Ross Clark

To the question why has Germany had so many fewer deaths from Covid-19 compared with Britain, the Observer usually has only one answer. As the title to an investigation in today’s paper puts it: 'How a decade of privatisation and cuts exposed England to coronavirus'. Yet buried deep down in an interview in the very same paper, comes an alternative insight, and one which, remarkably, does not involve the Tories in any way. The paper carries an interview with Karl Friston, a neuroscientist at UCL who has been advising SAGE, the government’s scientific committee. In it, he explains how he has been using dynamic casual modelling – a mathematical technique developed to predict activity in the brain – to analyse the Covid-19 epidemic.

Two weeks ago I wrote here about a study by the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, which found that between 40 and 60 per cent of people who had never been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 – the virus which causes Covid 19 – nevertheless seemed to develop an immune response to the disease in their T Cells. They appeared to have a cross-reactive immunity which had been gained through exposure to other coronaviruses – those which cause the common cold. Now comes another study providing more evidence of the same phenomenon from a team at the Emerging Infectious Diseases Program from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore.

Finally we are getting a clue to the most vital statistic of the Covid-19 epidemic: how many people in Britain have had to disease – and who therefore might be expected to have some kind of immunity to it? Today, the ONS published the results of antibody tests on a randomised sample of nearly 19,000 people. On those, 885 – 6.78 per cent – were found to have antibodies to Covid-19, suggesting that they have had the disease. That so many people infected with SARS-CoV-2 have no symptoms explains why the disease has proved so difficult to control That is a little higher than the five per cent reported in Spain, but a lot lower than the 21 per cent reported for New York City.

The route out of lockdown has become a groundhog day in which the same ideas keep on coming round again, with unnerving regularity: test, track and trace, vaccine, semi-permanent social distancing and so on. Today it is the turn of another hoary old chestnut: immunity passports. Announcing that 5 per cent of the country, and 17 per cent of Londoners, have already been infected with the virus, Matt Hancock suggested that following the distribution of the millions of antibody tests that have been ordered from Swiss pharma giant Roche, it will be possible to consider ‘systems of certification’ which allow some of the people who have already recovered from Covid-19 to resume more normal lives. He did not give further details.

The daily death toll has been a constant backdrop to the Covid-19 crisis. Would we ever have entered lockdown, would so many people have been driven to panic, were it not for the publication, every afternoon, of the number of deaths in the past 24 hours? It has helped set in the minds of the public the idea that this is a lethal disease, on a scale completely removed from other common diseases. How much differently would we see Covid-19, though, if we were also fed with a slightly different statistic: the number of indirect deaths, caused not by the disease itself but by other factors associated with lockdowns: closure of medical facilities, fear of going to a hospital and so on.

Some countries are refusing to open their schools for fear of a prompting a second wave of coronavirus infections. But their policies would appear to be flatly contradicted by evidence from Iceland. There, a company called deCODE Genetics, in association with the country’s directorate of health and the national university hospital, has analysed the results of coronavirus tests on 36,500 people. The tests identified 1801 cases of people suffering from the disease – and ten deaths. Each case was carefully tracked. In not a single case could the researchers find evidence of a child passing on the disease to their parents. The company’s CEO, Kari Stefansson, revealed the findings in an interview carried on the Science Museum website.

Cambridge professor of the public understanding of risk David Spiegelhalter recently made the point that, given the uncertainties over exactly what constitutes a death from coronavirus, the number we should we watching is the ONS’s figure for deaths from all causes. That, he argued, will give us the surest indication as to the progress of the epidemic. For anyone minded to take his advice, the ONS’s figure for deaths from all causes fell again in the week ending 1 May for the second week running. In England and Wales, 17,953 deaths were registered, down from 21,997 in the week ending 24 April and 22,351 in the week ending 17 April.

Today, the cabinet has to decide where to go next with the lockdown – although the decision will not be announced until Sunday. Boris Johnson has talked of a ‘menu of options’ for relaxing some of the measures, but we have been warned not to expect too much. The government has also distanced itself from speculation that rules on outdoor exercise will be loosened, as well as garden centres and a few other businesses allowed to reopen. How does anyone know which lockdown measures have been effective and which haven’t? A team of epidemiologists led by Paul Hunter have attempted to do that, and their pre-published paper may well feed into the government’s decision-making today.