Covid-19

Michael Gove – New lockdown ‘could be extended’ Yesterday Boris Johnson announced that England would be entering another lockdown as of this Thursday, which will last for, at the very least, the entirety of November. Sophy Ridge’s first guest of the day was the Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove, who told her that the envisioned end-date of Wednesday 2nd December was subject to change if the rates of Covid infection could not be reduced: SR: If the data on the whole is not looking as you are hoping, then the national lockdown could be extended? MG: We will always take a decision in the national interest, based on evidence… SR:

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

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 —

Nearly a month ago, I called for an urgent 24-day full national lockdown, arguing that the restrictions were unlikely to make a significant difference in reducing transmission. If we had acted strongly and decisively then, and implemented a circuit-breaker lockdown — as we now know that the government’s scientific advisory group Sage also wanted — we would be in a much stronger position today. Many readers considered it a controversial and unwise strategy. The government agreed, declining Sage’s advice and instead announcing the eventual rollout of a three-tier system covering areas of ‘medium’, ‘high’ and ‘very high’ risk, each with their own restrictions. Yet case rates, hospitalisations and deaths continue to increase across the country.

Keir Starmer has made life difficult for Boris Johnson this week with his demand for a circuit-breaker lockdown. But the Labour leader’s colleague Andy Burnham is currently presenting a far greater threat to the Prime Minister. On Thursday, the Mayor of Greater Manchester gave a furious speech in which he accused the government of being ‘willing to sacrifice jobs here to save them elsewhere’ while treating his area like ‘canaries in the coalmine for an experimental regional lockdown strategy’. The government, he argued, was treating the North with ‘contempt’ by telling regional leaders there wasn’t enough money to protect jobs during the new restrictions while spending large sums on consultants