Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. His books include Not Zero, The Road to Southend Pier, and Far From EUtopia: Why Europe is failing and Britain could do better
The government has placed a lot of hope in its test and trace system, but even disregarding teething problems with the smartphone app and reports of some of the 25,000 contact tracers being left idle, is it even possible for it to achieve its objective? The problem with Covid-19 all along, and the reason it
All through the Covid-19 pandemic we have been hampered by a lack of data on just how many people have had the disease. Given that several studies have indicated that as many as 80 per cent of people who are infected show no symptoms whatsoever, it is extremely difficult to estimate this crucial figure –
Huge stock has been placed in the development of a vaccine for Covid-19, with the Prime Minister suggesting this week that the disease will not be properly defeated without one. The government has held out on the idea of a vaccine being available as early as September. The CanSino vaccine is only one of 120
You might have thought that of all people, leaders of teaching unions would be concerned about the effect of lockdown on children’s education and, in particular, on the gap in attainment between children from the wealthiest and least-wealthy households. From the beginning of lockdown in March, it became clear that children were going to have
Professor Neil Ferguson has been a little elusive of late – ever since he was forced to resign after he was revealed to have entertained his married lover at his home, thus breaking lockdown rules. But he did emerge from the woodwork this morning to give evidence to the House of Lords select committee on
Sweden has received quite a kicking for its decision to avoid a lockdown: look at its death rate, critics say, which at 435 per million is several times that of neighbouring Denmark (99) and Norway (44). But there is another country that has taken the Swedish route which is rather harder to criticise. In Japan,
To the question why has Germany had so many fewer deaths from Covid-19 compared with Britain, the Observer usually has only one answer. As the title to an investigation in today’s paper puts it: ‘How a decade of privatisation and cuts exposed England to coronavirus’. Yet buried deep down in an interview in the very
Two weeks ago I wrote here about a study by the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, which found that between 40 and 60 per cent of people who had never been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 – the virus which causes Covid 19 – nevertheless seemed to develop an immune response to the disease in
Finally we are getting a clue to the most vital statistic of the Covid-19 epidemic: how many people in Britain have had to disease – and who therefore might be expected to have some kind of immunity to it? Today, the ONS published the results of antibody tests on a randomised sample of nearly 19,000
I wonder if Matt Hancock, or anyone else who has been developing the track and trace system for coronavirus, has set themselves this little test: get a blank sheet of paper and write down the names, addresses and telephone numbers of the people you sat next to on your last tube, train or bus journey,
Test, track and trace is an integral – and very expensive – part of the government’s plans for lifting lockdown and getting the country back to normal. The government is trying to hire 25,000 contract-tracers to augment an app-based system which seems mysteriously to have all-but vanished from its plans. But could there be a
The route out of lockdown has become a groundhog day in which the same ideas keep on coming round again, with unnerving regularity: test, track and trace, vaccine, semi-permanent social distancing and so on. Today it is the turn of another hoary old chestnut: immunity passports. Announcing that 5 per cent of the country, and
As much as the government has any kind of strategy for lifting Britain out of lockdown it appears to revolve around the ‘R’ – or Reproduction – number. So long as this stays below one, we are told, the epidemic cannot progress – while the moment it strays above one then the disease will start
It has been clear from the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic that there is a very steep age profile to its victims: with few children and teenagers experiencing serious symptoms while their grandparents suffer a high death toll. But what about the numbers of people infected? Two studies, in Britain and Sweden, appear to show
Could the Government be about to relax the two-metre rule for social distancing? On Wednesday morning, professor Robert Dingwall, a sociologist who sits on the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, questioned the rule, saying he had tried to trace the scientific justification for it but couldn’t. The evidence, he said, was ‘fragile’.
One of the great unknowns of the Covid-19 crisis is just how deadly the disease is. Much of the panic dates from the moment, in early March, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a mortality rate of 3.2 per cent – which turned out to be a crude ‘case fatality rate’ dividing the number
The effect that a commercially-available vaccine would have on the global economy was amply demonstrated on Monday afternoon. The FTSE 100 jumped by more than 4 per cent after an announcement from US drug company Moderna that results of phase one vaccine trials had been successful. Development of a vaccine has become an international race
Aside from a handful of anti-vaxxers, virtually everyone would leap at the prospect of a vaccine earning us an early exit from the Covid-19 crisis. The only snag is that we do not have a vaccine that is proven to work, let alone safe to use, and that it is improbable that we will have
The daily death toll has been a constant backdrop to the Covid-19 crisis. Would we ever have entered lockdown, would so many people have been driven to panic, were it not for the publication, every afternoon, of the number of deaths in the past 24 hours? It has helped set in the minds of the
Testing, the government keeps telling us, is the way out of the coronavirus lockdown. Soon, the Prime Minister assured us in his address to the nation last Sunday, we will be testing ‘literally hundreds of thousands of people every day’. Given that Matt Hancock seems finally to have achieved his ambition of testing 100,000 people