THERE’S an old episode of Doctor Who in which the Doctor arrives in the future, long after the Earth has been destroyed, and discovers a spaceship being piloted by what’s left of the British people. The Doctor asks if there any Scots on board. “Oh no, there are no Scots here,” says a member of the crew, “the Scots demanded their own spaceship.”

It’s a good joke because it’s funny but it’s a good joke because it’s true. Some people have accused the UK Government of acting, especially in the early days of the crisis, as if the British were somehow special, as if British lungs would be resistant to foreign bugs, or we should do things differently from Europe. They called it British exceptionalism.

But there are signs of the same attitude in some of Scotland’s response. To be fair to the Scottish Government, it has worked closely with the other administrations, but you can see a bit of exceptionalism in its approach to the tracing app being developed in London: Scotland might use the app, we’re told, but only if it works with Scottish systems. There’s a hint too we might want our own app. Our own spaceship.

The problem with all of this is the same problem we’ve seen elsewhere in our response to the crisis: a tendency to talk about the virus in ways that do not increase our understanding of it. The virus doesn’t know when it’s crossed the border between Scotland and England, and lots of people cross the border every day, so we should have a response that works on both sides of it, and to talk in terms of Scottish and English apps is confusing. It doesn’t acknowledge how the virus actually works.

The same applies to the issue of targets on testing: they too are a way of talking about the virus that doesn’t increase our understanding of it. The target that the UK Government has set itself is 100,000 tests a day, although the PM Boris Johnson was again suggesting this week that in time it might be 200,000 or more. This is the first problem with targets: why 100,000 or 200,000? Why not some other random number? What is the methodology?

The second problem is how targets affect behaviour and we can see it in the British Government’s approach and in many other areas of public life. When the Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the daily target was being met, it was then revealed that the 100,000 figure included 40,000 tests that had been posted to people but might not actually have been carried out. But, you know, the target was met.

This is exactly what targets do. We’ve seen it before in hospitals with patients being made to wait in ambulances to meet A&E targets and you may have seen it in your own workplace: management set a target and staff proceed to come up with ingenious and sometimes misleading ways of meeting it rather than working in a more honest way. The target becomes the focus rather than the problem it was supposed to fix. Worse: the target can conceal what’s really going on.

A better approach would be to drop the virus testing targets altogether and try to assess what’s going on in a more sophisticated way. Are we getting the tests to the right people, for example staff in care homes? Are drive-through centres the best way of delivering the tests? Should the home testing kits be going to hospitals and care homes instead? There’s a danger that questions like that are not being asked because instead we’re constantly asking: have we met the 100,000 target?

You can see the same need for a more nuanced approach when it comes to drawing comparisons with other countries. We’re now being told the UK has the worst coronavirus death rate in the world after the US, but different countries have different types of population, they can have more city dwellers than others, and, most importantly, countries do not all count the deaths in the same way. In other words, the comparisons can darken the picture rather than clear it.

And it doesn’t end there because the next big test for how we think about the virus will be the end of lockdown. Some people tell me they won’t leave home “until it’s safe to do so”, but “safe” isn’t a hugely helpful word here. A better word to use would be “risk” because we’ll get out of lockdown when we work out, personally and collectively, what an acceptable level of risk is and then start living through it. I see that some people, such as Neil Ferguson, the now former coronavirus advisor to the UK government, have started already.

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