Coronavirus

The price of oil just hit $0 a barrel. What’s going on?

If you’ve ever wanted to own a barrel of oil, today might be your lucky day – for the first time in modern history, there are traders across the world who’ll let you have it for free. On Monday evening the price of oil futures plummeted, with one key oil price in the USA hitting $0 per barrel shortly after 7pm UK time. It sounds unbelievable – and illogical. Why go to such great efforts to extract oil, which was selling for $60 a barrel just three months ago – only to give it away for free? How did we get here? The collapse in the world economy has led

Nick Cohen

Bailing out Richard Branson comes with a big price

Richard Branson is asking British taxpayers – a club he resigned from when he moved his affairs to the lax tax regime of the Virgin Islands – to bail him out. With an estimated fortune of £4.7 billion, he is richer than any man needs to be. Yet he still wants a country – whose health and emergency services his taxes are not supporting in their moment of greatest need – to lend the Virgin Atlantic airline £500 million. The government has rejected Virgin Atlantic’s advances to date, but not for reasons you and I would cite. The Financial Times reports that officials turned down the airline’s initial bid because

Steerpike

‘You are endangering the world’: German tabloid goes to war with China

Could China have done more to prevent the coronavirus pandemic? One tabloid editor in Germany certainly thinks so and an extraordinary bust-up has broken out between the Chinese government and his newspaper as a result. The row kicked off last week when Bild – the best-selling paper in Germany – published an editorial entitled ‘What China owes us’, calling for China to pay reparations of £130 billion for the damage done by the outbreak of the virus.  Later that day, the Chinese embassy in Berlin then responded with an open letter saying ‘we regard the style in which you ‘campaign’ against China in your current report on page two as infamous… Those

Steerpike

Keir Starmer comes third in a two horse race

Following a weekend of negative headlines for the government over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, any cross-party truce to hold off criticism of the Prime Minister while he recovers is well and truly over. However, one group with whom Boris Johnson remains popular is the general public. In recent weeks, the Conservatives have enjoyed some of their best approval ratings since Johnson entered office. The election of Keir Starmer as Labour leader was billed as something that could change this. However, so far any Starmer effect has failed to materialise. A YouGov poll asking who out of Boris Johnson or Keir Starmer would make the best Prime Minister puts Johnson in the lead at 46 per

John Keiger

Don’t bank on a V-shaped recovery

Last week, Britain and France were treated to an avalanche of financial statistics jostling with the macabre daily litany of Covid casualty numbers. All are premised on a V-shaped recovery in which the severity and rapidity of the Covid recession is matched by a rapid bounce back. But the French above all should be aware of a historical parallel that suggests caution regarding the V-shaped recovery. But first the size of the problem. In Britain, the Office for Budget Responsibility produced the most pessimistic scenario for the British economy compared to those of KPMG, Morgan Stanley and the OECD. Based on a three-month lockdown it projects a 2020/21 budget deficit

Robert Peston

Why is Britain not using its testing capacity?

The government’s excuse for why it didn’t engage in a comprehensive testing and tracking approach to contain Covid-19 after it started to spread throughout the community was that – unlike Germany and South Korea – it did not have the sufficient number of labs to process the tests. Well that excuse is almost exhausted, because testing capacity is increasing rapidly. Take for example the new super lab being built in Cambridge by AstraZeneca (AZN) and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), using equipment and technology made in the UK by Primer Design, the molecular diagnostics division of Novacyt. AZN’s chief executive Pascal Soriot tells me that tests will start any day now and that

Did the government really ‘brush aside’ coronavirus fears in January?

Was Matt Hancock shrugging off Coronavirus in late January? An ‘insight’ article in the Sunday Times which has spread like wildfire online accuses him of doing so. The virus was making its way over the world, it says, but ‘it took just an hour that January 24 lunchtime to brush aside the coronavirus threat. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, bounced out of Whitehall after chairing the meeting and breezily told reporters the risk to the UK public was “low”.’  The ‘Insight’ government deep dive – which curiously appears to have been swerved by the paper’s award-winning political editor Tim Shipman – states that Boris Johnson didn’t chair any meetings about it

Sunday shows round-up: ‘Grotesque’ to suggest the PM skipped meetings, says Gove

Michael Gove – Government is not thinking about lifting lockdown restrictions yet Sophy Ridge began the morning interviewing the Cabinet Office Minister, Michael Gove. On Thursday, the government announced it would be extending the UK’s lockdown for a further three weeks to best tackle Covid-19. Gove downplayed reports that the government had drawn up a three-stage plan to end the lockdown, and explicitly quashed the idea that schools could be open again from mid-May. Instead, he told Ridge that the government’s efforts would continue to be guided by the science, and would not be drawn on a timescale: MG: We’ve set some tests which need to be passed before we

