Unsurprisingly, leaders around the world have emphasised following science as a key to facing the Covid-19 pandemic.

Last week, in response to a group of anti-vaccine truckers protesting in Ottawa, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said: “You can’t end a pandemic with blockades … You need to end it with science.”

On Sunday, Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor assured the public it was the “scientific choice” to follow the government’s “dynamic zero-Covid” strategy to combat the pandemic in Hong Kong.

Scientific research is essential in meeting the challenges we face today and helping us understand how Covid-19 spreads and how its spread can be halted. Scientific research has led to the development of vaccines and boosters which have the power to end the pandemic, saving countless lives.

It also promises even more invaluable medical advances in the future, such as a new Covid-19 drug that can reduce hospitalisation and death among those who contract the virus’ more lethal variants.

But can science really tell us what to do? The answer is not so straightforward. Around the world, governments use different strategies to respond to the pandemic, from pursuing herd immunity and living with the virus to zero-Covid policies.

All these policies have scientists who endorse them. However, which policy is best is not necessarily a question of chemistry or biology. These are questions for the “soft sciences” – social sciences and the humanities.

Social sciences focus on understanding and predicting people and their behaviour. In contrast with the “hard sciences” such as chemistry, biology and physics, social sciences answer questions related to what humans can and should do about Covid-19. Without insights from the social sciences, policies guided only by “hard” science can lead to unexpected outcomes.

By studying people and their behaviours, social scientists are able to predict, for example, the rise of anti-vaccine groups in Western societies and the extent of vaccine hesitancy in Hong Kong. Other important questions, such as whether people will be motivated or discouraged from voluntary testing based on the government’s quarantine policies for those who test positive, can only be effectively answered by research with people.

These are not matters where the research of even the world’s best biologists will be helpful. Epidemiology, the study of health and disease in the population, thus integrates research methods from both the hard sciences like biology, and social sciences. But it is not the only important field to consider.

Educational research is another vital area of social science that has been undervalued in the battle against Covid-19 – as well as in facing other challenges, for example related to climate change. Educational research is best suited to understand why people hesitate to follow the science and why people resist expert advice on vaccination or other policies.

Educational research can help us understand the best way to ensure that disasters like the one we now face – which are human as well as scientific in nature – do not happen again. Psychology can play a major role in understanding the motivations behind people’s behaviour, how to promote the healthiest behaviours and the impact of various quarantine measures on people’s mental health and emotional well-being.

Even humanities subjects such as philosophy can be valuable in responding to the pandemic. Philosophy is the discipline that can answer the question of what we “should” do as individuals and as a society.

It can help us weigh our competing values and ethical principles, related for example to the need to preserve all human life, the ethics of fighting Covid-19 through impinging on personal freedom, and the benefit of academic freedom, so that diverse scholars can share their views as they pertain to the challenges faced.

Together with the field of history, philosophy can help us critically reflect on what we did in the past and its consequences to show the best way forward.

The Hong Kong government is among the world leaders in funding scholarly research – it’s one of the things that brings talented academics from around the world to the city. The Hong Kong Research Grants Council encourages research focused on making a social impact in relation to current challenges, including Covid-19.

However, most government-provided research funding schemes on current issues favour the hard sciences. In these schemes, scholars using methods from educational research, psychology or history are not encouraged to apply. Philosophers and other cultural and political theorists are also largely not considered for these important grant programmes.

As a result, we have a vibrant research culture in Hong Kong but one where scholars in the soft sciences can sometimes feel undervalued. As an educational researcher, I get excited every time I hear about a new government grant scheme that aims to tackle the major questions and challenges of our day.

But I feel disheartened when I read the fine print to see that climate science matters but not how we educate about it or even learn or think about what we should do about it as a society. Pandemic science matters, but somehow the social science that can most effectively support meaningful human responses does not.

We need the soft sciences and the humanities, not just hard science, as we face Covid-19 going forward.