Coronavirus rumours only fill the vacuum left behind by awful government communication

Your phone buzzes. Doctors are urgently warning that petrol pumps are a major spreader of coronavirus – avoid touching them. Another buzz. Researchers at Harvard have warned not to use Ibuprofen if you have coronavirus. Buzz. No one will be allowed to leave London in 48 hours’ time. Buzz. The army are being deployed.

These kinds of rumours, half-truths, and outright misinformation – often sourced to a “mate’s brother’s girlfriend” or similar – have been swirling across WhatsApp and Facebook groups at a frenetic pace over the last week, contributing to a sense of confusion and anxiety on what exactly any of us should be doing about Covid-19.

The usual answer in these situations is to blame WhatsApp, Facebook, or Mark Zuckerberg, the man who (largely) owns and (entirely) controls both of them. And while MPs and columnists have pointed the finger, and even pulled in senior officials from multiple social media companies to No 10 meetings, the internet is not to blame for the maelstrom of misinformation around a global pandemic.

The simple truth is that the torrent of online rumour-mongering is simply filled by a vacuum left where official communications should be. At a time of crisis, with hundreds of thousands of lives at stake, government communications have failed in a way never seen before in modern times.

The failures started early: in early March, the public was left deeply confused after a still-unnamed special advisor briefed Robert Peston that the UK was pursuing a strategy of “herd immunity”, intending to allow millions of people in the country to catch coronavirus.

The government’s actual scientific and medical advisors tried to explain this wasn’t the case, but mixed messages continued – Boris Johnson suggested people should self-isolate, only for his dad to say he still planned to go to the pub.

The government launched a televised briefing, only for major announcements on shutting down the tube and restricting national rail to be made by late-night press release, with no public information online and little mention of seismic changes in national bulletins.

Millions of people don’t know whether to self-isolate for seven days or 14 days, or even what self-isolation means, while many more don’t know whether they are among the 1.5 million “extremely vulnerable” people mentioned in on-air briefings, the wider vulnerable group (including over-70s) told to practice “extreme social distancing” or what any of that means.

Last Wednesday, aides briefed that some form of lockdown was coming for London – leading to 48 hours of wild rumours about military deployments, and bans on travelling into and out of the city – ahead of an underwhelming Friday announcement asking pubs, restaurants and other outlets to shut across the country.

There is, in other words, an absolute and systemic breakdown of government communications at a time when such communications could not be more important. Pandemics spread exponentially: cases move from the hundreds, to the thousands, to the tens of thousands within a few weeks – by the time you spot thousands of cases, you have a much bigger problem than you know. Every day lost to chaos and confusion is vital time wasted.

Communication was supposed to be what this government was best at: this is, after all, the team behind “Take Back Control” and “Get Brexit Done”, and which managed to authorise £100m in adverts for a no-deal Brexit which never even happened. There is a message which should be just as simple to sell – “Stay At Home” – and no one is selling it.

The result is people crowding into pubs, filling parks, flocking to beaches, and endangering themselves and others.

The bleak irony of this is that underneath the communications mismanagement, the government is largely trying to follow the same strategy as most other countries – to dramatically slow the pace of coronavirus through social distancing to avoid overwhelming the health service, and the dire consequences that would result.

Perhaps its judgment on timings is wrong – though it is dealing with a country which has had far fewer restrictions on movement in living memory than most on the continent – but it is following, to an extent, the same playbook as everywhere else. It’s just most of us have no way of knowing that.

No one should be in doubt about what to do about coronavirus. No one should be able to watch TV, open a newspaper, or browse the internet, without being plastered by hard-hitting public information messages. We should be seeing appeals from doctors, relatives, and at-risk groups to do the right thing. Where these are published, they are terrifying.

The only way the government’s plan of asking – rather than forcing – us to do the right thing could ever work was a relentless and clear public information campaign. Instead, we have had a messy and confused briefing fog, and virtually no adverts.

The public’s confused, selfish and seemingly self-destructive response to coronavirus hasn’t come from nowhere. This was the hour when government PR had the chance to save thousands of lives. They have failed to step up to that moment – and we will pay a heavy price for their failure.