LONDON / ROME - It is dubbed the “nudge unit,” a section of London's Downing Street staffed with behavioral scientists set up to advise the British government. The scientists now trying to fashion strategies to coax Britons to improve their personal hygiene say the nudge may have to turn more into a shove.
Like governments across the globe, the British government has been running a massive public information campaign to try to retard the spread of the coronavirus and to get their citizens to ramp up their personal hygiene. “Washing hands for 20 seconds is central to the expanded public awareness campaign to prevent and slow the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19),” announces the government’s own website.
The advice is that you should wash your hands frequently and use paper tissues when coughing or sneezing — then promptly discard the soiled tissue securely. And the message is being hammered home relentlessly. The media obligingly have echoed the counsel, quoting Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has been repeating that handwashing should last for as long as it takes to sing two renditions of "Happy Birthday" — or the country’s national anthem.
But the counsel appears to be falling on some deaf ears, according to a poll published this week by the YouGov pollster agency in which only 35 percent of respondents said they had improved their personal hygiene, such as by washing their hands. According to Britain’s Daily Mail: “British people are among the most relaxed people in the world about the threat of coronavirus – but are also the least likely to take precautions.”
Cabin crews on all major international airlines, British or otherwise, are expressing increasing alarm. They believe there should now be mandatory public health announcements on all flights explaining the basic hygiene protocol to be observed. Other cabin crew believe their airlines should be encouraging them to remind passengers who ignore guidelines that they must wash their hands during the flight and cover their coughs and sneezes. The crews say they believe that passengers who don't comply should be handed a surgical mask and ordered to put it on.
“We aren’t asking our bosses to adopt a Chinese approach,” one flight attendant told me, a reference to an online video that showed someone being tied to a tree for failing to wear a face mask. “But a lot of the passengers just don’t get it, and research suggests a sick attendant can infect around three passengers.”
But the British government’s message about hygiene protocol wasn’t aided this week by the country’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, who during parliamentary testimony proceeded to cough into his hand.
The Italian government has also been trying to hammer home the message of the need for people to wash their hands. Despite the surge in new cases in Italy, residents there still seem to believe the virus can be contained. And they are counting the days to March 15, when schools and universities are slated provisionally to reopen after being closed because of the infection.
That date is also when the government’s top medical experts believe the drastic measures Italy has adopted — with the nationwide closure of schools, regulations for red zones and yellow zones, the banning of large public gatherings and advice to the elderly to stay indoors — should be showing signs of working. The number of cases should be falling by then, say the government’s experts.
There were more than 4,000 confirmed cases in Italy at the time of this writing. Among the sick a few kilometers down the road from me in Lazio is a specialist in infectious diseases. Ironically, he is believed to have contracted the virus not from his work but from his brother, a university lecturer, who’s thought to have caught it from an overseas student. There is now a race to trace all staff and patients with whom the doctor had contact at the local hospital.
Marco Marsilio, the governor of Abruzzo to the south and west of Lazio, sounded a note of resignation Friday. “The virus knows no boundaries. Stopping an infection is like stopping the sea with your hands. We have to be realistic. But here we are still living good days. And this window of opportunity is giving us time to prepare ourselves, as far as possible,” he said.
Abruzzo, a mountainous rural region with low population density, only had its first confirmed cases this past week and has gone from zero to nine in a few days.