Mitigating Cognitive and Behavioural Biases During Pandemics Responses

Many countries seemed to a large extent to have been unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic and national governments often acted uncoordinated resulting in many inconsistencies in the mitigation processes. The acknowledgement of the multiple factors at stake in handling the crisis has more often than not been omitted from public communication, where public officials’ statements mostly framed the problem unilaterally, basing their narratives on warnings coming from the medical and public health scientific community. In this article, we propose a model for policymaking regarding hazardous events, such as a pandemic, to, in advance, forming better response strategies for future similar scenarios. We describe how an epidemic model can be integrated into a multi-stakeholder multi-criteria framework and how a more integrated analysis can be done, even under significant uncertainties