Covid-19 poses an extraordinary challenge for policy-makers. In the face of a new disease that has brought the world to a standstill, policy-makers have to identify at breakneck speed the optimal measures needed to save lives and restart the economy. Good data and solid modelling are crucial, yet we are seeing government after government fail at harnessing the power of these two critical tools. Policy-makers are struggling to understand what data they need to collect, what models they need to build, and what safeguards they must put in place in order to find a resilient and fair way out of this crisis. In this talk, we provide clarity and make concrete recommendations as to how policy-makers can ensure that data and data science are our ticket back to normality.