvement of the students. So how were you gathering the data to feed into the tracker?
So the extraordinary thing about this project is that it is entire, entirely volunteer based has been from the beginning.
Now we have a core research team involved in the actual organisation of it, who we pay.
But we've had over a thousand people come through as volunteers.
At this point. And so how do we get them together?
So at the beginning it was willing students and I am kind of in awe of them
because they had exams a few weeks away and they didn't know what was going on.
And the idea of giving of hours of your day to a project that you didn't know if it was going to be big or small or whatever at that moments,
you know, hats off to them. That's really the vocation of public policy as opposed to just the outcome of your Oxford degree.
And since then, it's expanded to different communities.
So we have a.
Groups. So other universities in other countries have got involved.
We had to add we have a collaboration with Microsoft, say some of their employees can get time off to do volunteer work.
Yeah, we sort of it seems to find its way into new contacts.
And then these people create a new community public that wants to get involved.
Lots of medical professionals actually do it. Mm hmm. So what does each participant have to actually do?
Right. So good question.
And so we ask about four, five, 6 hours a week and they will be allocated, uh, perhaps a country to coach for that week or a few countries.
And that means that they have to get to grips with the coding manual and then for each of the policies.
So for how the strength of school clashes, for if there's different vaccine policies.
Now we code, we look at test and trace all sorts of things. They have to look out for what official government policy is.
And so they have to check government websites and all sorts of official forms, sometimes quality media as well,
to sort of check whether things are really happening on the ground for some of the indicators.
And then they input this into an online database.
And that's that. What is really hard to explain to a lot of people is when someone I'm thinking of my mum,
when they say that when someone's in fact coding for the week, it's life, you know,
from their laptop in Peru,
it then automatically via an API ends up on the Financial Times websites feed through to all sorts of epidemiological modelling around the world.
We do have a sort of a check of everyone's coding, but that takes about a week or two to do so.
The last little bit of data is slightly more kind of a rough cut than everything, a bit older, but that's how it works.
So when it comes to looking at the effectiveness or comparing the effectiveness of policy of government policy responses in different countries,
that that's that's a research job for which your resource is is actually acting.
Is the the database, is that research being done all over the world?
Or are you do you do you hope that that a basket of information here?
So the idea the philosophy has been we hold nothing. Everything is available instantly.
It's available free of charge and we make it as easy as possible for people to use.
Um, we do do a bit of research ourselves,
but it's primarily a data project and this certainly it would make no sense for us to try and hold the data and we wouldn't have the skills,
the capacity to do different types of modelling that would be very necessary for this.
We have ourselves had a few papers about what works and thinking about a different way so that the first way we try to
think about it is thinking about how different combinations of policies and correlates with how deaths and cases vary.
We did some very quite simple modelling compared to the kind of modelling that you would.
The people I used to study with ages ago would do where they have much more nuanced idea of what your counterfactual is.
And that's the natural curve of the disease is the typical statistical workhorses of the social sciences.
It's quite hard to get to that.
But where we've I think really made progress is combining our data with behavioural data from mobile phone mobility and from survey data,
and then we can look quite closely at how different policies affect behaviour, either self-reported in surveys or objectively,
but which people tend to have smart things about how people are moving around.
And that's yielded some really interesting insights. Tell me a bit more about that.
So what did the results, which were the most interesting results being?
So a few. So one of the big policy questions early on was whether something called behavioural fatigue or pandemic fatigue existed.
And this was very contentious because at least Sweden and at one point the UK suggested, well,
he just had this sweet spot if you know when the policies are going to be really effective because people give up on them,
they get sick of them, then we need to, you know,
essentially wait and bring in the herd closure policies at just the right moments rather than put them in place now.
And that was a big issue in March 2020.
So we. This particular question.
So how long are able people able to stick to the policies?
And what we broadly found for the physical distancing policies so the stay at home and so on,
was that people didn't manage to adhere to these protective behaviours nearly as much as they did in the first month over time,
but it never fully decreased. So there was a decrease in then almost hitting a threshold, that kind of internal compromise,
I guess, for how much you can handle and hold on to in the long run.
And this was this is remarkably consistent across countries and also across different societal groups.
So, for example, it might be that different ages or certainly different genders have different initial compliance behaviours,
but the patterns of reduction over time just completely echo each other for different groups.
