Current affairs develop fast. Deciding whether and when to make an intervention is difficult. (This Opinion Piece was offered to selected press media on 17th and 19th June 2020. Now superceded, I yet wish to make certain points, hence my publishing it here.)
Two aspects of the current COVID-19 story have come to the fore in recent days.
On 7th June was the following exchange on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show. Interviewing the UK Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, Andrew Marr commented: “I was going to say that this is, in a sense, art not science, because these are old figures you are getting. There is a time-lag and so forth…” Mr Hancock replied: “Well. It’s actually science. It’s not art. It is science on which we base these decisions. And science is necessarily looking at uncertainty.” Canadian, Sir William Osler (1849-1919), described medicine as “A Science of Uncertainty and an Art of Possibility.”
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