Digital Health And Pandemics: What Covid-19 Reveals About The Challenges

Data Science is not a panacea. It needs good data and good science

Investment in health data science has been growing for over a decade, and its potential to improve health intelligence for disease surveillance, prediction and operational management is well known. In Covid-19, we have seen some governments relying very heavily on predictive models to guide their policies. But such models are only as good as the data, evidence and theory feeding them, and at the outset of this new disease, these could best be described as tentative.

In the UK, the fetishisation of data science led