Which is fascinating because if you see these same patterns in rich and poor countries and amongst employed people and unemployed people,
it suggests that the logic isn't fundamentally about whether you can afford to stick to the policies,
and if you then compare the patterns we see for physical distancing,
which is a very individually costly kind of behaviour compared to something like mask wearing,
which is very cheap behaviour, you see radically different patterns.
So physical distancing has this descent to a threshold mask.
Wearing is just just rises and rises and rises controlling for the strength of policy.
So people adopt mask wearing over and above what governments tell them to.
And then if you think about why that might be, well, mask wearing is habituated, kind of like wearing a seat belt or helmet.
Like if you try and drive without wearing a seatbelt, you feel kind of naked.
Where is staying? At home day after day after day is more like continuing to do press ups over time.
Like each one gets harder, it's cost accumulating. And so that in itself is very fascinating.
It also suggests that, you know, risk perception isn't a fundamental driver either,
because if it was risk that was bothering you, makes you do everything as much as possible that could protect you.
Right. So in some ways, to me that project sort of showed that, you know,
the behavioural economist behavioural sciences have probably got the best insights as to what's going on, at least for that kind of question.
The other thing that we found that was fascinating with that project was comparing
countries with different levels of trust in institutions and in strangers in society.
And certainly very early on in the pandemic, the assumption was that the more that people trusted their governments,
the more they would do what they were told.
And yet we saw countries with high levels of trust in governments have really high debts and low debts just all over the map.
And what we saw was that when we compared the adherence patterns to protective behaviours, that high and low trust countries behaved exactly the same.
But when we looked at whether people trusted strangers in their society, interpersonal trust, we saw divergent patterns.
So if you trust strangers a lot, you're far more likely to stick to the physical distancing protective behaviours than if you don't trust them.
And there are inter-country differences in this level of trust in both governments and strangers.
See, we looked at above and below the median and yes, there's quite a big, big difference.
Examples of countries. Yeah. So Germany would be a high trust country for inter-government and strangers?
Yes. At least in the the data I have about Germany and its government.
So one of the big questions that we don't know, of course, is how much levels of trust have changed during the pandemic.
Actually, for Germany, there is now as an outlier, a country where there are good surveys.
But for most countries, we don't know much about that.
And I wouldn't be surprised if something this salience in people's lives sort of shifts trust far more quickly than social science is used to.
Brazil would be a country where people don't trust strangers very much.
And so the think the kind of the the political science logic behind all of this is actually collective action theory, just recast.
So if you're trying to create a public good, so public goods like climate change, reduction,
all that stuff, in this case, the public good would be reducing the infection rates.
And you have individual costs of staying at home.
The only reason you would want to pay that individual cost is if you trust that everyone else is doing the same.
If you don't trust that, then why would you pay that high individual cost?
You're not going to create the public good. And that's and that is what was found.
That is what was found. Yes. Yeah. Yes.
We might go into some some more findings, but I didn't ask before about whether you needed to raise funding to support the work you mentioned,
you know, have some paid staff and how how easy was it to.
Find a funding to do this work. The beginning.
I mean, all of the institutions that create grants weren't ready.
I mean, no one was ready at the beginning. And so the first few months, I mean, we worked so hard, we were doing everything, the routine.
You know, I remember sort of 2 a.m. on a Saturday night trying to code Middle East countries with Google Translate open.
And then I think it was about three, three months.
And Rush gave us some money for this project.
We heard about it not that much, but when you're desperate for a few research assistance just so you can sleep,
that's pharmaceutical company, then pharmaceutical company.
And then since then we've had a number of funders and you know, the main thing we need to pay for is just the research assistants to,
you know, manage the contributors and the emails, check the data, all that stuff.
And so actually our main funder has been the Blavatnik Foundation,
but we've applied for various funds since then and been quite, you know, been quite successful.
So UCL, we have a, an agreement with the Cabinet Office and Tom and I every Tuesday during COVID have joined a pool of academic advisers to them.
Oh, you've printed other of my questions. Oh yes it was.
Thanks. It was quite.
And. So, yes, I mean, clearly, this was something that was worked very collectively on this with a very wide range of people.
Did that feel different from how research is normally done?
No, I'm sure it's something that, you know, research can be a very competitive arena to be.
You know, it's extraordinary, particularly, I think.
So I now have tenure. But when it started, I didn't. And a few people told me it was bonkers because obviously you can't keep up all your
current projects and you the main emphasis was day to day to day to the other.
