/Oversharing is useless. Several others agreed with the above line of thinking. As one respondent from Australia commented, 'it is critical to understand that oversharing of information (i.e. scientific detail) is perceived as useless to policymakers'. Others echoed these points, stressing the distinction between what is academically important and what is important in policy. 'Scientists need to recognise policy makers don't have time/capacity for long-winded answers!' Being able to give a ballpark figure was very helpful. For example, another remarked that 'providing confidence intervals through Bayesian approaches to future predictions or bootstrapping is academically important but not important in policy'. Intermediaries in the UK and South Africa acknowledged these challenges and portrayed the 'difficult dance' of communication between science and policy, balancing the need for brevity with the need to understand the level of uncertainty and relevant limits of the scientific research each week. One piece of advice was to rule out the less useful parts of modelling; in a few countries presenting numbers of cases for example was quickly deemed ineffective, since this metric is not accurate and is heavily dependent on level of testing. Some modellers for example stopped presenting and communicating cases after their first work package.