The public needs clear information about coronavirus – the government’s communication strategy must change

Editorial: Downing Street has made a habit of briefing particular journalists or news outlets but, given the seriousness of the task we now face, that has to stop

Matt Hancock had to clarify the government’s policy yesterday (EPA)

Whether the government’s scientific advisers are taking the right approach in handling the growing coronavirus epidemic is not a subject for the layperson. Almost all analysis on that matter is counterproductive.

But it is not to doubt or even to scrutinise the wisdom of the experts to say that the government’s management of the information, and the fashion in which the public are discovering horrifying news, has been a disaster, and it must be rectified immediately.

It is no exaggeration to say that hundreds of thousands of elderly people, more likely millions, spent Saturday night staring at their phones or iPads, trying to compute news that had appeared on the blog of the ITV political editor Robert Peston, that they are to be quarantined, quite possibly in requisitioned hotels, for several months, to protect them from a virulent and deadly disease.

It is, quite possibly, the most life-changing single piece of information to enter the public domain in some time.

On Sunday morning, the health secretary Matt Hancock appeared on several of the political television shows, to clarify the news, and could only say that, yes, quarantining the elderly is “part of the action plan” but that the government couldn’t say “formally” for now, what or when it was.

He would tell the BBC’s Andrew Marr that it remains OK to visit elderly people, if neither you nor they are showing symptoms. That it was possible to check if someone was OK, or to deliver shopping, without going within two metres of them.

So the precise nature of the quarantine, when it will happen, what it means, is still unknown, though the possibility, indeed the near certainty, of it occurring has been confirmed.

Within hours of the blogpost appearing, the next stages of the country’s battle plan appeared online, in the form of an article by Matt Hancock in The Sunday Telegraph, which was at first only available to read by Telegraph subscribers. The paywall restrictions were soon lifted amid a furious reaction. The reaction was correct.

The article itself says that “herd immunity” was never part of the government’s plan. Herd immunity refers, essentially, to allowing huge swathes of the UK population to catch the virus, to develop immunity, presumably during efforts to keep the elderly and vulnerable away.

If “herd immunity” was never part of the plan, it is particularly disappointing that the chief scientific advisor, Sir Patrick Vallance, and the head of the government’s Behavioural Insights Team, Dr David Halpern, have both discussed the “herd immunity” – with Sir Patrick doing so on the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday.

The precise degree of involvement of the Behavioural Insights Team, better known as the nudge unit, has become something of a bone of contention. There is, of course, nothing wrong with analysing and seeking to manage how human beings will behave in response to a virus, whose behaviour is rather more straightforward to understand.

Might it, perhaps, be wise if the experts in human behaviour were to offer some guidance in how humans might behave, should they find out about their own quarantining via an ITV News blog and a down-the-line TV interview on a rolling news channel?

That the prime minister has thus far seemed to be deferent to his chief scientists throughout this terrible crisis has been, in its way, reassuring. But the weekend that passed has changed everything, and the prime minister has been nowhere to be seen.

Most people do not want to panic, but they do not know what to do or what to believe. That is no way to manage a crisis as serious and as frightening as this. That must change, immediately.