Lockdown

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

This is not a natural disaster, but a manmade one

Should our future permit an occupation so frivolous, historians years from now will make a big mistake if they blame the nauseating plummet of global GDP in 2020 directly on a novel coronavirus. After all — forgive the repetition, but certain figures bear revisiting — Covid’s roughly 290,000 deaths wouldn’t raise a blip on a graph of worldwide mortality (reminder: 58 million global deaths in 2019). Covid deaths will barely register in the big picture even if their total multiplies by several times. For maintaining a precious sense of proportion, check out some other annual global fatalities: influenza, up to 650,000. Typhoid fever, up to 160,000. Cholera, up to 140,000.

Jayanta Bhattacharya & Mikko Packalen

Lives vs lives – the global cost of lockdown

‘There have been as many plagues in history as there have been wars,’ wrote Albert Camus in The Plague, ‘yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.’ So it was this time. The arrival of a new coronavirus blindsided governments of most advanced nations as they reached for a tool that few had ever really considered before: lockdown. It all happened too fast for a proper discussion about the implications. The biggest question — the extent to which lockdown will claim lives as well as save them — is one you can ask at a global level. We know the national costs. In the United States, there is

Robin Oakley

How to get your racing fix under lockdown

There is racing elsewhere in the world. It restarted in France on Monday, la course de chevaux being classed in that fine country as an agricultural activity. My friend the form guru, who combs back six races in search of clues, has even cast his net to include somewhere called Morphettville in Australia where last week he succeeded in backing a 65-1 winner. When, over the phone, he sensed my raised eyebrow at a horse with truly believable form being allowed to start at such odds, he explained that the animal had won two previous races: ‘The horse wasn’t to know they were lower-class events. He still got the same

Friday

John Lee

Ten reasons to end the lockdown now

Writing in this magazine a month ago, I applauded the government’s stated aim of trying to follow the science in dealing with Covid. Such promises are easier made than kept. Following science means understanding science. It means engaging with rival interpretations of the limited data in order to tease out what is most important in what we don’t know. Instead, the government in the UK (and many other places) seems uninterested in alternative viewpoints. The chosen narrative – that lockdown has saved countless lives – has been doggedly followed by all spokespeople. No doubt is allowed. We have been seeing the groupthink response to a perceived external threat that Jonathan

Thursday

James Kirkup

Keeping schools closed until September would hammer poor kids

Schools should stay closed until September, according to a big teaching union: In view of the continued and pressing public health challenges and the considerable task that will be required to ensure that every school is ready to admit increased numbers of children and adults into safe learning and working environments, the NASUWT urges ministers to act to end speculation on the reopening of schools beyond the current restrictions prior to September 2020. That’s the latest from Patrick Roach, head of the NASUWT. This is a hardening of the line from teaching unions, and one that I think has the potential to cause significant tensions with the government. It’s worth noting

Samantha Rea

A military guide to surviving lockdown

“Wire your booze cabinet up to the mains so you can’t get into it!” says Jason Fox, the former Royal Marine Commando and Special Forces Sergeant who’s best known for barking orders on Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins. With wine o’clock starting earlier each day for many of us, as we crawl the walls in isolation, I’ve asked Jason for his take on lockdown drinking. “It’s not the answer really. It’s great fun and I enjoy having a drink, but I won’t allow myself to drink all day. It doesn’t make you feel better about yourself.” Having spent sizeable chunks of his 20-year career sardined in submarines with other

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How do we know which lockdown measures should be lifted first?

Today, the cabinet has to decide where to go next with the lockdown – although the decision will not be announced until Sunday. Boris Johnson has talked of a ‘menu of options’ for relaxing some of the measures, but we have been warned not to expect too much. The government has also distanced itself from speculation that rules on outdoor exercise will be loosened, as well as garden centres and a few other businesses allowed to reopen. How does anyone know which lockdown measures have been effective and which haven’t? A team of epidemiologists led by Paul Hunter have attempted to do that, and their pre-published paper may well feed

Susan Hill Susan Hill

In the Covid era, age isn’t just a number

When I told my seven-year-old granddaughter, over Zoom, how much I missed being with her, I added: ‘Maybe it won’t be much longer before I can see you.’ But she said that it would be some time, as ‘the government are going to stop old people seeing anyone because of the virus’. Asked what was meant by ‘old people’, she said: ‘I think anybody more than 54.’ Clearly some misunderstanding. At nearly 25 years beyond 54, I am correctly classed as old; some days I feel it, most days I don’t, but I am well, have most of my marbles and am working hard. Age is just a number. Except

The Spectator

Track and trace should not be our only exit strategy

The concept of the state tracking our every movement is anathema to this magazine and, we assume, to its liberal former editor now resident in Downing Street. Nevertheless, such is the impasse over coronavirus that it is right the government should attempt to exit lockdown via the application of a voluntary ‘track and trace’ on mobile phones, trials of which began on the Isle of Wight this week. Track and trace appears to have worked for Asia so, given what’s at stake, it’s reasonable to try it here. South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam — the countries which employed tracking and tracing from an early date — appear to have dealt with

Melissa Kite

My toilet ultimatum to the builder boyfriend

The rain showers had a strange and wondrous effect. All the cyclists, joggers and dog walkers that were coming from miles away to take their essential exercise in the countryside magically disappeared. No one we didn’t recognise took any essential exercise in the downpours, but then resumed it when the weather changed. I find this odd because the explanation of the day-trippers for putting their bikes and their backpacks and their hiking equipment and their picnic baskets into the backs of their cars had been that they really, really needed to do that — come hell, high water or Covid. The locked-down inhabitants of towns and cities needed to pedal

Toby Young Toby Young

Professor Lockdown’s spell has been broken

I originally had Neil Ferguson down as a kind of Henry Kissinger figure. The professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London seemed to have bewitched successive prime ministers, blinding them with his brilliance. Whenever a health emergency broke out, whether it was mad cow disease or avian flu, there he was, PowerPoint in hand, telling the leaders of the country what to do. And they invariably fell into line. In 2001, after the outbreak of foot and mouth, his team at Imperial advised Tony Blair’s government to adopt a strategy of pre-emptive culling, leading to the slaughter of more than six million animals. Gordon Brown consulted him about swine

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: What do I say to the neighbour who comments on my daily exercise?

