BRITAIN’s media and politicians are working themselves up into a moral panic about outside exercise and coronavirus transmission. There is no evidence of significant transmission in open air settings with reasonable social distancing: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jan/11/ban-on-exercising-with-others-likely-but-elite-sport-fears-played-down

COVID transmission overwhelmingly occurs indoors in crowded and/or poorly ventilated spaces with sustained contact. High risk environments are homes, workplaces, education and social spaces such as churches. The obsessive focus on exercise outdoors is misleading and unhelpful

You are most likely to transmit COVID to another member of your household, a work colleague, a fellow student or someone in close personal contact. You’re unlikely to give it to someone while out walking, cycling or running and risk is further reduced with basic social distancing

But instead of a sensible discussion about risk and transmission in high risk contexts, Britain is consumed by a hysteria about passing on the virus in situations where there is very little risk, which is both misleading and actively dangerous

Britain’s scientists, politicians and journalists have, for the most part, done a poor job in communicating risks to the public, what everyone needs to do to control the virus, choices being made, and consequences. Truth has proved first casualty of an epidemic as well as a war

Epidemics are about externalities. My behaviour affects not only my own risk but those facing other people. Externalities are why government is right to impose rules regulating behaviour and why we can’t all make up our own rules based purely on an assessment of individual risk

But the government’s right to regulate behaviour intrusively assumes it is behaving rationally and proportionately. Once it ceases to do so, the argument for following the rules based on externalities disappears.

We’ve all seen and heard horrifying stories of hospitals full of COVID patients. But they are NOT there because people didn’t follow the rules in force at the time or because they exercised in the open air. They are there because schools, work places etc have remained open.

We need scientists, politicians and journalists who will take a deep breath, dial down the moral panic, and explain calmly why the epidemic has surged again, how it really transmits and how to minimise the threat as much as possible

So far in this epidemic I have followed all the rules, even when I’ve personally disagreed with them, because for a society to function we can’t all make up our own rules and because of the externalities issue. But my patience and willingness to comply is being sorely tested now

Britain’s politicians and media seem to want to turn everything, including the epidemic, into a morality play, with good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains, the law-abiding majority and a feckless minority, substituting a fairy story for real life. But the virus isn’t moral

COVID like other diseases doesn’t care about morals, whether you are a saint or a sinner, whether country overdoses on wartime metaphors or not. It’s not even alive. It’s a bit of genetic code that transmits in fairly predictable ways, combatted by intelligence not hysteria