Coronavirus

Thursday

Katy Balls

Tory MPs see red over the new tiers

Boris Johnson began the week with an optimistic message of an end to the English lockdown and hopes of a vaccine breakthrough to rid us of coronavirus restrictions altogether. However, until then his revised three-tier system is becoming a major cause of frustration for Tory MPs. The three tiers have been bulked up from their pre-lockdown incarnation. While gyms and hairdressers now can remain open under any tier, socialising is stricter than before. The level of disquiet means No. 10 will likely have to offer more to backbenchers However, the point of contention among Tory MPs is which areas are under which tier. The hope among many in the parliamentary party was

Jennifer Rogers

What we know so far about the Oxford vaccine

It’s three for three as far as positive outcomes from Covid vaccine trials are concerned. But the announcement from AstraZeneca and Oxford University, at a first glance, may not seem to be as exciting as those from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. The figures are a bit of a head-scratcher, so let’s look at them in more detail. Monday’s results from AstraZeneca and Oxford University state that the combined Phase 3 interim analysis from their COV002 and COV003 studies (based in the UK and Brazil respectively) included 131 Covid-19 cases and that the vaccine was found to be 70.4 per cent effective overall — but that vaccine efficacy in two dosing subgroups was

John Connolly John Connolly

Full list: Boris Johnson’s new tiers

The government has revealed today which areas will be moved into different tiers at the end of the national lockdown on 2 December. And as expected, Boris Johnson has decided to take a hard-line approach to the new restrictions, before the regulations are relaxed over the Christmas period. Only three areas in England have been kept in the lowest Tier 1, two of which are not on the mainland. Only the Isle of Wight, the Isles of Scilly and Cornwall have been spared tighter restrictions. The vast majority of the country will be kept in Tier 2 at the beginning of December, which means that mixing between household bubbles will

Constantin Eckner

Germans face a ‘lockdown light’ for Christmas

Germans, just like Britons, will have to cope with restrictions during this year’s Christmas holidays. Yesterday, Angela Merkel and the heads of Germany’s federal states agreed on an updated catalogue of regulations that will allow ten adults to meet for a Christmas party. After three weeks of what is widely called a ‘lockdown light’, the infection rates in German cities and regions continue to remain above the threshold that has been set by medical experts. The vast majority of Landkreise (regional districts) have recorded an incidence proportion of higher than 50 cases per 1,000 inhabitants within the last week.  Chancellor Merkel said yesterday that the ‘lockdown light’ has prevented the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Christmas is on, Trump is off and Piglet stars on a 50p piece

Home The AstraZeneca vaccine developed by the University of Oxford was found to be 70 per cent effective — 90 per cent among those given a half-sized first dose and a full-sized second dose. It does not require supercooling. The United Kingdom had ordered 100 million doses. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 22 November, total deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for the coronavirus) had stood at 54,626 including 2,860 in the past week, compared with 2,878 the week before. The proportion of secondary school pupils absent for reasons connected to Covid-19 rose to 22 per cent. Travellers from abroad would from 15 December be allowed to

Ian Rankin

We don’t want pandemic novels – we want gentle escapism

I’m often asked when I’ll write a pandemic novel. I’m not sure I’d ever be tempted, though the backdrop of Edinburgh’s deserted streets at the height of the (first) lockdown certainly provided food for the imagination. I dare say novels will arrive — some may even be good. But I find that fiction concerning momentous events usually benefits from the dust having settled. Only then can we begin to comprehend the human costs, stresses and implications, by which time there may also be an audience ready to relive the experience. In the near future, however, I foresee a hunger for escape to a gentler and more reasonable world. I’ve been

Louise Cooper

Why next year could bring a 1980s-style spending boom

Most forecasts for the economy are pretty grim: bankruptcies, bad debts, job losses and a massive debt hangover leave little room for optimism. But I’m going to try. I think there is a wodge of money burning a hole in UK consumers’ pockets. And once they can, households will go out and spend it. This wall of money can be seen in the savings ratio — the amount of income that households save. For decades it has wobbled around 10 per cent. But the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that households are now saving an astonishing 30 per cent of their income. It’s never been

