Portrait of the week: Vaccine hopes up, Zoom shares down and Biden calls Boris

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Pfizer and BioNTech announced a vaccine against Covid-19 of 90 per cent efficacy from two injections three weeks apart. It was not known if it prevented transmission of the virus. The vaccine has to be stored at an ultra-low temperature of minus 80˚C. In July, the British government had bought 40 million doses, enough for a third of the population, with ten million available by the end of the year (along with access to five other vaccine candidates, totalling 340 million doses in all). The army and police planned vaccination centres. Shares in air transport went up; shares in Zoom went down. Asked whether we could say with confidence that life should be returning to normal by spring, Sir John Bell, the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, said: ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

At the beginning of the week, Sunday 8 November, total deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for the coronavirus) had stood at 48,888, including 2,333 in the past week, compared with 1,810 the week before. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, foresaw England returning, on 2 December after its four-week lockdown, to restrictions according to tiers. An investigation, nicknamed Operation Chatty Rat, into who leaked plans for the second lockdown (thus precipitating it), examined the mobile phone data of Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, and Michael Gove, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. After a 17-day ‘firebreak’ lockdown, Wales allowed churches to reopen and people in groups of four to meet in pubs as long as they did not go into England. Wales cancelled GCSEs and A-levels for 2021. In England plans were hatched for mass testing in 67 locations and of university students before they are allowed back home. Greg Clarke resigned as chairman of the Football Association after referring to ‘coloured footballers’.

Unemployment rose to 4.8