Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

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Welcome to the Colette Podcast. I'm Jonathan Kay.

In recent weeks, the discussion about COVID-19 has increasingly turned from the medical

aspects of the disease to the often contentious debate about optimum policy response.

But this debate often has seemed like a dialogue of the death because comparing the myriad policy responses in different countries around the world is difficult, so everyone naturally focuses on the national examples that best suit their argument.

But researchers at Oxford University's Levatnik School of Government are trying to change that,

with a database and analytical tool that they call the coronavirus Government Response Tracker,

which includes an index that measures the overall stringency of politics. response tracker been summarized in a working paper titled Variation in Government Responses to COVID-19,

which was published on April 29th.

After reading it, I asked one of the authors

and project leaders, Oxford Public Policy Professor Thomas Hale, to come on the

podcast to explain his methodology and his goals. He spoke to me from Oxford earlier

this month. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

Your paper is titled variation in government responses to COVID-19 and you attempt to quantify the degree of stringency of lockdown responses was it difficult to assign a

number to things like policies involving school closures and that sort of thing.

How difficult was that?

It's definitely difficult but also necessary to create a comparative measure.

...