Coronavirus

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Shopping bans in Wales, soft drinks in Scotland and stowaways at sea

Home Wales, entering a 17-day ‘firebreak’, closed most shops by law but then tried to stop supermarkets selling ‘non-essential’ items such as bedding, kettles and smoke alarms. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 25 October, total deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for the coronavirus) had stood at 44,745, including 1,166 reported in the past week, compared with 819 the week before. In England, Nottingham entered the most severe restrictions,Tier 3, taking the number of people so restricted to 7.9 million (in Liverpool, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, South Yorkshire and Warrington). About 54 Conservative MPs from the north of England wrote to the Prime Minister asking him to ‘show

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The long winter – why Covid restrictions could last until April

Not much makes sense during a pandemic but in recent weeks the Covid puzzle has become a deeper mystery. When local lockdowns failed, the solution was to try even more of them. Manchester was put into Tier 3 restrictions when its Covid cases were falling; now there’s talk of a Tier 4. Confirmed infections are nowhere near the 50,000 a day that Boris Johnson’s scientific advisers warned about last month – but the panic now seems far greater. The fear, of course, comes from what officials think will happen next. We’re told that the Prime Minister fears a second wave larger than the first, but we’re not really told why. Decisions

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

My Covid risk assessment

Classes of people at moderate risk from Covid-19. Addenda to current NHS guidelines. Those at risk from coronavirus now include people who: • Are 70 or older. • Have a lung condition that’s not severe (such as asthma, COPD, emphysema or bronchitis). • Have heart disease (such as heart failure). • Have diabetes. • Are a London property owner, or buy-to-let landlord. You’re at particularly high risk from Covid if you’re an epidemiologist in an open marriage • Are running a university as a highly lucrative property and real-estate business (with a small pedagogical business attached); i.e. 90 per cent of higher education. You’re now just the Open University with

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What will post-pandemic politics look like?

A few days ago, I came across a group of Tory MPs in a House of Commons corridor looking rather perplexed. It soon became apparent why. They had been discussing the government’s myriad problems and expressing their concerns about how things were being handled by Downing Street. Then their phones had pinged with news of a poll that showed the Tories moving into a six-point lead. To be sure, not all the polls are this favourable to the Conservative party: one at the weekend had Labour two points ahead. There is also an argument that it’s not useful to look at voting intentions so far away from the next general

Monday

Jim Lawley

Will Spain’s nation of rogues comply with the curfew?

A few years ago, when I was in the queue to catch a plane, a Spanish lady caught me watching her as she surreptitiously removed a sticker from her hand luggage, which meant it would have been stored in the hold. ‘Los españoles somos muy pícaros’ (we Spaniards are real rogues) she told me with a smile of complicity and a rueful shake of the head. Spaniards sometimes point out with a touch of pride that it was their country which pioneered the picaresque novel – a literary genre which tells the story of an ingenious rascal who lives by his wits, sometimes on the wrong side of the law.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Covid or no Covid, social distancing could be here to stay

Throughout this year, the biggest worry for healthcare planners has been what happens if a second wave of Covid-19 coincides with a winter flu epidemic. We are now in what looks like a second wave of Covid-19 – and October is the month when flu cases tend to start rising. So are we on the edge of a vast deep abyss? Not if the experience of the southern hemisphere winter is anything to go by. A paper in the Lancet led by the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand analyses this year’s influenza season – and observes that it was virtually non-existent.  The researchers looked up cases of flu reported

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Brandon Lewis defends refusal to extend free school meals

Brandon Lewis – Our position on free school meals ‘is the right one’ Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign to extend the provision of free school meals over the school holidays has seen the government facing considerable criticism, with Labour forcing a vote on the issue in the House of Commons last Wednesday, which was defeated by 61 votes. A rift has even developed within the Conservative party itself, with Robert Halfon, chair of the Education Select Committee, writing in the Spectator on the conservative case for the extension. Sophy Ridge asked the Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis why the government was holding out against the campaign: BL: I think

Saturday

Ross Clark

Why did the ‘Florence Three’ keep testing positive for Covid?

Worse tales have emerged during the pandemic than that of the ‘Florence Three’ – Rhys James, Quinn Paczesny and Will Castle, who have all now returned home to Britain after 61 days incarcerated in a hotel in the Italian city. Some might say a couple of months stuck in Florence could have been a blessing – and so it might have been, had they not each been stuck in solitary confinement and fed microwaved mush, with no more chance to go out to a trattoria than to visit the Uffizi. But what stands out about the story of the Florence Three is not so much their plight, but what it

Wednesday

Matthew Lynn

A circuit breaker would break the economy

More jobs will be lost in the long run. Businesses will go under. And government debt will soar even higher. Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds is pushing the argument that a circuit breaker — that is a short, sharp national lockdown — will be cheaper in the long run. It will keep the virus under control, and therefore enable the economy to bounce back quicker. Channelling her inner Gordon Brown, she has even come up with a very precise figure for that. Apparently, not having a circuit breaker will cost us £110 billion. But hold on. Even leaving aside the point that precise estimates should always make us suspicious —

Monday

Ross Clark

Does Manchester really need tougher restrictions?

Is Andy Burnham’s resistance to tier three a principled stand or just an attempt to extract more money from central government? While Burnham is insisting that he ‘won’t be rolled over’ for money — he is believed to have been offered between £75 million to £100 million if he agrees to the higher level of restrictions — communities secretary Robert Jenrick is insisting that the government is close to making a deal with Andy Burnham’s local authority. Meanwhile, what no one seems to have noticed — or at least are not letting on — is that cases in Manchester are now falling and are showing signs of levelling off in the other

Friday

Ross Clark

How deadly is Covid-19?

