Coronavirus

Saturday

Toby Young

Dissent over coronavirus research isn’t dangerous – but stifling debate is

One of the paradoxes of the coronavirus crisis is that the need for public scrutiny of government policy has never been greater, but there’s less tolerance for dissent than usual. I’m thinking in particular of the work of Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London, which has done so much to inform the government’s decision-making. Remember, it was Professor Ferguson’s prediction last month that an extra 250,000 would die if the government didn’t impose extreme social distancing measures that led to the lockdown last week. Anyone questioning Professor Ferguson’s analysis is likely to be met with a tsunami of opposition. Witness the furious reaction provoked by Professor

Ben Schott

Unreal, uncertain and mostly silent: life in the centre of New York’s coronavirus storm

‘How are you bearing up?’ ‘Is everyone terrified?’ ‘What’s the mood?’ These are the questions concerned family and friends are kindly asking about New York City which, according to my armchair epidemiology, is about ten days behind Italy and ten days ahead of Britain. It would be reckless to describe things as calm, not with a New Yorker dying every seven (?!) minutes, and refrigerated trucks parked ominously outside hospitals. But I sense no mass panic. Life, of a sort, still goes on. People run, dogs are walked, post is delivered, Amazon arrives, and the shelves are stocked with food. The absence of cars without the presence of snow is

Taki

Covid-19 shows us that virtue trumps freedom

Look at it this way: we’re all doing Desert Island Discs nowadays, and unless you’ve got the bug, it’s a damn good thing, too. I did the desert island bit around 30 years ago, when Sue Lawley was the presenter, and we got along fine, even after I commented on air that she had nice legs. I suspect it would have been a different story today, but another good thing about the virus is that it has knocked #MeToo off the front pages. For good, I hope, but I doubt it. Among my desert island picks was a version of ‘Lili Marlene’ sung by an army choir that I first

Fredrik Erixon

No lockdown, please, we’re Swedish

Uppsala Who would have thought that Sweden would end up being the last place in Europe where you could go for a beer? We have, in our normalcy, suddenly become an exotic place. Other countries are closing their cities, schools and economies, but life in our corner of the world is surprisingly ordinary. Last weekend I went to the gym, met up with friends, and sat in the spring sun at outdoor cafés. My foreign friends are stunned. They can’t fathom that there are still people enjoying the fruits of civilisation, as if the natural reaction to pandemics is to embrace totalitarianism. And they wrestle with another conundrum: how on

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The longer lockdown continues, the more imperilled we become

Comically, Chinese Communist party officials have speculated that Covid-19 was planted by the US army. Yet a respectable conspiracy theorist would deduce that a virus sending the rest of the world into an hysterical, wholesale economic shutdown has ‘Made in China’ written all over it. After all, China didn’t flat-line its entire economy to contain the contagion. At the end of this debacle, then, China could rule the world — although it won’t have many solvent customers left to buy its products. The only other countries calling the shots in future could be South Korea, Japan and Sweden, having thus far resisted the stampede to lockdown. In my 1994 novel

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Don’t let anyone tell you there’s a war on

‘Shut up — don’t you know there’s a war on?’ Strong hints of that attitude have emerged in recent weeks, and the hints are getting stronger. The attitude is mistaken. The right answer to any enquiry about whether we know there’s a war on is that there isn’t a war on. Nobody with sensible questions to ask about the current strategy or its implementation should be abashed to ask them. Hitler’s spies are not listening, Lord Haw-Haw will not be broadcasting them, and a grown-up citizenry does not confuse intelligent questioning with unpatriotic breaking of the ranks. No doubt some questions will be misplaced, some will have easy answers and

Lionel Barber

How will the world be changed by the war against coronavirus?

