My intuition is that research abouts NPIs on behavioural change might be more tractable and therefore impactful than research where the endpoint is infection. If the endpoint is infection, any study that enrolls the general population will need to have very large sample sizes, as the examples you listed illustrate. I am sure these problems can be overcome, but I assume that one reason we have not seen more of these studies is that it is infeasible to do so without larger coordination.
While it is unfortunate and truly surprising that we have very little research on e.g. the impact of mask wearing and distancing, we do know that certain behavioural, realistic changes would be completely sufficient to squash the pandemic in many regions.
The change does not have to be large: As the reproductive number R is magically hovering around ~1.1 to ~1.3 in most regions in the Western world, it would be sufficient if people would act just a little bit more careful to get R below 1: That could mean reducing private meetings by e.g. one third (or moving them outside), widespread adoption of contact tracing apps, placing air filters in schools, or targeting public health messaging towards people that currently are not reached or persuaded. I have seen some research about vaccine hesitancy, but far less about these other areas. At the very least, a randomized study comparing different kinds of public health messaging seems really easy to do.and fairly useful. This might look differently for the next pandemic though.
More broadly: As you alluded to, fostering and increasing coordination between researchers looking to conduct a study might also be really useful. This applies probably even more to research about drug interventions, but way too much of it is underpowered and badly conducted, and thus pretty much useless before results have even been published. This paper argues that the solutions are already known (e.g. multicenter trials), but not implemented widely due to institutional inertia. Again, it is worth looking into how to facilitate such coordination, I believe that large cash grants by EA aligned institutions conditional on coordination between different trial sites could work.
Truly excellent post!
My intuition is that research abouts NPIs on behavioural change might be more tractable and therefore impactful than research where the endpoint is infection. If the endpoint is infection, any study that enrolls the general population will need to have very large sample sizes, as the examples you listed illustrate. I am sure these problems can be overcome, but I assume that one reason we have not seen more of these studies is that it is infeasible to do so without larger coordination.
While it is unfortunate and truly surprising that we have very little research on e.g. the impact of mask wearing and distancing, we do know that certain behavioural, realistic changes would be completely sufficient to squash the pandemic in many regions.
The change does not have to be large: As the reproductive number R is magically hovering around ~1.1 to ~1.3 in most regions in the Western world, it would be sufficient if people would act just a little bit more careful to get R below 1: That could mean reducing private meetings by e.g. one third (or moving them outside), widespread adoption of contact tracing apps, placing air filters in schools, or targeting public health messaging towards people that currently are not reached or persuaded. I have seen some research about vaccine hesitancy, but far less about these other areas. At the very least, a randomized study comparing different kinds of public health messaging seems really easy to do.and fairly useful. This might look differently for the next pandemic though.
More broadly: As you alluded to, fostering and increasing coordination between researchers looking to conduct a study might also be really useful. This applies probably even more to research about drug interventions, but way too much of it is underpowered and badly conducted, and thus pretty much useless before results have even been published. This paper argues that the solutions are already known (e.g. multicenter trials), but not implemented widely due to institutional inertia. Again, it is worth looking into how to facilitate such coordination, I believe that large cash grants by EA aligned institutions conditional on coordination between different trial sites could work.