Here's my @guardian piece carrying on the campaign to set up a new Epidemiology-Macro crossover quango doing regular forecasts and policy simulations for government. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/30/covid-economy-britain-guessing-eat-out-policy?CMP=share_btn_tw

Some comments that did not make the editorial cut: the institutional divide in the UK and elsewhere reflects a deeper intellectual divide between economics and epidemiology.

Early pioneers like @toxvaerd1 and @EliFenichel have been fusing the two subjects for a long time. And now dozens of macroeconomists are getting in on the act. Which is all very encouraging.

The ESRC also has a new call for funding for a research centre in this field.

But these developments won't cut it. Researchers have to publish papers in top journals. And there are no Nobel Prizes or Econometrica papers in figuring out the optimal time to open gyms, or to let students start having sex with each other again.

So far, it has to be said, this campaign has fallen on entirely deaf ears. One has to presume that the govt and officals that advise them don't see the problem, or care to fix it. Unless plans are afoot in secret.

Note that there are no such bodies anywhere, not just here in the UK. Other countries need them too, to fine tune policies, make distributional choices in full knowledge and out in the open.

If anyone in govt comes across this thread, give me a call! I'm not trying to create a job for myself - you can find better people to run it. But I can come in and explain in more detail how it would work, what your plan of action would be.