Coronavirus: The stockpilers and the apathetic have something in common – they don’t trust the government The Government’s lack of clarity has created both panic and apathy

The United Kingdom is taking the Covid-19 outbreak with the correct level of seriousness – it’s just unevenly distributed. On the one hand, you have the groups of people who think that the disease is no worse than the flu, and believe the Government and most businesses are overreacting, and are making no real changes to their lives as a result. In doing so, they are risking their health and that of many others, both directly, through the risks of Covid-19, but also indirectly: if the disease overwhelms the NHS, as it has for a time overwhelmed the Italian health service, many people who cannot receive adequate healthcare will die of other causes – people who would otherwise have lived.

At the opposite end of the scale, supermarkets are being picked clean by shoppers engaging in frantic stockpiling. These shoppers certainly appear to believe that Covid-19 is serious, but the reality is that deliveries and supply chains are not likely to collapse because of it.

In the middle is a far greater number of people who are quietly doing the most they can to limit unnecessary social contact, to help out their elderly neighbours and to keep themselves healthy as well. But what the stockpilers and the calm-down-it’s-just-the-flu brigade have in common is that they don’t trust the Government.

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The stockpilers don’t trust the Government when they hear that there is no need to panic buy, and the ones who are ignoring official advice don’t trust the Government when they are told that Covid-19 is a serious problem.

Every country in the world shares the problem that parts of the population don’t believe that Covid-19 is a serious threat. That’s why many countries have had to go further in locking down cities and in some cases whole countries and areas. A handful of countries have had problems with stockpiling, including the Netherlands, where one minister was reduced to telling Dutch voters not to worry, as the country had enough loo roll for them to poo “for a thousand years”.

What unites the countries that have stockpiled is that they have not been clear in their communication, spooking their electorates and sending them rushing to the supermarkets. Boris Johnson has the same problem. At the start of the week, the Government was pursuing a radically different policy than it is today – one based on the idea that you could fight Covid-19 by isolating the over-seventies and those with pre-existing conditions, without much in the way of meaningful change for everyone else, beyond more frequent hand washing.

That approach put the British government in a small group of countries that were swimming against the tide of scientific consensus about how to tackle it. They might have been right to do so – during the last pandemic, when HIV was first publicly diagnosed and identified, the initial scientific consensus on its causes was wrong. But in this case, when the British Government’s advisors updated their model to take account of the latest information from Italy, they realised that their preferred approach would overwhelm the NHS and cause many deaths.

‘Any fudging from the Prime Minister breeds public mistrust’

But the change in approach means that Boris Johnson started the week telling people they should continue going to pubs and restaurants but wash their hands with vigour, and has ended it saying they should stop going to pubs and restaurants – but they should still wash their hands with vigour. No wonder people are confused and distrustful.

The nature of medical advice is that sometimes it is wrong, or it changes when doctors have better information. If you have ever been ill, you will know that sometimes your doctors aren’t sure what’s wrong with you at first, and that can change when they find out more information. That doesn’t mean that you should ignore your doctors and treat yourself with remedies you find on Facebook and WhatsApp.

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But the danger of this crisis is that an inherently uncertain condition – a new disease – is colliding headlong with the desire for politicians and political commentators with certainty. Will the Prime Minister guarantee he won’t close down cities and towns? How long will this go on for? These are questions to which the honest answer is always: “I don’t know”. But if the Prime Minister opts to fudge a change in position, or to hold out an undue level of certainty about when this crisis might end – then the real risk for him and the country is that we decide he’s a quack doctor, and look for cures to the crisis elsewhere.

Stephen Bush is political editor at ‘New Statesman’ magazine