Society

As Boris Johnson was being treated in intensive care, Dominic Raab expressed his confidence that the Prime Minister would defeat Covid-19 and return to work because ‘he is a fighter.’ The press howled in opposition to these hopeful words. Things culminated in BBC Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis, disdainfully telling viewers: ‘You do not survive the illness through fortitude or strength of character, whatever the Prime Minister’s colleagues will tell us’. The video clip achieved its intended virality, and was picked up by cable networks around the world. But we need to set the record straight.  She’s wrong. Medically wrong. Dangerously wrong. As a critical care physician, I can say from both clinical experience and

We don’t know if our model for estimating immigration into the United Kingdom works. It’s a long-standing dataset, produced by the Office for National Statistics – one of the best at what it does in the world. The model measures people entering and leaving the UK, something tracked at ports and airports. It’s a model of high political interest and concern. And despite all of that, we’re still not sure it’s good enough to be classed as a gold-standard ‘national statistic’. In the modern era, almost any number we ‘know’ – be it population, immigration, unemployment, inflation, or GDP – is actually an estimate produced by complicated statistical modelling. Coronavirus

One redoubtable lady I know died in intensive care a few days ago. Neither her husband nor children nor grandchildren could be with her in her final days. The most natural impulse in the world, to rush and be with someone you love, is denied. The woman’s shell-shocked widower is now at home alone. Family members dare not support him in his sorrow in case they are asymptomatic carriers and kill him too. How long before our old people rebel? Why wouldn’t you decide that ‘staying safe’ is hardly worth it if such time as you have left lacks what makes life worth living? The technical term ‘social distancing’ gives

The Jewish Chronicle might be rescued but if it is, it’s not going to be pretty. The world’s oldest Jewish newspaper announced, alongside the Jewish News, that it was going into liquidation on the eve of Passover. A few days later however, the paper’s current owner, the Kessler Foundation, unveiled a bid to take both titles out of liquidation by merging them. Kessler has claimed to be securing the JC’s long-term future before, with evidently limited success, but there seemed to be no alternative.  Not any longer. A consortium of media, business and political figures has come forward with a rival bid. It claims that it can actually deliver on talk of

The mayor of Paris’s 20th arrondissement has asked residents of her neighbourhood to stop denouncing each other. ‘When it’s a question of violence against women or children, or selling drugs, I’m still all ears,’ said Frédérique Calandra this week. ‘But these calls stigmatising Parisians who wish only to get a breath of fresh for a few minutes, they’re unacceptable.’ Passing on a message from the police, Calandra told people to stop denouncing their neighbours for petty infractions of the confinement regulations because it was overwhelming their emergency phone lines. In reporting the case, Le Parisien newspaper headlined its story ‘Halte à la délation’, which is the word for passing on information

‘Now I can believe I’m alive.’ These were the first words I heard my father speak in over a month. It was 7.15 on Wednesday morning and I was just clambering out of bed for my morning jog on Bodmin Moor. I am lucky in that I can run a few miles down to an old china clay quarry on the moors with a trusty labrador and two terriers in tow without seeing a single other human being. My telephone rang and I noticed it was a Plymouth number, likely heralding a call from Derriford Hospital where my 83-year-old father, Robin Hanbury-Tenison, has been fighting coronavirus since mid-March. He has