Coronavirus

Thursday

Philip Thomas

Why the Omicron wave won’t overwhelm the NHS

Barely six weeks after it was first discovered in Britain, the Omicron variant has changed everything. Cases have soared far beyond records made in the first wave. Hospital admissions are surging and pupils are once again wearing masks in school. Modellers have produced terrifying figures — up to 25,000 hospitalisations a day, more than five times the last peak. It looks like a Covid groundhog day, a doom loop we seem unable to escape. Last summer, just before the end of lockdown, I wrote in this magazine about a ‘third wave’ of infections which could be just as big as the first. But my model also pointed to something else:

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Rip it up: the vaccine passport experiment needs to end

Flying anywhere right now is difficult, but for those of us who are jabbed, it is at least possible. So just after Christmas I set off for America to see my family in Connecticut, armed with the NHS app technology which we were once assured would never be used as a vaccine passport. It’s now precisely that. I tapped my phone to summon my travel credentials en route to Heathrow, but to my astonishment my vaccination status wasn’t there: ‘No Covid-19 records found.’ My ‘passport’ had been suspended. My crime, it turned out, was to have caught Omicron in mid-December. I’d had a positive result on a lateral flow test

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

How to wrongfoot an anti-vaxxer

The headline looked promising: ‘How to argue with a Covid anti-vaxxer.’ And, yes, a Times colleague had put together a good, informative feature assessing some of the bogus arguments flying around in this pandemic. But it was not what I was looking for. Since undergraduate days I’ve been fascinated by the category of mental imbalance we call paranoia, believing its milder manifestations to be present to some degree in all of us. Mass paranoia is plainly a strand in the anti-vax movement, and I’ve been listening to a powerful BBC Radio 4 and podcast series researched and presented by Jon Ronson, Things Fell Apart. Ronson looks into the rise of

Douglas Murray

The time has come to get on with our lives

If anyone had any doubts about the wisdom of tempting fate then they probably haven’t considered the case of Betty White and People magazine. Assuming that some Spectator readers are not also subscribers to People, I should inform you that the cover for the current issue features the last of The Golden Girls. ‘Betty White turns 100!’ sings the headline, with the subtitle ‘Funny never gets old’. But while funny may not get old, the issue soon did. White died a few days shy of her 100th birthday, just as People magazine hit the newsstands. It sits there still, the worst example of a cover tempting fate since November 2016,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My dog and the NHS have a lot in common

We are considering privatising or selling off our dog, Jessie. She seemed a rather wonderful idea when we got her nine years ago. But since then she has become a hideously bloated, entitled creature who almost by herself determines how we live our lives. In winter she is particularly tyrannical — she has three walks a day, and with darkness falling at four o’clock that means almost every hour of daylight is spent servicing her needs. We cannot go out by ourselves without ensuring she will not be unduly inconvenienced, and as she has grown older so the costs of keeping her have spiralled — and will continue to spiral.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What Boris must do to survive

In recent years, the notion of cabinet government has been a polite fiction. In theory, the prime minister is merely the first among equals when he meets his secretaries of state. In practice, they all owe their position to No. 10 and usually do what they’re told. The situation was summed up by an old Spitting Image sketch showing Margaret Thatcher at a restaurant with her cabinet ministers. She orders steak. ‘What about the vegetables?’ the waitress asks. ‘Oh,’ she replies, ‘they’ll have the same as me.’ For the first two years of Boris Johnson’s premiership, cabinet ministers were more claque than cabinet. ‘How many hospitals are we going to

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson rejects lockdown (again)

Boris Johnson latest Covid press conference was slightly confusing. The Prime Minister spent nearly an hour saying nothing particularly new. He warned that there was ‘considerable pressure’ on the NHS at the moment and unveiled daily priority lateral flow testing for 100,000 essential workers so that key services, including healthcare, don’t seize up due to staff absences. But while he accepted that hospitals were feeling the heat, he also insisted that there was no data suggesting that a lockdown was necessary or helpful. Indeed, he argued:  ‘We have a chance to ride out this Omicron wave without shutting down our country once again. We can keep our schools and our