People need a in an emergency rather than your own, you know, publications or whatever.
Yes. So, I mean, where to start with how it's different?
First of all, just the the collective energy.
So it's it's volunteer driven.
So just harnessing and frankly, enjoying that community spirit is how the project has carried on to this day almost, you know, a year and a half in.
And that's just a world away from, you know, impact factors and how do you compare to other people and and all of that stuff.
I've learnt so much about, I guess community science and frankly about leadership as well.
We have a very sort of open hearted way of running the tracker, very much a sort of collective feel of what skills do you want to learn?
How can we help you do that? It is exhausting.
It's more time often to do it that way than just to sit in the corner and run your models and write papers.
But it's taught me so much and none of it would have been possible if we'd been more selfish about it.
That's really interesting. Yes.
Yeah. I've asked you about how individually the volunteers do that data gathering and you put it together that you've,
um, and I noticed from one of your papers that you've used data from our world in data and they've used your data.
So are there other, other collective groups out there who are now collaborating really across the whole sort of data driven landscape?
Yeah, so I have I mean, it's mixed, if I'm honest.
It's been very much, um, kind of, um, I would say mushrooming of data sources at each stage, right?
Of, um, you know, in John Hopkins, at least probably in the beginning and it's been a bit of a trying to put together a
patchwork as these kind of different projects have got off the ground to check the data,
can talk to it to each other's different datasets.
And, you know, sometimes it's worked.
Everyone has been insanely busy. That's the thing about the people running these data projects that if there's one barrier to collaboration,
it's generally not the philosophy of doing emergency work.
It's just the you know, we have four minute meetings sometimes that kind of you're in that world.
It's unrelenting. Um, but things have settled a bit now,
and certainly I've started working quite closely with someone in payroll quality
who's been running surveys in lots of countries every two weeks to try and align
or create synergies between the questions that are asked that you can only get
at and survey data that are relevant to interpreting how policies are working.
Yeah. Because that's the big question really, isn't it? It's either you're collecting data about what the policies are,
but you really need to look at the effectiveness of those policies, which talk about, you know, how people actually behave.
And that's that side of it. You're dependent on other people to collect.
Is that right? Yes. Yeah.
I mean, I. Yes.
In short, yeah.
So I mean, just to go back to sort of the big question, I mean,
how how easy is it to make comparisons between countries or between substate entities made up of a similar enough view to make?
Perhaps if you seem to I mean, do do the comparisons stand up one against the other?
And you talked about using quite a simple scale to presumably try and get around that problem.
Yes, it is. The answer probably depends on how what you what you're trying to do with your comparison.
Right. If you're trying to answer the big questions about what works using policy data,
then that's quite a bit harder than, if you like, simply comparing the strength of policy in different countries.
And we have an interpretation guide for every possible ordinal jump up for every possible indicator.
That is pretty exhaustive. You know, if, for example, schools are only opening for exams but aren't opening for any classes,
whether how you code that in our system will be in the interpretation guides if buses are being extra cleaned.
But that isn't affecting the bus timetable, it's in the interpretation guide.
And so that kind of thing. I think we I mean, we have meetings every week to reflect on whether we're consistent enough,
whether we're detailed enough internally with our code book.
And then we have calls every week,
multiple calls with different coding teams where we answer questions from all of the coders about issues and questions they have about what policies,
how to code particular policies. And then we have WhatsApp groups which acts like help desks, which the research assistants man.
And actually one thing to point out about whether you can truly compare, I think one sort of silence,
huge benefit of this project that is fairly unrecognised is that because we have
this objective code book to compare the strength of policies that I think,
you know, stands up to a lot of battering and questioning, which it gets every single day, pretty much.
It's really I think it's a political scientist move the conversation on in an age where there's so much questioning of the facts.
It's the question of, well, we're doing this and you're not.
Is that really true? Our policies are stronger than yours, even though they're quite different.
And it's hard to seemingly compare just anecdotally.
That's just not been a noisy part of the conversation until we've just moved the conversation on to what is working and what's not.
What about if you've got a variable like how authoritarian a country is or even how
well they score on your on on your stringency and other levels of what's being done?
But then you've got different levels of social inequality in different countries.
Does that have an impact on the results? Out of the economic inequality.
So what do these things do? Affect results in different ways.
