Acting like the virus is no longer a risk undermines our trust in public health measures and the scientists proposing them
Covid is alive and kicking. About 2.3 million people are infected with the virus in the UK, including as many as one in 18 in Scotland. There are more than 10,000 Covid patients in hospital. These infections are increasing the burden on the NHS and contributing to the staff shortages that are already causing chaos in airports and elsewhere. And that’s before we even consider deaths and long Covid.
Yet our government talks and acts as if Covid is dead and gone. The health secretary, Sajid Javid, claims that we are in a post-pandemic phase. The prime minister insists that sky-high infections are no cause for concern (and indeed that Covid is so trivial that he hasn’t even bothered to think about the issue “for a while”). The government’s own website recommends wearing masks in enclosed crowded spaces (as do other agencies such as the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control), but ministers and MPs conspicuously fail to wear masks in spaces such as the House of Commons.
Stephen Reicher is a member of the Sage subcommittee advising on behavioural science. He is a professor of psychology at the University of St Andrews, a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and an authority on crowd psychology
