Coronavirus

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Were fears of a third wave overblown?

So, the third wave is officially no more. New modelling by SPI-M, the government’s committee on modelling for pandemics, has, at a stroke, eradicated the predicted surge in new infections, hospital admissions and deaths which it had pencilled in for the autumn or winter as a result of lockdown being eased.  Previous modelling published in April suggested that we could end up with 20,000 in hospital — higher than during the first peak last April. Now the third wave is looking less like the swell off Newquay during an Atlantic storm and a little more like a ripple on the Serpentine. The central predictions for the next peak in hospitalisations,

Monday

Kate Andrews

Hugging gets the green light

The next stage of the roadmap is set to go ahead. At tonight’s No. 10 press conference, Boris Johnson announced from next Monday, 17 May, groups of up to six (or two households) can meet indoors, while up to 30 people will be able to meet up outside. Face coverings in school classrooms will be scrapped, and there will no longer be a cap on the number of people attending a funeral. Indoor hospitality can reopen, including restaurants and pubs, while hotels, cinemas and theatres can also open their doors, albeit with social distancing still in place. The one-metre plus rule means that while many may start to feel like

Friday

Kate Andrews

Does the UK’s ‘green list’ for travel make sense?

International travel is back on the menu, in theory. From 17 May the ‘stay in the UK’ restrictions are lifting and residents can legally leave the country once again. But the number of destinations where you won’t have to quarantine on return is limited, and travelling anywhere will require jumping through several hoops. At today’s No. 10 press conference, Grant Shapps revealed the first 12 countries that will be placed on the ‘green list’, which includes Portugal, Iceland and Israel. It’s a return to the traffic light system and most countries are ranked ‘amber’, which will require a ten day quarantine at home upon return. ‘Red’ countries will still require hotel quarantine,

Terence Kealey

In defence of Biden’s Covid-19 patent waiver

For a man who is regularly derided by Republicans, president Joe Biden has racked up a fine number of achievements. He made his latest on 5 May, when he threw his support behind waiving the Covid-19 patents, overturning decades of American protection of its industries’ intellectual property rights. His words packed a punch: the Frankfurt-listed shares in BioNTech promptly lost 14 per cent, while Moderna and Novavax closed three to six per cent down in New York. The U.S. pharmaceutical industry was quick to denounce the measure, as Jeremy Levin, chair of the biotech trade association Bio, asserted that ‘securing vaccines rapidly will not be the result.’ But, in fact, that’s

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: von der Leyen’s vaccine amnesia

How well has the EU dealt with the pandemic? According to Ursula von der Leyen, the bloc’s performance has been world beating. In an address yesterday, the Commission president lauded her own performance while claiming that the EU had proven its detractors wrong. During her so-called ‘state of the union’, she said: We all heard the nagging questions, especially in the first months of this pandemic: aren’t nation states better equipped to fight this crisis? Isn’t our union of 27 too slow to react? And our processes too cumbersome and our stakeholders too diverse? Today I am here to say: Europe has proven these claims wrong…Most importantly we decided to procure vaccines

Thursday

Kate Andrews

Will Britain’s economic recovery break records?

It’s been a good week for seeing the vaccine factor at work. We’ve had multiple real-world updates on the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness against new variants of Covid-19 (this bodes well for the UK, which was the first country in the world to use the vaccine to protect its most vulnerable residents). And today we’ve had a revised economic forecast from the Bank of England, suggesting the UK’s impressive vaccine rollout could translate into the strongest growth since records began in 1949. The Bank of England now predicts that the economy will expand by more than 7 per cent in 2021, up from its forecast of 5 per cent in February. Its

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The problem with Britain’s mental health

Experts tell us that we are facing a mental health ‘time bomb’ in the UK, partly as a consequence of Covid restrictions and partly because we have a Conservative government which has as its apparent main priority a malevolent desire to see people go insane and, hopefully, kill themselves. I am paraphrasing the experts here, all of whom hate the Tories and want more money spent on their area of expertise, i.e. mental health. In January the Daily Mail quoted still more experts telling us that this mental health time bomb was actually ‘ticking’, in an ominous manner, suggesting to me that this was a very old make of time

Niall Ferguson

The China model: why is the West imitating Beijing?

‘There’s an osmosis in war, call it what you will, but the victors always tend to assume the… the, eh, trappings of the loser,’ says one of the officers in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. ‘We might easily go fascist after we win.’ Americans have long been haunted by the notion of the osmosis of war. Throughout the First Cold War, a recurrent theme of liberal and conservative commentary was that there was a kind of convergence taking place, causing the United States to resemble — at least in some respects — its Soviet antagonist. That all nuclear superpowers would end up as slave states had been George

Jay Bhattacharya

The case for sending vaccines to India

Hospitals in Delhi are openly pleading for supplies of medical oxygen, a commodity so scarce that it is now being sold on the black market for almost ten times the normal cost. Makeshift crematoria are being set up around the city to cope with the surge in the number of deaths. Richer countries are asking why India, with 20 million Covid cases now recorded, is so reluctant to lock down again. It is a good question. The answer lies in the disastrous effects of lockdown for so much of India’s population. Closing any society has serious consequences, but the results were always going to be worse in the developing world.

Laurie Graham

What should we put in our time capsule of the plague year?

