The wrong sort of evidence

Many years ago, on my commute home from London to Wendover, we used to get get regularly delayed by "leaves on the line" or "the wrong sort of snow". Those days are long behind me. The experiences left me with a determination to avoid commuting like the plague.

Right now however, we have plagues of sorts, but the thinking that drove me away from commuting remains.

Over the years, we have developed an obsession with evidence based decision making.

My local council will not entertain measures to calm traffic along rural 'rat run" routes without evidence of enough accidents. I assume that somewhere in their policy there is a CQ ("Carnage Quotient") level that must be exceeded. A quality of evidence based that conveniently ignores the probability of an accident that will at least ruin someone's day - if not their life - is high, but we need evidence.

We have known about the probability of a pandemic for decades, but in the absence of precise evidence as to when and where, we sidelined it. I g…