{"id":2693,"date":"2020-11-30T18:42:53","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T18:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=2693"},"modified":"2020-11-30T18:42:53","modified_gmt":"2020-11-30T18:42:53","slug":"the-uks-invisible-victims-of-covid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=2693","title":{"rendered":"The UK’s Invisible Victims Of Covid"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Boris Johnson<\/em><\/p>\n

How do you get people to take covid seriously?\u00a0 In England, that\u2019s a question which pre-occupies many scientists, medics and politicians. They are fearful that festive Christmas drinks and family gatherings will lead to a re-escalation of the epidemic.<\/h3>\n

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is an obvious problem.\u00a0 His \u2018mixed messages\u2019 populate an ever-enlarging case study of how not to do pro-precautionary communications.\u00a0 His tone as much as his inconsistency is the problem.\u00a0 He urges caution and justifies restrictions in one sentence while telling the nation that he, and they, are freedom loving libertarians in the next.\u00a0 He seems unable to resist the urge to emotionally distance himself from the life-saving controls he announces, by saying how much he regrets them. \u00a0He says he thinks this is the right thing to do but his qualifications say he feels it is the wrong thing to do.<\/p>\n

Another issue is the combination of presentations of Johnson and his government scientific advisers.\u00a0 He deploys sub-Churchillian flowery rhetoric and Trumpian bombast as if he thinks he can bluster the virus into submission: a progressively less effective approach.\u00a0 Then the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Adviser and their assistants deliver death-by-PowerPoint presentations filled with statistics, which then have to be summarised by journalists, by which time many of the public have switched off or zoned out.\u00a0 Neither the English governments\u2019 politicians or its scientists seem to have the capacity of Angela Merkel to calmly explain key scientific facts in a way which makes the policies make sense.<\/p>\n

Sensible Celebrities<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today it was announced that NHS intends to make the vaccination case with \u2018sensible celebrities<\/a>\u2019 as messengers.\u00a0 Not a bad idea, although it\u2019s debatable whether it helps to share the strategy as opposed to the content, and probably reminds us about Johnson who obviously wouldn\u2019t pass the audition.<\/p>\n

What Else ?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You could fill a communications strategy book with could-have-done-better illustrations drawn from the Johnson Government\u2019s handling of the epidemic but some of the might-be-better next steps are hiding in plain sight.\u00a0 During the first wave \u2018lockdown\u2019 the \u2018clap for carers\u2019 became a weekly public ritual on streets across the UK, after it was started by Annemarie Plas<\/a>, a Dutch national living in south London.\u00a0 It focused attention on something that the statistics lack: empathetic victims<\/a>, in the shape of health workers.\u00a0 And it was mobile phone videos shared by exhausted Italian doctors and nurses<\/a> and repeated in media interviews, that first convinced the British that coronavirus was not \u201cjust like the \u2018flu\u201d.<\/p>\n