What the British Government should have learned from the AIDS public health campaign

People are dying of ignorance: not understanding how the virus spreads, or the risk of spreading it; not wearing masks properly, or at all; not observing social distancing. Boris Johnson’s government have clearly handled the pandemic badly. One of their failings has been very poor communication.

Two things really struck me. Firstly, there has not really been a coherent public health campaign. We get the cabinet and various chief science and medical officers on news briefings, but where is the national campaign of posters, fliers, and adverts explaining how and why to wear a mask? Where are the public information films about how Covid is spread? Why are we not being told to keep windows open, as Merkel is telling Germany? Why are we not being taught about viral loads? All we have is a government baffling everyone with convoluted rules, and this weird ongoing obsession with pubs. Arguably, modern media is less conducive to a national public health campaign. People stream specific programs, and download news, so there are fewer places into which to fit a short film or large advert that all people will see.

But when you read the rules you can, if you are well informed, begin to see how actual science informed them, but it is well hidden and entirely unexplained to the public. We…