So I wrote a paper about different forms of authoritarianism with some other academics here in the school to say Joe Wolf and my tutor,
and sort of thinking about how leaders with an authoritarian style might respond to this kind of opportunity or moment in time.
And what we argue is that depending on your type of authoritarian, you go one of two directions.
If you seise the moment and you get it right, I can put and put in place the really strong policies and then hold them there.
I say the big issue is whether there are sunset clauses or if you're the more science denying.
I prefer small governments.
You're in a bit of a corner when a pandemic comes along because you can't necessarily say, wait, time for big government, let's learn from science.
And then you were in the Bolsonaro Trump camp of policies are very, very weak compared to other countries, at least at the federal level.
And then for different questions about what works on the ground, how people are responding in terms of their behaviours,
then things like questions of inequality and so on become far more prominent.
Right. But I guess the all these different variables matter in quite complex ways depending on what your question is.
And and I thought it was interesting that they.
Were you surprised to discover that the the kind of wealth in the sense of the you know,
the economic ranking of countries didn't necessarily relate to how effective they were at implementing their COVID presenting prevention policy.
I think we all were. I mean, particularly not just sort of just about wealth.
I think when you look at reports that were written before this pandemic about countries preparedness to handle a pandemic,
all of these indices, which is way off. Absolutely way off.
So the U.S. and the U.K. did very well on those. Yes. Yeah, we had.
But then the performance didn't match up to that. Exactly.
I think leadership going early.
Coordinated policies have been very, very important.
More so than how much you spend on your health system, necessarily.
Mm hmm. Can you give an example of a country that would be thought of as a low to middle income country, but actually which did pretty well.
So I guess Vietnam for a long period of time did very well.
It's I would say a lot of. It's I don't want things changing covered so quickly.
You ask me this question.
I didn't know even a month ago I would have said southern African countries, some of them South Africa certainly had some big waves,
but some of them have done very well, although, you know, the data is really, really patchy.
And in some ways, Omicron has shone a light on just how patchy the data is because.
Sort of speaking though in his rookie he genetics play rather than my own work but I saw
a sort of a genetic tree a family tree of all the different variants and the deltas,
the betas, the alphas, they all came off the same tree omega and it looks like it split in around February 2020.
Which means one of various things.
And so, you know, it could be in animals or that time or whatever.
But one of the options, probably low probability.
But who's to say is that there's other versions of the con patting out that
family tree that we've never found that haven't blasted out like on the corners,
but were there somewhere along the way and no one was looking.
So it's hard to answer the question about foreign countries.
I think one of your papers talked about how some countries had had four waves and some that were a couple who won the journey had one wave.
But I don't know if that's still true is everybody had more than one wave now.
Question Which country was that? Only had one wave. Um.
I'd have to check. It's funny, like, even so, I've got a paper under review right now with The Lancet.
And in that paper,
we draw a quite a stark contrast between what we refer to as the two main strategies of mitigator countries and eliminate two countries.
Oh yes.
So mitigator countries being countries like the UK that have just tried to keep the number of cases kind of below what the health system could handle.
Squash the sombrero. I really haven't had that here.
That was that was that was the Boris. I think you flatten the curve, squash the sombrero.
Yes. Oh. And then countries like Australia being eliminated as like they the moment is
the slightest hint of a case or the possibility of community transmission.
So make sure it doesn't go any further. We're not going to have this as a sort of a feature of of population biology.
And, you know, what's happened in Australia and New Zealand in the period this paper's been under review,
it looks like China's the only eliminator left strategically now.
So such is the world of COVID research.
It moves so quickly you just can't keep up. But the implication being that the elimination strategy doesn't work, you can't fight it that way.
I don't want to agree with that because I think the elimination strategy worked
for a very long time and was potentially very preferable to what we got um,
on many grounds. And that particular paper is about mental health and we find it on the grounds of mental health apart from,
and that's completely aside from the even more important issues of deaths.
Right. And hospitalisations and long COVID and all the rest of it.
Yeah, I, there's a lot to be said for eliminating. So you talked over you mentioned that you were having weekly conversations with.
The Cabinet today was the Cabinet Office. That was what you said. And. Can you see evidence that your work has directly influenced policy?
And I can see evidence that our work has really.
Very deeply infiltrated the thinking of the Cabinet Office to the extent that they even talk in the language of indicators,
which sounds a bit like a Chinese takeaway menu.
