The public needs clear information about coronavirus – the government’s communication strategy must change

Editorial: Downing Street has made a habit of briefing particular journalists or news outlets but, given the seriousness of the task we now face, that has to stop

Matt Hancock had to clarify the government’s policy yesterday (EPA)

Whether the government’s scientific advisers are taking the right approach in handling the growing coronavirus epidemic is not a subject for the layperson. Almost all analysis on that matter is counterproductive.

But it is not to doubt or even to scrutinise the wisdom of the experts to say that the government’s management of the information, and the fashion in which the public are discovering horrifying news, has been a disaster, and it must be rectified immediately.

It is no exaggeration to say that hundreds of thousands of elderly people, more likely millions, spent Saturday night staring at their phones or iPads, trying to compute news that had appeared on the blog of the ITV political editor Robert Peston, that they are to be quarantined, quite possibly in requisitioned hotels, for several months, to protect them from a virulent and deadly disease.