Covid-19 has exposed structural flaws in the body politic that have been evident for some time but are now threatening to break under the stress of a rolling global crisis.

Across western democracies the failure to mobilise people to take the urgent collective action necessary to thwart the global pandemic underlines the failure of 20th-century institutions to organise 21st-century society.

We can take issue with the decisions of individual leaders and the urgency of their public health directives, but all are stymied by the decline of trust in their authority, the collapse of the media as a single point of truth and the hollowing out of public services.

Guardian Essential poll: one-third say there has been an overreaction to coronavirus Read more

Some of us have been banging on about this for some time; how the collapse of the public square and its replacement with a commercially-owned social platform has undermined democracy, concentrating wealth and fomenting denial of our most existential challenges.

But it is only when coordinated state-directed activity is desperately needed that the relationship between a government and its people can really be tested.

Essential is polling the public’s attitudes, their fears and, critically, their stated behaviours through this crisis, not to make short-term judgments but to provide a baseline to understand this relationship. The early signs are deeply sobering.

Our snapshot from the last week shows that while health experts such as Bill Bowtell and Dr Norman Swan were sounding alarm bells about whether the PM was moving fast enough, many of us were carrying on business as usual.

One in three Australians, when polled between Wednesday and Sunday last week, believed the government was overreacting, more than the number who thought the government was dragging its heels.

Among under 35s that number was 40%, an attitude that had its public manifestation in the notorious Saturday Bondi spawn-fest and associated piss-ups across town on Saturday night.

We can shake our heads at the individual acts of selfish disregard, but these individuals are the natural products of a society which not only privileges but reinforces the sanctity of “me”.

Men too were more likely than women to think the threats were over-blown, a complacency that in even medium-impact scenarios will be responsible for thousands of deaths requiring a government response with a harder economic and social edge.

One explanation, though not an excuse for these behaviours, are the low levels of trust in the information we receive, which by any objective measure has become a wall of noise.

Just 19% of respondents say they have a strong level of trust in information from the government, a consequence of both the low regard in which partisan politicians are held and, I fear, the mixed messages that have been coming from our leaders over recent weeks.

But even lower trust is reported from the media, where strong trust is in single digits and total trust just one third. In contrast a chilling 40% say they don’t have trust in the media. This can only be read as the consequence of a piece of social infrastructure that is now broken.

As more and more people have departed traditional news platforms for the self-reinforcing, commercially-manipulated echo-chambers of social media, a lot of what remains of the traditional media has become shrill and marginalised (this publication notwithstanding).

This matters at a time when the public urgently needs to receive and, critically, act on fact-based information. But if the bond of trust has been broken, then the media is really just more noise.

As a brief aside, it’s been interesting to note the impotence of the social media platforms through this crisis. With no purpose in truth-telling, the constant stream of fears, feels and fake news has surely contributed to the stasis.

The end point of this is that not enough people have changed their behaviour in ways that doctors say are necessary to flatten the curve of the spread and give our hospitals the best chance of ensuring every sick person receives the level of care we thought was our right as a citizen.

In most polling I conduct, 72% is a pretty fair result; but this is not a horse race and this number represents a significant proportion of Australians abrogating their collective civic responsibility. Likewise, 40% say they are still shaking hands and getting social even as their leaders and the media were imploring them to conduct “social distancing”.

And while a minority were preparing themselves to weather the impending storm, the vast majority have been carrying on like it is business as usual, in a world where the biggest concern was the impending climate crisis (something else they chose to ignore).

Taken together, these numbers show a complacency anchored in distrust of society’s institutions driving behaviours that are precipitating a health crisis, feeding an economic crisis and likely a social crisis to come.

There is no point in catastrophising or pointing fingers as we wait for the tsunami to hit. We will all need to hunker down together and offer each other the level of support and regard that has been conditioned out of us in our pursuit of individuality.

But when this wave has passed (as it will) and we put our nation back together, let’s do so with a renewed commitment to building structures that bind us together and anchor us in truth.

• Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company