Pandemic

Why has the government changed its mind and asked children to wear masks in school? When Plan B was announced last month, there was no requirement. But that has changed. Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, was asked why on Monday. He replied that ‘we conducted a small observational study with 123 schools who had followed mask-wearing in classrooms before and saw that they made a difference’. He suggested it was quite a significant study. ‘If you just think it through, with a respiratory disease that is aerosol-transmitted, if you are asymptomatic but wearing a mask, you’re much, much less likely to infect other people.’ The government has now published an ‘Evidence Summary’

Since becoming Health Secretary there has been one big question Sajid Javid cannot answer: how can he justify firing a worker who has recovered from Covid, has antibodies and doesn’t want the vaccine? Javid first did this with unjabbed care home workers and now plans to fire unjabbed NHS doctors. Today he met one of them — and it didn’t go well. Javid’s answer? He didn’t have one During a visit to King’s College Hospital in south London, Javid was on camera talking to NHS staff asking them what they thought about his plans for compulsory vaccination. He presumably expected them to agree. But then along comes Steve James, an intensive care doctor who

Boris Johnson latest Covid press conference was slightly confusing. The Prime Minister spent nearly an hour saying nothing particularly new. He warned that there was ‘considerable pressure’ on the NHS at the moment and unveiled daily priority lateral flow testing for 100,000 essential workers so that key services, including healthcare, don’t seize up due to staff absences. But while he accepted that hospitals were feeling the heat, he also insisted that there was no data suggesting that a lockdown was necessary or helpful. Indeed, he argued:  ‘We have a chance to ride out this Omicron wave without shutting down our country once again. We can keep our schools and our

‘A stain on our soul’. That was how Gordon Brown, in his latest missive on the subject, described the failure of the west to ensure that the whole world is vaccinated. In a previous attack on western policy — at the end of November, just as Omicron was emerging — he wrote of “hoarding” and ‘vaccine nationalism’. Take Africa: it is certainly true that vaccination rates in many countries are very low. While the UK has managed to deliver 195 doses per 100 people, Nigeria has only managed seven, Ethiopia and Somalia nine, and Chad and South Sudan two. Can all this be blamed on the failure of western nations to donate

Hooray for Cardinal Vincent Nichols, who used the one day of the year when his pronouncements are amplified by the season to ‘sincerely appeal that [the government] do not again consider closing churches and places of worship.’ He said in a BBC interview he believed it had been demonstrated that the airiness of churches meant they are ‘not places where we spread the virus’. Mind you, Catholic churches weren’t as bad as the Church of England This is, of course, entirely sensible. It was nuts for churches to close at the start of lockdown, at least as spaces for prayer if not for communal worship. Pretty well any church is ‘Covid-safe’, in

Public health officials in Britain and South Africa were on different planets for about a fortnight. While those in South Africa kept presenting data suggesting that Omicron caused less severe disease than earlier variants, scientists in Britain continued to claim it was too early to say. Scenarios published by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) last week pictured a frightening picture of January, suggesting that hospitalisations could peak above previous waves. An assumption was made that Omicron was just as likely to land you in hospital or kill you compared with Delta. As LSHTM admitted, quite a big assumption:- Due to a lack of data, we assume Omicron has the

Man makes Covid predictions and God laughs. Yet with the stakes this high in Britain, every bit of real-world data is useful. That’s why South Africa is so important: it’s a country with a well-digitised healthcare sector that we have to thank for sequencing the Omicron variant, and has been first to experience the impact. That’s why its figures, released daily, are being watched so eagerly world over. Right now, there are two questions: is Omicron now falling? And if so, what conclusions can we draw? The epicentre is Gauteng province: home to Johannesburg, Pretoria and about a quarter of South Africans. The below chart adjusts for population and shows that