So for example, if I say to one of our coders C7, they know it's about internal movement closures,
right in the cabinet of his speak in this language as well. I can certainly say that their slides that they distribute in inform.
Important people with reflect you know I work.
I it's hard to draw a straight line between you know, our discussions on these calls with other academics of different stripes.
So geneticists, epidemiologists and so on. And the policy outcomes coming from the government.
Mm hmm. And is that something you expected to be happening at this stage in your career?
I mean, how do you feel about that personally? It's the question of how do you feel about anything is not something you ever have time to drink.
Said that to me. I said, we don't have time to think about it.
It's announced that people. Yes, people have given me.
Um, it's, it's strange to say, I think, you know, before that I would be quite in touch with how I felt about different things I was doing at work.
So if I was giving a talk, you know, am I nervous?
Like, if I prepared enough, everything goes out the window and you're moving at this pace.
I've been used to now, you know, joining conferences and probably I didn't know how to this or not, but it all went fine.
A number of times I've had to join calls where we're presenting in different
venues and knowing that my colleagues are doing the 10 minutes before me and
having to kind of write my bits while they're talking and then do my bit and jump off and do the next one or be in multiple meetings at the same time.
It's been a, you know, a hamster wheel like nothing else.
Hmm. That's that's the question I was getting to see what this might be with your journalist hat on rather than your public policy hat, but.
I mean, one of the difficulties for policymakers has been that there hasn't always been a clear consensus coming from the biomedical community.
Why do you think it's been difficult for biomedical scientists to come up with a clear,
unified message of I suppose one obvious example is in the UK case this.
Feeling in the first week or so that herd immunity was what they were going to go for.
So completely throwing elimination out the window, just letting it run through,
and then suddenly realising that that was going to lead to to overwhelming the hospitals.
And we would have to backtrack on that. I don't think that many sensible by this were pushing for herd immunity.
I think when I heard that phrase, you know, even with literally undergrads,
that's 15 years old, having studied the concept of herd immunity and population models.
You can see I remember doing the back of the envelope calculation and when they gave the note,
I and I knew in about a minute that they were talking about more than 400,000 deaths.
Right. And that's you know, that's with, you know, my basic decade undergrad.
I think. Yeah, I, yeah, I think herd immunity was a terrible idea at the beginning.
Um, particularly, I mean, for something that isn't nearly as dangerous as criminals, then there are arguments for it, but for something that can.
Kill quite a lot of people. Just ethically unthinkable.
Hmm. Um. I think, you know, the evidence around some things has changed as the data has come in.
To its credit, the World Health Organisation is often criticised for this, changed its tune on masks.
Um, and, but I think that is a very positive thing.
It's not, it's evidence of egos. Right.
Um, but it's, it's been a really tough job to know the evidence on things that, you know,
I wrote and the Lancet called me very early on and one of the news editors and just said,
Honey, you know, what do you think of some of the unanswered questions? And I said, Well.
Again, this is very early on. It's like when can we get antibody tests?
So these very, very difficult closure policies are coming in.
We want to know, you know, when people are safe because it's only and we don't have any vaccines,
you don't have any drugs, you know, but doctors have to be in the hospital.
Right. So who amongst them is safe and who is? And I remember interviewing all the top people around that.
And and at the time, you know, we thought the best evidence was size 1.0 thousand point zero.
This one is. And that, you know, that that's 17, 18 years old and the frozen blood vials and the people who survived that are still immune to it.
Right. So but so we thought early on that immunity would be very long lasting.
But now we know that it's kind of not the case.
We thought we didn't realise in the epidemiological modelling early on that you had asymptomatic transmission.
Right. And that meant that an entirely different structure of models needed to be used.
So I think the biomedical community has I mean, I can't imagine how stressful it is.
I know what it's been like for us. But overall, I think they, you know, they have stepped up in a big way.
And it's just been to too many unknowns. Yes, I do.
70. Yeah. I think you know, a big change of public policy not just to do is disease t with climate change and you know,
researchers in general have to communicate uncertainty to policymakers.
And that's such a difficult job.
When I worked for The Economist in the Science Desk, we used to have a bit of a joke that as science journalist we would report the average.
The paper we'd be reporting from would have an average and a variant statistic.
And then when we actually talk to policymakers and often MP said.
Ask me at parties, you know, what should I do on this? You've written about it.
They just want to know what direction, up or down, so much gets stripped away.
And you try to have that conversation with them about variants.