Liam Halligan

Covid has left Britain printing money like never before

Lockdown is convulsing the British economy on multiple fronts. ‘Going to work’ has been upended, hitting transport and commercial property sectors. The demise of the high street accelerates as online retail surges. Yet the definitive Covid-related economic trend is happening within the national accounts, as the government spends vast sums on furloughing and other business support, while our locked-down economy struggles to generate tax. This has big implications for investors. The UK borrowed an astonishing £215 billion between April and October, almost twice the annual NHS budget. Our national debt now exceeds £2,000 billion — and just outstripped annual GDP, a first in our peacetime history. Amid renewed lockdown, with

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A vaccine won’t heal the scarring of lockdown

Ever since the pandemic struck, a spectre has haunted Boris Johnson: would Britain ever escape from this? His scientific advisers had given him a terrifying vision. Only 7 per cent of the public had caught Covid in the first wave, they said, meaning 93 per cent were still susceptible. So what was to stop his premiership being a never-ending cycle of lockdowns? Now, he has his answer: not one but three vaccines, two with efficacy rates of 95 per cent. This has transformed his outlook. The war against Covid is not over, but victory looks imminent. The Prime Minister has a weakness for wartime metaphors, but this time they are

Rachel Johnson

I was dreaming of a cancelled Christmas

I am on the record as being, if not a convicted seasonal denier, at least insufficiently Christmassy. Last year I interviewed Noel Gallagher for the Christmas cover of a magazine and we bonded over our mutual dread of what our American friends call, dispiritingly, holidays. ‘Christmas Day’s the longest day, longer than D-Day — and more stressful,’ he moaned. ‘You’re sitting there exhausted, thinking, “And it’s only 11 o’clock”.’ For the avoidance of doubt, I love Christmas trees, holly, mistletoe, church services, chestnut stuffing and mince pies. I do not love schlepping round the shops, all playing Slade on a loop, in the sleet buying things people don’t want, and

Simon Stevens

How the NHS has coped with the second wave

Across Europe, hospitals have been filling up again with the second wave of coronavirus. France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands have all been hit, as has the Midwest of the United States. In England we’ve gone from fewer than 500 Covid-positive patients in hospital at the start of September to nearly 15,000 now. Each morning, we anxiously scrutinise the overnight figures. Thankfully, in the past week Covid inpatient numbers have begun to plateau — although they’ve still been rising in parts of the Midlands, London and Kent. So it’s an uneven picture. But unlike in March, community testing gives hospitals advance warning, so we’re able to adjust the provision

Stuart Ritchie

How to win over vaccine sceptics

We have a vaccine. In fact, we have three — and more are on the way. While we still need to scrutinise the full data from the Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca trials, the initial reports are stunning: vaccines that in some cases exceed 90 per cent effectiveness, and might be ready within weeks. Previous surveys showed a big appetite for the vaccine, but more recent ones are concerning. According to YouGov, only 67 per cent of British people say they’d be ‘likely’ to get the Pfizer virus, with 21 per cent saying they’d be ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ unlikely to. Other polls also find that scepticism towards the vaccine is increasing.

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

We need a dose of vaccine realism

One of my geniuses as both a commentator and a character is to confront what for most normal people amounts to unqualified good news and immediately spot the downside. I’m a professional party-pooper. Hence, as promising early results from three major Covid vaccine trials inspire a flurry of jubilant metaphors about tunnels and cavalry, your downer columnist glowers — for the New York Times didn’t tag Shriver ‘the Cassandra of American letters’ for nothing. Beware, warns this killjoy crank, allowing your minders to keep you in confinement ‘just a little bit longer’ and then you’ll be let out to play. Like the classic carrot dangling before a donkey’s nose, an

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What do excess deaths tell us about Covid?

