Government incompetence stops people in Britain being able to assess the real risks around them

In the early 1970s I showed a visiting American around Belfast at the height of the Troubles. I had lived there for several years writing my PhD at Queen’s University and knew the city well.

I told him about its religious/political divides and which places were considered particularly dangerous. We were walking near the hard-Protestant Sandy Row district in south Belfast, when my friend asked me nervously: “Didn’t you say that this street was dangerous?” Pointing across the street, I replied, speaking as if this was common knowledge, “I said that that side of the street was dangerous, but this side is perfectly safe.”

I completely forgot the incident, until I accidentally ran into the same American in the US twenty years later and he reminded me about it. He said that my words had impressed him because they showed the precision with which front lines between unionist and nationalist territory were defined in Belfast. During the Troubles, the risks posed by moving anywhere in the city had become hardwired into the minds of all its residents as a common-sense survival mechanism. Like everybody else in the city, I became used to carrying out an automatic risk assessment wherever I went.

These sub-conscious but possibly life-saving calculations are the inevitable response of people forced to live with a permanent threat to their lives and livelihood. Over the years, I saw the same instinct at work in Beirut, Baghdad, Kabul and many other cities and countries where people felt at risk.

Britain in the age of coronavirus will soon go down the same road as the threat of Covid-19 becomes a feature of everyday life. People will have to decide what dangers they are prepared to accept and where they draw the line. As happened in Northern Ireland and Lebanon, experience will swiftly tutor people into working out the risks they will have to face on a day-to-day basis.

I left Belfast in 1975 and went to Lebanon where the fifteen-year-long civil war was just beginning. At first, everything looked equally terrifying to me – with shells falling apparently at random and militiamen at checkpoints reported to be shooting dead members of other religious and ethnic communities, after a glance at their ID card. But, after a few weeks, I had refined down in my mind what was really dangerous and what might appear risky but was in practice relatively safe.

One street in west Beirut might be eerily empty, but the next would be unaccountably busy, bustling with shoppers and people sipping their coffee in cafes and restaurants. Some beaches were deserted but others would be crowded with sunbathers and swimmers. Invariably there turned out to be some good practical reason why the perception of threat differed from place to place, such as the sectarian make-up of that part of the city or the direction and proximity of snipers and artillery fire.

Absolute safety had become a thing of the past and Beirut’s inhabitants had to learn to live with a higher level of anxiety than they would have liked.

The British government is now saying that there will inevitably be risks as it eases lockdown and partially reopens schools. This is not exactly news to the rest of the population, but it has seen so many governmental missteps since March – leaving Britain with the highest death toll from coronavirus in Europe – that many people no longer trust what the government says about potential risks. They will have to try to calculate the threat level themselves, but that moment has not yet come.

In this epidemic the risk to individuals varies vastly, more so than in past epidemics – with vulnerability depending on age, health and location. The government has been singularly inept in identifying those most at risk, despite early pledges to do so. As slogans about protecting the NHS turned into ill-judged policies giving this aim priority, elderly and untested patients were returned from hospitals to care homes where they spread Covid-19.

This contributed to the deaths of 12,500 fragile people from the age-cohorts known to be most in danger. Also predictable was the premature death of thousands of desperately ill people whose treatment had been postponed or who were too frightened to go near a hospital. Saving the NHS was promoted as a quasi-religious duty, as if this was distinct from saving lives.

An inevitable part of epidemics down the ages is panic, but when Britain locked down after 23 March, the government used that in order to ensure that its instructions were obeyed. But panic and fear do not have a reverse gear and the government is averse to admitting that its own actions were ill-conceived and excessive and that containment of the disease could have potentially been achieved by a more targeted and better-organised response.

Most culpably, the government was extraordinarily slow in carrying out pilot studies to establish the extent of the infection and the dangers it posed. Only now is it becoming clear from a study by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) published last week that Covid-19 is nothing like as widespread as had been feared, with only 0.27 per cent of people having caught it in England outside hospitals and care homes. This percentage in that data converts into an average of 148,000 people infected out of an English population of 56 million.

If the ONS figures are true, and they are particularly well sourced, then the threat is serious but much more limited than ministers and officials have been saying. Compared to other epidemic illnesses, Covid-19 is very age specific; the fatality rate is close to zero for some age groups, with only two deaths among the 10.7 million children under 15. By way of contrast, the over-90s have a one in 81 chance of catching it and dying.

Grim news this certainly is for the minority most in danger, but the figures show the absurdity of comparing what is happening with the Black Death in the 14th century, the Great Plague of 1665 or the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918/19.

Overall, the government has shown a level of serial ineptitude not seen since the First World War. At least in Belfast and Beirut we could see the risks we were facing and could do something to avoid or mitigate them. People in Britain will likewise find a way of living with coronavirus, because they have no alternative and it is not an existential threat.

However, real risk assessment requires correct information about the nature of the dangers to be faced, and this the government has wholly failed to provide.