Scientists had their say… now it’s our turn

PFFFFF. Here we go again. Living under Covid restrictions is becoming a bit of a drag. Listlessness abounds. The pub and restaurant closures that start today are less draconian than other measures that were considered but they are still a blow to the spirit. For some hospitality businesses they are potentially calamitous.

The public mood is as joyless as the October skies. Bump into a friend and “how are you?” is liable to be met with a deep sigh and a wan smile. Springtime was a social and economic desert, but we were spurred on with the promise of normality ahead; now in October, we’re still trudging towards that mirage.

The experts call it pandemic fatigue and unless the governments at Holyrood and Westminster tackle it, it threatens to make a fraught situation very much worse. This suggests that ministers need to start asking individuals and communities for their views on how best to tackle the pandemic. We all need to own the strategy for it to work, which means less of the “we say, you do” approach ministers have taken so far.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) is sufficiently alarmed by pandemic fatigue that it is urging governments to deal with it as a priority. Its research shows that apathy is a problem for 60 per cent of people in some European nations. Given that preventing a winter nightmare in our hospitals depends on us all accepting our role as footsoldiers in the fight against Covid, this is a worrying development.

Some of this demotivation is caused by the sheer tedium of the situation (Halloween without guising? Christmas without parties?) and the open-ended nature of constraints on our lives (until a vaccine has been approved and administered, restrictions will be necessary).

But even people who have been carefully abiding by the rules are starting to wonder whether ministers have got the balance right between, on the one hand, lockdown measures designed to prevent Covid deaths, and on the other, keeping public services and the economy operating normally enough to prevent avoidable non-covid deaths, and worsening mental health and economic harms.

It’s a measure of how much of an issue this has become that Sir Keir Starmer, who has previously been supportive of tightened restrictions, is now vigorously questioning them. Producing analysis suggesting that infection rates have risen in 19 out of 20 areas of England subjected to local lockdowns (would they not have risen still higher without the restrictions?), he has embarked on the not-entirelyrisk-free strategy of challenging the Government’s basis for its restrictions and demanding to see the evidence for them.

Mayors, councillors and voters in so-called red wall seats are properly hacked off with the Prime Minister over the restrictions being imposed there, so there is political opportunism in this from Labour, but Sir Keir is also tuning in to wider public frustration with government decisionmaking on Covid, especially when the basis for those decisions is not always well explained and consultation about them is scant or non-existent. We need to take a step back. For all the criticism, the stark reality is that there is no straightforward formula for containing Covid while supporting the economy. It’s true that in countries where a well-designed, effective test and trace system was quickly established, governments have been more successful in containing the disease. The UK has fallen short on that measure.

But when it comes to restrictions on social mixing, it is not realistic to expect the governments in either Edinburgh or London to have bulletproof evidence to prove beyond doubt that every rule they impose will work. Scientific evidence is rarely so unequivocal.

It comes with caveats and limitations. The Twittersphere might be full of self-appointed experts asserting with Trumpian confidence what the Government should be doing, but the epidemiologists who are doing the number-crunching know better than anyone that there is rarely a clear-cut answer to these policy questions. Politicians can only review the evidence, listen to the experts and do what they think is right.

The greatest fear of those politicians is the possibility of hospital overload, bringing grim death rates, severe knock-on effects for non-covid patients and a full lockdown all over again. Imposing temporary localised restrictions is all about trying to prevent that happening.

Some scientists say that the unintended harms of lockdown have been so severe for public health and the economy that the answer is to shield the most vulnerable while allowing the virus to run through the rest of the population to build up herd immunity. The counter arguments are that it would be difficult in practice to protect older and vulnerable people if the disease were rife in the wider population, that young, apparently healthy people sometimes succumb to the disease, that we still don’t know how long immunity to Covid lasts and that many people would end up with debilitating long Covid. Like I say, no easy answers.

What policy-makers are fairly confident about is that restricting indoor mixing does slow transmission, so that’s what they’re doing. What they are not doing is bringing the rest of us along with them. That’s why the WHO’S Europe director Hans Kluge says leaders need to “move beyond biomedical science” and start talking to individuals and communities.

Governments often have to make short-term decisions quickly, but this pandemic is going to continue for months. That creates the opportunity to consult with us all over how to tackle it in a publicly acceptable way.

It’s rather odd that the Scottish Government isn’t already conspicuously doing this. Government ministers can’t get through 60 seconds without using the phrases “partnership working” or “reaching out” or “collaboration”. It’s all the rage.

There has been a huge amount of this during the pandemic with ministers and civil servants “reaching out” to charities and councils, professional bodies and interest groups, but when it comes to dealing with the public at large, the approach has been much more old school. That has to change.

Behavioural insights, drawing on psychology and cognitive science in understanding what drives people’s choices, will be key to getting it right from here but above all we need consultation.

Science and experience are crucial, but seven months into this pandemic, it’s time the infantry had their say.

It is not realistic to expect the governments in either Edinburgh or London to have bulletproof evidence to prove beyond doubt that every rule they impose will work