On March 17th, after a tepid initial COVID-19 response, Prime Minister Boris Johnson began encouraging citizens to avoid non-essential social contact. President Donald Trump followed suit, introducing travel bans and social distancing policies. These responses marked the beginnings of drastic and unprecedented government measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the United States and the United Kingdom.
A major …
In December 2019, reports emerged of a pneumonia of unknown origin in the city of Wuhan, China. A week into 2020, a novel pathogen was identified–– “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” (SARS-CoV-2), a new coronavirus. The novel virus is highly similar in structure and sequence to the first SARS coronavirus (2003). After entering the body, typically through the mucus …
The COVID-19 pandemic has been called “a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco” (Ioannides, 2020), while the editor of the Lancet has declared that “the handling of the COVID-19 crisis in the UK is the most serious science policy failure in a generation” (Horton, 2020). At the heart of the science policy is mathematical modelling, a scientific activity once reserved for mathematicians, epidemiologists …