The fourth and final of our Covid evidence sessions for fellows and other statisticians, to garner opinions on government's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. This session will be looking at evaluation.
The evidence session will begin at 3pm but will be preceded by Matt Hancock, who was Secretary of State for Health and Social Care at the start of the pandemic, reflecting on his experiences and taking part in a Q&A.
This is a hybrid event and this page is for booking to attend in-person in London.
If you wish to book to attend online please register via this
link.
Questions investigated:
1. How are risks to successful evaluation – low participation-rates, biased comparators, weak performance-monitoring, delayed transparency – best managed?
2. Which Covid-health policies needed evaluation – not all do and so who decides and are there some criteria we could set out which might us help prioritise those policies which could/should be evaluated?
3. How are prior beliefs formulated about the likely impact of public-health policies during Covid – via modelling, formal elicitation etc?
4. Medicines and vaccines apart, what are the barriers to randomization when evaluating non-pharmaceutical interventions?
5. What were some of the benefits that evaluation brought during the pandemic? What were missed opportunities? How can statistical science help to deliver more robust policy-evaluation in the next decade?
Speakers:
- Theresa Marteau, Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge
- Isabel Oliver, Chief Scientific Advisor Transition Lead at UKHSA, and Tim Peto, Co-Leader for the Infection Theme of the Oxford Biomedical Research Centre
- Max Parmar, Director of both the MRC Clinical Trials Unit and the Institute of Clinical Trials and Methodology at UCL
- Chris Robertson, Professor of Public Health Epidemiology in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Strathclyde University and Head of Statistics at Health Protection Scotland (HPS).
Organisers: Sheila Bird, Christl Donnelly and Max Parmar for RSS Covid-19 task force