Coronavirus

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Cameron’s cash, A-grades abound and Tower Bridge won’t budge

Home With less frightening domestic data on the coronavirus pandemic to ponder, subjects such as the rivalry between Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, found time for discussion. The seven-day average of coronavirus cases detected by tests remained below 30,000. In the seven days up to the beginning of the week, 637 people had died with coronavirus, bringing the total of deaths (within 28 days of testing positive) to 130,281. (In the previous week deaths had numbered 524.) In a week, numbers remaining in hospital fell from 5,943 to 5,631. Three quarters of adults had received two doses of vaccine, but numbers crept

Charles Moore Charles Moore

What ministers won’t admit about A-levels

The tale of A-levels shows how ministers can sometimes find themselves in a position when it is simply too dangerous to admit something that is true. To the exterior eye, it is obvious that the temporary abolition of exams and its replacement by teacher assessment has produced grade inflation. This year’s A-level cohort has not suddenly got a third better than its pre-Covid equivalent. You or I can point that out, but if Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, says it, he thereby implies that he has presided over a change which devalues the exam, seriously weakening the basis of admissions to university. He will also be accused of disparaging pupils

Matt Quinton

The great holiday Covid test rip-off

I holidayed in Malta last month with my partner, having chosen it because it was on the ‘green list’. Foolishly, I assumed this would mean we could waltz back to the UK without any hassle. I was wrong. We needed a test before departing Malta. Within a few minutes of looking on the Malta airport website, I found a provider, headed to their test centre, and €30 later, was given the all clear. But that wasn’t all. To complete my pre-flight passenger form, I needed a ‘Day 2’ test for when I was home. For this, the UK government has a website pointing holidaymakers towards a slew of private firms

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Why China’s vaccine diplomacy is running into difficulties

Tear gas and rubber bullets hold off the protestors marching to Government House in Bangkok. They’re looking for Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha, who they blame for Thailand’s Covid plight. As Covid cases continue to rise in Thailand, the protestors have three demands: the resignation of Prayut, more funding for the country’s Covid response, and for the country to stop using the Chinese-made Sinovac vaccine. Back when Sinovac first landed in the country in February the shipment was welcomed by Prayut, who proclaimed it ‘a historic day’. But six months down the line hundreds of healthcare workers are still being infected with coronavirus despite having received two shots of Sinovac. A

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The problems posed by booster shots

It is already known that there will be a campaign of booster shots in the UK this autumn to boost immunity among the over-50s. But it now looks like the government is planning one for autumn 2022 as well. Steven Swinford reports in the Times today that the UK has ordered 35 million doses from Pfizer for next year. The number of doses ordered suggests that the government wants to have the option in 2022 of giving a booster shot to everyone in clinical groups 1-9: the over-50s. Swinford reports that the government was prompted to act, in part, by the fact that the EU has already placed an order

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Macron’s Covid passports are causing intergenerational warfare

The protest movement against Emmanuel Macron’s Covid passport, which comes into full effect today, continues to grow in France. On Saturday over 200,000 men, women and children took to the streets, more than twice the number that demonstrated when the protests began on July 17. As a veteran of the Paris protests, I’ve found one of the most interesting aspects to be the reactions of passers-by as the cortège files through the streets of the capital. Some clap, some look on in contempt, others shout words of encouragement and a few hurl terms of abuse. There’s no doubt the Covid passport has divided the people, and while the protest movement

Sunday

Paul Hunter

Will Covid turn into the common cold?

Many experts and modellers thought that the 19 July reopening would be a disaster. So far, that has not been the case. Daily case numbers actually started falling within days after 19 July, although that was far too soon to have been caused by anything to do with ‘freedom day’. The question now is how the pandemic will play out for the rest of this year and the next? In trying to understand this, we need to understand some important things about the biology of coronaviruses and their interaction with their hosts: us. Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, is not going away. Like other coronaviruses, it will likely infect

Thursday

Philip Thomas

Why we shouldn’t fear a ‘fourth wave’ of Covid

A few weeks ago, as the government was preparing for a great reopening on 21 June, I wrote a cover story for The Spectator with some bad news: a third wave was coming, I argued, and it could be even bigger than the second. It jarred with the mood. Covid cases were falling and a great many people desperately wanted this to be the end of it. My model, the Bristol University PCCF (Predictor Corrector Coronavirus Filter), showed otherwise: the biggest wave could be yet to come. But with a vital difference: hospitalisations and deaths would be much lower than at the beginning of the year when we were largely

Douglas Murray

The path to re-enchantment

Most social occasions now seem to kick off with a wasted hour or two. The time is spent discussing Covid: who’s had it and who hasn’t, who’s had the most nightmarish encounter with a mask fanatic and who the worst lockdown. After that there can be a second course, discussing things like international travel. Remember when we used to be able to book a ticket, put up with the indignities of the budget airlines but still arrive in any place we wanted? Now everybody has stories of friends and relatives they haven’t seen, places they can’t go, and experiences they’ve had to miss. The world has become a little smaller.

Monday

Ross Clark

Are booster shots necessary?

Will Britain become the first country in the world to have a large section of its population immunised against Covid-19 three times over — and will that be a worthwhile achievement? The government is reportedly planning to give out booster shots — eventually to everyone over the age of 50 — starting as early as 6 September. This appears to be following the advice issued by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation on 30 June. If the government tells us we all need an extra shot after so short an interval, might it undermine confidence in the vaccines? The reasoning is that the benefits of immunisation wear off over

Friday

Katy Balls

Is the government bluffing on vaccine passports?

