Moving Forward From the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 outbreak was the most serious pandemic in recent decades. More than 7 million deaths have been attributed to COVID-19 (https://covid19.who.int/). The pandemic demanded difficult decisions on the best ways to contain the public health threat while preserving economic and social functioning. These dilemmas led to an unprecedented effort to collect relevant data, which became essential tools for decision makers and standard reports to the public by the media. Like many statisticians worldwide, we were all engaged in those processes; our collective experience includes informing policy decisions in various European and Middle Eastern countries, India, and the USA. A common feature: we all found that our and statistics’ ability to influence policy was often less than desired, in some cases much less. The goal of this letter is to draw lessons from our experiences on what can and should be done to provide a better basis for expert statistical involvement and influence. COVID-19 has morphed to endemic disease, dropping out of the headlines, and much of the statistical response enterprise has also subsided. Although the return to “business as usual” is natural, we advocate that now is the time to exploit and act on the pandemic lessons learned. We begin by commenting on salient statistical issues that emerged, then relate to more general challenges of how to increase the value of our discipline in times of crisis (Grieve et al. 2023), and conclude with a list of action items.