Right. And it's hard. It's really hard.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think it's.
Yeah, yeah. So yes, is it possible at this stage to draw any conclusions about different policy approaches and their effect on this,
either the spread of disease or pressure on health systems or the economic impacts?
I mean,
is it you've made some you've recently made some recommendations that have been taken up in the paper from the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board.
Yeah. And so what were your recommendations? And so that paper is interesting because they asked us to.
Really think about why a lot of policies that you know, there are many good policy recommendations.
There's a sea of great PDFs out there. But implementation and pickup is very, very patchy.
And so that conversation is really around trying to understand why so many of the recommendations
that would have been very helpful if they had been implemented up to this point had not been.
And so we sort of we looked into that, but really to reaffirm the ones that were most important and should be back on the table.
So things like increased funding for the W.H.O.,
thinking about some sort of a international body or council to try and coordinate decision making, that kind of thing in terms of.
Think about packages of policies at the things that we code, which is the question that very often get asked.
I mean, it's. I usually say they work is a simple thing to say, right?
But different countries use different combinations of different contexts, which is why it gets very complicated.
On closure policies. I think the thing that I just you don't actually need to code to say you don't need all this data is.
Well logically you know if people are in households and this you know people get COVID and passed on for about two weeks.
So you have one person comes home with COVID. Imagine they just got it.
So then they've got it for two weeks and and for two weeks. Then they spread it to someone else in the household.
Who? Everyone else in the household, they can have it for two weeks.
Right. So I think what you want to do with closure policies is to make sure that households
aren't mixing and you want to keep them in place for long enough for that logical,
roughly a month period to be done. And you want them to be effective.
I think one of the things that we have not done well is we've had very long lockdowns that have been very costly to people in their everyday lives.
And it's been done with poor messaging, and we don't code that.
But there's a fascinating study from Italy. It compares two regions with the same policies.
And in one region, they basically say, you know, we're doing this for as long as it takes.
Keep going. And then another region, they set clear goals, you know, case rates, number of days.
And in that second region, people adhere to the policy so much better.
And it goes back to what I was talking about with the pandemic fatigue, with this logic of if you just tell someone to keep doing press ups,
just keep going, motivated, they're going to be compared to counting them down, you know.
So the the broad point I want to make and it's it's strange how you have to keep making this and I had to make it.
A bunch of UK US legislators recently is the policies worked, they cut deaths, they cut cases,
but they should be done intelligently because they are some of them are very costly for mental health, education and so on.
So. Yes. I've been reading your papers and from what you've just said, I came to the conclusion that essentially you're arguing.
Arguing for. A form of world government in this specific area.
Which. Is itself a politically contentious ideas.
And the idea that I mean, yes, we've got the World Health Organisation,
but it depends on all the individual countries agreeing and so it tends to make policy will change
policy rather slowly as you separate them off it to go from trying to to change its policy on masks and.
But you seem to be suggesting there should be a short cut.
That is a is a global organisation or globally trusted organisation that can that can move quite
quickly and which people other people have to other countries or countries have to conform to.
I'm not sure we call it a world government. I have a saying that slightly.
But, you know, I think a you know, a strengthened, more nimble, a legitimate council would be would would be helpful.
You know, more personally, I think and that's not in the report because it would have taken a lot more work than we had resources to do at a time.
I think one of the issues, which is very hard to pull off in international relations in its current state,
is that this has been essentially a regional pandemic, the way it's moved around the world.
It was you know, it was in China and it was big in Europe and and in New York and then shifted to South America.
And now you've got it in Africa. And you know, the.
What the W.H.O. has done too much, given its budget of essentially a large U.S. hospital, is its annual budget has been going into this.
And it should have pandemics. And it's really it's absolutely.
But I think there is a case for strengthening regional bodies as well.
But apart from getting the African Union and maybe to some extent ASEAN, nobody, China is not in that.
It's not easy to pull off. Mm hmm. Yeah. But it's I mean, I think it's interesting because we've got other big problems globally.
Climate change is the obvious one. And I wonder whether you think there are lessons from.
The necessity of of global exchange of data in the pandemic that might actually help to shift the dial a bit on something like climate change.
Well, I sincerely hope so. Actually, Tom Hale, my colleague, we all have this.
He's building a and a tracker of policies for climate.
It's very much the same model. But I think actually one of the things that I hope we get to do next year, so I have my fingers crossed.
