Covid-19

Matt Hancock provided a vaccine update on Monday, explaining that the chances of a drug being ready by early next year are ‘looking up’. With trials pending in the UK, USA and Brazil, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine could be approved this year, although the Health Secretary he conceded it would more likely come in spring 2021. He added that doses are already being manufactured so that it will be ready to roll-out the moment it does receive approval.  We’ve heard this all before. At the height of lockdown, Oxford professor Sarah Gilbert – head of one of the teams developing the vaccine – told the Times that a vaccine would be ready by September: ‘It’s not

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

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

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

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

It’s not unusual that the left and right hands of government don’t know what the other is doing: despite being based in the same postcode, different departments are notoriously bad at communicating. They even stop speaking to one another occasionally, with secretaries of state blocking new policies at what is known as the ‘write-round’ stage of policy development. This is where ministers consult colleagues across government on a policy, which others can then block. Sometimes departments have such a strong objection to a policy in another ministry that they refuse to sign off anything else through write-rounds until this plan is dropped. But this polite form of hostage-taking is far

The Bank of England offers a mixed bag of forecasts today. It now expects Britain’s economic downturn to be less extreme than feared, while also predicting a recovery will take longer than originally thought. The Bank now expects the economy to contract 9.5 per cent in 2020, substantially less than the 14 per cent drop it predicted at the height of the national lockdown. But it joined the Office for National Statistics in revising its optimism for a sharp V-shaped recovery downward, expecting nine per cent growth in 2021, with GDP not returning to pre-Covid-19 levels for another eighteen months. The Bank’s forecast remains one of the most optimistic, still

Sweden has released growth figures for the second quarter – a contraction of 8.6 per cent – and two narratives are circulating. The first is that the Swedish experiment has failed spectacularly, resulting in both a higher death toll than its Scandinavian counterparts as well as a collapsed economy. The second is that Sweden has been vindicated, taking a much less severe economic hit than the EU’s average and in a better position to recover as well. Which is the fairer assessment? Sweden has indeed taken an economic beating despite never instigating a full lockdown. Its population’s change in behaviour (adopting social distancing and heading indoors despite this not being

As ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ kickstarts this month – giving customers 50 per cent off their meals (up to £10) at restaurants and pubs that have signed up to the scheme – the centrepiece of the Treasury’s Covid-19 policy package starts to wind down. From this month, employers will be asked to pay a small part of their employees’ wages: 5 per cent now, 10 per cent next month, and 20 per cent in October, before furlough officially comes to an end. A policy that was initially expected to have take-up from 10 per cent of businesses has become the crutch of more than one million businesses across the

In an effort to avoid another national lockdown at all costs, the government is relying on two tools: a comprehensive track-and-trace scheme and localised lockdowns. The first isn’t expected to be up and running until autumn at the earliest, after a series of setbacks and U-turns (the pains of which are already being felt, as infection rates have started to creep up). The second is arguably in full swing, as East Lancashire, Greater Manchester and parts of West Yorkshire join Leicester in having specific rules and restrictions imposed, due to fears of a rising R-number. But are these really local lockdowns, or regional ones? The restrictions that came in at

On 12 May, the government stopped publishing international comparisons of its Covid-19 death toll in the daily press briefings. The argument was that the data wasn’t helpful, and perhaps even misleading: the way calculations were carried out varied country-by-country, with each nation on a different timescale when experiencing the peak of infections and death. There would be a time for international comparisons, but that time wasn’t now. Today, the ONS picks up where the press briefings left off, comparing excess mortality rates throughout Europe. The data is not specifically calculating Covid-19 deaths, but rather all causes of mortality on a five-year average. This is the metric the UK’s chief medical officer

On a visit to Nottingham this morning, Boris Johnson warned that a second wave of Covid-19 could be on the verge of ‘starting to bubble up’ in Europe. Meanwhile, he defended his government’s lightning-speed reintroduction of a 14-day quarantine for travellers entering the UK from Spain. But concerns of a second wave are not solely related to Spain or select European countries. Yesterday the Financial Times revealed the Prime Minister’s warning to over a dozen businesses that the threat of another Covid wave in autumn is very real. It’s not just what’s happening abroad, but the possibility of infection rates spiking within the UK that has captured the government’s attention. It is not

It is an uptick so small that it could almost be comic, but the UK economy started to grow in May: by 1.8 per cent following a 20 per cent slump in April. Office for National Statistics figures out today show that, even in lockdown, surging online retail sales – coupled with signs of a recovery in construction – show a small increase in GDP. The big question is what shape we can now see: a L, a Nike swoosh or a sharp V? Reopening the economy can only go so far: tackling people’s fear of Covid-19 is key for a V-shaped recovery Today’s increase suggests growth is  – every so

Has government policy on going back to work just shifted? Today at his “People’s PMQs”, the Prime Minister was asked about support for universities and the social distancing measures that will be needed to make it safe for students and faculty to return. But Boris Johnson applied his response further than the university sector, turning the formal guidance – ‘working from home where possible‘ – on its head: ‘I want people to go back to work as carefully as possible – it’s very important that people should be going back to work if they can, now. I think everybody’s taken the ‘stay at home if you can’. I think now we should

At 5pm, we are being encouraged to head to our windows and doors to clap for the National Health Service on its 72nd birthday – the idea is that we’d be doing, once again, what we did in lockdown. Except we wouldn’t. The original gesture was to show thanks to the many healthcare staff (and a broader scope of key workers) who were putting their lives on the line to help others, treating our sick at the peak of the virus in the UK. These are brave people at the best of times, but especially so in the early months of the pandemic, when we were still in the dark

Today Boris Johnson launched his ‘new deal’ for Britain – billed as an economic recovery plan to follow the Covid recession.  It sounds positively Rooseveltian. It sounds like a new deal. All I can say is that if so, then that is how it is meant to sound and to be, because that is what the times demand – a government that is powerful and determined and that puts its arms around people at a time of crisis. What has changed is the PM’s political positioning, away from the market economy and towards state intervention But were the announcements really a ‘new deal’ – or a new anything? The vast