[LINK] Transparency key to controlling virus: Swan

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

The government prefers a mushroom management strategy – keep us in the
dark and feed us bullshit. This goes for COVID-19 information, modelling
and tracking apps.

I don’t always agree with Dr Swan (especially when it comes to My Health
Record) but in this case I think he’s right - "In Dr Swan’s opinion, the
earlier a government decides to be transparent about those decisions,
the more likely the public will be to follow the health advice".

Transparency key to controlling virus: Swan

15 April 2020

http://medicalrepublic.com.au/transparency-key-to-controlling-virus-swan/27518

Science journalists who are interpreting and relaying COVID-19
information to the public are being criticised for breaking news about
the pandemic before Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Chief Medical
Officer Dr Brendan Murphy.

One of the front-runners of this scrutiny has been Dr Norman Swan,
physician and broadcaster, who started a podcast dedicated to following
pandemic developments in early March.

Dr Swan told The Medical Republic that when he started Coronacast for
the ABC, he didn’t quite appreciate he was walking into a vacuum and
talking to millions of people who didn’t know anything at all about the
virus.

“What I was doing wasn’t necessarily appreciated by the federal
government,” he said.

Dr Swan was slammed by News Corp Australia for questioning the advice of
public health officials and statements from various government
committees on how to stop the spread of the virus.

But Dr Swan says asking questions and holding the government to account
remains a critical part of his job as a journalist.

“As someone who has been a medical journalist for many years, I
understand how to read scientific evidence and translate it for the
public,” he said.

“The feedback from the federal government, indirectly not directly, has
been that I’ve been getting ahead of them, and they find that an
uncomfortable place to be.

“What the community really wants is somebody to tell them what is going
on, to explain the statistics, explain this disease as much as we know,
and tell them it’s strange – not treat them like idiots.”

At the start of the pandemic, Dr Swan said the government was seen to be
taking an overly cautious approach in an effort to avoid public panic.

But when a government is telling everyone not to worry, it tends to
create the opposite reaction.

“Transparency is what’s needed, and I think they are much better now
than they were,” Dr Swan said.

It was only a few weeks ago that the government was still condoning
gathering for large sporting matches, including the Melbourne Grand Prix.

These events were only cancelled after significant pressure from health
professionals who said it would not be wise for them to proceed.

But one debate that is continuing is whether the public should be privy
to all the scientific data which is informing government decisions
during the pandemic.

“I think is very unfair to the general community to just dump raw data
without some interpretation and therefore I think that we should be
transparent about the decisions we’re making, we should be transparent
about the options, and why we’ve chosen which option, and allow debate,”
Dr Swan said.

The pandemic has not only been a difficult health crisis to control, but
also one forcing political decisions that compromise how people live,
work and socialise.

In Dr Swan’s opinion, the earlier a government decides to be transparent
about those decisions, the more likely the public will be to follow the
health advice.

“The experts in this area are saying that it is possible to lay out a
path to the public and say ‘Look, we think by doing X, Y, and Z, and by
you doing your job, that we can get down to single digit growth rates,
and at that point, we think that we can control this epidemic pretty
well,’” he said.

It was vital for the public to understand the decision-making behind the
public health guidelines for COVID-19 so that they continue to follow
the guidelines of social distancing and understand the burden of their
individual actions on the unfolding situation, Dr Swan said.

-- 

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
email: brd at iimetro.com.au