I don't want to jinx it by talking about it.
Now that we get to run surveys in other countries regularly where we probe how linked people's thinking is,
or how maybe their perspectives might have shifted on the value of international coordination.
That's the you know. I hope so.
I also think that many aspects of how the world is managed this pandemic have felt like a car crash in slow motion, particularly vaccine distribution.
Um. Entirely predictable.
Car crash information. And so because, because countries took a me first approach.
Yeah. If you were to say okay well the world's structural inequalities are going to be how this ends up,
you know, and essentially that is what has happened. So.
Well, we'll see. In short, I mean, Glasgow wasn't.
I heard the jamboree that we could have all hoped for.
Kind of. Yeah. The emergence of a sense of global unity through a pandemic.
We're emerging as the pandemic, but we might get there.
I'd like to think if it was a possibility still. So I may be a little bit now to you more personally.
So how did the provisions that were made in this country, lockdowns and so on, impact on what you personally were able to do?
It was a. Wow.
To start with that one. Um, well, I, you know, a lot of my colleagues have kids,
so and home schooling happens what they were able to do personally in terms of their research, you know, I got blown out of the water.
Um, and I don't know how they kept teaching. Um, I don't have kids.
I. So I think it's probably worth saying the first lockdown, um, uh, so late March onwards,
2020, I didn't have a meal with another human being for four months.
It was actually fine. You know, if you say that, that's about to happen to you.
I don't think anyone would particularly want to roll the dice on their psychology, just seeing how that one plays out.
But I. I do think that.
The track is in some ways being a kind of therapy.
And in that I didn't really feel any sort of psychological impacts from that experience because it's every day, multiple times a day.
I was seeing a huge group of people brought together by a sense of, you know, public service and.
Um, also a sense of agency as well, when we all felt we didn't have any hope or it was being taken away from us.
Yeah, actually. Everyday agency. Um. So.
I have. Exhausted by this project, but it was being propped up by its owner personally.
No, that's the idea. That's another question I had, which was whether.
Yeah. Having something to do that felt worthwhile. Just a little bit to do with your own well-being?
Definitely, yes. Yeah, definitely. Even when I wasn't sleeping very much.
And did the the institution.
Did you feel that that within that, of course,
the institution that was in a sense that for colleagues who might be struggling, there was support there for them?
Yes.
I feel extraordinarily lucky to be part of the school because it's the youngest department in Oxford and it feels like a very, very modern workplace.
We're constantly talking about, you know, different policies for different kinds of diversity.
Different aspects of well-being. And those systems are there and they're prominent in our conversations before the pandemic.
And so I think it's I wouldn't say it hasn't been a strain,
particularly when we all had to step up and we had to move everything online for the teaching.
And, you know, there's only so many staff and so many hours in the day, so people have felt the heat.
But at the same time, I think this department has been incredible.
Mm hmm. And the teaching, particularly because a lot of the students are from overseas, aren't they?
Yeah. Did they were they here or did they stay in their home countries in a complete mixture?
Um, you know, I, so when it came to Hillary 20, 21, I think a lot of the assumption was we were going to be teaching in person.
And then as Christmas drew closer, you know, things looked much worse here.
And then we had something like ten days before Hillary started to turn everything into online material and students couldn't come back.
A lot of them. I remember taking a supervision with a student in Indonesia.
I didn't know she was still in Indonesia and bless her, she'd stay up till three in the morning for the supervision, you know.
But even that, she'd been locked in her little flats away from her family.
She was in Jakarta. Her family were elsewhere. And, you know, just having a kind of.
Um. She was just so down from being a tiny, sweaty little flat, trying to stay up for classes, moonlighting, basically.
And yeah, it's been the human experience of Kobe just being.
Off balance for everybody and completely different ways is how I feel about it.
Yeah. And still no light at the end of the tunnel?
Not much. Well, vaccines, I think, like keeping light.
And in our mental health research, vaccines are really important for mental health.
Oh, that's interesting. Would you like to expand on that? Well, it's unpublished, so.
Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. Um, so I.
I'm moving to a closed now. Has this experience, um, raised questions you'd be interested in exploring in the future?
Oh, a little bit about a host of questions. Yes. Yeah, I think.
So in terms of the the COVID work, I think there's a whole stack of research and thinking that needs to be done around,
you know, what does preparedness really mean? If we were so bad, it's indicating it before.