3 ms·

What would be a better course of action to take in this crisis? Would you have preferred for your elected leaders to not have taken the consensus expert view?

• lbeltrame 6y ago
  The latter. I believe there's no real consensus at this point, save for a few points, of which the minutiae require more investigation. A lot on this virus is being learned "on the go" as the situation develops. Also, some choices made at the time were made in haste, now, like the Science blog warned about "pandemic research exceptionalism", we need to make sure that public policy is subject to the same rigorous line of thinking (an extreme example of not doing so is the bleaching of a beach in Spain), IOW no decisions simply "because it's a crisis". Public policy and elected officials need to be aware of these unknowns when taking decisions, especially since many of these, in one way or the other, carry negative externalities.
  • rbg246 6y ago
    Interesting. My take has been that they have taken a conservative action with regards to the virus, I've seen locking down as a way for the government to slow down time to try and work out what is going on before then taking a more considered point of view. There was so much confusion in mid March about what would happen and lockdowns seem to have slowed things down a bit to get a clear head about what the path through is going to be like and I hope they don't rush their next decisions as there are so many things that are still not known. In the future these current decisions could be wrong and will be wrong, I'm hoping that they aren't badly wrong but who knows... It seems to be considered on what mainstream scientific consensus but that's been wrong before but I feel it's the best we have given the situation.