Assessing the number of Covid deaths has been notoriously difficult throughout the pandemic. Over the summer, English figures were revised down by more than 5,000 after researchers at Oxford University discovered a flaw in the way Public Health England was registering deaths. Another route for assessing the mortality of Covid is to look at excess deaths — while comparing this year’s deaths to previous years is a blunt instrument, it is also in some ways more reliable. We may not know the reason for death but we know that more are occurring. Tuesday’s release by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) looking at weekly registered deaths in England and Wales painted a bleak picture. From the week

Monday

Matt Ridley

Was Covid beginning to peak before the second lockdown?

‘I don’t think that word means what you think it means,’ says the Spaniard Inigo Montoya in the film The Princess Bride, when Vizzini keeps saying it is ‘inconceivable’ that the Dread Pirate Roberts is still on their tail. I muttered those words to myself during a parliamentary debate just before the start of the latest lockdown, when the minister twice said that the wave of infections was increasing ‘exponentially’. Far from increasing, let alone exponentially, the data showed that the wave was faltering if not cresting already. The lockdown came in on a Thursday. The very next day data from three reliable sources – the Office for National Statistics,

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The problems with Boris Johnson’s ‘freedom pass’

In one of his early lockdown press conferences, the Prime Minister suggested that those who tested positive for Covid could be released from lockdown because they’d be immune. The idea of an ‘immunity certificate’ was then dropped, as it raised obvious questions of unfairness: would you really have a caste of immuno-privileged people exempt from the lockdown rules?  But now the idea seems to be back. The Sunday press reported on an Orwellian-sounding ‘freedom pass’ that would be granted to those who complied with a government-mandated testing regime. A source told the Sunday Telegraph that such a pass would ‘allow someone to wander down the streets and if someone else asks why

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Tiers until March, Boris tells MPs

Boris Johnson’s statement to the Commons announcing the end of the national lockdown was meant to hit an optimistic note. However, he faced two hurdles when it came to achieving this.  Firstly, his internet connection in No. 10 broke down and Johnson was cut off from MPs midway through the session. Secondly, the measures he announced in place of the national lockdown can’t really be described as a great liberation; social distancing is here for the foreseeable future. What’s more, those who find themselves in the new ramped up Tier 3 – with the tiers for each area to be announced on Thursday – could struggle to see much difference at all with what

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What we don’t yet know about the Oxford vaccine

We have become used to Mondays bringing good news on the vaccine front. But the publication of interim results from the Astra Zeneca/Oxford University vaccine – AZD1222 – will certainly please the UK government. Not merely because this is the home-grown option and we have already ordered 100m shots, but because, shot for shot, it is considerably cheaper to buy and administer than the other vaccine candidates. The vaccine itself is less than a fifth of the price of the Pfizer vaccine. Moreover, it does not need storing and transporting at minus 70 Celsius – it can be kept at ordinary fridge temperatures (2 to 8 Celsius), greatly facilitating any

Trisha Greenhalgh and Deepti Gurdasani

Eight key questions on the Danish facemask study

The ‘Danmask-19 trial‘ sought to test whether face masks are effective in preventing infection with SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) for the wearer. It found that the recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures ‘did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than half in a community’. So does this mean wearing masks is a waste of time? There are several reasons that drawing such a conclusion from this study might be unwise. A randomised controlled trial (RCT) is often – though not always – the best way of testing whether a treatment works, because RCTs guard against the biases inherent in many other

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Oxford’s vaccine success could mean a return to normal by April

One consequence of the positive Oxford vaccine news this morning is that the UK will shift to a strategy of attempting to vaccinate as much of the adult population as possible. We know from NHS documents obtained by the Health Service Journal that the aim is to have 75 per cent of the population vaccinated by April. If this was the case, all social distancing measures could be ended that month, with even nightclubs open as before. The Oxford vaccine is particularly well suited to a mass vaccination programme. Unlike the Pfizer one, it can be stored at fridge temperature making distribution of it far easier. Rolling this vaccine out