Personally I find it strange why everyone is focusing on the act of deleting WhatsApp messages, rather than questioning why they were using WhatsApp at all.
Matters of government should be carried out over government communications. I realise that the government guidelines around this issue were updated last year, but I don’t really see this as an excuse given how the government already held certain industries to much higher standards on this.
For me the use of private messaging, WhatsApp etc is just another example of a fundamental lack of professionalism which was horribly exposed by the pandemic.
Agree, all communications should be a matter of public record.