During this pandemic, I can say that a few new pet peeves emerged. At the beginning, it was the phrase "stay home, stay safe." There was another equally annoying mantra that became popular within the past year: "Follow the science." Those who were advocating for lockdowns, mask mandates, and other closures and regulations used it to try to establish legitimacy.
"Follow the science" is a feel-good slogan. After all, who wouldn't want to follow a seemingly objective, straightforward process of determining what is valid and what is not? At the very least, it works to delegitimize those who disagree with your viewpoint because "only an idiot wouldn't believe in the science." In practice, "follow the science" actually meant something entirely different from actually having scientific facts rationally inform policy decisions. Let's take a look at a few major examples to see what I mean by this assertion, shall we?
Lockdowns. This ends up first on my list not only because of the onerous nature of the lockdowns, but also because there was no "following the science." Prior to this pandemic, there was never a time in human history where we decided to isolate the healthy. That was the case for good reason. In September 2019, Johns Hopkins suggested that quarantine would be the least effective in controlling the spread (Johns Hopkins, p. 57). To make this point even stronger, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a report on non-pharmaceutical interventions in response to epidemics and pandemics. This report was written in October 2019, which was shortly before this pandemic began. Guess what their recommendation was for dealing with those who weren't sick? Well, here it is:
"Home quarantine of exposed individuals to reduce transmission is not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure, and there would be difficulties in implementing it (p. 16)."
Putting healthy people in lockdown was not "following the science." Quite the opposite! The WHO had a game plan in which it said that isolating the healthy was not recommended, and the world ignored it. Instead, we threw ourselves into what I would consider the largest social experiment in human history. There was no cost-benefit analysis done and no evidence base to support it. I expressed my concerns early on (see here and here), ranging from economic costs and non-COVID health costs to social unrest and global instability. We need to wait for the dust to settle because it will take years to find out the effects of what these lockdowns have had on society. Preliminarily, I could cite a study from Stanford University researchers showing that lockdowns were ineffective in slowing down the transmission of COVID (Bendavid et al., 2021). In any case, I'm willing to bet I will write on this topic multiple times in the future. I don't know how that research will pan out (although I can take an educated guess), but I can safely state right now that the politicians implementing the lockdowns did anything but "follow the science."
Travel and Immigration Restrictions. For months, multiple countries have either shut their borders completely to international travel or have been restrictive enough to significantly damage their economies. The theory is that because COVID is transmitted through people, anything that reduces the movement of people should help. How useful are such restrictions?
I covered Trump's ineffective immigration ban executive order back in April 2020, but I want to keep this to travel restrictions generally. In April 2020, the Cato Institute released a policy brief on the topic of travel restrictions. At the beginning of the pandemic, influenza research would have been the most relevant for determining the efficacy of travel bans. As the Cato Institute shows, travel restrictions are only effective if they have not reached another country. At best, they only delay the spread of the disease for a few weeks, especially since stopping travel on a global level is unfeasible and unenforceable. The pre-COVID research showed that travel restrictions are unable to stop the spread of a given pandemic. This also seems to have been the case with COVID-19, as well (e.g., Chinazzi et al., 2020).
As University of Washington public health expert Nicole Errett points out, such targeted initiatives as domestic travel screening, patient monitoring, vaccine development, and general emergency readiness are more effective (and certainly more based in science) than travel bans. Essentially, any country that still has travel bans (which is almost all of them) is not following the science.
Cleaning Surfaces. I have seen countless people scrubbing and cleaning surfaces, whether at such places as the grocery store, the gym, or on an airplane, in the hopes that they won't contract COVID-19 from touching a surface. According to the CDC's primer on COVID and surface transmissions, the probability of getting COVID in response to touching a contaminated surface is less than 1 in 10,000. This, of course, assumes that the surface you are touching is indeed contaminated, which is to say that the odds of getting COVID from touching any given surface is even less likely.
Rutgers Professor Emanuel Goldman wrote an article in The Lancet about the exaggeration of fomites being a form of transmission of COVID. Professor Linsey Marr, who is an airborne viruses expert at Virginia Tech University, went as far as saying that "there's really no evidence that anyone has ever gotten COVID-19 by touching a contaminated surface."
Cleaning surfaces has its place, but it has been taken to an extreme, especially since COVID-19 transmission through surfaces is so rare. If I had to guess why so many people like doing in spite of the evidence showing its lack of effectiveness, it's probably to appear socially conscientious or some other sense of self-gratification. I'm sure Lysol is happy to make money off of this irrational obsession, but it does add a cost for businesses, one that is unnecessary for stopping transmission of COVID. I wouldn't be surprised if people in the future look at the obsession with cleaning surfaces the way we look at people back in the Middle Ages that tried to cure everything with leeches.
Social Distancing: How Much? This is one of the key questions in terms of preventing the transmission of a respiratory disease. For months, those in the United States have been told to keep six feet away, as if it were some proven or consistent rule.
Last month, the CDC had a press release outlining changes in operational procedure for primary and secondary schools. It changed its social distancing policy for schools from 6 feet to 3 feet because the CDC did not find any additional risk involved. You could argue that this could only apply to children, but it does bring some doubt as to the efficacy of more stringent social distancing rules.
Additionally, since the beginning of the pandemic, the WHO's recommendation has been to keep 3 feet (1 meter) away from everyone, not 6 feet. If you want some nuance for the social distancing debate, look at the chart below from Massachussets Institute of Technology [MIT] researchers (Jones et al., 2020). In any case, what I can say is that there is no consistent and "determined rule" as to what is safe. Even asking the question of "what is safe" comes with some arbitrariness. If we all stayed isolated from one another, that would be safest. How much safer is six feet versus nine feet versus twenty feet? What is the marginal benefit from a few extra feet? With this much nuance, what does it really mean to "follow the science?"
