Ross Clark

Just how a big a deal is today’s announcement that the steroid anti-inflammatory drug Dexamethasone has been shown to be effective at lowering the death toll of Covid-19 patients? At first sight, this is a modest breakthrough. The drug was shown to reduce the death rate among patients on ventilators by a third and among those on oxygen by a fifth. Overall, it reduces 28-day mortality from the disease (the study doesn’t look at patients who may have died after that period) by 17 per cent. Notionally, had the effect of the drug been known at the beginning of the outbreak, it would have meant that we could have reduced the Covid-19 death toll from 42,000 to 35,000.

The suspension of schooling has already led to fears of a lasting impact on children’s education, especially among poorer children. As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, the Education Endowment Foundation has estimated that a six-month closure of schools could lead to an attainment gap of 36 per cent between children from the best-off and worst-off households.But what about the effect of school closures on children’s emotional development? A team from Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing in the Lancet Child and Adolescent Health, warns that deprivation of peer contact among adolescents could have a serious impact on brain development, leading to anxiety, depression and aggression.

Is anyone really surprised that GDP fell by 20.4 percent in April? Perhaps we should be. It doesn’t sound high enough to me. We have just been through a great economic experiment in which most shops have been forced to close, all pubs and restaurants been forced to shut their doors and the public ordered to remain indoors except for essential visits. Road traffic at one point was back to 1950s levels. And yet the economy officially shrank only by a fifth – taking it back roughly to the size it was in 2003. I am not sure that these statistics quite pass the smell test. According to the breakdown provided by the ONS, accommodation and catering fell by 88.1 per cent. It makes you wonder how that 11.

What would happen if the government suddenly announced that from next week it was ending all lockdown measures and that life could go back to normal? Would we end up with the dreaded second spike as people were suddenly released to go and celebrate in pubs and clubs, jamming public spaces, spreading the virus as they travelled about the country? We have a possible answer to this question because this same experiment was carried out in Wisconsin on 15 May when the US state’s supreme court overthrew the governor’s ‘stay at home’ order. Governor Tony Evers was disgusted by the move, precipitated by the state legislature and won on a technicality. He declared his state to be the ‘Wild West’ and predicted a surge of deaths.

Resigning in disgrace has come to take on a very different meaning than it did in the days when John Profumo withdrew from public life and dedicated himself to Toynbee Hall, a charitable institution in east London. Now, it seems to mean a few weeks in the sinbin before you are allowed to creep back to doing pretty much what you were doing before. It is only five weeks since Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College was forced to resign from the government’s SAGE committee after it was revealed that he had twice broken lockdown by entertaining his married lover at his London home. Yet twice in the past fortnight he has been back to give evidence before Parliamentary committees, last week with the House of Lords and today with the Commons select committee on science.

There seems to be only one certainty with Covid-19: that every day we will be bombarded with fresh evidence and scientific opinion that is contradictory and leaves us a long, long way from understanding this disease. Just when it seemed that antibody tests were indicating infection rates of no more than 10 per cent in the worst-affected countries and no greater than 20 per cent in the worst-affected cities, along comes a study which points to vast numbers of infections. This morning, the public health agency in the Northern Italian city of Bergamo – the epicentre of the Italian outbreak in March – reports that a random sample of 9,965 residents from the worst-affected areas show the presence of antibodies in a remarkable 57 per cent of cases.

Are we going to see a dreaded second spike in coronavirus cases? The question has a new poignancy after a week of mass protests where all pretence at social distancing seems to have gone out of the window. Life is getting back to normal, employment is sharply on the rise again and markets are soaring. Most notably of all, the distressing scenes in New York hospitals have ended as the virus appears in sharp decline there. Nationally, across the US it is possible to detect a downwards trend in the number of new Covid-19 cases and deaths. The epidemic appears to have peaked in early April and tailed off since then – just as it has in Europe. But that isn’t the whole story. Drill down state by state and there is a very mixed picture.

The government has placed a lot of hope in its test and trace system, but even disregarding teething problems with the smartphone app and reports of some of the 25,000 contact tracers being left idle, is it even possible for it to achieve its objective? The problem with Covid-19 all along, and the reason it has managed to evade the efforts of containment which had worked with previous novel viruses such as SARS and avian flu, is the sheer number of people who seem to be infected but who show no symptoms. Some studies have shown that 80 percent of cases might fall into this category. Worse, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that these asymptomatic individuals are capable of passing the infection to others.

All through the Covid-19 pandemic we have been hampered by a lack of data on just how many people have had the disease. Given that several studies have indicated that as many as 80 per cent of people who are infected show no symptoms whatsoever, it is extremely difficult to estimate this crucial figure – which determines the mortality rate of Covid-19 and also how far away we might be from achieving a position of herd immunity. Today, however, comes some very substantial data. The Medical Research Council’s Biostatistics Unit has published estimates of infections derived from serological studies on samples collected from the NHS Blood Transfusion Service.  It estimates that between 4.9 million and 6.

Professor Neil Ferguson has been a little elusive of late – ever since he was forced to resign after he was revealed to have entertained his married lover at his home, thus breaking lockdown rules. But he did emerge from the woodwork this morning to give evidence to the House of Lords select committee on science and technology. In doing so he succeeded in walking into a fresh controversy. One of the first questions he was asked was by Conservative peer Viscount Ridley, who brought up (10:40) the subject of a Swedish study which sought to apply to Sweden Ferguson’s infamous mathematical model which forecast 250,000 deaths in Britain if the government continued with its mitigation strategy.

Sweden has received quite a kicking for its decision to avoid a lockdown: look at its death rate, critics say, which at 435 per million is several times that of neighbouring Denmark (99) and Norway (44). But there is another country that has taken the Swedish route which is rather harder to criticise.  In Japan, restaurants, shops, hair salons have remained open throughout and there have been no restrictions on personal movement. Moreover, in contrast to South Korea and Taiwan, there has been little testing – Japan has performed 2,300 tests per million residents, compared with 920,000 per million in South Korea (Britain, by the way, has performed 63,000 tests per million). Even Sweden, on 24,000 tests per million has outperformed Japan on that front.