Coronavirus

Thursday

The Spectator

The policing of lockdown is failing

The scenes in Clapham Common have brutally exposed the problem with lockdown rules. People had gathered to mourn Sarah Everard and protest in defence of the right to walk the streets safely. The Metropolitan Police had been asked by the government to stop people going outside for anything other than a handful of allowed reasons: protest is not one of them. Given how many anti-lockdown protesters were arrested at Clapham Common earlier this year, the Met decided it could not be seen to pick and choose causes. Protesters were told it was ‘unsafe’ for them to be there due to Covid-19. Officers swooped. Chaos ensured. Footage from the protests showed a row of women

Richard Dawkins

Science is not an instrument of patriarchal oppression

Safe spaces, diversity quotas, gender-neutral pronouns, culturally relative facts, heteronormative hegemony. Are my right-on credentials right on enough? Am I sufficiently penitent for being white, cis and male? Will I be cancelled or de-platformed by the Pronoun Police? What is my woke-quotient? At least as far as science is concerned, it’s a satisfactory zero. Science is not a patriarchal instrument of colonial oppression. Nor is it a social construct. It’s simply true. Or at least truth is real and science is the best way we have of finding it. ‘Alternative ways of knowing’ may be consoling, they may be sincere, they may be quaint, they may have a poetic or

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Will the Tokyo Olympics go ahead?

Tokyo This week was the tenth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the country. It, along with the tsunami it triggered, claimed an estimated 19,000 lives. I was walking in the Shibuya district of Tokyo when the quake knocked me off my feet. I recall being first puzzled (why am I falling?); then awestruck, as I glanced up at a thin concrete ‘pencil’ building swaying gently like a flower in the breeze. Two women on a balcony seemed to be, bizarrely, unaccountably, laughing. Then I became aware of a man running towards me, gesticulating frantically and, oddly for Japan, swearing. When the

Sean Thomas

How I’d write Covid: The Thriller

Like 98.3 per cent of humanity, I’ve spent the past 12 months reading dubiously precise statistics, staring listlessly into space for hours on end, and, most poignantly, wondering if I am an extra in a movie about a pandemic. This last intuition only worsened when I watched Contagion — the 2011 Kate Winslet/Gwyneth Paltrow pandemic movie — and it felt like I was simply watching the TV news (again), right down to the scenes of giant stadiums ominously filled with empty hospital beds. The sensation that I am living through a real-life thriller is particularly acute for me, because that’s what I do: write thrillers. I used to write globe-spanning,

Olenka Hamilton

Poles apart: why the Polish community doesn’t want the vaccine

There is a joke going around Poland at the moment which encapsulates the national character perfectly. A German is told he has to have the Covid vaccine. He is uncertain. ‘It’s an order,’ the doctor says, and so he agrees. A British man is told the same. He wavers. ‘Do it for Queen and country,’ the doctor says. He agrees. A French man is told ‘It’s the fashionable thing to do’, and he agrees, too. Finally, a Pole has his turn. The doctor says: ‘You’re Polish, you definitely won’t take the vaccine.’ The Pole replies: ‘Don’t tell me what I think. Give me that vaccine!’ Anyone who knows Poles (I’m

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The West has lost its moral high ground

International travellers running the gauntlet of English airports must already test negative for Covid before the flight, and on return to the UK get tested again before boarding, fill out a locator form, quarantine for ten days and test negative twice more. But that’s not enough oppression for Boris Johnson’s government. As of this week, outbound intrepids have also to fill out ‘declaration forms’ explaining why their trip is essential. Not doing so is a criminal offence. This new hoop to jump is obnoxious on a host of levels. The declaration form came in on the very day the first few lockdown restrictions were eased, with hospitalisations and deaths dramatically

Gus Morton

Remote lessons have been an education for teachers like me

I had a Post-it note beside my laptop during the online lessons I taught during lockdown. It simply said ‘shut up’. I have spent 20 years teaching maths in urban comprehensives, reflecting and refining my methods and trying to train others. I thought I was doing a pretty decent job, but the pandemic and the necessity of teaching remotely has made me rethink the whole process. Early on in May I realised I had to work out, from scratch, what I actually wanted my students to become and how, in the world of screen-mediated learning, I could help them achieve this. What do I want my students to become? I

Thursday

Ross Clark

Is this a once-in-a-generation chance to invest in central London?

