Ross Clark

Antibody tests on random samples of the population have so far shown much lower levels of general infection than the government’s scientific advisers claimed would be necessary to attain ‘herd immunity’. In London, for example, tests have shown that 17 per cent of the population have antibodies to Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. In New York, the figure is 21 per cent. At the beginning of this crisis, on the other hand, Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, suggested that at least 60 per cent of the population would have to be infected in order to achieve herd immunity. It provides a possible explanation for why the Covid-19 epidemic seems to have died away in many places But are antibodies the whole story?

The Covidiots are at it again – crowding onto beaches in flagrant breach of lockdown rules, treating the pandemic as if it were an extended bank holiday. Pictures of crowded beaches on Thursday inspired Chris Whitty to tweet that Covid-19 is ‘still in general circulation’, and worked Matt Hancock into such a froth that he threatened to close the beaches. But are we really suffering a mass outbreak of irresponsibility or just the tyranny of the telephoto lens? Take a quick look at these two photos – and then take a more careful look.

As is often said, choose your statistics carefully and you can use them make just about any point you want to. But rarely does the Office for National Statistics put out two releases on the same day whose statistics point in totally opposite directions. If you listened to the BBC midday news, you may have heard that overall deaths in England and Wales, while they have fallen, are still running at 5.9 per cent above the average for the time of year. This was based on an ONS release entitled Deaths Registered Weekly in England and Wales. However, poke your nose in another release put out an hour or so earlier, entitled Deaths Involving Covid-19, and you would have come to exactly the opposite conclusion: that overall deaths in England and Wales are running at 5.

Police were no match for the Black Lives Matter mob that pulled down a statue of Edward Colston last week and threw it in Bristol harbour. But the Scouts are evidently a force to be reckoned with. No sooner had Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council announced that it was planning to take down a statue of Lord Robert Baden-Powell on the harbour front at Poole than the Scouts had mobilised themselves to defend it, setting up camp at its base. The council decided to board it up instead, to protect it from protestors. The ‘Topple the racists’ website had identified Baden-Powell among its targets, claiming that the creator of the Scout movement had ‘committed atrocities against the Zulus in his military career and was a Nazi sympathiser’.

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.