The world as we have known it for the past 40 years has come to a stop. We have a supply chain crisis, a demand crisis, a labour market crisis and an oil price crisis. The second crash that people were long predicting has arrived — but against the backdrop of the Covid-19 threat, it seems like a second-order story. The pound has already hit its lowest rate for decades, and more shocks may occur in the bond and currency markets. How long the disaster will last — or how much worse it will get — is anyone’s guess. Thanks to the virus, events which earlier this year would have

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Coronomics: Ordinary remedies won’t be enough for a surreal crash

We have seen crashes before, recessions and depressions, but nothing like this. Our fear of coronavirus has hindered and halted every aspect of daily life. We look out of our windows and barely recognise the country we’re in: police film dog-walkers and pour black dye into lagoons to deter swimmers. We wait in queues for empty-shelved supermarkets. The stock market collapses, surges, then collapses again. None of the old rules make sense. Welcome to the world of Coronomics. If this were a normal recession, the remedy would be simple: encourage people to go out, spend money and boost the economy. But today’s public health concerns require the government to repress

David Rose

Revealed: Extinction Rebellion’s plan to exploit the Covid crisis

As we contemplate the havoc being wrought by coronavirus, most of us see mainly sickness, death and economic ruin. Dr Rupert Read, spokesman for the climate protest group Extinction Rebellion — plus sometime Green party candidate, and associate professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia — has rather a different view. In this pandemic, he writes, ‘there is a huge opportunity for XR… It is essential that we do not let this crisis go to waste.’ Read’s thoughts are set out in a paper entitled ‘Some strategic scenario-scoping of the coronavirus-XR nexus.’ The paper is not meant to be widely read. ‘NB, this is a confidential document for

Robin Oakley

Does horse-racing have a future?

Asked, after his Imperial Aura’s impressive win in the Northern Trust Novices’ Handicap Chase at the Cheltenham Festival, if he had been worried about one particular challenger in the race, Kim Bailey wryly replied: ‘Of course I was worried. I’m a racehorse trainer.’ Trainers now have a lot more to worry about. When we finally resume racing — and few expect it to be after the six weeks originally announced — how many of the 14,000 racehorses in training as the suspension was announced will be coming back? How many owners whose businesses have suffered from Covid-19 will see paying bills for forage, farriers and vets’ attentions as a priority

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Spare a thought for the poor estate agents

The suspension of the residential property market is disheartening for those who were hoping to buy a first flat or new-build house this spring. But spare a thought also for estate agents, who are usually well back in the queue for public sympathy but are nevertheless a familiar part of our high-street fabric, their windows and websites feeding the national aspiration to home ownership that also fills so many hours of Kirstie-and-Phil television. With government urging completions to be deferred, mortgage lenders tightening their terms, viewings and removals impossible and shares in the bellwether London agency Foxtons down by half, the whole sector is now in what Niraj Shah of

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The corona curtain-twitchers are watching

Welcome, then, to a country in which the police send drones to humiliate people taking a walk and dried pasta has replaced the pound as the national currency. ‘Gimme that pappardelle, mofo.’ ‘Not until you prise it from my cold dead hands, punk.’ A week is a long time in politics, but also a long time in pestilence. And the next time someone uses the phrase ‘the new normal’, I may well break my social distancing regimen and chin him. The lockdown has come as a great boon to the police, who seem to be enjoying it immensely, and indeed to Britain’s vibrant community of curtain-twitching, onanistic, meddlesome ratbags. Police

Friday

Isabel Hardman

The truth behind ‘do not resuscitate’ orders

Coronavirus is revealing many good things about our society: the number of people willing to volunteer to help tackle the outbreak and help the isolated, the number of former doctors and nurses keen to return to the front line, and the number of businesses that have switched to making equipment and protective clothing for those healthcare workers. But it has also revealed our ignorance about many matters that are still important outside of a pandemic. Today’s example comes, inevitably, from our general reluctance to think about what old age and end-of-life care look like. Care homes have expressed concern that residents and their families are being pressured into signing ‘do not resuscitate’

