Read on Twitter
“Stay at home” getting a lot of attention but it’s the abandonment of “Protect the NHS” which is perhaps most significant. Doctors had been getting concerned about it. Excess deaths at home up. People not going to hospital when they need to. Capacity nowhere near being reached.
Not paying much attention to Twitter this weekend but logged back in to see it awash with criticism of new slogans. Though they are nebulous it’s worth remembering that though the old ones had benefit of simplicity, clearly they can’t be appropriate for every stage of the virus.
And worth remembering that you have to look at policy and deaths in the round. There was a lot of concern in medical profession (and clearly from Whitty himself) that the “protect the NHS” line was creating all sorts of short and long term problems.
Ive been reporting for weeks now that principal metric of govt success (keeping capacity free) isn’t much of a success if there’s just loads of excess deaths in the community (of which there’s an enormous number). Deaths are deaths, whether they’re Covid deaths or something else.
Concern of some doctors/medical professionals was that “Stay at home/protect the NHS” was making this problem worse. We need to get people to go to hospital, whatever illness they have. This is important context to remember when considering message evolution.
Of course, you could argue that we should always have had a more sophisticated discourse with the public rather than slogans, that it was always too blunt an instrument. Other countries certainly have had a different approach. But we are where we are and that’s another convo.
But the truth is, moving into the next phase was always going to be messier and less straightforward than the first. Indeed even the first, as I’ve argued, was perhaps too blunt and straightforward a message. Policy is going to become more nuanced and complicated.
Perhaps ministers and the rest of us, should be prepared to entertain that nuance.
*puts on tin hat*
Ok, now I’m going back to my book
Ok, now I’m going back to my book
