{"id":47548,"date":"2020-05-18T18:14:49","date_gmt":"2020-05-18T17:14:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=47548"},"modified":"2020-05-29T17:53:11","modified_gmt":"2020-05-29T16:53:11","slug":"andy-cowper-how-not-to-unpick-a-lockdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2020\/05\/18\/andy-cowper-how-not-to-unpick-a-lockdown\/","title":{"rendered":"Andy Cowper: How not to unpick a lockdown"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Readers of <em>The BMJ<\/em> may be familiar with the <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dunning\u2013Kruger_effect\">Dunning-Kruger Effect<\/a>. It\u2019s almost an Inverse Competence Law, which proposes a cognitive bias in which people who are not good at a task overestimate their ability.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This effect has been to the forefront of many people\u2019s minds as they observe the UK government\u2019s handling of the covid-19 pandemic. In particular, the events of the past ten days, with the prime minister\u2019s launch of a routemap to ease out of the &#8220;lockdown,&#8221; have displayed a &#8220;greatest hits&#8221; of this administration\u2019s deficiencies.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Communication has been, as <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2020\/04\/30\/andy-cowper-slippery-language-and-defensive-politics-try-to-hide-the-real-problems\/\">I have previously written for these pages<\/a>, central to the Government\u2019s self-inflicted problems.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is powerfully ironic, as members of the Government seem to think they are actually very good at it. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/34c45068-5cc0-4356-86e9-ed71cafe6f93\">One\u00a0<\/a><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">briefed the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Financial Times<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> that <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cour comms have been some of the best in Europe.\u201d The fact that this individual said these words out loud in the real world, to a journalist, is almost impressive. If there were a metric scale of Dunning-Kruger-ness, this would clearly have broken it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Prime minister Boris Johnson <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gov.uk\/government\/speeches\/pm-address-to-the-nation-on-coronavirus-10-may-2020\">gave a\u00a0pre-recorded speech introducing the lockdown changes<\/a>: this in itself was interesting, as it removed the opportunity for live questions from the media that have been standard parts of the daily televised covid-19 Downing Street briefings. Questions from the public have recently been added to these events. A cynic might say this was a populist move by Johnson\u2019s <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/election-2019-50777071\">people\u2019s Government<\/a>\u201d to reduce media scrutiny: in fact, many of the public\u2019s questions have been better than some national journalists have managed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The daily briefings themselves have indulged the presentational style of the &#8220;minister of the day.&#8221; Health secretary Matt Hancock clearly thinks he\u2019s rather good at them, and has developed a tendency to comment on and review the questions which in no way looks like an inept and obvious effort to buy thinking time. Other ministers have taken to presenting the briefing with a curious and unfamiliar tone, which comes across as over-emotional to the point of wheedling. Perhaps these ministers are thinking ahead to the inevitable public inquiry that will follow, and pre-mourning their time in office before it is even over.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Johnson\u2019s pre-recorded speech was long on military metaphors (but at least spared us the covid-19 infection as \u201cinvisible mugger\u201d imagery of his bizarre statement when returning to work at Downing Street).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A few days earlier, the Government had announced new slogans. Previously, the nation had been urged to <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cStay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives\u201d, which was clear and comprehensible, at least.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The re-write to prepare us for the first easing of lockdown means that now we are urged to \u201cStay alert. Control the virus. Save lives.\u201d The problem is that \u201cstay alert\u201d doesn\u2019t really mean anything. It evidently doesn\u2019t help people to \u201ccontrol the virus\u201d in the absence of adequate information, infrastructure and PPE for safe social distancing at work or on public transport; let alone having a testing, tracking and tracing system in place. Perhaps we\u2019ll end up mixing and matching phrases: \u201cStay NHS. Protect the virus. Control home.\u201d makes about as much sense as the government\u2019s current re-write.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">These revised slogans had been widely mocked since their launch, and Johnson\u2019s efforts to make them more meaningful were not really a success. The launch of a graphic to demonstrate the new five-level Covid Alert System (which will trigger the stages of lockdown relaxation) was <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">amusingly close in style to the \u2018Peri-Peri\u2019-ometer hotness scale used by the fast food chain Nandos. It\u2019s good to see that someone, somewhere in Government communications has a spicy sense of humour.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Much emphasis has been made in the following media briefings of the \u201ccommon sense\u201d approach that will inform the un-lockdown: another populist touch from the UK\u2019s most populist Government in living memory. Yet all is not well in Johnson\u2019s &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2020\/05\/10\/cabinet-ministers-furious-boris-johnson-leaves-dark-lockdown\/\">people\u2019s Government<\/a>&#8220;: <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">leaks from the Cabinet to the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Daily Telegraph<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u2019s political editor revealed anger among Cabinet ministers at being excluded from decision-making on key covid-19 issues: that has been relegated to the &#8220;Quad&#8221; of PM, Chancellor, Health Secretary, and Michael Gove.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The question of whether the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Officer were involved in the changing of these covid-19 communications messages was rather half-heartedly answered, with both the scientists demurring from being comms experts and the Government asserting that the two were always fully involved in decisions about the science. It will be interesting to see how well that line, along with so very many other lines, holds up over time and with greater scrutiny and post-event candour.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2018\/07\/Andy_Cowper.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-42597\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2018\/07\/Andy_Cowper.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"160\" height=\"160\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2018\/07\/Andy_Cowper.jpg 160w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2018\/07\/Andy_Cowper-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 160px) 100vw, 160px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Andy Cowper<\/strong> is a freelance journalist and editor of <\/em>Health Policy Insight<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Competing interests<\/strong>: None declared.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Readers of The BMJ may be familiar with the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It\u2019s almost an Inverse Competence Law, which proposes a cognitive bias in which people who are not good at [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2020\/05\/18\/andy-cowper-how-not-to-unpick-a-lockdown\/\">More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47479,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[236],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nhs"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Andy Cowper: How not to unpick a lockdown - The BMJ<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2020\/05\/18\/andy-cowper-how-not-to-unpick-a-lockdown\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Andy Cowper: How not to unpick a lockdown - The BMJ\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Readers of The BMJ may be familiar with the Dunning-Kruger Effect. 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