It's hard to give the public confidence in a nuanced message when you are trying to manage a disease you don't fully understand.
That perhaps helps explain why senior ministers and officials I've spoken to are now nodding to a lowering of expectations. Yes, schools are almost certain to open from 1 June but take-up will be minimal at first until more parents feel more confident about sending their children back."It's the carrot not the stick," says one government insider."We've got to show people we have the measures in place.
But the government also needs to put far more flesh on the bones of its five tests in the coming days to give the public more confidence that it has a handle on the disease. It has predicated its route out of lockdown on two critical measures. The first is making sure the- the reproduction number - is below one, in order to make sure the number of infections is under control and not accelerating.
This is true too of track and trace. The government's own deputy chief scientific adviser Dame Angela McLean said this week all changes to lockdown would need an effective system of tracing and isolating new cases, but we have no information on how this system will work beyond the prime minister's commitment to 25,000 new contact tracers being in post by June.
Of course it's much harder to give the public confidence in a nuanced message when you are trying to manage a disease you don't yet fully understand. But the government still has a lot to do convince the public its route map out is safe, starting with making sure its track and trace system is fully operational in 10 days time.
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