Everyone can disagree with me

Of course I'm writing a post about Covid-19, you all knew I would didn't you? But this isn't so much about the virus itself, as about that which is swirling around the virus.

It can hardly have escaped your notice that I am not the greatest cheerleader for the Tories, or indeed for the self-interested manoeuverings of most of our elected politicians. I am usually the first to leap to attack incompetence, venality or stupidity. However, and it surprises me to say this, I am becoming increasingly angry with the level of bitching and carping about the government response that I'm seeing on old-fashioned media, and social-media. What purpose does it serve to stoke fear? Whose interests are protected by spreading mis-information? Who are you helping by claiming to know better? There are people who I like and generally respect who I now feel are doing the job of the Daily Mail - spreading fear, distrust and doubt, fanning the flames of panic buying and selfishness.

I am as sick of comment pieces that start, "I am an epidemiologist and I think..." as I am of comment pieces that start, "I am not an epidemiologist, but..." There are as many opinions as there are arseholes in this country at the moment, and very few of them are helpful.

No, our government is not perfect.

No, they don't know what they are doing.

Nobody does.

Not me.

Not you.

This is new, this is scary, but however unpalatable you may find it, the government is trying to do the best that it can. You may or may not believe that its choices are the best, but you do not know any more than I do. The one thing that does seem to be the case is that the government is basing its plans on scientific evidence and modelling. I am heartily in favour of evidence and science.

Is our government making the same decisions as every other government? No, not exactly the same decisions, but the broad thrust remains the same, no matter the strategy used. And there will be no way of knowing which strategy is most effective until a long way down the line. Declaring that it's "nonsense" or "obvious" or "stupid" on social media is just... arrogant, futile, thoughtless and dangerous. There is enough anxiety, enough fear, enough misunderstanding.

To return to my old hobbyhorse of Brexit for a moment... a great many Leave-supporters made a habit of hurling accusations at Remain-voters that we just needed to get behind the plan and it would all be fine, it was our negativity about the outcome that was dragging the plan down. To my mind, that was arrant nonsense - my opinion on Brexit was clearly never going to have an impact on the negotiating stance of the US in trade talks, or the willingness of Nissan to make cars in Sunderland. This situation however, is quite different. Every time you talk down the government; every time you say it's making the wrong decisions; every time you say you know better, you contribute to undermining the possibility that people will follow government instructions. You contribute to fear, to panic-buying, to social unrest. You are society. You make the world around you. No matter what plan the government opts for, it will only work if they can take the people with them. Take you with them. Take the people who listen to you with them.

The modelling that our government is basing its advice on is available from Imperial College and makes genuinely interesting, and sobering, reading.

Among the many, many interesting statistics and forecasts in that model was the fact that it assumes only 70% of people will follow the instructions. Be that 70%. Encourage others to be that 70%. The smaller the percentage uptake of advice to isolate and distance, the more people die.

There is no simple solution.

There is no path through this that does not cause social disruption.

Sadly, there is no path that does not lead to people dying.

But there are paths that don't lead to the breakdown of the fabric of society. And I hope and believe that there are paths that lead to us being able to minimise the number of deaths. And that isn't just deaths from Covid-19. We need the health service to function to serve all those who are ill with everything other than Covid-19. We need businesses to stay afloat so we are not forced into another decade of austerity, because austerity kills - not as fast or as demonstrably as a virus does, but it still kills.

So wash your hands; distance yourself from your fellow citizens; isolate if you are vulnerable; isolate if you develop symptoms; isolate if someone in your household develops symptoms.

But don't insist that you know best about when or whether schools should close. The knock-on effects of closing schools in terms of both viral spread, impact on key-workers and economic-induced hardship further down the line may be worse than the effect of keeping schools open. Or it may not be. Nobody knows. Not me. Not you.

Don't insist that everyone should stop going to work. Those who can work from home should do so, but no companies are being told to close (as of government advice on 18th March) so don't bully or shame your friends into thinking they should stay away from work if the nature of their work isn't compatible with working from home, and they can maintain sensible precautions at work*. A functioning economy is necessary for the health and wellbeing of the people of this country after this outbreak. Insisting that everything must stop only breeds fear, and panic, and risks further social breakdown and hardship.

I am not, as I said, a cheerleader for the government. But I don't believe, however much I loathe them, that the Tories want us to die.

For once in our lives, we are in positions of power. For once, our actions are going to dictate how the situation unfolds. It is within us to help our fellow man. You may get sick; your loved ones may get sick but most of us will weather that with few problems. It is our duty to protect those who can't weather this virus. It is our duty to support every measure put in place to limit the risks to the vulnerable, and if that means supporting the government in word and deed, then that's what we need to do.

I can still think Brexit is a shit idea though.


* I will hold myself up as an example here. We currently have 7 people at work. We have 3 people self-isolating and 2 people working from home. Each of us at work is in a separate office. When we use communal areas, we all wash our hands with soap and water before and after entering the area. We wear single-use gloves when handling the scientific equipment that we make. No, mass-spectrometers probably don't count as critical national infrastructure at the moment, but if the company folds, it would never re-form and that would have surprisingly wide-ranging knock-on effects on R&D in this country, as well as putting twelve people out of work. We are following government advice, and if that advice changes, our actions will change.