If you test positive for Covid now in Britain, the odds are that it’s Omicron: it’s now the dominant strain in England and Scotland. Data released this evening by the UK Health Security Agency showed that by Tuesday, 54 per cent of PCR tests were positive for S-gene target failure (a proxy for Omicron). For perspective, it has only taken eight days for the variant to become dominant: Delta took nearly a month. North of the border, Sturgeon said that the ‘tsunami [of cases] was starting to hit’ and confirmed that in Scotland more than half of cases were Omicron too. Again, that’s using S-gene dropout as a proxy. Some

There were two takeaways from last night’s press conference: firstly, the hard data showing that the number of recorded cases of Covid had surged by 19,000 – or 28 per cent – in a single day. Second was the assertion that, as a result, the NHS is in danger of being overwhelmed. What was lacking was the hard data on hospitalisations and the number of people in hospital. Although you would never have guessed from the tone of the conference, these both fell. The number of people admitted to hospital – a figure which runs a few days in arrears owing to a delay in the four constituent nations of

Why is the government so scared of the Omicron variant? So far, most of the evidence we have for transmissibility and virulence of Omicron is based on very limited data from South Africa, but the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has now published its own preliminary study of the variant — the results of which will presumably have been available to ministers and scientific advisers prior to Wednesday’s decision to enact ‘Plan B’. They appear to show a variant which is more transmissible, more likely to evade vaccines and more likely to reinfect people who have previously had Covid. But there is a very big caveat: they are based on

There was nothing but gloom about the Omicron variant at yesterday’s No. 10 press conference. But with reporters preoccupied with last year’s Christmas parties, no one thought to bring up a statement by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the WHO, who earlier told reporters that there is ‘some evidence that Omicron causes milder disease than Delta, but again it’s still too early to be definitive.’  You don’t want to make decisions before you have good evidence, but if it does turn out that Omicron is a milder disease, won’t the government’s efforts to suppress it with travel bans and restrictions be counter-productive? If Omicron makes people significantly less ill than Delta, it should be

Is Boris Johnson really deploying a ‘diversionary tactic’ in announcing vaccine passports on the day he has had to perform a volte-face over a Christmas party in Downing Street? After watching his press conference tonight, I’m not so sure, though not because of the explanation the Prime Minister himself offered. He was asked about this accusation, which was first levelled by one of his own MPs, William Wragg, at PMQs. Johnson’s response was to ask journalists to imagine what it would have been like if today’s political row had forced a delay of the ‘Plan B’ measures to contain the spread of Covid this winter. It will be trickier still

It will be weeks before we know just how worried we should be about Omicron — but the first indications seem hopeful. The epicentre of the first recorded outbreak has been the subject of a study that suggests that it may be milder than Delta. Early data from 166 patients in the Tshwane district comes with the usual caveats, especially that very little Omicron has been found among South African over-65s. But the study nonetheless has two weeks of hospitalised Omicron patients to analyse — more than any other country. Here are the main indications so far:  Fewer people hospitalised with Omicron have ended up in intensive care: 8 per cent, compared to 25 per

Until a few days ago, ministers could see how the government might regain its footing after several weeks of self-inflicted damage. The argument, as I say in this week’s magazine, went like this: as Christmas approaches, voters will see that life in Britain — and specifically England — carries on with very few Covid restrictions whereas elsewhere in Europe more draconian measures have been imposed. This scenario seemed plausible. Austria was in lockdown and heading for compulsory vaccination; there had been rioting in Holland after the announcement of an 8 p.m. curfew and several German states had cancelled Christmas markets. In private, secretaries of state were making the case that the

There are good reasons to be concerned about the Omicron variant. For starters, this strain has 50 mutations, twice as many as Delta. Early reports from South Africa, where the virus has been circulating for a while, suggest it’s outcompeting Delta and spreading rapidly. There is a concern, too, that it could blunt the vaccines, because more than half of the new mutations affect the spike protein that the jabs are designed against. But all of this is theoretical: we need real-world data. So we won’t know whether it really is more transmissible, or how the vaccines perform against it, until long after Christmas. The concern, for now, remains Delta, as