* Part of a series of books on the COVID-19 pandemic, exploring the role of the media, public compliance, the impact of restrictions, and behavioural interventions, to offer a broad psychological assessment of the COVID-19 crisis * Focuses on how government decisions about how to tackle the pandemic were influenced, to a significant degree, by epidemiological modelling that predicted very high excess deaths rates from COVID-19 in the absence of very severe interventions to control public behaviour on a mass scale * Offers guidance on how interventions might work in relation to future crises, and how future pandemic-related research might be constructed to deliver more powerful analyses of the effects of interventions and the role played by different population risk factors