1/ I had the good fortune to visit Portugal last week. It is proving itself to be one of Europe’s most cohesive and resilient societies and there are some vital lessons we could learn from it.... #COVID__19
telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…
telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…
2/ The starkest difference is in the way its thousands of small businesses - all open since 1 June - are approaching hygiene. I would seriously recommend that @BorisJohnson @MattHancock or @CMO_England get someone to take a look - it's gobsmackingly different...
3/ Flying from Luton to Lisbon, the first thing that strikes you is the lack of hazard tape and two-metre floor markings. Luton airport, like much of the rest of Britain, is both literally and metaphorically tangled with the stuff - but not Portugal....
4/ In Portugal the emphasis is less on rules and more on understanding. The overriding principle guiding the lifting of lockdown is that the transmission of droplets from one household to another should be avoided. From this, a series of simple but intuitive behaviours follow...
5/ First, every shop, bar, restaurant and pastelaria has a bottle of hand sanitiser at the entrance. You don’t get in without first cleaning your hands. It takes only a moment, it’s refreshing and it is the oldest and most effective public health intervention in the book...
6/ Then there are face masks. The etiquette is they should be worn, not outside, but whenever you enter a business or a crowed space. They are used not just by customers but also by workers, many of whom also wear face visors....
7/ It is with these two simple - but almost universally adopted - measures that Portugal has opened up its economy again. As a fall-back, it has widespread testing available and a localised track and trace system in place...
8/ Yet in Britain, the reverse is true. The government is rightly desperate to restart the economy but has failed to communicate the basics of good hygiene to small business (where households mix) and few of them have even the most basic hygiene measures in place...
9/ I suspect the UK government’s hang-up with face masks (see below) might be the knot at the heart of our Covid tangle. By refusing to mandate their use in enclosed spaces is it inadvertently preventing us from properly grasping how the virus is spread?
telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…
telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…
10/ Think about it like this. We are told the virus is held in droplets that emerge from our mouths and noses. They warn us to cover our faces if we cough or sneeze. They say we should stand 2m from others. Yet they also say facemasks are only “marginally beneficial”..
11/ For any communication campaign to work, it must contain a consistent logic or at least not flatly contradict itself. Portugal has kept its rules and its messaging simple and logical - and it is working. We should do the same here before it is too late. telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…
12/ One last point. If PHE tells you it is getting around the problem by asking people to queue outside shops and only enter two at a time, ask them how well it thinks this will work in a British winter....
