Coronavirus

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Prime Minister taken into intensive care

Last night, Downing Street announced that Boris Johnson is now in intensive care at St Thomas’ Hospital after his condition deteriorated. He is not on a ventilator currently but has been moved there in case he needs one.  This is the statement from No. 10: Since Sunday evening, the Prime Minister has been under the care of doctors at St Thomas’ Hospital, in London, after being admitted with persistent symptoms of coronavirus. Over the course of this afternoon, the condition of the Prime Minister has worsened and, on the advice of his medical team, he has been moved to the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital. The PM has asked

Robert Peston Robert Peston

What will a coronavirus ‘exit strategy’ look like?

At the daily press briefings of senior ministers, the medical and the scientific advisers, there is a reluctance to talk about a timescale for an ‘exit strategy’ from these unprecedentedly severe restrictions on our freedom to move around and see people – and even to discuss what that strategy might look like. The understandable priority is to get us to commit wholeheartedly to the surrender of these basic rights so that the incidence of the virus can be slashed and many lives can be saved. Among the senior medical and scientific advisers, who seem to be steering pretty much everything right now, any initiatives that aren’t about immediate virus suppression

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Can Boris really run the country from his hospital bed?

Despite many of his colleagues urging him to take a step back and rest now that he is in hospital, Boris Johnson is continuing to receive his red box of papers while being treated for the persistent symptoms of coronavirus. The Prime Minister’s official spokesman told journalists this lunchtime that the PM ‘remains in charge of the government’, that he has been in touch with No. 10 colleagues, and that he ‘had a comfortable night and he is in good spirits’. Given how sick patients tend to be by the time they are admitted to hospital, it sounds rather odd that the Prime Minister is really attempting to work while

Constantin Eckner

How Germany has managed to perform so many Covid-19 tests

Over the past few weeks there has been widespread curiosity about the German healthcare system. Since the coronavirus outbreak, the infection curve in Germany has risen just as steeply as in Italy, and the measures it has imposed are quite similar to those elsewhere. Yet, its death rate is noticeably lower. Of 100,132 Germans who have tested positive, only 1,584 have died, as of this morning. Compared to fatality rates above 6 per cent in neighbouring France, Netherlands or Belgium, that seems remarkable. The most important reason for Germany’s rate is intense testing, using the South Korean model where widespread testing and isolation helped flatten the curve of new infections.

Sunday

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson admitted to hospital for coronavirus tests

Boris Johnson has been admitted to hospital for tests after having a continuous temperature for 10 days since testing positive for coronavirus. Those close to him are keen to stress that he is in for ‘routine checks’ and that this is not an emergency admission, or anything like that. I am told the problem is that the symptoms are persistent and refusing to clear up. They are, I am informed, not getting worse. Number 10’s official statement tonight stresses that Boris Johnson remains in charge of the government. But someone who has been unwell enough with coronavirus to be admitted to hospital, albeit for tests, will clearly struggle to operate

Peter Hunt

A rare speech from an isolated Queen

Once upon a time, a speech by the Queen had the capacity to surprise. Only a handful of her trusted advisors would have been privy to its content prior to its delivery. Elizabeth, a Head of State who has thrived for decades by remaining above the political fray, didn’t use to indulge in extensive pre-briefing. Such tactics were the preserve of those who relied on the ballot box – not an accident of birth, for their position. This status quo is yet another victim of Covid-19. As we settled down to watch the monarch momentarily delay an episode of the Antiques Roadshow, we had a sense of what she would

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Footballers’ response to coronavirus: self-delusion or cheek?

Last week I was put on furlough from my job, which was – in a way – quite exciting, invoking images of sturdy sailors on shore leave (my grandfather, who was a sailor, had his own approach to this; jump ship from a vessel in port if he fancied a change). Anyway, the largest bit of my present work is to review art exhibitions and since there aren’t any exhibitions to review, and there’s a limit to the number of times you can exhort people to have a look at the Hermitage online, I could kind of see the point. But now I’m thinking that I was actually dreadfully short

Gus Carter Gus Carter

The curious case of the coronavirus conviction

Last Saturday, a 41-year-old woman was arrested for what police described as ‘loitering between platforms’ at Newcastle Central station. By Monday, she had been successfully prosecuted – finding herself with a criminal conviction for breaching the newly enacted Coronavirus Act 2020. Days later, the conviction was dropped after police accepted they had misunderstood the law.  Why does all this matter? Well, clearly it’s important when law enforcement misuses some of the most draconian legislation passed in living memory. But the case tells us something else about the state of our criminal justice system. British justice, like the other parts of our constitution, is designed precisely so that failures like this do not occur.

Steven Fielding

How Keir Starmer’s message was pitch perfect

It was not the acceptance speech he could have anticipated making when the campaign for the Labour leadership began many months ago, but it was one Keir Starmer used to define the type of leader he would be during the pandemic, and beyond. Recorded before he was confirmed as Jeremy Corbyn’s successor, Starmer spent most of his speech addressing, not Labour’s electoral crisis, but the national emergency provoked by Covid-19. Significantly, he talked to the country first, rather than his party’s members – 56.2 per cent of whom had just made him leader. Starmer positioned his Labour party as the solution to the country’s current ills Elected promising to reunite

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Does Matt Hancock really think banning all exercise is a good idea?