Buy when there is gunfire on the streets, goes the old adage. But could this be a case of the right time to buy being when there is, well, hardly anything happening on the streets? Few investments have been as hard hit by Covid-19 as commercial property in central London. As shops and restaurants have been closed, and office staff made to work from home, landlords have struggled to collect their rent. In the six months to September, for example, Shaftesbury, which owns 600 buildings in the West End including 1.9 million square foot of retail and office space, managed to collect only 41 per cent of what was due,

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Rishi’s nightmare: will inflation crush the recovery?

At first, it seems to make no sense. Britain is in the middle of the worst economic crash in recorded history, with a Chancellor who is famously keen on low taxes, spending control and sound money. But Rishi Sunak this week presented a Budget that seems inspired, in parts, by Labour’s last manifesto. Debt surging to £2.8 trillion. Public spending up by a quarter in a year. And taxes: soon going up. Corporation tax, freezes to the personal tax threshold. The explanation most Tories comfort themselves with is that Sunak wants to explain to a high-spending Prime Minister that today’s cash splurge is tomorrow’s tax rise. But in truth, Sunak

Melinda Hughes

Did I give Russ Abbot Covid?

For the past few weeks there’s been a 7 p.m. curfew in Barbados as part of what the government calls a ‘national pause’ (lockdown, essentially). I’m actually grateful because it’s been manic lately. The excitement started with the visit of Captain Sir Tom Moore in December. I was commissioned by a golfing group called the ‘Sandy Lane Swingers’ to write and perform a song, ‘Marching on to Victory’, at a charity lunch. It’s a jaunty tune, composed by my co-writer Jeremy Limb, with a singalong at the end. Captain Tom joined in, waving his napkin in the air. As an encore I sang a verse of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The moral debate over Covid jabs for children

Israel has the world’s attention, becoming the first country to achieve mass vaccination. What it does now may be followed worldwide. The first big development has been the use of immunity ID cards which give vaccinated Israelis access to gyms, indoor restaurants and — soon — holidays in Greece. Britain is preparing to follow suit, with Michael Gove considering UK vaccine certificates ahead of the great unlocking on 21 June. He’s widely expected to come out in favour of IDs in some form. But the other idea attracting interest in Whitehall is Israel’s plan to vaccinate children. Israel’s deputy health minister Yoav Kisch has said those aged 12 to 16

The Spectator

Which countries still haven’t had a single case of Covid?

French lessons France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to three years in jail, with two of them suspended, for corruption and ‘influence peddling’ after seeking to bribe a judge. Some other French leaders who have been convicted in criminal courts:— Jacques Chirac got a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for setting up fake jobs to claim public funds for political purposes.— Christine Lagarde was convicted in 2016 of making payouts to a businessman while she was finance minister in 2008. She was not punished and went on to be appointed head of the European Central Bank.— In 2020 former PM François Fillon was given a five-year sentence, three suspended,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: A Covid Budget, a Cotswold meteor and Angelina Jolie sells Churchill’s painting

Home First-dose coronavirus vaccinations totalled more than 20 million. A study suggested that in the over-eighties, a single dose of either the Pfizer or Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was more than 80 per cent effective at preventing hospitalisation. Hospital admissions of 8,452 in the week ending 27 February were 22 per cent down on the week before that. At dawn on 28 February, total UK deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus) had stood at 122,705, including 2,340 in the past week, down by 32.3 per cent on the week before that. Six people with the Brazilian variant of coronavirus were detected in Britain, but one could not be traced.

Friday

Ross Clark

Are people tiring of lockdown?

