FearU.K. Government Has “Terrorized” Britons into Believing Coronavirus Will Kill Them, Says Adviser

The Government’s coronavirus warnings have “effectively terrorised” Britons “into believing that this is a disease that is going to kill you” even though most those infected will not be hospitalized, one of its advisers has warned. Christopher Hope writes in The Telegraph that Professor Robert Dingwall also told Friday’s Chopper’s Politics podcast – which you can listen to on the player below – that the government should let people come within 1.5 meters of each other inside and outside as part of measures to ease the lockdown.

Hope continues:

Speaking in a personal capacity, he said: “We have this very strong message which has effectively terrorized the population into believing that this is a disease that is going to kill you. And mostly, it isn’t.

“Eighty per cent of the people who get this infection will never need to go near a hospital. The ones who do go to hospital because they are quite seriously ill, most of them will come out alive – even those who go into intensive care.

“We have completely lost sight of that in the obsession with deaths, the human interest stories about deaths, the international comparisons about death rates, the opportunities for intrepid television journalists to put on lots of PPE and go into high tech where people are acutely ill. 

“All of that helps to create this climate of fear, and I am not surprised in a sense that the Government might take a rather cautious approach to try to unlock the lockdown, simply because they would really be nervous that if they pushed it too quickly it would like giving a party and nobody came.”