Matt Hancock has threatened that the government will ban all forms of outdoor exercise if a ‘minority’ of people continue to ignore social distancing rules. Ministers had been worrying that this weekend, which is sunny and warm, would see people trying to get around the lockdown by congregating in parks. Yesterday there were reports – not all of them hugely reliable or conclusive – of large numbers of people turning up to their local parks, with police forces dispersing groups and stopping people from sunbathing. Lambeth Council has announced Brockwell Park in London will be closed today after too many people converged on it. Hancock’s threat looked inevitable before the

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The benefits of the coronavirus era

On the ‘count your blessings’ principle, it is worth making a list of benefits of the coronavirus era. These include: no aeroplane noise, no smell of hamburgers, much shorter weekend newspapers, more work for good butchers, and a temporary end to the persecutions of TV Licensing. I am wondering whether to refuse to pay my licence all over again. I am reluctant, since last time it cost me £800, but one reads that non-payment will not be pursued while the plague lasts. Even if it were, could the magistrates’ courts sit to hear the cases? This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Spectator Notes, available in this week’s magazine.

Saturday

Ross Clark

How many people have Covid-19 and don’t even know it?

Just how many of us have Covid-19 and are not even aware of it? It’s a question at the heart of this crisis. Epidemiologists are deeply divided, and no-one truly knows. Yesterday came news from China that 130 of the 166 people most recently found to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 there have proved to be asymptomatic. That is to say they had no symptoms whatsoever which would have led them to suspect that they were infected. This is consistent with research from the village of Vo’Euganeo in Northern Italy where all 3,000 inhabitants were tested for the virus early in the Italian outbreak. There, between 50 and 75 per cent

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

The art of the hermit

Late in the afternoon on Valentine’s Day, I walked through an almost empty Uffizi. Coronavirus was then a Wuhan phenomenon. Our temperatures had been taken at the airport, but there were no restrictions on travel and those wearing masks looked eccentric. I congratulated myself on finding Florence so quiet. Off-season, I thought smugly. That’s the way to do it. Heaven knows it’s empty now. The painting that caught my eye on that distant-seeming visit was a long, low cassone-shaped painting on the theme of the Thebaid attributed to Fra Angelico (c.1420). The Thebaid is a collection of texts telling of the saints who in the first centuries of Christianity retreated

John Keiger John Keiger

Could coronavirus lead to Frexit?

Is France flirting with the idea of Frexit again? Coronavirus is currently provoking a chorus of ‘reprendre le contrôle’ (take back control) across the political spectrum. The epidemic is laying bare France’s dependence on outside states for essentials such as masks, medicines, test kits and ventilators. Even arch-Europhile Emmanuel Macron visiting a French mask manufacturer declared this week: ‘We have to produce more in France, on our territory, from now on to reduce our dependency… we must rebuild our national and European sovereignty’. His reference to Europe is not unusual, but highlighting national sovereignty is. The second ‘take back control’ stimulant comes from growing irritation with the European Union. Images

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Coronavirus hits cabinet, EasyJet grounded and postman soldiers on

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, contracted the coronavirus disease Covid-19, as did Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary. The Prince of Wales had earlier been tested in Scotland and isolated himself with the disease for a week. Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical adviser, also isolated himself after suffering symptoms, as did Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s chief strategist. By Sunday 29 March, 1,228 people in the United Kingdom had died of the disease, compared with a total of 281 a week before. Two days later the total was 1,789. Two more temporary hospitals, in Birmingham and Manchester, in addition to the Nightingale Hospital in the London docks, were being

Peter Jones

Pericles would have approved of the PM’s response to the pandemic

It must be infuriating for those who see the Prime Minister as a prisoner of a rigid elitist mindset that he is reacting to the pandemic not by crushing the workers but by doing what needed to be done, however radical. Pericles, his hero, was equally pragmatic, as the historian Thucydides said — and reaped the reward. Consider Pericles’s reaction in 431 bc to Sparta’s effective declaration of war. Athens at that time had walls that ran the five miles from the harbour up round the city, and back down to the harbour again. This made Athens impregnable by land, and since its triremes controlled the seas and could import

The Spectator

How much are people eating during lockdown?

People power Boris Johnson said that the reaction to the coronavirus crisis showed ‘There really is such a thing as society’ — an apparent reference to an interview Mrs Thatcher gave to Woman’s Own in 1987. A reminder of what she actually said: ‘I think we have gone through a period when too many people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!”… and so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people,

The Spectator

Letters: Why coronavirus is so hard to investigate

Corona mysteries Sir: John Lee highlights the issue of dying of seasonal flu vs dying of coronavirus when assessing attributable deaths (‘The corona puzzle’, 28 March). The obvious solution would be a high autopsy rate. However, autopsies on known or suspected coronavirus deaths are not being done in case they lead to mortuary technologists and pathologists becoming infected. (Tuberculosis, HIV and even rabies infections are easier to prevent in mortuary work than coronavirus.) This contributes to a lack of information about how coronavirus affects people. In the long term, it also seems unlikely that anatomical examination of the dead will revert to its pre-coronavirus autopsy rate of 17 per cent

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Perhaps we are all communists now

‘I am a columnist for the Daily Telegraph,’ I began a text message to an NHS executive last week. Due to predictive text, the word ‘columnist’ was replaced by ‘communist’. Luckily, I spotted it just in time to delete. But perhaps the error was accurate. Some say we have all come to see the virtue of massive state control. Perhaps we are all communists now, even on the Daily Telegraph, accepting Jeremy Corbyn’s self-assessment that he has been proved right. For a heady moment, it might seem to be the case, but the more one ponders Mr Corbyn’s claim, the odder it sounds. He seems to think that the policies

Jeremy Clarke

Had the entire village population been wiped out since last week?

With my signed and dated laissez-passer in my pocket, I trotted down to the village to see if I could buy anything to eat, drink or smoke. A sensation of being out and about in the world was also high on the agenda. Cycling and jogging earns you a fine, of which a quarter of a million have been doled out in a fortnight. But we are permitted to walk the dog for one kilometre, or 546 yards there and 546 yards back. We cheat a bit, Catriona and I, by taking the dog separately, meaning she gets two walks a day. She’s elderly and frail, the poor bewildered thing,