Experts need to stop beginning sentences with the phrase “there is no evidence that” to encourage or discourage behavior. When you’re dealing with a novel dise

Experts need to stop beginning sentences with the phrase “there is no evidence that” to encourage or discourage behavior. When you’re dealing with a novel disease there’s not much randomized controlled evidence of anything so the best you can do is guess how situations work. Rather than saying “there’s no evidence that” previous infection leads to immunity they could say “there are known diseases where recovery does not confer permanent immunity so don’t rely on that when creating policy” Rather than say “there’s no evidence” that people have caught covid by touching their groceries and then touching their faces they could say “covid appears to spread by droplets and you should clean anything which might have come in contact with such droplets or wash your hands after every time you touch such things”