Confirming the science behind COVID-19 policy recommendations

In early 2020 a group of behavioral scientists from around the world came up with about 20 science-based recommendations for public policymakers regarding COVID-19. Ellen Peters, the director of the University of Oregon’s Center for Science Communication Research, was among them. Those recommendations were published in the April 2020 issue of Nature and included messaging recommendations from social distancing to how to work with individual communities. 

Now, nearly four years later, those same researchers — and an independent panel of scientists not involved in the original research — looked back at the real world data to see how accurate those recommendations were. Both groups found that about 84% of the original recommendations were accurate. Their findings have just been published in the December 2023 issue of Nature. We talk with Peters about some of the recommendations and what the results say about the scientific process and public’s confidence in science.