The ladies of my church knitting circle (note, we are open to those who identify ‘-otherly’, and to practitioners of diverse crafts) are an enterprising bunch, and no techno slouches either. Unbowed by Covid, we have continued to meet via Zoom, bringing along our own tea, cake and creative endeavours. We love a project, and we now have one: a time capsule of the plague year. This idea is so far proving to be more a feasibility study than a done deal. There are so many decisions to make. What size should the capsule be? Where will it be stored? When will it be reopened, and by whom? And what

The Spectator

Data, not dates: there is no reason to delay a return to normal life

A slogan can come back to haunt you. For Boris Johnson, the words ‘data not dates’ sounded powerful at a time when Covid cases were high and hospitals full. The idea was that the government would be guided by scientific reason, would respond to the figures and would not let rigid targets dictate policy. Since the Prime Minister announced his roadmap at the end of February, however, ‘dates’ seem to have become far more important than ‘data’. How can he claim to be following the data when he will not budge from a timeline which now looks like it was designed for a different phase of the pandemic? Why were

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Covid retreats, raves resume and a £165,000 squid

Home ‘I think we have got a good chance of being able to dispense with the one-metre-plus from 21 June,’ Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, remarked. By the beginning of the week, 29 per cent of the adult population had received both doses of coronavirus vaccination; 65 per cent the first dose. In the seven days up to the beginning of the week, 107 people had died, bringing the total number of deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus) to 127,534. Maldon in Essex reported three cases per 100,000 people, which meant only two people in the whole district. Care home residents in England were allowed to make

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The ‘Covid deaths’ that are not caused by Covid

Registered Covid deaths fell to just one on Monday, leading many to comment that the epidemic in Britain is effectively over. One day’s statistics don’t mean an awful lot, especially over a bank holiday, but what about the wider picture? Over the UK as a whole, there have been 90 deaths over the past seven days, a fall of 41.2 per cent over the previous seven day period – although that, too, may be affected by the bank holiday. A more in-depth analysis, offering more context – although a little out of date – is provided by the latest weekly analysis of deaths from all causes, published today by the

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The new care home scandal

Care homes have been at the centre of controversy and mishandling throughout the Covid-19 crisis. Decisions taken last spring to move patients out of hospital, without so much as a Covid-19 test, contributed to a surge of cases in facilities designed to look after Britain’s most vulnerable. Failure to tackle early on the problem of asymptomatic transmission meant that workers weren’t isolated. They unknowingly brought the virus in, sometimes to multiple homes. Zero detection – until it was too late – resulted in tragedy. It’s estimated that over 29,000 excess deaths have occurred in care homes since last March. Now there is another care home scandal brewing, the details of

Tuesday

Kate Andrews

Why we should worry about the post-Covid exodus of older workers

Concerns around unemployment during the pandemic have, understandably, been focused on younger people. Last year it was under-24 year olds most likely to be furloughed and then subsequently made unemployed when coming off the government’s scheme. For millions, the fate of their jobs remains on the line, as unemployment is expected to rise over the course of the year (albeit far less than originally predicted), even as the economy rebounds when lockdown restrictions lift. But today the Office for National Statistics flags another concern; one that could potentially have a bigger impact on the labour market’s recovery post-pandemic. While the youngest have experienced a substantial economic hit from the virus,

Thursday

Akash Goel

In India, the Covid crisis has left us helpless and broken

New Delhi Crematoriums are burning so many pyres that they have run out of space and wood to keep up with demand. Vehicles filled with bodies queue outside the funeral homes for hours. People are dying in the streets, some laid out on stretchers, while ambulances wait in vain outside every hospital in the city. This is what a collapsed healthcare system looks like. There are 4,700 Covid intensive care beds for Delhi’s population of 19 million. There are 20,750 non-ICU Covid hospital beds, but most are without any oxygen support and have strict admission criteria. To find a bed, the families of Covid sufferers are forced to call hundreds

Thursday

Dr Anton Gilbert

Hospital wards are filling up again – with fakers

How do I know that Britain’s Covid crisis is over? The fakers are back. The hypochondriacs, the psychosomatics, the pseudo-fitters, the attention-seekers and the lonely. They’ve started to return to the acute medical ward where I work. They’ve been gone so long I actually almost missed them. This collection of patients, who take up time and resources inversely proportional to the state of their physical health, simulate symptoms for gain (malingerers), simulate/induce their symptoms for the pleasure of the sick role (Munchausen’s syndrome) or genuinely experience symptoms such as pain, seizures or paralysis in atypical ways with no physically identifiable or treatable cause (now vaguely termed ‘functional disorders’). Members of

Toby Young Toby Young

Am I really paying £3,000 for six days in Wales?

Has it ever been more difficult to plan a family holiday? At the time of writing, it is illegal to travel abroad from the UK for non-work purposes. That restriction is expected to be lifted in due course, although not before 17 May, and replaced by a traffic light system, with countries ranked green, amber or red depending on how they’re coping with the virus. Only eight places are expected to be on the green list — Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Israel, Gibraltar, Iceland, Malta and the USA — and holidaymakers will be required to take a PCR test before boarding a plane home and another within 48 hours of

Jonathan Dimbleby

Why I don’t regret leaving the BBC

I have just had my second jab and it poses a dilemma. As an assiduous Covid rule-taker, I have been appalled by those — including friends and relatives — who have flouted or sidestepped the regulations and guidelines in the belief that they don’t apply to them. ‘We know we shouldn’t but it’s good for us’ or ‘We use our common sense’, they say. Since the issue is as incendiary as Brexit, I have fumed in silence. Of course the rules are anomalous and inadequately explained by ministers but I tend to trust the scientists. That said, the mantra ‘no one is safe until we are all safe’ is clearly

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Covid pills, Chauvin’s conviction and a red card for the Super League

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, announced the hunt was on for two effective pills to treat Covid, to be ready (after clinical trials) by the autumn. He had cancelled a visit to India, which has seen an increase in Covid deaths, with Delhi put into lockdown. Scarcely was his trip off than India was added to a ‘red list’ of countries from which most travel to Britain is forbidden. Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition, visited The Raven public house in Bath only for the landlord to shout at him: ‘Get out of my pub!’ He left. By the beginning of the week 9,416,968 people had received