England’s ‘pingdemic’ is a convenient distraction from the real problem | Stephen Reicher
More people are being pinged because Covid infections are out of control. But No 10 has its head in the sand
- Stephen Reicher is a member of the Sage subcommittee advising on behavioural science
We’re now in the full looking-glass stage of the pandemic, where things seem entirely back to front and solutions are treated as problems. The “ping” of the NHS test-and-trace app has been widely criticised as the cause of disruption for businesses, workers and supply chains. But our problem isn’t a “pingdemic”. A ping simply tells you that you have been in contact with someone who is infected and allows you to do something about it. The problem is the high rate of infection that greatly increases the chances that you will have been in contact with someone who has tested positive – and therefore that you might have Covid too.
Right now we are at a point where one in 75 people in England is infected (up from one in 95 the week before) – even without accounting for the government decision to remove almost all measures on 19 July. While there are many factors are involved, meaning we can’t be sure how infection levels will progress, the health secretary, Sajid Javid, has blithely accepted that cases could rise to 100,000 a day, while some estimates suggest they could reach 200,000.
Read the original article at The Guardian