Jonathan Fuller at the Boston Review: “COVID-19 has revealed a contest between two competing philosophies of scientific knowledge. To manage the crisis, we must draw on both….The lasting icon of the COVID-19 pandemic will likely be the graphic associated with “flattening the curve.” The image is now familiar: a skewed bell curve measuring coronavirus cases that towers above a horizontal line—the health system’s capacity—only to be flattened by an invisible force representing “non-pharmaceutical interventions” such as school closures, social distancing, and full-on lockdowns.
How do the coronavirus models generating these hypothetical curves square with the evidence? What roles do models and evidence play in a pandemic? Answering these questions requires reconciling two competing philosophies in the science of COVID-19.
To some extent, public health epidemiology and clinical epidemiology are distinct traditions in health care, competing philosophies of scientific knowledge.
In one camp are infectious disease epidemiologists, who work very closely with institutions of public health. They have used a multitude of models to create virtual worlds in which sim viruses wash over sim populations—sometimes unabated, sometimes held back by a virtual dam of social interventions. This deluge of simulated outcomes played a significant role in leading government actors to shut borders as well as doors to schools and businesses. But the hypothetical curves are smooth, while real-world data are rough. Some detractors have questioned whether we have good evidence for the assumptions the models rely on, and even the necessity of the dramatic steps taken to curb the pandemic. Among this camp are several clinical epidemiologists, who typically provide guidance for clinical practice—regarding, for example, the effectiveness of medical interventions—rather than public health.
The latter camp has won significant media attention in recent weeks. Bill Gates—whose foundation funds the research behind the most visible outbreak model in the United States, developed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington—worries that COVID-19 might be a “once-in-a-century pandemic.” A notable detractor from this view is Stanford’s John Ioannidis, a clinical epidemiologist, meta-researcher, and reliable skeptic who has openly wondered whether the coronavirus pandemic might rather be a “once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.” He argues that better data are needed to justify the drastic measures undertaken to contain the pandemic in the United States and elsewhere.
Ioannidis claims, in particular, that our data about the pandemic are unreliable, leading to exaggerated estimates of risk. He also points to a systematic review published in 2011 of the evidence regarding physical interventions that aim to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses, worrying that the available evidence is nonrandomized and prone to bias. (A systematic review specific to COVID-19 has now been published; it concurs that the quality of evidence is “low” to “very low” but nonetheless supports the use of quarantine and other public health measures.) According to Ioannidis, the current steps we are taking are “non-evidence-based.”…(More)”.