The military are mobilising. Preparing for the deployment of Army units to protect hospitals, supermarkets and other vital facilities.
Not from a hostile invading force, or terrorist fanatics. But from the British people, in the event the coronavirus emergency starts to spiral out of control.
It sounds like something out of science-fiction film. Or a rehash of one of the more apocalyptic Project Fear scenarios from the Brexit debate.
Britain’s new motto: Dan Hodges says it has gone from Keep Calm And Carry On and changed to Panic And Snatch The Toilet Roll
But it’s not a film, or a political construct. Coronavirus is real. It has no political affiliation.
And unless we as a nation realise that, and start to get a grip, a lot of people are going to die.
Until a couple of weeks ago, our unofficial national motto was Keep Calm And Carry On.
This morning it has become Panic And Snatch The Toilet Roll.
Never mind the fact many of our fellow citizens with serious existing medical conditions need the products being greedily and selfishly hoovered from the shelves.
Ignore the most vulnerable in society, who don’t have the luxury of investing a month’s food bill on a single shop in order to ‘be prepared’.
Warning: Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called on people to act responsibly
‘I think it is very, very important that people should behave responsibly and think about others,’ Boris Johnson told the nation on Monday.
But the hard truth is there are too many of us not thinking of others. Or even thinking at all.
Partly that’s because we are trying to fight the virus while still fighting a vicious culture war.
As the Chief Scientific Adviser and Chief Medical Officer were calmly and patiently setting out the rationale for the Government’s response to the crisis, journalist Carole Cadwalladr was taking to Twitter to inform her 460,000 followers: ‘We voted Vote Leave into power knowing they’d broken law, lied and refused to answer questions on their conduct.
And now the fate of our nation rests on trusting that they are making critical decisions in accountable and transparent ways based on best possible info.
Can you ‘cheat’ coronavirus? Is that the strategy? Can it be rigged? Like, say, an election?’
No, it’s not the strategy. And Cadwalladr knows it. But for some, dying in the ditch over Brexit still has to take precedence over trying to save the lives of those threatened by coronavirus.
Another problem is however fast the virus is spreading, that’s nothing when compared to the way malicious misinformation about Covid-19 is surging across social media.
Over the past week, three naked lies about the Government’s response were able to flourish virtually unchecked.
The first was a video which purported to show Boris claiming his plan was to ‘take it on the chin’ and let Britain bear the brunt of the virus in order to protect the economy. It had been deliberately doctored, with the section in which he explained he had rejected that option purposely edited out.
But it ran for days. Indeed, it’s still running.
The second was the claim a shadowy ‘nudge unit’ of behavioural scientists – egged on by the No 10 super-forecasters – was directing the response of Ministers, to the exclusion of advice from clinical experts.
But as a Department of Health source explained: ‘What people don’t understand is behavioural science is a key part of epidemiology.
It’s built in. It’s not a case of behaviouralists versus scientists. Doctors and clinicians understand how people react to the spread of diseases, and measures to contain that spread, and it all forms part of our modelling.’
The most pernicious lie of all was the claim over ‘herd immunity’. Or, to be more blunt, the claim we are about to be subjected to a Government-sponsored genocide of the old and sick.
Herd immunity: Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said 60 per cent of the population needs to catch coronavirus to defeat the virus
Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance had stated that in order to finally defeat the virus, 60 per cent of the UK population would need to contract the disease at some stage, building up sufficient natural biological protection to protect the more vulnerable members of society.
This was immediately seized upon and spun as an attempt by the Government to perpetuate a new form of natural selection.
Rebecca Long Bailey’s media team took to social media to claim: ‘With the current mortality rate, that’s 780,000 deaths. Which amounts to almost twice the number of British civilian and military casualties in World War Two.’
But as a No 10 official explained for the umpteenth time: ‘Our objective is not to secure herd immunity.
Our objective is to flatten the curve of the virus’s spread to ensure the NHS and other services retain the capacity to protect the most vulnerable patients.
As the epidemic develops, a lot of people will have minor symptoms, and hopefully begin to develop natural immunity.
That’s a good thing. But it won’t help us during the course of this virus cycle. It will only help contain future outbreaks.’
The danger we face as a nation is not that we will be killed by a misguided policy on herd immunity.
What is imperilling us is a herd mentality. A stampede away from facts and truth towards biases and prejudices embedded by years of Brexit trench-warfare.
This is not a game. Coronavirus is not ‘like the flu’.
As Boris said, we are facing the worst public health crisis in a generation.
And that crisis cannot be overcome by the casual transmission of lies and half-truths and fake news that will in their own way prove as lethal as the transmission of the virus itself.
Yes, we live in a democracy. Yes, it’s right that our leaders are challenged. But in the middle of a global pandemic, we cannot have them usurped.
We have a constitutionally elected Prime Minister. His Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty is a former practising consultant at UCLH and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Outbreak: Chief Medical Officer for England, Chris Whitty was also involved in tackling Ebola
He was Chief Scientific Adviser and Director of Research at the Department of International Development, where he helped tackle the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone.
Sir Patrick is a former professor at UCL Medical School, and former head of research and development at GlaxoSmithKline, where he developed new medicines for combating cancer, asthma and HIV.
Who should we be looking to at this moment of global crisis? Men like that?
Or men with the clinical and scientific foresight of Watford football manager Nigel Pearson, who popped up on Thursday to declare: ‘I don’t think we had any great leadership last night… I was totally underwhelmed by the lack of leadership and clear message.’
Imagine you are on a plane. Suddenly the passenger in the seat next to you starts screaming that the pilot is flying erratically.
Do you keep faith with that pilot? Or do you force your way into the cockpit and land the plane yourself?
We have a PM who is being honest about the challenges we face as a nation, and open about the strategy required to meet them.
He is being guided by experts who are honour bound to protect the health and wellbeing of the public. They are implementing a strategy that has been modelled and refined and rehearsed over several decades.
Now is the time for Britain to put its collective faith in them.
If for no other reason than we have no other choice.