Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. He writes on Substack, at Ross on Why?
From our UK edition
What percentage of people who are infected with Covid-19 will go on to die of the disease? The dramatic response to the pandemic on the part of almost all governments around the world has been based on the idea that Covid-19 is a far more lethal disease than seasonal flu, which is often quoted as
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Test and trace, according to the leaked minutes of Sage’s meeting on 21 September, has had a ‘marginal’ impact on the infection rate of Covid-19. But let no one say it has not achieved anything. It has succeeded in the virtually impossible: making HS2 look relatively good value for money. Documents revealed to Sky News
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Could a two-week ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown really ‘save’ nearly 8,000 lives, as is being widely reported this morning? Not according to one of the authors of the paper on which the claim is based. Matt Keeling, a mathematician at the University of Warwick, was questioned on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning about the paper —
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Does catching the SARS-CoV-2 virus give us immunity from further infection by the virus or can we catch it a second time? The question has been given extra poignancy this week following Donald Trump’s tweet on Sunday, quickly censured by Twitter, claiming that he was immune. Before that row has had a chance to die
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It says much about the covid ‘traffic light’ system to be announced by the Prime Minister later that the three alert levels are expected to be labelled ‘medium’, ‘high’ and ‘very high’. It is a bit like condom sizes which start at ‘large’, move onto ‘extra large’ and ‘extra, extra large’. It is all very
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It is little surprise to see the International Air Transport Association (IATA) claiming that the risk of catching Covid-19 on a plane is incredibly low. No industry has been as devastated by the pandemic as the airline industry and there is desperation to get planes flying again. But is IATA’s claim that just 44 out of
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Two days ago, the Prime Minister told us we are at a critical point in the Covid-19 crisis as a second wave threatened to engulf us. He warned of a second national lockdown. Yesterday, in spite of evidence from Imperial College of a declining R number, Matt Hancock introduced new restrictions in Liverpool and Teeside.
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This morning’s so-called ‘React study’ — an attempt by Imperial College to estimate the prevalence of current Covid-19 infection in Britain — has aroused much interest thanks to its suggestion of a sharp fall in the R number. Its central estimate for R is 1.06, but it applies a range of between 0.74 to 1.46,
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So, the numbers of new Covid infections in the UK failed to register a fourth consecutive fall and instead rose to a new record of 7,143. This does not mean that the disease is spreading as rapidly as it did in the spring when far fewer tests were being undertaken, but the rise has nevertheless
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New confirmed cases of Covid-19 have been rising now since early July — steadily at first and then sharply since early September. But is there any sign of an increase in deaths? The latest weekly figures from the Office for National Statistics for deaths in England and Wales, released this morning, do record an
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We have had plenty of anecdotes about people failing to be diagnosed with serious diseases during lockdown. This is thanks to either to hospitals cancelling appointments, GP surgeries stopping face-to-face meetings or people picking up the message that they should protect the NHS by trying not to use it. It seems clear that the rush to
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The tighter Covid restrictions introduced this week, along with larger fines for people who gather in groups of more than six or fail to self-isolate, followed a press presentation in which Sir Patrick Vallance and Professor Chris Whitty produced a graph showing new infections doubling every seven days until mid-October, when there would be 50,000
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If there is one country which has influenced the government’s toughening of Covid restrictions over the past fortnight it is Belgium. It was Sophie Wilmes’ government which, faced with a resurgence of Covid cases in late July, came up with the idea of placing a limit on the size of social gatherings – five rather
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In a strategy that now appears to be one of outright suppression, the government has put huge stock in the approval of a vaccine before too long. But could the answer turn out to be not a vaccine but an anti-viral drug? Research by a team from Bristol University and published in the journal Science
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Today, 32 scientists, economists and other academics have written to the Prime Minister demanding a change in policy on Covid-19, saying that attempting to suppress the virus is ‘increasingly infeasible’. They have instead demanded that vulnerable groups should be protected from the disease while younger people should be allowed to get on with their lives. Many
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The chief medical officer, professor Chris Whitty, and chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, made a statement this morning on the latest data surrounding Covid-19, laying the groundwork for new restrictions that the government is expected to announce tomorrow. It wasn’t a press conference with questions, so they could not be challenged on what they
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Back in May I wrote about a study by La Jolla Institute for Immunology, which raised the possibility that exposure to coronaviruses which cause the common cold could offer some degree of immunity to Covid-19. Scientists involved in the research had discovered a reaction to Sars-CoV-2 – the virus which causes Covid-19 – in the
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Perhaps the most reliable test of Covid-19 levels is carried out by the Office for National Statistics, which every week releases the results of random samples. The results, just published, show a striking divergence in age. Another significant rise amongst the young but, importantly, almost no rise amongst the over-70s who are those who made
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It was easy to criticise Westminster for caving into Extinction Rebellion’s demands for a ‘citizen’s assembly’ on climate change when it agreed to convene just such a body at the end of last year. By appeasing the group’s law-breaking, so the argument went, parliament was emboldening XR and other direct action groups to block streets, spraypaint buildings,
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Should we be looking at confirmed cases of Covid-19 to give us a guide as to how the epidemic is progressing – or at the number of people reporting symptoms? Over the past few months attempts to track the virus have been hampered by a very inconvenient fact: the number of tests being performed has
