During summer 2020 I wrote an essay about what science can and cannot do and the role it can play in public policy decisions including those pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic. I concluded that science explains relationships between cause and effect: no more and no less. No normative conclusions about individual or collective decisions follow directly from science. Instead, costs, benefits, and other values properly enter both individual and collective decisions.

I have written three times since then about gradual recognition of this argument among medical professionals as well as journalists. I am writing again about recent columns and an editorial. I am encouraged by what I read.

David Leonhardt recently provided risk assessment information about COVID as well as about other more familiar risks. The average weekly chance that a person who had been vaccinated and received a booster died of Covid was about one in a million during October and November 2021. For context, the weekly auto fatality rate for Americans is more than double — about 2.4 per million. And the average weekly death rate from influenza and pneumonia is triple — about three per million. In a subsequent column, he argued “public health, like the rest of life, usually involves trade-offs.” “People have to weigh the risks and benefits.”

Jay Varma, COVID-19 advisor for former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, recently described how difficult it was to decide what combination of observable metrics ought to govern policy decisions about restrictions on human interaction during the pandemic. “The truth is that science doesn’t have an answer for what level of Covid-19 transmission is acceptable in schools before and after masks are removed or what level is acceptable in communities before and after vaccine verification. Someone has to decide, and that decision will involve subjective assessments of the risks people will tolerate.”

Even though journalistic coverage is improving, there are setbacks. Just as I started to write this blog and claim victory, a Washington Post editorial, discussing recent moves by governors to remove mask mandates, declared “Science, not politics and pandering, should determine pandemic policy.” A Post article the next day was better because it recognized that “… advocates for each side in the masking debate are once again claiming the mantle of science to justify political positions that have as much to do with widespread bipartisan frustration over nearly three years of life in a pandemic as any evolution of scientific findings.”

For a good summary of the scientific evidence about mask effectiveness in COVID and respiratory infection transmission reduction read this article in the current Regulation.