Special issue: Risk science foundations in light of COVID‐19

Abstract

The outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was followed by millions of cases and deaths with Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) globally. Societies have faced significant challenges in adequately assessing, communicating, and managing risks associated with COVID-19. The Coronavirus pandemic clearly demonstrated the relevance and challenges of applying risk analysis and risk science.Risk science represents an important knowledge base for guiding the application of concepts, principles, approaches, methods, and models for assessing, communicating, and handling risk related to the Coronavirus, as discussed at the 2021 SRA Annual Meeting roundtable "Risk analysis foundations in light of Covid-19." Still, as discussed at the roundtable, further efforts are needed to strengthen both the foundations and practical applications of risk science. This is especially so for "wicked" problems such as COVID-19 risk management. The Coronavirus pandemic represents a rich source of challenges and inspiration for such efforts. It involved situations where risk science could not adequately inform practice and where existing risk science knowledge was available and useful but not fully used in practice.The purpose of this special issue has been to stimulate and disseminate knowledge (i) illustrating how COVID-19 challenged risk analysis at the fundamental level (e.g., by demanding answers when knowledge was still very incomplete and perceptions differed widely) and/or advancing risk science knowledge related to such challenges or (ii) demonstrating how the application of generic, foundational risk science knowledge can help to improve risk analysis practice related to COVID-19.This special issue seeks to advance the foundations of risk science and the risk science-informed practice of risk analysis for managing pandemic risks. The coordination of this special issue has been part of the SRA Foundational Issues in Risk Analysis Specialty Group activities.This special issue consists of nine articles that are briefly summarized in the following. Dawson and Hanoch (2022) investigate the role of perceived risk in dishonest decision-making during the Coronavirus pandemic. The article reports on three studies, where the first two studies assess whether perceived risk influenced the decision to behave dishonestly to gain access to vaccines and furlough payments, while the third study assesses to what extent such dishonesty was discouraged by the communicated probability ("objective risk") and the subjective probability (perceived risk) of being detected. The article finds that heightened health risk perceptions were positively correlated with lying to obtain a vaccine but finds no evidence