What percentage of people who are infected with Covid-19 will go on to die of the disease? The dramatic response to the pandemic on the part of almost all governments around the world has been based on the idea that Covid-19 is a far more lethal disease than seasonal flu, which is often quoted as having an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.1 per cent. The World Health Organisation (WHO) is often quoted as claiming that Covid-19 has an IFR of 3.2 per cent — a claim that goes back to a press conference in early March when it, in fact, said that the case fatality rate (CFR) at that

Thursday

William Nattrass

Covid’s second wave is hitting the Czech Republic hard

When the pandemic first hit, other countries turned to the Czech Republic for lessons in how to deal with Covid-19. But while the country coped relatively well back then, the second wave has been rather more brutal.  The Czech Republic now has the highest rate of Covid-19 infection in Europe and one of the highest in the world. A new daily record of 9,544 cases was set yesterday; just a few weeks ago, 500 new cases a day was cause for concern. The death toll has now risen above 1,000, over 2,500 people are in hospital with Covid-19, and almost a quarter of all tests performed come back positive. During the ‘first

Limor Simhony Philpott

King Bibi’s pandemic problem

‘They are S-C-A-R-E-D’. So said Binyamin Netanyahu in a famous 1999 election campaign speech, referring to the media. Now he is the one who is scared. The political mastermind who has been Prime Minister for the past eleven years stands to lose his crown. Israel’s political crisis of 2019-2020 saw three general elections without producing a clear winner. Eventually, asserting a need for national unity to combat the pandemic, Bibi masterfully managed to form a coalition under his leadership while dividing the main opposition party, Blue and White. Under the rotation agreement, Bibi is to step down after two years and be replaced by Blue and White leader, Benny Gantz.

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The real north-south Covid divide is in London

From Friday night, southerners are set to be cooped up in their homes because of high Covid rates in the north. I’m talking, of course, about the decision to impose tier two restrictions on London. The capital’s nine million people will be banned from socialising indoors with people they don’t live with and commuters urged to stay off public transport. It’s clear that the rising rate of infection in London meant that something needed to be one. But treating the capital as one is a big mistake. Nine out of the ten boroughs with the highest infection rates in the capital are north of the river. And the eight boroughs

The Spectator

Mind the gap: how wide is the North-South divide?

Red light, green light The three tiers of Covid restrictions have been described as a ‘traffic light’ system. — The world’s first traffic light is recorded as having been installed at the Palace of Westminster in 1868 to help MPs and peers enter and leave parliament. Those lights only had red and green phases.— Traffic lights installed in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1914 incorporated a buzzer to warn that the lights were about to change. The amber phase was patented by Garrett Augustus Morgan, an African-American inventor, after witnessing an accident. Watford Gap? New lockdown measures have rekindled talk of a north/south divide. Has the gap widened or shrunk over the

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Covid has killed off our civil liberties

It started with smoking. The 1960s and 1970s saw little popular objection to legislation restricting advertisements by private companies purveying a legal product. Little objection was raised thereafter when these same companies were banned from promoting their wares at all. Broadly shamed, even smokers have mutely accepted confiscatory taxes on cigarettes. As laws to protect the public from passive smoking have extended parts of the US to beaches, parks and even one’s own apartment balcony — locations where the danger to others is virtually nonexistent — few have cried overreach. It’s a truism: tobacco companies are evil (and so are smokers). The suppression of smoking is widely regarded as a

Matt Ridley

Students who catch Covid may be saving lives

It is counterintuitive but the current spread of Covid may on balance be the least worst thing that could happen now. In the absence of a vaccine, and with no real prospect of eradicating the disease, the virus spreading among younger people, mostly without hitting the vulnerable, is creating immunity that will eventually slow the epidemic. The second wave is real, but it is not like the first. It would be a mistake to tackle it with compulsory lockdowns (even if called ‘circuit breakers’), whether national or local. The cure would be worse than the disease. If you cannot extinguish an epidemic at the start, the best strategy is for

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

How new Covid restrictions are stalling the economy

The theory behind a V-shaped recovery relied on the assumption that the economy would open up almost as quickly as it shut down. This did not happen. The UK moved at a much slower pace than its European counterparts exiting stringent lockdown measures. And already restrictions are being implemented again. August’s GDP figures were surprisingly dismal, and now all future monthly updates for economic growth will be affected by a longer list of restrictions that are bound to impact recovery. As a result, scenarios for the UK’s economic recovery are being revised to reflect this. In the last day, we’ve had two updates: one from the IFS’s Green Budget (in association with

Tuesday

Kate Andrews

Britain’s unemployment crisis is closing in

Unemployment is creeping up. For months it remained stagnant, as the combination of the furlough scheme and people keeping out of the jobs market kept the rate deceptively low. But over the past few months, it has started to increase, with today’s labour market overview from the Office for National Statistics revealing a 4.5 per cent unemployment rate — the highest level in three years. There’s a sliver of hope in today’s data, which shows job vacancies are up Still, at first glance you’d expect the unemployment rate to be much worse. After the largest economic contraction in three hundred years, an increase from 3.9 per cent at the start

Monday

James Forsyth

Chris Whitty: tier three alone will not be enough

Chris Whitty made clear at tonight’s press conference with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor that he doesn’t think that the tier three restrictions are enough to get on top of the virus in the worst hit places. He was explicit that local councils will need to go even further in terms of closures in some places. Later in the press conference he said that the government ‘knew full lockdown works’ but it was also aware of the societal and economic harm it does, and the government rightly wants to keep schools open. Taken together, the answers strongly implied that Whitty thinks that in Covid hotspots everything apart from schools