Coronavirus

Thursday

Fiona Mountford

Covid has exposed our confusion about food

These past five Covid-buffeted months have shone a spotlight as never before on the choices we as a nation make about and around food. We are quite confused when it comes to eating. The government’s two recent messages on the subject are in conflict with each other: it’s our civic duty to ‘eat out to help out’, we’re told, but also we need to lose weight to protect the NHS. These muddled messages were evidenced by the somewhat mad poster advertising ‘eat out to help out’: after listing the practical terms of the scheme, the optimistic last line reads ‘Look out for better health choices’. I don’t know about you,

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

Will the next U-turn be on face masks at work?

There’s a new trend emerging when it comes to Covid-19 policy: where Scotland leads, England follows. In recent weeks, decisions taken by Nicola Sturgeon have – eventually – been adopted by the UK government for England: first, the U-turn on how A-level and GCSE results would be attributed, and today another U-turn on face masks in schools. When Scotland announced face masks would be made mandatory for pupils earlier in the week, the government remained adamant that this would not be required in English schools. But within days, the advice quite substantially changed, now requiring secondary school students in local lockdown areas to wear them in the corridors and communal areas. The

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Has this Brazilian city reached herd immunity without lockdown?

Throughout the Covid crisis, the international response to the disease has rested on a simple assumption: that none of us have any resistance to it, being caused by a novel virus. Therefore, if allowed to let rip through the population, the virus would exponentially spread until around 60 – 70 per cent of us had been infected and herd immunity was reached. This was the assumption behind Neil Ferguson’s paper in March, claiming that Covid-19 would kill 500,000 Britons if nothing was done and 250,000 of us if the government carried on with the limited mitigation polices it was then following. Yet real world data has challenged this assumption. First

Tuesday

Ross Clark

What per cent of Covid deaths are directly from Covid?

Just how many people have died of Covid-19, as opposed to having died with the virus? It is a poignant question, especially after it was revealed that Public Health England had been counting a Covid death as anyone who died after testing positive for the virus, even if they swiftly recovered and went on to die of some other cause, like under a proverbial bus. A study by the health authorities in the Östergötland region of south-eastern Sweden aims to answer the question. The study looks at the cases of 122 people who have died in the region outside of a hospital setting – either at home or in accommodation

Monday

Ross Clark

What does the evidence say on re-opening schools?

It is still far from clear whether schools will succeed in re-opening next week, as government ministers, education authorities and unions battle it out over safety – or supposed safety – concerns. Now, as back in May, when the government first proposed re-opening schools, the unions have demanded evidence that it will be safe for children to return to the classroom. The difference now is that we do have real-world evidence on the spread of Covid-19 in schools. Public Health England (PHE) has analysed what happened when over a million children finally returned to school in June. In the subsequent weeks until the end of term, 70 children and 128

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

Rejoice for the return of the church choir

Not all coronavirus research sounds like fun, but wouldn’t you just loved to have been at the session where 25 choristers were asked to sing Happy Birthday at varying volumes to determine whether or not it would be safe for choirs to get back to business. The exercise was carried out by academics collaborating with Public Health England (while it lasted) and the Department for Culture. And you know what? It turns out that the quieter the singing, the lower the risk of transmitting droplets. The researchers found that singing did not produce much more aerosol than speaking at a similar volume, but singing or speaking loudly increased the production

Friday

Kate Andrews

Can Britain get its record-high debt under control?

Last month, Britain joined the club of countries whose national debt is greater than 100 per cent of economic output. According to an Office for National Statistics update, public debt exceeded £2 trillion, taking the debt to GDP ratio over 100 per cent for the first time in 60 years. A fast economic recovery will prove vital for getting the Britain’s deficit under control Crossing this mark doesn’t come as much of a surprise given the copious amounts of spending the UK has done on Covid-related policy. July saw the fourth highest borrowing of any month on record – the top three coming in the previous three months when the

Thursday

James Delingpole

The joy of an illegal rave

Every time I read that Britain’s anti-coronavirus measures are being jeopardised by a ‘small minority of senseless individuals’ holding illegal raves, my heart soars. Maybe there’s hope for the youth after all! I’d been beginning to wonder. In my experience, kids of about university age have been priggish and obedient about the government’s rules during lockdown. ‘Why can’t they just get off their faces on drink, drugs and repetitive beats, like my generation did at that age?’ I’ve often mused. Well, thank goodness that’s exactly what some of them are doing. Last month alone, the Metropolitan Police claim there were as many as 500 illegal raves across London. According to

Joan Collins

Joan Collins: my face mask fight with the gendarmerie

It’s three days since rumours swirled around France that President Macron was going to impose a ‘tit-for-tat’ quarantine on UK visitors. While waiting for the axe to fall, several friends who had booked flights to visit us in Saint-Tropez were unsure whether to come or not. Julian Clary, who had already accepted the fact that he was going to have to quarantine upon his return home to London, told me: ‘I don’t mind having to stay at home — what I mind is not being able to visit my mother.’ ‘Well, I haven’t seen my eldest two children or my grandchildren for nearly six months,’ I retorted. There seems to

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Why are more people dying at home?

The death drought continues. For the eighth week in a row the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has recorded fewer deaths in England and Wales than would be expected at this time of year. In the week ending 7 August, 8,945 people died, one fewer than the previous week and 157 (1.7 per cent) lower than the five-year average for this week of the year. There is, however, a geographical divide: deaths in the East Midlands are running five per cent higher than the five-year average. While deaths in the North East and North West are slightly higher than usual. What should be worrying the government is the sharp rise

Monday

Ross Clark

A-levels and the dangers of predictive modelling

It turns out we’re not quite so in awe of predictive modelling after all. How different it was back in March when Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College published their paper predicting 250,000 deaths from Covid unless the government changed course and put the country into lockdown. It was ‘the science’; it was fact, beyond question. Yet no sooner had the A-level results been published last week than a very different attitude began to prevail. How terrible, nearly everyone now says, that an 18-year-old’s future can be determined by an algorithm which tries to predict what grade they would have achieved had they sat the cancelled exams.

