THE POSITIVE PROFESSOR

SOCIAL media’s voice of calm Karol Sikora has been signed up by the Daily Express. Readers can now enjoy his soothing advice in these troubled times that have won him hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. If you need reassuring everything’s going to be all right read Professor Positivity.

THIS crisis has thrown up several phrases that I hope fade away as quickly as the virus. “Led by the science” and “Stay alert” are two I wish the politicians would stop repeating.

One phrase I do like is “Shoe-leather epidemiology”. The idea that the best way to fight a virus is by, metaphorically speaking, getting your hands dirty and burning through pairs of shoes as you pound the streets tracking down the unseen enemy.

Matt Hancock’s new test and trace app is the Government’s attempt at this. As with anything, there are creases to iron out. It looks wide open to abuse, and works on a trust basis – a commodity the Government does not have an abundance of at the moment. And where’s the accompanying NHSX app? What really happened on the Isle of Wight?

But let’s give it a chance. If we can get this working efficiently it could transform our approach and give us the key information we need to eradicate it. It’s going to be anonymous which means the contacts of someone who is positive cannot make their own assessment of risk. Clearly there are huge differences in the closeness of contact – who will be the arbiter if it’s anonymous?

The Danish Health Authority have helpfully ranked the usefulness of virus control measures. First is isolating people showing symptoms, our new system will add to this.

Most interestingly, they rank hygiene second above social distancing – I agree.

I suspect our hand-washing campaign had a far greater impact on the spread of the virus than we realise. Keeping your hands and surfaces clean means the millions of virus particles have nowhere to hide in wait – every minister should be shouting about this from the rooftops still.

Denmark have been ahead of the curve on everything in this crisis. They have also just halved their social distance rule down to one metre, a measure which will give the economy some desperately needed breathing space.

There’s not been a whiff of a second wave in Denmark and they opened up around six weeks ago. We should be confident we can follow their lead. Let’s stop talking doomsday scenarios.