COVID-19 SCIENCE

Hasty judgements and an inadequate review process

By Dr Juergen Ude | February 14th 2021

Lockdown and social distancing measures were introduced as unprecedented measures following the examples of other countries that appeared to have early success with such measures. However, many of the examples were misleading. Experts were in fact ‘jumping to conclusions’, arriving at decisions too early and without the proper processes to review such decisions in a timely, well-prepared and organised manner. It was a matter of attributing causation, a problem with the modern science community, to what was at best an appearance of association or correlation of variables.

There were many examples throughout the pandemic where public health experts jumped to conclusions. Examples include the widespread lauding of Singapore, South Korea and Japan for the early successes of their approaches only to find them struggling with rising ‘cases’ later. Taiwan and Vietnam had relatively reduced testing programs. If you do not test you will not find problems. Vietnams neighbors, Laos and Cambodia also had low cases.

The graph below demonstrates the Singapore experience illustrating how timing is important when examining the success or failure of various public health strategies and the difficulty of attributing causation to the various measures employed.

The black line is when Singapore’s performance mesmerized the world. The blue lines are when the WHO complimented Singapore for its success.

How much time, money and effort were wasted and how much hardship was caused because of conclusion jumping believing, without scientific process in the hasty judgements?