Ross Clark

With Covid-19 cases still rising a week into the third lockdown (and after several weeks of Tier 3 restrictions in London and the South East) the questions are inevitably being asked: why isn’t lockdown reducing transmission of the virus and do we need even more stringent rules, whatever they might be? While some studies claim to have quantified a beneficial effect from lockdown measures during the first wave of Covid-19, a study at Stanford University questions this.

As with any crisis, Covid-19 has created great opportunities for some – and not just private companies selling PPE to the government at vastly-inflated prices. For some of the left, it has presented a chance to push for policies involving a much greater role for the state. With the government paying the wages of millions of furloughed workers and propping up private businesses forced to close under lockdown rules, what better time than to push for much greater state involvement in all areas of our lives? Typifying this opportunism is an article by Bill Ribeiro-Addy, Labour MP for Streatham, arguing that the crisis in home-schooling shows why Jeremy Corbyn was right all along about free broadband.

Was the latest release from the Office of National Statistics the shocking piece of evidence that led the Prime Minister to change his mind on children going back to school, and to introduce a full lockdown in England?  The ONS does not usually publish its infection survey on Tuesdays – it usually comes out on Fridays – yet today we seem to have a special release. It shows that the sharply rising numbers of new infections as picked up through the NHS Test and Trace system, and which have shown 60,000 new infections today, are not the result of distortions caused by Christmas. The ONS survey is based on testing a random sample of the population for prevalence of the disease and from that estimating a nationwide figure.

How likely are you to be reinfected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus for a second time? It is a pertinent question because, at present, all government policy is predicated on the assumption that developing Covid-19 cannot be relied upon to offer you any immunity from reinfection whatsoever. Remember the Prime Minister telling us from his Number 10 flat, where he was incarcerated for 10 days after being ‘pinged’ by NHS Test and Trace, that it didn’t matter that he had already had the disease and must be ‘bursting with antibodies’ – he had to do his duty and self-isolate nonetheless?

What a joy it would be still to be in the EU. We could, for example, be part of the bloc’s Covid vaccine-buying programme. Or maybe not, to judge by the German experience. There has been a lot of comment in Britain regarding the relative slowness of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in approving the Pfizer vaccine – which led to the EU’s vaccine programme beginning two weeks after Britain’s. But that is a fairly minor issue. Far more concerning is the failure of the EU to buy enough vaccines to ensure that an effective inoculation programme can be completed before next winter. The reasons behind this failure are an object lesson in how the EU operates, and why we should be pleased to be organising our own vaccination strategy.

The Port of Dover has been closed, with freight as well as passengers unable to cross the Channel, due to the new strain of Covid concentrated in London and the South East. So how long before supermarket shelves are empty? A lot depends on the behaviour of British consumers.  As has been proved on a number of occasions, such as with lavatory paper at the beginning of the spring lockdown and with petrol during the fuel protests in 2000, you don’t need an actual shortage of goods to result in apparent shortages – panic-buying can lead to empty shelves within hours, if people are minded to stock up their freezers and larders to a level they would not normally do.  Yet Britain really is painfully dependent on imports of many kinds of food.

How certain should we be of the government’s claim that the new variant of SARS-CoV-2 is 70 per cent more transmissible than the previous common strain falls apart? I ask not because I have any information that would contradict the Prime Minister, but because it has become a repetitive feature of this crisis: that the piece of science which leads the government into a sudden change in policy ends up looking a little flaky. It happened with Professor Ferguson’s famous prediction of 240,000 deaths unless the government introduced the first lockdown – Imperial published similar figures for Sweden which were later shown to vastly overstate deaths, throwing serious doubt upon its model.

So, Christmas, it seems, will not be cancelled after all. The government has decided instead to tackle fears of a January spike in cases with tougher messaging, telling people that just because they will have the legal right to mix for five days next week doesn’t necessarily mean they ought to avail themselves of that freedom. In other words, we’re not changing the rules, but we’d really rather you didn’t take advantage of them. But could the vaccinations which have already been performed save us from a post-Christmas spike? The Pfizer vaccine – the only one being given to the general public so far – is designed to be given in two doses, 21 days apart. The first people to be given the vaccine had their first jab last Tuesday, 8 December.

Just how widely is the economic pain from Covid-19 being felt? Still surprisingly little, according to the latest employment figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). The absence of an explosion in unemployment goes some way to explaining why the lockdowns and restrictions have been accepted so meekly by the population at large. That said, unemployment is beginning to rise significantly now. There are now 819,000 fewer payroll employees compared with the start of the crisis in February. The employment rate stands at 75.2 per cent, 0.9 per cent down on a year ago, and the unemployment rate is 4.9 per cent, up 1.2 per cent.

Should we worry about the emergence of a new variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19? News of the new variant – which, it seems, might transmit more easily than previous versions – was the big surprise of Matt Hancock’s statement to the Commons this afternoon. The other big announcement – that London and parts of Essex and Hertfordshire will be going into Tier 3 – was a foregone conclusion. As I wrote here in May, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has already mutated once into a form that might be more transmissible. This could possibly explain why Europe and North America have found it harder to contain the virus than have Asian countries. Were we fighting a slightly different disease to the one which emerged in Wuhan in January?