Challenge is keeping the public interested
THE increasing difficulty of maintaining the cooperation of the public is being discussed within the National Public Health Emergency Team – though no obvious answer is available.
‘We can see in the tracking data that the public are paying less attention,’ behavioural scientist Peter Lunn told the Irish Mail on Sunday.
As founder and head of the Economic and Social Research Institute’s Behavioural Research Unit, Professor Lunn is a member of NPHET’s sub-committee on behavioural science.
The challenge he has to grapple with is keeping an increasingly jaded public on board with NPHET and Government policy.
‘If I had a magic bullet, I’d have told the Government weeks ago,’ he said.
This time around factors such as shorter days and winter weather means social distancing will be more challenging.
‘I think when it came to
Fatigue and tiredness affect the experts, too
flattening the initial curve we did really well. Clearly the view in recent weeks and months is we’ve not done as well,’ he said.
‘I think it’s substantially harder now because you’re trading off competing interests. Before, the message was “flatten the curve” and it was very simple. We had to do this or we faced a crisis in our health system and thousands of deaths, so we had to do it.
‘Once you’re in a situation of trading off risk against your social and economic life – the education of your children and all the things we’re doing – it’s more difficult.’
Another difficulty has been the fallout from the Oireachtas golf dinner scandal.
‘It was clearly a problem. It was clearly something that was quite disillusioning for a lot of people. There was a lot of anger. That was entirely understandable and I think a lot of people who made substantial sacrifices in their lives were really annoyed by it.’
Despite this anger, tracking data suggests the scandal did not impact on people’s willingness to comply with lockdown rules.
‘If I look at the data, I can’t see it’s made much difference. But do I think it’s made some difference? It must have done,’ he said.
Professor Lunn also gave an insight into how six months of Covid has worn down those responsible for public health.
‘A lot of people have talked about fatigue and tiredness and so on. That also applies to all the officials who have to cope with this.
‘It has been an exhausting time with people working incredibly long hours seven days a week trying to deal with all this.’
He also spoke of the difficulty of keeping public confidence when even the experts in charge are uncertain of so many factors.
‘Uncertainty is what we have to live with. We’re trying to spread an understanding of things that we do know and we can work out – in a climate where there is so much that we don’t know.
‘With everyone’s expertise you have to admit how much you don’t know. I mean I’m uncertain where we’re going to be in a month’s time, let alone six months’ time.’
Nevertheless he remains positive about the future. ‘As a scientist I’m quite optimistic we will get a vaccine reasonably quickly and I’m quite optimistic treatments will improve as well.’
He also derives hope from the behaviour of people so far.
‘One of the things that gives me hope is how adaptable people are. We don’t like it and we desperately wish it would go away but actually people have been remarkably adaptive in getting on with their lives and finding ways to live in these circumstances. That’s what we’re going to have to keep doing. I’m optimistic we can – but at the end of the day we just don’t know.’