Over the past week, the government have been upping the ante when it comes to calls for vaccine passports. Long gone are the days when ministers went out on the airwaves to declare that the UK was not a ‘papers please’ country. Instead, the Prime Minister has already declared that they will be needed to enter nightclubs from September while Dominic Raab this week promised to provide prior warning if – as has been reported – vaccine passports become mandatory for students at university. Long gone are the days when ministers went out on the airwaves to declare that the UK was not a ‘papers please’ country However, it’s something

Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

The vaccination campaign is making the same mistakes as Remain

One of the great cautionary tales of the last five years is how political campaigns can start off with what looks like a strong case and end up losing with 48 per cent of the vote. What happened to the Remain campaign is now happening to the campaign to deploy vaccines – and in several countries. Governments are telling anti-vaxxers that they are stupid; they are exaggerating their case like the French education minister, who suggested that vaccination means that you can no longer infect others. Or they are lecturing people, saying that they should listen to the experts. And when things get really bad, they are talking about compulsion.

Thursday

The Spectator

The dangers of post-Covid isolationism

There is something bizarre about a sporting event designed to bring people and nations together but from which spectators have been excluded. Most foreigners are currently forbidden from setting foot inside Japan, let alone inside the Olympic stadium. In many senses, Tokyo 2020 — which like the Uefa Euros retains its original name, despite a year’s delay — encompasses the worst of our pandemic-ridden world: the global elite can attend while the rest of us have to settle for watching it on TV. Yet a successful Olympics — even a week in, it looks as if the Tokyo Games will be judged a kind of success — could provide the

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why am I so angry?

Last week, walking into a branch of Waterstones in south London, I made way (or so I thought) for a pixie-faced man in Lycra who was theatrically hauling his bike into the shop. It seemed a bit of a liberty, but these days cyclists are godly folk who can do anything they like, especially in the eco-obsessed puritan commonwealths south of the river. Then a querulous voice piped up behind me. ‘Excuse me! You just pushed past me and my bike.’ I think it was the ‘and my bike’ that did it. Pixie Face headed for Waterstones’ mandatory display of anti-racist memoirs, bleating about ‘manners’ while caressing his affronted vehicle.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Channel crossings, chain-gangs for criminals and Tesco Bank shuts up shop

Home The daily number of coronavirus cases detected by tests fell from 54,674 on 17 July to 23,511 by 27 July. About 92 per cent of adults in England and Wales had coronavirus antibodies at the beginning of July, according to an estimate by the Office for National Statistics. In the seven days up to the beginning of the week, 447 people had died with coronavirus, bringing the total of deaths (within 28 days of testing positive) to 129,130. (In the previous week deaths had numbered 284.) In a week, numbers remaining in hospital rose from 4,121 to 5,238. By the beginning of the week, 88 per cent of adults

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

The French are rebelling against Macron’s Covid Passports

A manager of an attraction park in France was reportedly assaulted on Sunday after he denied entry to a customer. It’s alleged the man lost his rag when he was turned back because he didn’t have a valid Covid passport. It is unlikely to be the last such incident. In the space of a fortnight, the atmosphere in France has turned toxic. A hospital in Saint-Étienne was invaded on Monday by 60 demonstrators, mainly medical professionals, opposed to the measure that will force them to vaccinate or be suspended without pay. That is also a strike at a Lyon hospital that will start tomorrow. Elsewhere cinemas, theme parks and fitness

Tuesday

Kate Andrews

Whitehall’s Covid gloom could harm our economic recovery

As the government continues to put forward an extremely cautious narrative about re-opening, more evidence emerged today that the economy is surging ahead. The International Monetary Fund has once again upgraded its forecast for Britain’s growth this year: its April prediction of 5.3 per cent growth in 2021 has now been revised upward to 7 per cent. If correct, the UK could boast one of the fastest growing economies amongst major countries, with a recovery looking to be on par with the United States. Today’s update from the IMF fits a trend. Just this weekend the EY Item Club forecast 7.6 per cent growth this year – the fastest rate

Molly Kingsley

The danger of vaccine passports for education

In one sense vaccines are the perfect example of the ‘greater good’. Every citizen bears a tiny risk to protect not just their own health but that of society as a whole. By contrast, I can think of few graver threats to that greater good than the introduction of vaccine passports. Until recently the accepted view in Westminster seemed to have been that vaccine passports of any kind were discriminatory. Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccines minister, was told by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs committee last month that ‘Covid-status certification system would, by its very nature, be discriminatory.’ This all changed last week with the announcement that passports might, after

Terry Barnes

How Australia was caught in lockdown limbo

Sajid Javid’s deleted weekend tweet about Britain ‘learning to live with, rather than cower from Covid’ upset just about everyone – from frontline NHS workers to Covid-19 victims’ groups. But Javid could actually have been talking about Australians. While the UK’s Freedom Day went ahead despite 40,000 people testing positive for Covid daily, over half of Australia’s population has been cowering under lockdowns imposed by their state governments, while the other half are exhorted to treat their locked down fellow Australians as pariahs. For what? Yesterday, Australia’s health department reported just 157 positive cases in the previous 24 hours, mostly in the Greater Sydney area. There were less than 2,500

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How many Covid hospitalisations are caused by Covid?

How many people have been taken into hospital and are dying with Covid, and how many have been admitted to hospital and died because of the virus has been one of the fundamental questions of the pandemic. We have been bombarded with daily statistics which have never attempted to put this into context. An overall Covid death toll of 129,000 – by the government’s count – means little without knowing who has been dying. Statistics relating to the age profiles of the dead and their medical histories have cropped up from time to time – showing that those who have died are, on average, over 80 and that many suffered