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Boris’s plan to test key workers daily

The Prime Minister is attempting to lessen the threat posed by Omicron to essential services by requiring around 100,000 workers in specified industries to take daily Covid tests. In order to keep the lights on, maintain the supply of food and keep aeroplanes flying, these workers will have to test five days a week —  so that infections are caught as early as possible, to minimise spread of the virus to colleagues. A government source said the requirement to test daily would apply to those in civil, nuclear and other power generation, air traffic control, meat processing and food supply chains. Boris Johnson concedes that the coming few weeks will see significant disruption

Monday

Ross Clark

The problem with ‘vaccine equity’

‘A stain on our soul’. That was how Gordon Brown, in his latest missive on the subject, described the failure of the west to ensure that the whole world is vaccinated. In a previous attack on western policy — at the end of November, just as Omicron was emerging — he wrote of “hoarding” and ‘vaccine nationalism’. Take Africa: it is certainly true that vaccination rates in many countries are very low. While the UK has managed to deliver 195 doses per 100 people, Nigeria has only managed seven, Ethiopia and Somalia nine, and Chad and South Sudan two. Can all this be blamed on the failure of western nations to donate

Friday

Simon Cook

Covid is surging. So why is intensive care bed usage falling?

Omicron is sending Covid case numbers surging ( a new high of 189,000 cases reported yesterday) and hospital admissions along with it. But another important piece of data, intensive care admissions, shows a significant fall. This is early data, but worth noting as it may be part of an important trend. And it adds context to comments by Chris Hopson, Chief executive of NHS Providers, that the system may be better prepared than case numbers suggest. First let’s look at London; the Omicron epicentre. Hospital figures are rising fast – in part due to patients who are being primarily treated for something else (blue, below – that is now true

Thursday

Simon Cook

Working out length of hospital stay for Covid patients: a technical note

Length of hospital stay is a crucial metric, but hard to do with much accuracy unless each patient is certified Omicron or Delta. The closest proxy we have right now is information on patient stay and there are graphs for two cohorts: those admitted from 1 May (third wave) and from 1 December. The graphs were published in the CO-CIN study dated 22nd Dec (Fig 8). The younger age groups are at the top. Those who were discharged on the left, those who died on the right. The line drawn on each chart shows 14 days on, and indicates what percent of patients were discharged or had died by that point.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Remember panic-buying? Here’s what will happen next time

It’s post-Christmas, and there are already murmurs about supermarkets with empty shelves. Just as with the petrol shortage in September and shortages of loo paper at the beginning of the first lockdown, these things can rapidly develop into major crises, purely as a result of panic-buying. Tesco, whose store on the Isle of Wight is reportedly especially empty post-Christmas, denies it has any problem with its supply chain — which had been threatened with disruption thanks to an industrial dispute involving the company’s lorry drivers in early December. People may, on the other hand, have stocked up more than usual in response to fears of a post-Christmas lockdown — a fear which

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

The churches must stay open

Hooray for Cardinal Vincent Nichols, who used the one day of the year when his pronouncements are amplified by the season to ‘sincerely appeal that [the government] do not again consider closing churches and places of worship.’ He said in a BBC interview he believed it had been demonstrated that the airiness of churches meant they are ‘not places where we spread the virus’. Mind you, Catholic churches weren’t as bad as the Church of England This is, of course, entirely sensible. It was nuts for churches to close at the start of lockdown, at least as spaces for prayer if not for communal worship. Pretty well any church is ‘Covid-safe’, in

