Coronavirus

Sunday

Dr Chris Papadopoulos

Schools should stay shut

­­During the battle against Covid-19, the government’s priority has been to ensure that schools remain open. Their rationale has been that closing schools would threaten children’s life chances. Covid’s risk to children, ministers argued, is relatively low while the cost of stunted learning is severe. But the new variant has changed that calculation. Prior to this mutation, children accounted for only a small percentage of Covid-19 infections and therefore keeping schools open was a reasonably safe course of action. Now case rates are rapidly increasing to previously unseen heights, leaving the NHS creaking at its seams. There is preliminary evidence suggesting that the new variant is more transmissible among the

Friday

Christopher Snowdon

Why 2021 could be the year of economic Armageddon

The British economy is wrapped in bandages – we won’t know whether the wound has scabbed or turned septic until they are ripped away. By the time the furlough scheme ends in April, whole sectors of the economy will have been out of action or severely incapacitated for over a year. Cash grants and the job retention scheme, both riddled with fraud, have propped up zombie businesses, some of which would have gone bust in the last year even without a pandemic. Of the businesses frozen in March 2020, how many will come out of hibernation in April 2021? How many people on furlough will discover that they have, in

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Would speeding up the vaccine programme placate Tory MPs?

More than 75 per cent of England will be in the top tier of coronavirus restrictions from midnight after Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced a large number of areas would move up into Tier 4. This is part of an attempt to contain the spread of the new variant of Covid-19, as hospitals come under what Hancock described as ‘significant pressure’ to treat surging numbers of patients with the virus. Hancock was speaking on what he described as a day of ‘mixed emotions’, and he was naturally keen to emphasise the difference that the approval of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine would make to the length of time people will be subject

Dr Mark Toshner

Let’s bust some vaccine myths

Today is a great day for all of us. The licensing of the ChAdOx vaccine will mean a step change in vaccine deployment and is one of the most significant developments of the year. As is widely known, the vaccine developed is cheap, easy to store and we have enough doses to meaningfully start talking about widespread programmes of vaccination. Now is a good time to address a slow motion and avoidable car crash. Vaccines are not a political issue – don’t let anybody persuade you otherwise. You can see this happening and it affects both our interpretation of vaccine development and, more importantly, the likelihood of having one. The

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What does the Oxford vaccine approval mean for the UK?

This morning the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved by the UK medicines regulator, the MHRA. This is almost more of a game changer than the approval of the first Pfizer vaccine, because the UK government has ordered 100 million doses of it – and it is also much easier to distribute, as it does not need to be stored at the same very low temperatures as the Pfizer jab. It means that there really is a chance of life returning to normal in the not-too distant future. Ministers had been very clear in private that if this immunisation didn’t pass, it would mean society would have to work out how to

Mary Dejevsky

Has Covid changed the English language forever?

It was Nervtag that did it for me. The New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) was responsible for reviewing, and then delivering, the bad tidings to the government about a new variant of the Covid-19 in the UK. So much more easily transmitted did the group judge it to be that, within hours, a Prime Minister who had said he wanted to protect Christmas at almost any cost had cancelled it, and France led what became a procession of more than 40 countries curbing travel with the UK. As alarming as the news was in itself, the name coined for the group of scientists bringing it to

Friday

Toby Young

Most-read 2020: Quarantine with our new puppy will send me barking

We’re closing 2020 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 7: Toby Young on his lockdown nightmare When the news leaked at the weekend that the government was considering telling those aged 70 and over to self-quarantine for 12 weeks to protect them from catching coronavirus, I began to worry about my elderly neighbours. How will they get essential supplies, particularly if the supermarkets’ home delivery services get backed up? What if they’re not on Netflix and have gone through all their box sets? Who will walk their dogs? It was time to summon up that famous Dunkirk spirit and create a network of volunteers willing

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

France couldn’t care less about Boris’s Brexit deal

The reaction of the French commentariat to the Brexit partnership agreement will be largely one of extreme irritation that the traditional Christmas Eve dinner was so crudely interrupted. Any initial response to the deal has been rather abbreviated. Nobody has read the fine print. The usual pundits are out of town. Brexit has never been a subject central to French political discourse and since Covid it has shrunk further as a preoccupation of the country. The news channels with their skeleton holiday crews have been unable to mount a full-blown orgy of live remotes from Europe’s capitals and have resorted to more marginal regional figures, focusing on the fishing ports.

Wednesday

Philip Thomas

Could 30 per cent of Brits have some Covid immunity?

How big is the job of vaccination? The aim is herd immunity, to protect enough people so that the virus starts to run out of people to infect and rates fall. This is expected to happen when between 60 to 80 per cent of the population is protected, so quite a job for the NHS. Until this is achieved, ministers seek to use lockdown as a tool to keep the R below 1. This means the cycle of lockdown and release could be with us for some time, especially in light of the new ‘mutant’ strain of the virus. But are ministers seeing the whole picture? As a professor of

Monday

Steerpike

Neil Ferguson’s mysterious membership of Nervtag

It seems like a lifetime ago when the Imperial College academic Neil Ferguson was caught breaking lockdown rules to meet his married lover. Since then, a whole series of mad, bad and downright nonsense regulations have come and gone. At the time though, the breach was taken very seriously by both the government and Ferguson himself, who had been the main champion of strict lockdown rules being instated in Britain. On 5 May, Ferguson promised to stand down as a government advisor, saying he regretted ‘undermining’ the government’s harsh measures on social distancing. His decision was backed by the government. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, said Ferguson had made ‘the

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Covid and Brexit are about to collide

