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.