Thursday

Michael Simmons

Will Omicron overwhelm the NHS? The crucial missing data

If you catch Omicron your risk of ending up in hospital is between 50 to 70 per cent less likely than if you’d had Delta. That’s according to a new analysis released this evening by the UK Health Security Agency. It’s another blow to the case for lockdown. That case for lockdown goes like this: Omicron is growing exponentially and its casualties will overwhelm the NHS unless action is taken to slow the growth. The cautious course of action is to wait until we know more about crucial unanswered questions, such as: What is the limit to Omicron’s growth? How much milder than Delta is it? Is Imperial’s figure of

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Sage modellers start to accept that Omicron is milder

Public health officials in Britain and South Africa were on different planets for about a fortnight. While those in South Africa kept presenting data suggesting that Omicron caused less severe disease than earlier variants, scientists in Britain continued to claim it was too early to say. Scenarios published by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) last week pictured a frightening picture of January, suggesting that hospitalisations could peak above previous waves. An assumption was made that Omicron was just as likely to land you in hospital or kill you compared with Delta. As LSHTM admitted, quite a big assumption:- Due to a lack of data, we assume Omicron has the

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson and Kate Andrews

Sage memo makes the case for lockdown

On Monday, Covid restrictions were rejected after the cabinet debated the issue robustly for the first time since the pandemic started. The Prime Minister said he’d revisit the decision, so the debate is very much still ongoing. But it wasn’t just ministers meeting that day. Sage assembled its experts as well, with over 70 scientists and government officials in attendance. The minutes, seen by The Spectator, give an interesting summary of the official case for more lockdown restrictions. Everyone is wrestling with two questions; if there are no more restrictions, how far will Omicron case numbers rise? And how will that translate into hospitalisations? If there is reason to believe

Tuesday

Annabel Denham

Should businesses receive more Covid support?

As government considers whether to lock us down once again, should it put economic support for businesses affected back on the table? The combination of Plan B and Boris Johnson’s insistence that we modify our social behaviour has led to empty cinemas, ghost trains, cancelled gigs and ‘postponed’ Christmas parties. Just as the economy was getting back on its feet, the unofficial guidance to avoid social events is knee-capping it once again, forcing the Chancellor to not only drop his December plans but to announce yet more taxpayer-funded business compensation. So far he’s fallen down on the side of more support, though nothing (yet) like last time. Businesses in England that

Monday

Simon Cook

Is Omicron now falling in South Africa?

Man makes Covid predictions and God laughs. Yet with the stakes this high in Britain, every bit of real-world data is useful. That’s why South Africa is so important: it’s a country with a well-digitised healthcare sector that we have to thank for sequencing the Omicron variant, and has been first to experience the impact. That’s why its figures, released daily, are being watched so eagerly world over. Right now, there are two questions: is Omicron now falling? And if so, what conclusions can we draw? The epicentre is Gauteng province: home to Johannesburg, Pretoria and about a quarter of South Africans. The below chart adjusts for population and shows that

Sunday

Charlie Walsham

How the BBC lost its way on Covid

I have been a BBC journalist for many years, and in that time I have been committed to impartiality and the corporation’s Reithian values to inform and educate. My despair about the BBC’s one-sided coverage of the pandemic though has been steadily growing for some time. And in early December, as I listened to a BBC radio broadcast, I felt the corporation reach a new low. During a morning phone-in show on 5Live the topic of discussion was Covid jabs and whether they should be mandated, or if punitive action should be taken against those who refuse them, such as imposing lockdowns on the unvaccinated. Setting aside the fact that

Simon Clarke

Don’t underestimate the Omicron variant

As the Omicron variant makes its way through the population of the UK, the Chief Medical Officer’s warning that we don’t know all that much about the variant, but ‘all the things we do know are bad’ was not what anyone wanted to hear this week. Unfortunately, Chris Whitty is right. The Omicron variant’s assault on the UK has been like a blitzkrieg so far, and it has left a trail of shock and confusion in its wake. It is no wonder that Sage have advised this week that more restrictions may now be needed to prevent a rapid rise in hospitalisations. There is still a lot we don’t know