Changing the message

"Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives" worked well in terms of affecting the behaviour of the bulk of the population. But has it been too successful? It certainly seems to have put the fear of God into a lot of people. It has accentuated the public's notorious inability to understand and balance risks and benefits. And it isn't going to be easy to evolve, as shown by the reluctance of some teachers to get back to work, even though most of them and their charges are in very low risk groups. It's entirely possible that they will be at more risk travelling to work than once they get there. And of course, the risk to the teacher is being weighed against the benefit to the pupils.

Messages are difficult to change but easy to undermine as the Dominic Cummings saga shows, whatever the rights and wrongs what actually occurred.

All of this and much more is well summed up by Libby Purves in The Times today who says:

 "Another week on the road to financial misery and social dissolution. Over half the nation freezes in cautious immobility while the rest carry us on their backs. As the tenth week of lockdown begins, ever more intense is the shame of cowering behind a thin red line of gallant weary workers who are poorer and face more danger.

On the safe side are the comfier pensioners and the still-earning professional classes — executives, lawyers, journalists, academics — working from home with a garden or park, shopping online, moaning humorously about haircuts. Out on the front line “key workers” keep us all going. Not only NHS and care staff but a host of others: police, binmen, security guards, bus drivers, shelf-stackers, shopworkers, warehouse and postal workers, ships’ crews, delivery drivers roaring along the motorways in HGVs or piloting battered vans from local pick-up centres so that Amazon and Etsy can serve our whimsies...

Most of those working hardest are lower paid.... It forcibly reminds us of widening social inequality irrespective of value.... as we boredly seek entertainment....

..when government advisers shrug off their own warnings and break the rules, the fury is national and dangerous. It doesn’t help that, like most of the rural cottage-creepers (i.e second home owners) they probably did no actual harm. They just weighed the risks, as Swedes were allowed to and we weren’t. But in a democracy rules are made for all..... So the privileged owe respect to the obedience of poorer citizens."

Saying that, personally, she tends towards Lord Sumption’s view on leaving things to individual common sense and judgment, she continues: 

"At first there was a logic in the lockdown, to protect an NHS that had, by world standards, been left with far too few intensive care beds. It needed time to reconfigure and build. But it has done that with astonishing energy and now there are vacant beds, unused Nightingale hospitals, A&E departments open and tentative moves towards routine surgery.

So, for several weeks now, government restrictions have been built entirely around the mystical “R” number and political nervousness. It is, admittedly, tricky. Leaders told us daily that every inessential step outdoors would kill someone’s granny and make a tired nurse cry: an idea backed with ghoulish, shroud-waving sentiment by, in particular, the BBC bedtime news. So it will take nerve to ease up and say, “Nobody is ever entirely safe but keep calm, keep distanced, wash your hands and carry on.”

One of the most useful risk comparisons I've seen during lockdown is that the average risk from covid-19 roughly doubles an individual's annual risk of death from all causes, whatever age the individual. This wouldn't hold for people with particular vulnerability. The government now needs to get that perspective across. The message that life isn't risk free is completely obvious and yet very hard to communicate effectively. Purves has made a pretty good stab at it. Shame Dominic Cummings is probably a bit preoccupied to read it at the moment.

Lockdown is exposing some stark social divides. Libby Purves, The Times, 25 May