David Patrikarakos David Patrikarakos

Jews have always been blamed for plagues – coronavirus is no different

History has not usually been kind to the Jews. But even by its low and morbid standards, the 14th century was a time of chaos. From 1348 to 1351 between 30 and 60 per cent of Europe’s population died from the Black Death, a plague that strafed continents. Hundreds of Jewish communities perished too, their inhabitants slaughtered out of hatred and fear. It was a time of mass death and horror, too; and of scapegoating. Bad times for Jews then. And because once a year, we cleaned out our grain supplies for Passover, Jews flushed out the rats that carried the plague and lowered our death count. So they burned and killed

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Liberté, égalité and fraternité are being put to the test in France

When I left my apartment for my morning run today I saw that someone had scrawled on the courtyard in large chalk letters ‘Tenez Bon, Les Voisins‘ (Hang in there, neighbours). It could have been a message for the whole country. France is flagging after two and a half weeks of complete lockdown and the fact that today is the start of the official Easter holidays will only fray nerves further. To make matters worse, the country will be treated to a taste of summer this weekend with temperatures from Paris to the Pyrenees forecast to touch 23C on Sunday. In an interview today the Minister of the Interior, Christophe

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The government needs an ‘exit strategy’ from this crisis

The economic, and social, damage being caused by coronavirus is becoming clearer by the day. In the UK, we had the news on Wednesday that 850,000 more people than usual have applied for universal credit in the past fortnight. Across the Atlantic, the number of jobs lost in the last few week is approaching 10 million – that’s more than were lost in the Great Depression. This economic news underlines the need for an ‘exit strategy’ from this crisis. The lockdown is right at the moment; it appears to be the least-worst way to keep this virus within the NHS’s capacity to deal with it and so save lives. But, equally,

The Spectator

Matt Hancock: How we’ll get to 100,000 tests a day

The health secretary Matt Hancock spoke to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme earlier this morning where he explained how he thought the government could reach his new target of 100,000 coronavirus tests a day. This is an edited transcript of that conversation:  Mishal Husain How do we get from a testing level of 10,000 tests a day to 100,000 a day in England by the end of the month? That target, unveiled by the government yesterday, includes both swab tests, currently being used to diagnose whether people have the coronavirus, and the as yet unvalidated antibody test, which would identify those who have had it and which could therefore be a key

Parliament must return to defend our liberties

MPs seem to have lost interest in defending our liberties. On 25 March Parliament went into recess a week early when our fundamental freedoms are under threat, our economy is being shredded, and our most independent-minded individuals, such as the self-employed and entrepreneurs, are being required to plead for state aid or bank loans. Above all, Parliament did not even scrutinise the most draconian measures enacted since the second world war. Both houses went into recess on 25 March. The coronavirus regulations were laid before Parliament at 2.30 pm on 26 March and came into force immediately. These regulations granted the police powers to impose fixed-penalty notices on people for

Leo McKinstry

Coronavirus has forced militant firefighters to help the NHS

Even in the darkness of the pandemic, there is the occasional shaft of light. In its sweeping impact on our civic infrastructure, the coronavirus has achieved something that no recent governments have managed. It has forced a radical change in our outdated, under-occupied fire service by vastly enhancing the duties of firefighters. No longer will brigades just narrowly focused on attending fires. Instead, they will become a proper emergency service, complete with medical responsibilities. Under an agreement reached last week between employers, fire chiefs and the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), firefighters will embrace additional duties during this unprecedented emergency. These will include the delivery of essential items like food and

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

A Brexit delay could last longer than you think

Here’s something Brexiteers might want to keep an eye on. While the country’s attention is welded to the Tesco delivery website, there are moves afoot to delay the Brexit negotiations. Fabian Zuleeg, chief executive of the European Policy Centre, has called an extension of the transition period ‘an absolute must’ given the Covid-19 outbreak. He contends: ‘There will simply not be any bandwidth to focus on the negotiations, which require a delicate balance of give and take. In a situation with major healthcare challenges in the short- and long-term and economic challenges already requiring urgent action, there will not be enough political time and attention to successfully conclude this EU-UK