The pace of the news cycle around the Covid-19 pandemic is relentless. Just last week, the UK announced that the grim landmark of 200,000 deaths involving the virus had been reached. And as the current wave of infections, largely fuelled by the Omicron BA.5 variant, starts to recede, fears have been building up that a worse Sars-CoV-2 variant may be on the horizon, in the shape of BA.2.75.
The massive interest shown by the public in Covid-19 science is one of the few silver linings of the pandemic. However, the iterative, slow progress of science, through replication, or conversely, refutation of prior findings, has been put under severe stress. Many people find it difficult to accept that a published finding may just be false. Science’s self-correction mechanism also simply cannot keep up with the lifecycle of news coverage.
More recently, a preprint reported that current Omicron lineages in circulation (BA.1.12, BA.4 and BA.5) may have reverted to a level of virulence comparable to the previous Delta variant, mostly on the basis of experimental infections in hamsters. Those early results caused considerable alarm but could not be replicated in other hamster experiments. They were also at variance with the massive body of real-world evidence from many countries showing no increase in hospitalisation or death rates for infections caused by current strains in circulation.
Of the myriad doomsday Covid-19 variants that have been anticipated on the basis of early and often poor evidence, few did in fact sweep the world. A common misunderstanding is that “the science” is a set of absolute, immutable, indisputable and verifiable facts. Rather, science is a messy process eventually converging towards the truth in a process of trial and error.
There have been several instances during the pandemic where the first studies pointed to results that could not be replicated by other, often larger, studies. One example was the anti-parasite drug ivermectin. Several early studies on a few number of patients reported promising results, which led many to believe that it was a miracle cure for Covid-19. It was only once data from large clinical trials became available that ivermectin could be confidently ruled out as a useful drug against the virus.
The truth is that it remains next to impossible to predict how the next Sars-CoV-2 variant to spread globally will look. BA.2.75 might be it, though it is probably more likely to fizzle out. This massive uncertainty, combined with the high stakes of correctly predicting the next Sars-CoV-2 variant, makes it challenging to hit the right note between caution and public reassurance. Each time a statistical test is performed, there is a small chance it will pick up a pattern, even when there is none.
There is no easy solution to these problems. Irrespective of the immense efforts of the scientific community during the pandemic, we haven’t managed fully to communicate how science is an inherently slow and self-correcting process. I don’t blame the public – it is understandable that they, the media and policymakers all crave certainty and conviction, but this is not something science can generally deliver on. Though, another aspect we scientists have largely failed to convey to the public during the pandemic is that science is primarily about dealing with uncertainty rather than providing immutable, absolute truths.
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