Robert Peston

The government’s coronavirus mantra avoids its systemic problem

Paul Marshall makes the compelling point that mistakes have almost certainly been made by scientists and Public Health England. However, in the British system, power lies not with the scientists and officials, but with elected politicians. And I have been concerned since the start of this outbreak that ministers were using the expert advice of the scientists and epidemiologists, and the recommendations of the assorted expert committees, as a reason not to take responsibility for life-and-death decisions. ‘We’re following the science’ has been the ministerial mantra and cliché of this crisis. And if we’ve learned anything in this crisis it is the limits of scientific knowledge in respect of a

John Lee

Do face masks work? A note on the evidence

Should we, or should we not be compelled to wear face masks during a virus epidemic? It sounds a simple enough question. Indeed the answer seems so obvious to many, including the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, that they are questioning why this measure is not already mandatory. Surgeons wear them; they filter the air we breathe; viruses are in the air; let’s get everybody wearing them. Other countries have, so they must be helpful. It seems so straightforward. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as that, and the obvious becomes less obvious the more you look at it. ‘Following the science’ often feels like chasing a receding target, which throws

Modelling coronavirus is an imperfect science

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

Allison Pearson

How long before our elderly rebel against lockdown?

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

When will the public accept an end to the lockdown?

In the weeks leading up to Boris Johnson announcing lockdown measures, ministers and aides wondered how in the world you could enforce a lockdown like the one seen in authoritarian China in a liberal democracy such as the UK. But following Dominic Raab confirmation on Thursday that there will be another three weeks of lockdown, public resistance is the least of ministers’ concerns. The biggest surprise about the lockdown within government has been the level of public support for it. Polling has repeatedly shown that rather than fighting the social distancing measures, Britons are embracing them more obediently than anyone in might have dared imagine. A YouGov poll prior to Raab’s announcement found

Five measures that could prevent future lockdowns

That the World Health Organisation hasn’t exactly shone in the coronavirus crisis is now well-documented. It should remind us of the dangers of following one centrally-guided approach to tackling the disease. Thankfully, given how even experts have been unsure about how to respond to this enormous challenge, there was no unified EU response to Covid-19. Instead, European countries have been dealing with the virus using trial and error. As a result, looking at the responses of European and Asian countries, we can now distinguish five important things that seem to have worked to prevent the need for a strict, economically devastating lockdown. 1. Testing people with mild symptoms Even though

David Patrikarakos

The global politics of a pandemic

The Great Game of the 21st century is upon us and as ever it’s a scramble for resources. This time, though, the thirst is not for land or diamonds or gold. Personal protective equipment has become the oil of the contemporary moment: desperately needed by a world that is strafed by coronavirus. Britain has its own urgent PPE supply problems. But what about the broader international struggle? The answer to this question offers the clearest glimpse of how our post-pandemic global politics is likely to look.   At the top of this scramble stands China. Ahead of the curve (for obvious reasons), it imported about 2.5 billion healthcare items between 24 January

Leaked US document suggests Covid may be less lethal but more widespread

Have we been vastly underestimating the number of people who have been infected with Covid-19 and correspondingly overestimating its mortality? No one knows because we don’t know just how widespread this infection is in the population at large. But a leaked document from the US Department of Homeland Security suggests that the US government, at least, is working on the assumption that the virus is a lot harder to contain – but a lot less deadly – than is widely assumed. The document compares the likely outcome of two scenarios: one in which the outbreak is ‘unmitigated’ – i.e. life carries on as normal – and one in which the government imposes

The genius of Joe Rogan

Last month, just before coronavirus conquered the airwaves entirely, millions of Americans gave up two hours to hear a professor of epidemiology discuss the emerging pandemic. Despite its huge reach, not to mention its quality, the interview wasn’t broadcast on any of the news networks. Rather it was the work of a former martial-arts pundit and hallucinogenic-drug enthusiast who also happens to be one of America’s most popular — and influential — podcasters. Although it racks up some 190 million downloads a month, The Joe Rogan Experience tends to fly somewhat under the cultural radar — particularly in Britain. Even worse, his brash style and predominantly male fan base means

Lloyd Evans

Strangely absorbing: the first lockdown dramas reviewed

High Tide got there first. The East Anglian theatre company has produced a series of lockdown mini-dramas, Love in the Time of Corona, made up of five filmed reflections on self-isolation. ‘Rainbows’ by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm is narrated by a woman on the edge teaching her kids to decorate the windows with coloured paints. ‘Child Two is crying and Child One is giving me the finger.’ Outside, as she takes a photograph, she suffers an anxiety attack. ‘The gurgling panic in the base of my gut, the pain in my chest. Not virus, all fear.’ She decides to flee. But will her children survive without her? Convincingly performed by Katie

Trump has a point – the WHO has failed

The United States has long regarded itself as better prepared for a pandemic than any other country in the world, but it assumed the disease would be flu, rather than a coronavirus. This was a failure of imagination. The Sars epidemic showed the world that coronaviruses can lead to acute and fatal respiratory diseases. The Asian countries that suffered most from Sars updated their pandemic response kits accordingly, with mass testing and patient-tracing technology. Neither Britain nor America thought to do likewise. In Britain, we’re starting to admit to flaws in our pandemic response. Donald Trump is less inclined to do so, and is instead directing his fury at China