The government just tried to explain what 'stay alert' means but just confused everyone even more

Last week, the government announced that it was changing its Covid-19 messaging from “stay home, save lives, protect the NHS,” to “stay alert, control the virus, save lives”.

But despite this masterstroke of political messaging, people are understandably confused about what the difference is between the lockdown guidelines we were under a week ago, and the new ones which are supposed to be coming into place this week.

After a morning where Dominic Raab went on four TV different networks to clarify – and ended up confusing people further – the No 10 Downing Street Twitter account put out a thread to try yet again.

This is how it starts:

The thread goes on for eight more tweets – all of them start with the phrase “Stay alert”. They basically repeat what the lockdown guidelines had been for the last six weeks, and don’t really explain how people should be any more alert than they already are.

In the replies, people pointed out that you can’t exactly stay alert to a virus, and that these tweets didn’t really do much to clarify what people could and couldn’t do.

Other people pointed out that some of the tweets were just contradictory.

The second tweet in the thread asked people to stay alert by staying at home as much as possible, but that doesn’t really make sense.

The famous quote from the Princess Bride also featured pretty heavily in the replies to pretty much every tweet in the thread.

Downing Street also announced that its usual evening question and answer sessions would not be open to questions from journalists today, just from the public, which is incredibly reassuring.