When SARS-CoV-2 was first discovered, the world’s scientific community went into overdrive, researching this new pathogen, understanding its spread, its effects, and sprinting toward a vaccine in record time.
It heralded a great era in cooperation, with researchers collaborating across institutions and borders, sharing their results in real-time.
That work couldn’t have been done if all the research was being locked up by governments. But in Australia, they’re doing just that.
One of the researchers involved in producing forecasts for government goes as far as to call Australia’s approach “damaging to our public discourse”.
Domestically, epidemiologists and mathematical modellers have been hard at work for three years and counting.
They produced models to guide us through the emergency period of the pandemic, to help develop the “national plan” for re-opening, and they’re still producing regular forecasts and assessments of the local pandemic situation.
But Australian governments are — for unclear reasons — keeping their feet on the brake, slowing the spread of science, by preventing much of that work from being published.
What we don’t know
For example, governments have commissioned research coordinated by the University of Melbourne, producing weekly situational awareness modelling. That report includes an analysis of how many cases are being missed each day, trends in population behaviour, and state-level forecasts of cases and hospital occupancy.
Some of the high-level outputs are published each week in a National Cabinet-agreed format, including an estimate of the effective reproduction number. But those forecasts that governments are using to guide their decision-making? Nope.
As well as that, the government is conducting weekly behavioural surveys. That COVID-19 Public Adherence Survey “examines people’s perceptions, experience, and behaviours in relation to the public health measures implemented”.
It’s a survey that helps answer important questions about how many people are getting tested, and their reasons for getting tested. It helps governments know how many people are actively social distancing, or wearing masks, or following any of the other public health guidelines.
I can tell you that survey exists, but I cannot tell you any of the results from it. They haven’t been published.
This is all information that would be very useful to the broader scientific community that hasn’t been hired by a government department.
It would mean other academics — who have been producing modelling of their own — could have been using the best available data. Instead, through the first two years of the pandemic, many of those models produced independently of government were plainly less useful than what the government was using.
And because the researchers working for government weren’t able to speak freely, that modelling based on lower-quality public data was what got a lot of media coverage.
Missing a powerful public message
Releasing more data and modelling would help inform the public about what’s coming, and what to expect in future virus waves.
For example, during the Delta outbreak there was a very loud and bitter argument happening through the media that people weren’t taking things seriously.
There were repeated calls for stricter rules and tougher penalties to combat outbreaks spreading through parts of Sydney and Melbourne.
Professor James McCaw, who jointly leads the Doherty Institute modelling team giving advice to National Cabinet, says that the data didn’t support that narrative.
“The data that unfortunately weren’t publicly available at the time showed that the population continued to have high compliance with the orders,” he says.
“There was an opportunity there, if the data had been made public, that the community would have been able to see for itself that it was still taking the pandemic orders seriously, and that our fellow community members were compliant.
“That would have been a powerful, positive message, to help people stay the course.”
‘Damaging culture of secrecy’
Publication of this data would also help researchers and governments overseas, as other countries continue to respond to the pandemic.
We can say that with some confidence, because that’s exactly what Australia is doing.
The modellers of situational awareness have used data from overseas, including prevalence surveys from the United Kingdom, to help calibrate their models.
To be clear, Australia is using publicly available data from the UK to inform forecasts that are being kept under lock and key.
Professor Rob Hyndman from Monash University is part of the team producing weekly forecasts of COVID case numbers for all states and territories.
He calls it a “culture of secrecy around data that is damaging to our public discourse”.
Here’s what he told a recent seminar of the International Statistical Institute:
“We were able to put together a relatively good data set of case numbers for all states, but we were explicitly forbidden to make the data publicly available, even though our data was more accurate than what was appearing in the media.”
“Premiers would justify their policies by vaguely referring to ‘the modelling’ … but we would have preferred to have our forecasts available. So, the good data and the forecasts are kept secret, and what is available is of poorer quality, or out-of-date.”
Time for Australia to return the favour
Australia’s governments are sitting on a wealth of information about the pandemic, but they’re limiting its value by keeping it secret.
Why? There’s no impact on privacy or confidentiality, and the data is all owned by the government so there’s no clear contractual barrier.
Here’s Professor Hyndman’s take from December:
“It leads to worse analysis, it means less transparency in government, and it feeds distrust of government because it is not clear why decisions are being made.
“Making more data publicly available leads to a better society.”
When I asked, a federal health department spokesperson didn’t answer my direct question about whether there was any reason the situational awareness modelling and behavioural surveys aren’t being published publicly. Instead, they pointed to the weekly figures that are being published.
We’ve benefited greatly in Australia from open publication of modelling and data overseas.
Now, as we’ve entered the fourth year of the pandemic, perhaps it’s time for us to return the favour.
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