Good information leads to tasty outcomes
If you want to make a great birthday cake you need fresh ingredients and a good recipe to combine them. Without one or the other the cake is doomed.
Public health decisions in pandemics are much the same: you need good information and a way to bring the information together. For example, if you don’t know how effective vaccines are or how severe the next variant is, it becomes impossible to formulate good policies. Data are the key ingredient for evidence-based policies, but they are useless without the framework of a good recipe. To be useful, scientific data needs to be correctly collected, stored and linked with other data in a controlled but accessible environment.
If policymakers are the cooks of public health policies to manage pandemics, the BY-COVID project is providing the best possible recipes to combine data to inform their decisions. The goal is to support policymakers and provide the tools required to make decisions that are rooted in reality and proportional to the risks that are faced.
WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO EAT ?
Would you eat in a restaurant using expired ingredients, wild recipes that are never tested and no hygiene standards? In the same way, public health policies need good data, well-tested methods to combine the data and standards to ensure data protection. With the right raw materials, equipment and resources, everything is in place to make the best food possible.
Who do you trust to set policies in pandemic times?
What should their decisions be based on?
Which data are the most important to collect?
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE…
About the collaboration between scientists and policy makers: Science advice in times of COVID-19 - OECD
About the link between democracy, government action during the pandemic and citizen trust: Trust made the difference for democracies in COVID-19 - The Lancet
About the objectives of BY-COVID: https://by-covid.org/pdf/BY-COVID_factsheet_dark.pdf
About the impact of scientific uncertainty on public trust in science and support for science-based policy: Model uncertainty, political contestation, and public trust in science: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic