Ross Clark

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.

Test, track and trace is an integral – and very expensive – part of the government’s plans for lifting lockdown and getting the country back to normal. The government is trying to hire 25,000 contract-tracers to augment an app-based system which seems mysteriously to have all-but vanished from its plans. But could there be a cheaper way of gaining advanced warning of infection in an area, allowing localised lockdowns to be imposed? Whatever happened to RNA levels in sewage was followed very closely three days later in hospital admissions A study led by Jordan Peccia at Yale University raises the possibility of an intriguing early warning system for Covid outbreaks.

It has been clear from the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic that there is a very steep age profile to its victims: with few children and teenagers experiencing serious symptoms while their grandparents suffer a high death toll. But what about the numbers of people infected? Two studies, in Britain and Sweden, appear to show that when it comes to infections, as opposed to deaths and hospitalisations, there is an inverse profile, with young people are contracting Covid-19 at a higher rate than the elderly. This week, Public Health England (PHE) announced initial results of the antibody tests which should help us solve the great unknown: just how many of us have had Covid-19, whether we experienced symptoms or not?

Could the Government be about to relax the two-metre rule for social distancing? On Wednesday morning, professor Robert Dingwall, a sociologist who sits on the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, questioned the rule, saying he had tried to trace the scientific justification for it but couldn’t. The evidence, he said, was ‘fragile’. Some countries, such as the US and Spain, have also set a distance of two metres but others, such as Australia, Germany and the Netherlands are content with 1.5 metres and others, such as Norway and Finland are happy with a single metre. The two-metre rule is going to be a huge impediment to relaxing lockdown. As an example, a standard train carriage in Britain is 2.8 metres wide.

Aside from a handful of anti-vaxxers, virtually everyone would leap at the prospect of a vaccine earning us an early exit from the Covid-19 crisis. The only snag is that we do not have a vaccine that is proven to work, let alone safe to use, and that it is improbable that we will have one for some time. On 22 April, the Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty said the chances of a vaccine being ready within the next year are ‘incredibly small’. And he seems to be on the optimistic side. In the US, Anthony Fauci has suggested 12 to 18 months at the minimum and former federal vaccine scientist Rick Bright told the Senate last week that even 18 months is an ‘aggressive timetable’.

Could having a common cold protect you against Covid-19? The intriguing prospect has been raised by a team from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California. They were researching the response of human T cells – which play a vital role in the immune system – in patients who have recovered from Covid-19. The response they detected, however, also showed up in 40 to 60 per cent of a control group that had not been exposed to Covid-19. In a paper published in the journal Cell they write: 'This may be reflective of some degree of crossreactive, pre-existing immunity to Sars-CoV-2 in some, but not all, individuals'. Sars-CoV-2 is the virus which causes Covid-19.