Operational Research in the time of COVID-19: the ‘science for better’ or worse in the absence of hard data

How can policymakers and planners make informed decisions during a pandemic? What kind of (big) data are needed, and who and when is supposed to provide these? With the Operational Research community unable to get hold of reliable hard data–especially during the pandemic, the solutions promoted from analytics seem questionable. We may have to employ instead auxiliary data from social media and rapid market surveys. © Operational Research Society 2021.