MPs hear that making real-time data available for researchers is ‘absolutely critical’ to tackling Covid-19
Ensuring that researchers are provided with real-time data on a range of issues to track Covid-19 is “crucial” to tackling the pandemic, MPs have heard.
Speaking at a House of Commons Science and Technology Committee hearing Covid-19 and the economy on 5 June, James Poterba, Mitsui professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said an “enormous amount of information” had become available since researchers attempted to track the financial crisis 12 years ago.
For example, he noted the wealth of data from mobile phones, GPS and Google searches.
At the same time, he said, organisations and agencies such as the US Centre for Disease Control were being “pushed hard to make data available more quickly for the research community”.
However, “even if the information is collected, in many cases it takes a long time for that data to reach the point at which the research community can work with it”, he pointed out.
“In a situation like this, where we have not been tracking a lot of the key metrics previously, getting the real-time data available for researchers is absolutely critical. And it’s crucial if we are going to have this favourable feedback loop where the researchers can inform policy and then collect more data on things as they are moving forward.”
Carol Propper, a professor of economics at Imperial College London, agreed.
She noted the drop in A&E attendance following the lockdown as something that was not anticipated and could not be tracked in real-time.
Propper said: “The more we can get these ideas together, the faster we can get the data together, and the faster we get as much real-time data and to get health authorities to release data…the faster we can begin to build and analyse scenarios to get us out of lockdown quickly.”
Also giving evidence, Philip Duffy, the chief scientific adviser to the Treasury, said the Treasury had looked at “an awful lot of real-time economic data to help inform decision-making and also understand compliance with measures”.
This included data on traffic, electricity usage, and internet search, all of which were used to inform the work of scientific advisers.
However, he acknowledged that there were “limits to it because this data is not validated” in the way that economic data from the Office for National Statistics is validated.
“But I think there is an ambition from senior ministers in this government to make sure that the civil service is much more focused on real-time data to give them better quality advice on the choices they are making,” Duffy said. “And that may be one of the, if I might say so, the silver linings of what has been economically pretty catastrophic few months.”
Greg Clark, chair of the committee concluded that “we established very clearly the importance of gathering more and richer, and more timely, data”.