The government tries nightly to befuddle the country with daft little pseudo-technical graphs ("next slide please...") in nice colours, the sort of thing I'd have been shot down for by my science tutors at teacher training college, and vacuous talk of an R number, bouncing up and down its scale like those strong-man things that you hit with a hammer on fairgrounds, as if it's just a sweeping single country-wide thing (as DMcG so ably demolishes). These things are attempts to put a respectable face on gross incompetence. Any day now we'll have Johnson imploring us to "get R done," you'll see. It's disconcerting to see the highly-respectable Chris Whitty squirming unhappily. One day I'll buy his memoirs.