Science.

• Position: [FOREWORD]

With a touch of real sadness, we present the effects of COVID-19 in this issue in a set of articles that we believe will prove useful and interesting.

The art and science of underwriting relies upon levels of predictability that often include an irrational "gut" sense on the part of the professionals assessing risk. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, an entire society's leaders needed to don the robes of risk managers in a trice of time and try to find predictors and pathways that ended up being as much "gut" as science, since the science was so low in actual reliability and the scientists so widely varied in their views. Add a touch of "cancel culture"--the bane of our current social scene--and you have demotic rhetoric from podia and from TV screens. As close to a sane person as there is on the political scene, Mike Pence, the anti-COVID point person, was at a loss often for consistency and the President was at a loss for the right words that would reflect the right, reliable science--especially for words that were not full of demurring and terpsichore. Dr Fauci was not the sage that Americans hoped for nor was he rightly to have been discredited for being a mere human faced with an inhuman task. We learned the boundaries of science, to an extent, and will need to relearn them when the vaccines hit the streets in record time. Credit President Trump for Operation Warp Speed if--when, let's hope--it works..... The science of leadership: On the insurance scene, it is the last...