World

If coronavirus has taught us anything it’s that if you really want to understand something of a state’s essential character, look at how it battles a pandemic. This crisis has divided humanity up variously, but most markedly along national, if not occasionally stereotypical, lines.  Germany reacted with organisation and efficiency; it has made, on balance, a good fist of it. The UK wavered; it twisted and turned and did stuff on the hoof. Things could be a lot better, but they could also be a lot worse. Some countries have defied expectation. Greece, for example, locked down quickly and comprehensively: it kept mass death at bay. But in a sense,

Sweden has been the world’s Covid-19 outlier, pursuing social distancing but rejecting mandatory lockdown. Schools, bars and restaurants are open – albeit with strong voluntary social distancing compliance and streets that often look almost as empty as Britain’s. Has this been enough? Sweden’s public health agency has now published a study of its R number, a metric which the UK is using to judge the success of the lockdown. The UK objective is to push R below one, by which it means it wants the number of new cases to fall. Last week, the UK’s R number was estimated at 0.8 (± 0.2 points), a figure described as an achievement of

I’ll never forget an unusually frank conversation I once had with a Japanese acquaintance (let’s call him ‘Yoshi’). He was explaining how his marriage had failed, after only a few weeks: ‘I never had time to myself. Whenever I got home, she was always there.’ He stressed the words ‘always’ and ‘there’, drawing them out with a sad, weary, frustration. I remember wondering what exactly he’d been expecting, but it seemed rude to ask. Yoshi’s words came back to me this week when I read that, in an impressively opportunistic move, a firm in Tokyo is capitalising on the Covid-19 lockdown by letting out rooms for people who are finding

A week ago, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a warning which, if it were true, would constitute the most depressing-yet development in the story of Covid-19. It said that there was ‘no evidence’ that people who have already been infected with the disease, and who have developed antibodies as a result, have gained any immunity from further infection. The warning seemed to tally with news from South Korea that 263 people who had already had the disease appeared to have become re-infected. If antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 – the virus which causes Covid-19 – do not prevent you from further infection it would suggest that we could never develop herd