• Bjørn Hofmann.
• Department of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Gjøvik, Norway.
• J Eval Clin Pract. 2020 Oct 1; 26 (5): 1344-1346.

BackgroundThe COVID-19 has posed a wide range of urgent questions: about the disease, testing, immunity, treatments, and outcomes. Extreme situations, such as pandemics, call for exceptional measures. However, this threatens the production and application of evidence.MethodsThis article applies standard categories in epistemology to analyse the pandemic in terms of four kinds of uncertainty: Risk, Fundamental uncertainty, Ignorance, and Ambiguity.ResultsMapping the uncertainties of the pandemic onto the four types of uncertainty directs evidence production towards specific tasks in order to address the challenges of the pandemic: Eliminating ambiguity, being alert to the unknown, and gathering data to estimate risks are crucial to preserve evidence and save lives.ConclusionIn order to avoid fake facts and to provide sustainable solutions, we need to pay attention to the various kinds of uncertainty. Producing high-quality evidence is the solution, not the problem.© 2020 The Author. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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