Society

The Israeli government is reporting this morning that the country’s Institute for Biological Research has made a breakthrough in the development of a potential treatment against SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19. Scientists there have isolated a ‘monoclonal neutralising antibody’ which could potentially neutralise the virus after infection. The antibody was obtained from the blood of an infected patient. It is called monoclonal because it is generated from a single cell – which could allow vast quantities of the antibody to be produced quickly. Is it the breakthrough that could make all the difference? Treatment of novel viruses with monoclonal neutralising antibodies has been under development for some time, notably

Since mid-March there has been an assumption that herd immunity against Covid-19 would not be achieved until around 60 per cent of the population has been infected. It is a figure which gave rise to the now-famous paper by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, which claimed that a herd immunity policy (which the government denies ever following) would result in the deaths of 250,000 people in Britain. That figure has been challenged by scientists who have questioned some of the assumptions behind it – for example, it assumed a mortality rate of 0.9 per cent which Imperial College itself has since revised downwards to 0.66 per cent, and some

When the post office and stores closed in our village on Exmoor, my youngest stared out of the car window as we drove past and saw its dreaded ‘Closed’ sign and ‘For sale’ placard outside for the first time. ‘That’s my whole childhood,’ he wailed, ‘GONE.’ As an over-50 who’s had peak everything, I can’t complain — out loud anyway — but I find the losses for younger generations too painful to contemplate. No travel, no parties, no pubs, no clubs, no sport, no sex, no education, a life unlived online for the foreseeable. Given how badly Oliver took that one tiny but vital enterprise shutting up shop, I’ve been

Ever since the coronavirus first began to spread in the UK, one of the government’s staunchest critics has been the editor-in-chief of the Lancet, Richard Horton. In late March, he suggested that Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson were playing ‘roulette with the public’ and said on Question Time that the government’s response to the virus was a ‘national scandal’. In April he argued that the government would blame health experts for its ‘catastrophic’ policy failures. He has suggested the government’s failure to act in February caused ‘chaos and panic across the NHS’ and meant ‘patients will die unnecessarily. NHS staff will die unnecessarily.’ But Mr S has spotted that Horton

Covid statistics are like complex machinery; if you don’t read the instructions you won’t operate them properly. Which is why the claim by some media outlets that the UK now has the second highest number of Covid deaths in Europe, should be handled with caution. It is true that on Wednesday the official UK Covid-19 death toll increased by 4,419 to 26,097 after the government included deaths outside hospitals for the first time. The figures were revised respectively by Public Health England since the first UK death in March. According to the Guardian, ‘The change comes after weeks of criticism of the way that the UK had been reporting its