We are back in a full-scale economic crisis. In London and the south east, the richest part of the UK and engine of the economy, normal commerce has been suspended by the imposition of Tier 4. And the decision of much of the EU and a growing number of rich countries to put the whole UK into quarantine is devastating for trade. What are the immediate priorities? Probably the most important one is basic: the creation of a facility to give rapid Covid-19 tests to all lorry drivers leaving the UK so that the transport of freight can be restarted as quickly as possible. Second, to end the cancerous uncertainty for

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Sweden changes advice on facemasks

Big news in Sweden this afternoon where Stefan Löfven, the Prime Minister, has just tightened Covid-19 restrictions. Still no lockdown, but there’s now a rule of four for restaurants (it had previously been six) and an 8pm curfew on sale of alcohol in bars and restaurants (it had been 10pm). A cap is to be placed on numbers in shops, gyms and swimming pools: universities and sixth-forms will switch to remote learning until 24 January. But beyond that there are no new laws (or restrictions for private property). Löfven said he still has faith that Swedes will respond to his voluntary approach. ‘I hope and believe that everyone in Sweden

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Brits don’t appear to have been influenced by anti-vaxxers

Has the influence of anti-vaxxers been hugely overstated? That is one interpretation of the Office for National Statistics’ latest survey on social attitudes towards Covid-19 and the government’s efforts to tackle it. While fears abound that people might refuse the vaccine, with their minds turned by lies disseminated on social media about Bill Gates wanting to impregnate them with microchips, there is scant sign that the British public is becoming anti-vax. Across all adult age groups, 78 per cent say they are ‘fairly likely’ or ‘very likely’ to take the vaccine if offered it (and it is government policy that all will be offered it in time). More importantly, perhaps, that

Thursday

Steerpike

Will Macron start an EU Covid chain reaction?

The Elysée palace has just confirmed that French President Emmanuel Macron has tested positive for Covid-19, after developing symptoms this week. In a statement, the palace said the President had been tested ‘as soon as the first symptoms appeared’ and will now be self-isolating for the next seven days. It’s not yet clear how badly Macron has been affected by the disease, nor when he was infected. One can only wish him the best of health in the coming days. But Mr Steerpike couldn’t also help noticing, while looking through recent photos of EU meetings, that Macron’s positive test may pose some practical difficulties for EU leaders… In recent weeks

Andrew Sullivan

The joy of a cancelled Christmas

Among the greatest bores right now are those friends who insist on telling you, usually as if it’s some kind of state secret, that Covid lockdown hasn’t changed their lives very much. They work from home, anyway, you see. They were practising social distancing before it was cool! They’re not terribly social at the best of times. How lovely not to have to endure another dinner seated next to some tedious stranger or, worse, a drunken office party at this time of year. And I have to confess that I am one of those bores. Yes, I miss people a bit, or at least being around lots of people. But

The Spectator

Letters: The case for immunity passports

Joy Sir: Alexandra Coghlan identifies the coincidence between the rise of recording and broadcast technology and the flourishing of the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge (‘Going for a song’, 5 December). Just as the publication of A Christmas Carol in 1843 coincided with cheaper books and a growing readership to forge the modern Christmas, so recent improvements in musical technology have just as firmly established its soundtrack. If Dickens created our modern Christmas, then its musical accompaniment should be accredited to Sir Stephen Cleobury, who served as Director of Music at King’s for 37 years until his retirement in September 2019. He died two months later, but I hope that

Dot Wordsworth

The word of the year (whether we like it or not)

In 2015 smombie became the Youth Word of the Year in Germany. In January 2016 a survey found that 92 per cent of the young people asked did not know the meaning of smombie. Smombie is a portmanteau word composed from smartphone and zombie, used for those people who stumble about the street looking at their phones. Like many nonce formations it did not catch on. What, you may ask, was a putatively English word doing as the German youth choice? Certainly there is quite a bit of English vocabulary thrown lightly about by young people in Germany. The word of the year for 2020 is lost, but it was

The Spectator

Portrait of the year: Coronavirus, falling statues, banned Easter eggs and compulsory Scotch eggs

January Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, signed the EU withdrawal agreement, sent from Brussels by train. Sajid Javid, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, promised ‘an infrastructure revolution’ in the Budget. An American drone killed Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard commander, near Baghdad airport. Iran carelessly shot down a Ukrainian airliner taking off from Tehran, killing 176. Bush fires raged in New South Wales. Cases of acute viral pneumonia were noticed in Wuhan in central China. February Eighty-three British evacuees from Wuhan were quarantined on the Wirral. The Department of Health classified Covid-19 as a ‘serious and imminent threat’. In Hubei 68 million people were made to stay at

The Spectator

Ring out, wild bells: 2021 will be a year of renewal

Save for those old enough to have lived through the second world war and its immediate austere aftermath, it would be hard to remember a Christmas which felt less festive. Or a new year that brings such foreboding. In spite of the severe restraints on our lives, which have been in place for months now, it seems likely that we will see some sort of third coronavirus wave with a third lockdown also on the cards. And at the same time, Britain will be embarking on a Brexit adventure that many people still see as reckless and unwanted. Yet if we look a little beyond the immediate future, things begin

Carl Heneghan and Simon Clarke

Is zero Covid achievable? A scientific debate about the virus

Throughout the year Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford, and Simon Clarke, associate professor of cellular microbiology at Reading, have written for The Spectator about the virus and the government’s measures to contain it. They have had very different outlooks, but can they agree about what will happen next? They start by looking back at their early predictions. CLARKE: During the first wave I said: don’t lock down too quickly because there will be a cost. People won’t like it. But if we had acted sooner, perhaps we wouldn’t have been locked down for quite so long and the death toll probably wouldn’t have been so high. I