The words of warning from England’s chief medical officer during the coronavirus crisis
In his frequent appearances at Downing Street press briefings, Prof Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, has generally stood quietly as the prime minister, or one of his cabinet colleagues, has defended the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
But there have been instances when Whitty has diverged directly or indirectly from the government line.
If people hear a distorted version of what’s being said, that says ‘this is all fine now, it’s gone away’ and start behaving in ways that they normally would have before this virus happened, yes, we will get an uptick for sure.
It is absolutely critical people stick to the guidance that has been given; it’s a changed guidance for there are still very significant restrictions socially and there are very significant restrictions on business of different sorts.
We are going to have to do a lot of things for really quite a long period of time, the question is what is the best package and this is what we’re trying to work out.
Be very clear, we are not at the end of this epidemic, not by a long way. We are in the middle of it.
Until we have those [vaccines], and the probability of having those any time in the next calendar year are incredibly small and I think we should be realistic about that, we’re going to have to rely on other social measures, which of course are very socially disruptive as everyone is finding at the moment.”
Neither Sir Patrick nor I consider ourselves to be comms experts, so we’re not going to get involved in actual details of comms strategies, but we are involved in the overall strategic things and we have been at every stage.
The desire to not get pulled into politics is far stronger on the part of Sir Patrick and me than it is in the prime minister.
In terms of the setting of the alert level, it’s ultimately for the chief medical officers, who are informed by the data which has been collected, collated and analysed by the JBC (Joint Biosecurity Centre).
Those [measures – hand washing, use of face coverings and the 2-metre rule] are going to carry on really for as long as this epidemic continues.
I think there is a long list, actually, of things that we need to look at very seriously.
If I was to choose one, it would probably be looking at how we could … speed up testing very early on in the epidemic. Many of the problems that we have had came because we were unable to actually work out exactly where we were.
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