Society

Two weeks ago, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and Imperial College both published modelling showing frightening scenarios if the government did not react to the Omicron variant by imposing immediate restrictions on our day to day lives. The former suggested that hospitalisations could peak at 7,190 a day in January in its most pessimistic scenario; the latter was reported as suggesting that deaths might peak at 5,000 a day in January. Both figures, however, were made on the assumption that Omicron was every bit as virulent as the Delta variant. Since then, several UK studies have suggested that this is not the case, with data showing

Recent Sage reports have stressed that we’re still waiting on a major piece of information: the average stay in hospital for Omicron patients. It could be a game-changer. If the stay halves, the Covid-handling capacity of the NHS doubles and the risk of hospitals being overwhelmed falls quite a lot. As SPI-M says in a note published on 23 Dec: ‘A reduced length of stay would allow more capacity within hospitals to manage this, and, to a first approximation, this would scale linearly with the change, i.e. halving the length of stay would permit double the admissions.’ Might this all-important figure already be available? A Sage paper dated 22 December

Two stories, side-by-side in the Sunday paper I was looking at online. The first — ‘Strip Dame Dopesick of her title’ — was a report that the families of victims of opioid addiction were campaigning for Dame Theresa Sackler, whose family profited unimaginably from marketing addictive legal painkillers, to be stripped of her title. The second was the story of how the writer and TV presenter Richard Osman had spoken on BBC Radio Four of struggling with an addiction to crisps, chocolate and biscuits for four decades. He compared his relationship with food to an alcoholic’s with booze: ‘The addiction is identical.’ There’s a school of thought that will see

We’re ending the year by republishing our most popular articles from 2021. Number six is from Jeremy Clarke’s Low Life column in January. He writes about the joy of receiving his new black British passport. ‘Anything you want?’ says Catriona on her way out of the house to go to the shop. I’m standing at the hob stirring a first batch of Low Life’s 2021 Pandemic Second Wave green tomato chutney. (My outdoor homegrown tomatoes stopped turning red just before Christmas.) The wooden spoon stops revolving while I google my brain for things I want. No results. Materially, I have everything I need. Too much of everything. What I once looked on

We’re ending the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2021. Here’s number seven: Freddy Gray writing in March about Harry and Meghan’s revenge against the Firm.  Remember the Heads Together campaign? It was back in 2017. Prince William, his wife Kate and his brother Prince Harry, who’d recently begun dating a conspicuously woke actress called Meghan Markle, launched a charitable endeavour to raise awareness about mental health. The princes gave interviews in which they ‘opened up’ about their struggles. Such public emoting made fuddy-duddy monarchists nervous, yet a new generation of royal PR operatives and suck-ups saw the future. The royals were appealing to a younger audience, cleverly rebranding

We’re ending the year by republishing our ten most popular pieces from 2021. Here’s number eight: a Spectator editorial written in September about the need for GPs to resume face-to-face appointments. Nye Bevan famously said that he was only able to persuade family doctors to support the creation of the NHS because he ‘stuffed their mouths with gold’. But at least he obtained good service from them — including home visits. Until Tony Blair awarded GPs hefty pay rises while allowing them simultaneously to opt out of night-time and weekend work, they were responsible for their patients’ care 24 hours a day, seven days a week — with practices often pooling

It’s not quite ‘the night before Christmas’ but it’s close. The timing could hardly be worse for Justin Welby to clumsily wade into the argument over Covid vaccination. In an interview with Julie Etchingham on ITV, the Archbishop of Canterbury asserted that vaccination is a ‘moral issue’. Getting the Covid jab, he said, is ‘not about me and my rights to choose’. It is instead a fulfilment of the commandment to love our neighbour. ‘To love one another, as Jesus said, get vaccinated, get boosted,’ he continued. ‘It’s Christmas: do what he said’. What a grim and joyless corruption of the beautiful and familiar Christmas Gospel. And what wasted opportunity