Q To your correspondent with a guest whose table manners offend (2 May), you suggest screening him off with a well-positioned vase of flowers. Mary, this may work for lockdown but whether or not his peers say that ‘table manners aren’t a thing anymore’, they certainly are still a thing among the sort of people who might give him a job. Someone needs to upset him, in the short term, for his own good in the long. I write as a parent whose daughter’s likeable but slobbish-at-the-table boyfriend will re-enter our orbit when this blessed holiday comes to an end. — Name and address withheld A. The clue is to

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Hope in a takeaway bag: Mackerel Sky reviewed

You don’t dine in the age of pandemic: you scuttle about in the wreckage. If you can afford food, and you aren’t afraid of your neighbours, who don’t understand the government strategy and believe that if they stay indoors for eight years they will survive, and so should you, you can eat out; or rather you can collect takeaway in the comforting dusk. It is not because I want the food. My husband, with whom I re-enact Sunset Boulevard in lockdown, each taking it in turns to be crazy Norma or Max the butler, is a superb cook. It is that I want local restaurants to survive. It is my

Matt Ridley

We know everything – and nothing – about Covid

We know everything about Sars-CoV-2 and nothing about it. We can read every one of the (on average) 29,903 letters in its genome and know exactly how its 15 genes are transcribed into instructions to make which proteins. But we cannot figure out how it is spreading in enough detail to tell which parts of the lockdown of society are necessary and which are futile. Several months into the crisis we are still groping through a fog of ignorance and making mistakes. There is no such thing as ‘the science’. This is not surprising or shameful; ignorance is the natural state of things. Every new disease is different and its

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The importance of the Natural Health Service

Most people consider going for a walk or a run as a sort of optional leisure activity, something you get round to once you’ve been to the shops. But when the government announced its coronavirus restrictions, there it was in its own category of ‘essential activities’: daily exercise. Yes, there have been rows about whether sunbathing or sitting on a bench to eat a snack are acceptable, but by and large the message has been clear: we need to get outside to stay well. But it’s not just exercise that’s essential to our lives, it’s nature too. We have become used to thinking of nature as something we need to

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Lockdown used to be the norm for new mothers

I laughed when my Spanish midwife mentioned in passing that in Latin American countries they have a custom for new mothers known as la cuarentena — the quarantine. This was back in late February, a few weeks before my daughter Lily was born. I remember thinking it seemed not only ludicrous but archaic for a woman to spend a 40-day period stuck at home after giving birth. Modern mothers got on with life. I planned to do just that. I had invested in all the necessary equipment. The car seat was installed. I had bought the state-of-the-art breast pump which connects to my phone. My husband and I had chosen

Elisa Segrave

Lockdown can be overwhelming for those with autism

National Autism Month in April coincided with our strictest phase of lockdown. My son, 36, who has Asperger’s, has consequently been unable to stick to all his routines — one being the Sunday car boot sale on Brighton Racecourse — and I was worried about how he’d cope. He suggested we watch classic EastEnders together from our separate homes and text each other about the personalities and plot. It worked. The episodes from the early 1990s are fast-moving and the characters very real. One scriptwriter then, Susan Boyd, born in Glasgow, hung out with the Jamaican community in Ladbroke Grove in the 1970s. She died at only 55. I looked

Aidan Hartley

Why we’ll all be fleeing to Nigeria

I keep thinking what I’ll do when we regain our liberty — and I picture that beer at the end of Ice Cold in Alex, when after surviving his trek through the Sahara, a sweaty John Mills traces his finger up the frosted schooner, drinks the golden liquid down in one and says: ‘Worth waiting for.’ A month ago I had big ambitions for the future at home on the farm in Kenya. We were planting thousands of avocado trees, we were about to start rearing organic broiler chickens, there was a tilapia farm to expand, a new dairy project, and preparations for the Nairobi livestock breeders’ show later this

Wednesday

Johan Giesecke

Does lockdown really decrease Covid deaths?

It has become clear that a hard lockdown does not protect old and frail people living in care homes – a population the lockdown was designed to protect. Neither does it decrease mortality from Covid-19, which is evident when comparing the UK’s experience with that of other European countries. PCR testing and some straightforward assumptions indicate that, as of April 29, 2020, more than half a million people in Stockholm county, Sweden (which is about 20–25 per cent of the region’s population) have been infected. 98 to 99 per cent of these people are probably unaware or uncertain of having had the infection; they either had symptoms that were severe,

Tuesday

Steerpike

Neil Ferguson steps back from Sage after breaking lockdown rules

One of the government’s leading scientific advisers, professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, has stepped down from his government position after breaking lockdown rules. According to the Telegraph, the academic was visited on at least two occasions by a married woman, who lives in a separate household. Ferguson told the Telegraph that: I accept I made an error of judgment and took the wrong course of action. I have therefore stepped back from my involvement in Sage… I acted in the belief that I was immune, having tested positive for coronavirus, and completely isolated myself for almost two weeks after developing symptoms.I deeply regret any undermining of the clear