New research paper considers how to improve the transparency and accountability of COVID-19 models

News | Posted on Friday 11 September 2020

The new paper examines the modelling assumptions that have been informing the COVID-19 policy-making processes and to what extent these assumptions and their limitations are communicated to decision-makers.

A new paper by the Assuring Autonomy International Programme considers what can be learnt from other safety-critical industries to help improve the transparency and accountability of COVID-19 policy-making processes.

In industries such as aviation, it is common practice to produce an assurance case which assesses how confident we should be in any decisions we make based on the results of the model. This new paper suggests that any model that is used to guide critical policy decisions would benefit from being supported with such an assurance case to explain how, and to what extent, the evidence from the simulation can be relied on to substantiate policy conclusions. 

The paper also suggests that multidisciplinary teams - made up of experts with different expertise - are needed to develop the models and their assurance cases.

Read the paper here