Ross Clark

How worried should we be about the news that P1, one of the two Brazilian variants of Sars-CoV-2, has been found in six people who travelled from Brazil to Britain before the hotel quarantine rules came into force, and that one of these people has yet to be traced? Variant P1 is of concern not just because laboratory study has revealed changes to the spike protein, which might make it theoretically more transmissible, but because of real-world data from Manaus, the Amazonian city to which its origins have been traced. It was first detected in Japan on 6 January among a family which had travelled from the city.

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. Hospitalisations are declining at a rate that falls between the two — down 20 per cent over the past week.

The UK policy of delaying second doses of the Pfizer vaccine has been criticised by some as risky, with Pfizer warning that there is no data on the effectiveness of its vaccine other than for the dosing regime used in phase 3 trials: two doses, 21 days apart. But evidence is steadily trickling through. Earlier in the week I wrote here about the Scottish population-wide study which found that a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine reduced hospital admissions by 85 per cent between 28 and 34 days after the jab. This morning comes Imperial College’s React-2 study, which paints a picture that is, on the face of it, rather less flattering. It tested 154,000 people for the presence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19.

The two vaccines approved and in use in Britain showed high efficacy rates in trials, but it takes time for data to creep through on efficacy in the real-world. We are, however, getting the first figures trickling through. This morning comes a paper evaluating the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccines in preventing hospitalisation rates in the Scottish population, using a dataset that covers 5.4 million people, 99 per cent of the population. The Eave II study, led by the University of Edinburgh, followed the 650,000 people who received the Pfizer vaccine between 8 December and 15 February and the 490,000 people who received the AstraZeneca vaccine between 4 January and 15 February.

Is the British approach of prioritising first doses of Covid vaccines and not promising a second dose until 12 weeks later compromising our ability to fight the disease? It is not a moot point, with several EU figures asserting that it is a risky route to take. As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, as far as the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine is concerned, what evidence we have supports the practice of delaying a second dose until 12 weeks after the first one; the vaccine is more effective that way. However, a question mark has continued to hang over the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. There is limited data on the most effective dosing regime in this case because the phase 3 trials did not experiment with delayed doses – everyone involved was given a second dose 21 days after the first.

Last month, Imperial College’s React study claimed that new cases of Covid were static or even rising slightly. This contradicted the figures for confirmed new cases, obtained through the Test and Trace system, which had shown a sharp fall in new cases from the second week of January onwards. Given that React tests a randomised sample of the population to arrive at an estimate for prevalence of the disease — and is therefore not capable of being skewed by the number of tests being performed — some were more inclined to believe that this, and not the number of confirmed cases, showed the genuine picture. However, February’s React study, published this morning, shows a very different picture.

Before we had vaccines, NHS Test and Trace was supposed to be the breakthrough that would return us to a normal life. After all, testing, tracing and isolating contacts of infected people was credited with keeping Covid infections down in South Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere, so why wouldn’t it work here?  Instead, we had a second wave and the return to normality was reversed. In September, Sage, the government’s scientific advisory committee on emergencies, was dismissive, saying Test and Trace was having only a 'marginal effect’. A report by the National Audit Office in December, by which point the system had already cost taxpayers £22 billion, was equally scathing.

Will schools in England reopen on 8 March, and if so will it be partially or fully? It is likely to be the first firm measure to be announced when the Prime Minister presents his roadmap back to freedom next Monday. He has, after all, promised to give schools two weeks’ notice of when they will be expected to reopen, so he will be forced into a decision on 22 February. It was only six weeks ago that Boris Johnson was resisting calls to close schools and was reportedly the last cabinet minister left arguing that they should remain open. The rationale of those arguing for closure was that they had not been closed during the November lockdown, and that that lockdown had not been sufficient to bring cases of new infections under control.

On Saturday the government hit its target of administering a first vaccine dose to 15 million of the highest-risk groups for Covid 19. By now, everyone over the age of 70, all healthcare workers and vulnerable groups should have been offered a vaccine. It is an impressive achievement which stands in contrast to many of the other things that have gone wrong over the past year. But there is a rather large fly sitting in the ointment. While 90 per cent of eligible members of the general public have turned up for their appointments (97 per cent in the over-80s), the same is true of only 80 per cent of healthcare workers. In some places, the take-up among healthcare workers is even lower.

Well, that’s alright, then — we’re not going to have another recession. True, the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee expects the economy to shrink by 4 per cent in the first quarter of this year — following a fall of 9.9 per cent fall last year, itself the deepest plunge in economic growth in modern times. By the spring, we may have several million unemployed as the furlough scheme comes to an end. Many thousands of businesses could go bust as they run out of money and government help is withdrawn. But at least we won’t be in recession: because that ended last June and now we’re back in an era of economic growth. No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, either.

Not for the first time, metropolitan-based commentators and MPs have proved themselves to be out of kilter with the wider population. But there is an especially interesting disparity over the government’s proposals for ten-year jail sentences for travellers who try to conceal they have travelled from one of 33 ‘red list’ countries in order to avoid hotel quarantine. The proposal caused outrage among Conservative MPs as well as legal commentators such as Jonathan Sumption. Sir Charles Walker, vice-chairman of the 1922 Committee, accused the government of going ‘full North Korea’.