Have the daily Coronavirus bulletins fed up? Guardian article

Mixed signals from the government, writes The Guardian , about what is permissible are undermining trust, with potentially fatal consequences.

Go to the pub, but don't get in touch with other people. Meet only in groups of six, but also sit in a restaurant with 30 other diners. Go to the office, but don't go by public transport. Listen to the scientists, except when we ignore them. Relax. Under no circumstances should you relax.

It is sometimes difficult, in the face of such mixed messages from the government, to resist the urge to scream out loud as soon as you get out of bed in the morning.

The government does an unenviable job in dealing with coronaviruses, as the situation changes day by day, but other governments have undoubtedly done it better. According to a June YouGov poll of 27 cities, Brits have the second worst level of confidence in their government's handling of the pandemic.

The level of trust in decision makers determines whether or not people will follow their advice – so this is a pretty big problem. Part of it is that the decision-making process seemed so patchy and opaque. Rules and advice are issued after balancing priorities and risks, but the fact that the government process is never clarified makes one think about the priorities that are being weighed against those of others.

Bringing children back to school means increasing the risk of infections, so we must limit the contact of people elsewhere, for example in domestic social settings. This we can understand and accept. However, when the government pushes people to return to the office to pacify commercial property owners and then compensates for this risk, for example by banning the birthday picnic, it's like being kicked while on the ground.

Then there are the times when he has blatantly shown that there is one rule for them and another for the rest of us. First there was Dominic Cummings' tour of the Northeast during his solitary confinement. Now, groups larger than six cannot meet, unless you happen to be running around in a peculiar dress shooting birds for fun – which happens to be very popular in Yorkshire's Rishi Sunak constituency.

People have a habit of remembering past events and making their own judgments. The government can't go from arguing that no one should leave their homes when infection rates skyrocketed in April to declaring that you can get on a train full of people to attend a meeting with colleagues close enough to hear. smell of coffee breath just as infection rates rise again at a similar rate. If it was dangerous then, it's dangerous now.

To calm these fears, the government is constantly rummaging in the hat to find a new rabbit to present as the magic trick to ending the pandemic. The latest is Operation Moonshot, the patently insane idea that we will be able to carry out between 2 and 4 million tests per day by December, and 10 million by the beginning of 2021.

"It should be possible," Johnson said last week, "to deploy these tests on a much larger scale than any country has ever done before." I'm not sure what part of the past six months gives someone in the government the confidence that this "should be possible." Under our existing testing program, it's difficult to get a test for Belgium's closest coronavirus – and if you're lucky enough to have had one, there's currently a backlog of 185,000 swabs to process.

Before Operation Moonshot, there were proposed immunity passports, despite scientists not even knowing how coronavirus immunity worked, tracking apps that have yet to materialize, and the Covid risk monitoring system that sank without leaving. track.

There is, of course, a delicate balance to be struck between preventing the economy from completely sinking, allowing people some little freedoms and protecting the most vulnerable among us from unnecessary danger. But scattergun messaging gets us nowhere but into the worst recession of all G7 nations and an unforgivably high death climate. If government advice continues to be so contradictory, the easiest thing for people to do will be to trust their instincts to protect those around them.

(Extract from the foreign press review by Eprcomunicazione )