The discovery in Britain that a £5 steroid, dexamethasone, can be effective in treating Covid marks a potential breakthrough in our understanding of the virus. Much remains to be learned about the wider potential of the drug but the claims made about its success are striking: that it reduces deaths by a third in patients
Home Britain went into a frenzy of iconoclasm. The statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square was hidden by the Mayor of London in wooden crating. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said: ‘It is absurd and shameful that this national monument should today be at risk of attack by violent protestors.’ The next day he
Reality seems thinner these days. As I walk along the high street, passers-by drift apart as though afraid of crossing auras. Three months of lockdown has made this repulsion of human contact a matter of instinct. I can’t help but see this tendency reflected in the escalating intolerance and hostility on social media. So at
The actor John Cleese has been wondering if we should destroy Greek statues because Greeks believed ‘a cultured society was only possible if it was based on slavery’. That was not a Greek belief, but might the existence of ancient slavery suggest that their statues deserve to be knocked down anyway? Two points: first, the
Made to measure The government started reviewing whether we should stay two metres apart while social distancing or whether one metre would do. What is a metre? — Since 1960 it has been defined as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second. — But it was originally defined by
Hong Kong’s success Sir: Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson are right to compare the UK’s Covid-19 response with Hong Kong’s (‘Who cared?’, 6 June). We write as UK-trained emergency physicians, who have worked as specialists in both the UK and Hong Kong. In many ways, the economic and healthcare contexts are similar. The majority of