Is the decline in new Covid infections slowing down? That is the picture painted by the government’s figures for confirmed infections, arrived at via the NHS Test and Trace system. The most recent figures show that the 71,320 cases recorded in the seven days to Wednesday are 15 per cent down on the previous seven days — a substantial fall, yet over the previous few weeks numbers had been declining at around 25 per cent every week. The fall in deaths, on the other hand, appears to be accelerating. The figure for the past seven days — at 2,684 — is 30 per cent down on the previous seven days.

Thursday

Jo Macfarlane

The mysteries of ‘long Covid’

Soon, as the rates of coronavirus deaths and infections plummet, we’re likely to focus more on those who suffer what is being called ‘long Covid’ — yet the truth is we know very little about what precisely it is. Long Covid began as a quiet murmur in the background: anecdotal stories about symptoms which extended beyond the predicted 14-day recovery time. There’s no agreed definition, so it’s hard to say how many sufferers there are, but a survey from the Office for National Statistics suggests it affects as many as one in ten of those who have had the virus. As the second wave retreats, the number of people left

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The art of the public information ad

Bring back the Tufty Club. Bring back the Green Cross Code. Bring back ‘Charley says’. Bring back ‘Only a fool breaks the two-second rule’. Bring back Vinnie Jones and ‘Stayin’ Alive’. Bring back the Country Code and ‘Always take your litter home’. Bring back public information films. Bring back the Central Office of Information. For younger readers, I probably need to explain what the hell I am talking about. Tufty was created for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, and was an implausibly sensible young squirrel whose behaviour (in contrast to the foolish antics of the louche Willy Weasel) gave lessons to children on road sense. At its

Rob Palk

For lovers who live apart, it’s been a long year

Spring is coming, the roadmap out of lockdown is here, and the faint signs of an End To All This can be seen, in smoke rings, on the horizon. I scan the list of freedoms with impatience: schools, if you must, parental visits in parks, fine, fine, but when will I get to see my girlfriend indoors? If you express some level of frustration with lockdown life, the worry is that you will be taken for someone who believes the right to spread plague is enshrined in the Magna Carta or that society took a wrong turn with the suspiciously foreign antics of Louis Pasteur. I am keen neither to

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Will social kisses survive Covid?

There is a ‘pervasive presence of Chinese military-linked conglomerates and universities in the sponsorship of high-technology research centres in many leading UK universities’. When the think tank Civitas recently revealed this, Cambridge University denounced the report as misinformation and pushed Civitas to qualify it. Thus, when Civitas had referred to Cambridge’s Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with China’s National University of Defence Technology (NUDT), Cambridge wanted it added that the MoU had been ‘signed in the wake of the UK… government’s encouragement to create a “golden decade” for the UK-China relationship. That MoU produced no research, no collaborations, no funding and has been expired for three years’. Why, then, was it

The Spectator

Which Covid vaccine is really the most effective?

State of the art Graffiti on Edvard Munch’s first version of ‘The Scream’ was revealed to be the work of the artist himself. There is a tradition of artists damaging their own work: — In 2018, a Banksy, ‘Girl With Balloon’, was partially shredded moments after being sold for $1.4 million at Sotheby’s by a device fixed inside the frame. — In 1920, Dadaist Francis Picabia arranged for his friend André Breton to rub out his chalk drawing, ‘Riz au Nez’, shortly after it went on display in Paris. — In 1960, ‘Homage to New York’, a sculpture by Jean Tinguely, auto-combusted after going on display in the city’s Museum

Monday

Kate Andrews

The roadmap paints a grim picture for business

As the Prime Minister announced the details of his government’s ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown in the Commons on Monday, no doubt some will have been cheering on the announcements, which will allow them to keep their pre-planned parties or holidays scheduled in their diaries. But the timeline has painted a grim picture for business in the months to come. According to the timetable, we are nearly two months away from outdoor dining being made legal again, and three months away from a return to indoor dining. While non-essential retail and personal care premises (including hair and nail salons) are billed to open on 12 April, social distancing measures look set to