Face Masks. This is one of my favorites because wearing face masks has become so divisive in the U.S. political landscape. The premise behind face masks is that the covering of one's nose and mouth better captures respiratory droplets. The fewer respiratory droplets circulating in the air, the less likely that COVID-19 is to spread. It seems so intuitive that an imbecile should be able to figure it out, right? When this pandemic first started, I essentially did a literature review of the evidence for face masks, and the evidence was mixed. There was actually a lot of ambiguity because of this mixed evidence. As time passed, the evidence base grew, and it became more accepted of a practice. So many people think the science is "resolved," and yet it's not. As a matter of fact, here is what the World Health Organization (WHO) had to say in its December 2020 interim guidance entitled "Mask use in the context of COVID-19":
"At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 (p. 8)."
Almost one year into a pandemic, and the best that WHO can say is that the evidence is "limited and inconsistent." That doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement, which would explain why it advises the usage of masks as a part of a more comprehensive plan to flatten the curve.
I'm not here to say that face masks have zero effectiveness. I have already written on the topic twice (see here and here), and I am mildly in support of increased face mask usage. The main reason is given the relatively low costs to wearing a mask, "better safe than sorry" is nowhere near as imposing or onerous as it was with the lockdowns. My support does come with a few caveats. One is that because of how germs dissipate in outdoor air, face masks are more effective indoors. Two, N95 and surgical masks are more effective than cloth masks. Three, the masks are much more effective for those with symptoms for those without. Finally, and most importantly, the efficacy is modest at best. Those who are walking around high and mighty thinking they are saving the world by wearing their mask should think twice. In the case of face masks, it's not downright ignoring the science. Since the scientific findings are ambiguous, no one is "following the science" per se when they are wearing the mask.
School Closures. I will keep this short since I covered the topic in July 2020. There still remains little evidence of the closures' efficacy, as is illustrated by an article in one of the world's oldest medical journals: the BMJ (Lewis et al., 2021). The top official for the WHO in Europe, Dr. Hans Kluge, admitted in November that school closures do not work and should be avoided. Even the Left-leaning Washington Post came to terms with the lack of evidence in support of school closures for stopping the spread of COVID-19. Children, especially those in primary school, are not major transmitters of COVID-19. Schools have been shown not to be super-spreaders of COVID-19. As a result from not following the science, we have racked up a number of costs as a result (see list from UNESCO), including delayed development of children, lower student achievement, mental health for children and parents, as well as economic loss of both the parents now and future earnings of their children.
Restaurant and Gym Closures. I analyzed these closures last December. Much like with the face masks, there is limited and ambiguous evidence. There is also some nuance. For example, capacity limits are more effective with restaurants than shutting them down. With gyms, the limited evidence suggests that social distancing, proper ventilation, and good hygiene practices minimize the spread of COVID-19. There have been gym and restaurant closures in various jurisdictions. The fact there are more effective measures that can mitigate transmission than blanket prohibitions meant that politicians who went with blanket prohibitions were not "following the science."
Postscript. The "follow the science" mantra comes with many issues. The one I detailed the most today is that those who justified restrictions with "follow the science" were not following the science. In some cases, the science was clear (e.g., cleaning surfaces) and was simply dismissed. In other cases, there have been vague, inconsistent, and/or limited findings, as we saw with face masks and the closures of restaurants and gyms. The social distancing aspect is complex because the distance could vary based on such factors as the activity, whether it is done indoors, and whether there are multiple people in the vicinity. What does one do when there is ambiguity or the situation requires a nuanced approach?
There are more issues than asking what "follow the science" means. As the Cato Institute points out in a September 2020 policy brief on "trusting the science," science has its limits in what it can and cannot do. There is no straight-forward, objective way to proceed, as if it were strictly formulaic. One of the major reasons "follow the science" isn't adequate because we have to make value judgments. Those who love saying "follow the science" forget that science provides us insight to the pandemic and the nature of COVID-19 itself, but doesn't automatically imply a policy prescription. "Follow the science" doesn't factor in the economic, political, ethical, psychological, educational, or emotional considerations, not to mention civil liberties or other health considerations unrelated to COVID-19.
"Follow the science" also doesn't eliminate risk because we cannot live in a world without risks. We don't have an option to eliminate risk. We only have options in which we ask ourselves what are acceptable tradeoffs. One of the lamentable outcomes of this pandemic is a growing number of people act as if we could live in a risk-free world. As a society, we have let fear and hysteria get the better of us. That is not a point of hyperbole. A paper from Ivy League researchers showed how negative the coverage on COVID from U.S. media was (Sacerdote et al., 2020).
"Follow the science" does not mean actually having the data collection from scientific experiments or the scientific process guide our decisions. It is a thinly-veiled guise to justify restriction on top of restriction. To be sure, there are restrictions that can help mitigate the transmission of COVID-19, but we are well past that point. Before the pandemic, I never understood the phrase "the whole world has gone mad." Given how I have seen so many people react to the pandemic, especially the "follow the science" crowd, it makes me more cynical about humanity, especially when it comes to the irrationality that has become so predominant in recent months. What I can hope for at this juncture is that people can see the motive for these restrictions, that it's primarily not about public health, but about fomenting fear, hysteria, and absurdity. I just hope we can surpass the damage that ignoring the science has done to us.
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