Conley and Johnson (1) make a significant contribution to how the social sciences need to advance research on COVID-19. The authors suggest that studies on COVID-19 could learn from other similar one-time events to better understand causality and hence generalizability: Researchers need to be creative in their research design, due to the uniqueness of COVID-19, by constructing datasets that contain the same variables as the one-time event or studying possible effects over longer time periods. These approaches aim to study events that have occurred and examine their causal effects.

Letter in response to: Past is future for the era of COVID-19 research in the social sciences, (24 March 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

Reply to Velu and Iyer: The promise and limits of “near-miss” pandemic-related research, (5 October 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, volume 118, number 40.)