Thursday

Laura Freeman

Looking at Barnett Freedman makes me weep at the government’s dismal graphics

Among the spoils of a lockdown clear-out was a box of my grandmother’s books: Woolf, Austen, Mitford and The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear with a jacket by Barnett Freedman. You only need to see a corner of the cover — a stippled trompe-l’oeil scroll — to recognise the artist. Freedman, a Stepney Cockney born to Jewish-Russian parents in 1901, delighted in paper games. Maps unfurl, book leaves fly, cut-outs and cartouches abound. His designs are a miscellany of silhouettes, decoupage, concertinas, peek-a-boos, lift-the-flaps and grubby thumbprints. Edges are ragged, endpapers torn. On the dust jacket to Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1931), a military map has been

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Employment falls, exam failures and a roundabout rigmarole

Home In fine weather with calm seas, 565 migrants in four days crossed the Channel in small craft. French officials said that 33 migrants in two boats that got into difficulty had been returned to Calais. In July more than 1,000 migrants crossed the Channel. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, appointed Dan O’Mahoney as Britain’s Clandestine Channel Threat Commander, tasked with somehow making such voyages ‘unviable’. Employment fell by 220,000 in the three months to June, the biggest quarterly fall since 2009, but unemployment remained at about 3.9 per cent, as millions stayed on the furlough scheme. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 9 August, total deaths from Covid-19

The Spectator

How hot does a ‘heatwave’ have to be?

Some like it hot Are heatwaves becoming a devalued currency? Last year the Met Office defined a heatwave as three consecutive days when maximum temperatures exceed the 90th percentile maximum temperature for mid-July. In London that means when the maximum exceeds 28˚C. For the rest of the south-east, as far west as Hampshire and as far north as Nottinghamshire, the threshold is 27˚C. For Dorset, Somerset, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, South Yorkshire and Lincolnshire it is 26˚C, and everywhere else, including the West Country, most of Wales, the north of England and Scotland it is 25˚C. In places it will mean a heatwave occurring in 30 to 50 per cent

Toby Young Toby Young

I’ve started a dating site for lockdown sceptics

I started a dating site last Sunday. Not words I ever thought I’d write, but I’ve become a kind of den mother to a large group of people who believe the risk of coronavirus has been exaggerated, and it dawned on me that this could be a useful service for them. The idea is that if you’re a Covid realist you don’t want to go out with a hysteric who thinks the lockdown is being eased too quickly and frets about a ‘second wave’. You probably wouldn’t even be able to arrange a first date, let alone manage a kiss at the end of the evening. What you need is

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

In the race to recovery, Britain is losing

At the start of lockdown, the government was obsessed with how other countries were dealing with the Covid crisis. In No. 10 press conferences, Britain’s daily death toll was shown next to numbers from the rest of the world, putting our handling of the virus into perspective. But when our death toll jumped, the government claimed the calculations were too different to compare and dropped the graph. A few weeks ago, the Office for National Statistics picked up where the government had left off, revealing that England had the highest number of excess deaths in Europe, while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were in the top eight. The UK had

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The dismal rise of the modern elopement

I didn’t realise how attached I was to the traditional British wedding — the whole messy, pricey, drunken business — until I discovered it was under threat. The new fashion is for elopement, just the happy couple, one or two friends and a photographer, all perched on the edge of some picturesque cliff or on a mountain top. It makes sense while we’re all social distancing, but I suspect the elopement trend is set to continue — and I think it’s dismal. I first saw the signs when I asked a friend what he was up to this Saturday. ‘Oh, I’m just off to an elopement,’ he said. My immediate

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The New Normal Festival shows how theatre could return

So the madness continues. Planes full of passengers are going everywhere. Theatres full of ghosts are going bust. My first press night since March took place at a monumental Victorian building in Wandsworth where concerts are staged in an open-air courtyard. The entry process was less fussy than I’d expected. I didn’t need my phone and there was no ‘track and trace’ nonsense. A masked official aimed a ray gun at my face and showed me a reading — 36.4ºC. I’d passed the temperature test. He then pointed me towards a hand sanitiser. ‘Is it compulsory?’ I said politely. A look of fear crossed his eyes, as if violence were

Tuesday

Kate Andrews

Why unemployment figures haven’t budged

Look past the headline statistics and you’ll see economic reality starting to infiltrate the labour market. Today’s employment figures from the Office for National Statistics mark very little movement from the previous quarter, with employment at 76.4 per cent (down 0.2 per cent on the previous quarter) and unemployment at 3.9 per cent (unchanged from the previous quarter, still hovering at a record-low level). Yet today also marks the biggest decrease in UK employment for a decade, since May 2009 in the wake of the financial crash. For many workers, being temporarily away from paid work is likely to become permanent How can this be? The official figures from the

Monday

Ross Clark

How Covid spread in Sweden’s care homes

Why did Covid prove so lethal in care homes? Between 2 March and 12 June, there were 66,112 deaths of care home residents in England. Of these, 19,394 ‘involved’ Covid (in the Office of National Statistics’s own terminology) – 29.3 per cent of the total. As has been apparent from the beginning of this crisis, the risk of dying of Covid-19 sharply rises with age, so in that sense it is not surprising for deaths among care home residents to be high – but why has it proved so difficult to protect residents from the disease, not just in Britain but in many countries? It simply isn’t possible to isolate