Covid-19

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Where’s the slogan saying ‘Lose Weight. Stop Boozing. Survive the virus!’?

From our UK edition

Panic at the country feed store. Panic in the horse and pony aisle. I wonder to myself: could life ever be sane again? With apologies to Morrissey and Marr, I started singing a version of their seminal hit on the way back from getting the horse and dog food and I have been humming it ever since. I feel very jaunty, all of a sudden. I know I’m supposed to be paralysed with fear and hugely depressed, but I’m not. Sorry. I arrived at the feed store just in time, getting the last space in the car park before the place became besieged. A little old lady behind me in the queue reached out as I lost control of my trolley.

Friday

Ross Clark

ONS study finds infections slowed before lockdown

From our UK edition

The weekly ONS infection survey suggests that the rise in prevalence of Covid-19 in England has levelled off. Not only that, it suggests that the rate of new infections has actually fallen. In the week to 31 October, the ONS estimates that 618,700 people had Covid-19 — about 1 in 90 of the population. That was up from 568,100 the week before — a 9 per cent increase. However, it amounts to a stark slowdown on previous weeks. At that rate, it would take eight weeks for the number of people with Covid-19 to double — a long way from the doubling rate of eight to ten days which was observed in September.

Thursday

Kate Andrews

Sunak’s furlough extension paves the way for more lockdowns

From our UK edition

England has only been back in national lockdown for a matter of hours and already economic support packages are rolling in — not for the duration of this lockdown (furlough was already confirmed until 2 December) but for the months to follow after the country exits lockdown. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has abandoned a return to the jobs support scheme when lockdown ends — which sees the majority of financial costs fall on the employer — and instead decided to extend the furlough scheme across the UK in its most generous form.

Jeremy Clarke

The joy of red wine

From our UK edition

Everything is happening so fast. First we were put under a night curfew. A few days later M. Macron announced another lockdown. Then, pretty much overnight, I developed a taste for red wine. The Damascene conversion was a bottle of Clos de l’Ours, a local vineyard. It was pricey admittedly, even when bought direct from the vigneron’s shop, but it was a gateway. Now I’m guzzling red. It’s like finally liking sausages after a lifetime’s aversion. The suddenness and completeness of the conversion I can only put down to an organic deterioration in the brain. Old age, perhaps. Or years of drinking this unpretentious, paralysing brand of gin that is found on French supermarket shelves: it’s called ‘GIN’.

Wednesday

John Keiger

France is revolting against Macron’s second lockdown

From our UK edition

Second lockdowns are increasingly difficult for democratic governments to impose and maintain. Violent anti-lockdown demonstrations in Spain and Italy have hit the headlines recently. It was with considerable trepidation, then, that French political leaders ordered France’s second lockdown to begin at midnight last Thursday. It did not help that Macron like Boris had repeatedly said there wouldn’t be a second one.  Ahead it went, to last officially until 1 December with a mid-term review around 14 November. In his TV address to the nation, president Macron foolhardily declared that lockdown would end when daily infections – running at 50,000 – were reduced to 5,000.

Tuesday

Tom Goodenough

Vallance and Whitty hit back over ‘scary’ lockdown graph criticism

From our UK edition

Sir Patrick Vallance and Professor Chris Whitty have come under fire over slides used during the weekend announcement of the second Covid-19 lockdown. Today, the pair hit back.  A chart suggesting there could be up to 4,000 deaths per day by December under a reasonable worst-case scenario was described by Oxford expert Carl Heneghan as 'now proven to be incorrect'. The modelling on which the chart was based appeared to be out of date, indicating that daily deaths would have already hit 1,000 a day. In fact, in the most recent stats yesterday, the UK saw 136 coronavirus deaths. Despite this, Vallance insisted the purpose of the graphic was 'not to frighten people'.

Stephen Griffin

The problem with the Great Barrington Declaration

From our UK edition

With England returning to a full national lockdown, calls for a different response — a so-called 'segmentation strategy' — have also reappeared. The idea behind such an approach is that a 'vulnerable' section of the population is effectively sealed off from the rest of society. Meanwhile, SARS-CoV2 is allowed to spread among the remaining population, generating herd immunity which will eventually protect the entire population. This is the core principle of the Great Barrington Declaration, which has attracted a large amount of media attention since its inception a few weeks ago.

Monday

Marcus Walker

If anything is essential, it’s worship

From our UK edition

That the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable. There are few clauses of Magna Carta that are still in force today. Most have been whittled away by the stultifying hands of generations of bureaucrats. But one clause still stands in its in 800-year-old majesty: that the Church of England shall be free. (I realise that my Roman Catholic readers might quibble about what was meant by the Church of England in 1217, but I ask you to bear with me). Freedom of religion is a cornerstone of a free people. It stands at the heart of every declaration and charter of rights. It should be dispensed with only under the gravest of circumstances and with the heaviest of hearts.

Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya

Lockdown isn’t working

From our UK edition

Our approach to the Covid-19 pandemic has been a scientific folly. While some mortality is unavoidable during a pandemic, the failure to properly protect the elderly and other vulnerable has led to over 45,000 UK and 225,000 US deaths and counting. Added to that total is the extensive collateral damage on health from lockdowns, which is likely to be exacerbated in Britain by the latest lockdown. We have eroded public trust in the scientific community by ignoring basic principles of public health. To address this, the Great Barrington Declaration has called for a sharp change in Covid-19 policy with focused protection as its central idea.

Patrick O’Flynn

Farage will make Boris regret his panicky second lockdown

From our UK edition

During the 2015 general election campaign, when I was directing operations at the London HQ for Ukip, I had an 'absolutely brilliant' idea. The next day Nigel Farage would be campaigning on the Isle of Thanet, in Kent, where he was standing for election. On our grid, it was earmarked to be Small Business Day – designed to showcase the party’s manifesto focus on the self-employed and SMEs, aka 'the backbone of the British economy'. My plan? During his campaigning, Nigel should visit a butcher, a baker and a candlestick-maker (as mentioned in the nursery rhyme ‘Rub-A-Dub-Dub’). A suitable butcher’s shop and a bakery near to his route were swiftly identified.

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Boris’s ‘Captain Hindsight’ attack backfires

From our UK edition

Boris Johnson may be able to explain his U-turn on imposing a second national lockdown on England in policy terms, arguing as he did last night that he favoured trying to keep as many businesses operating as possible while taking other steps to drive down the rate of infection. But it is far harder to justify politically because of the way he conducted himself while resisting the idea of the lockdown. The Prime Minister appears to have regarded the difference between his local approach and the 'circuit-breaker' favoured by Sir Keir Starmer as a campaigning opportunity.

Melanie McDonagh

Why has Boris closed the churches?

From our UK edition

This morning, my son, who’s 17, was turned away from our local church. The designated spaces for people attending mass were full. He tried to book online at the church down the road - they were full too (and last week they turned my daughter away). It was too late to make an online booking for the lunchtime mass at the London Oratory, but the reservations system for the tea-time mass was still open, so he’s booked that, on a system that hilariously resembles the booking system for a commercial theatre, except that it concludes, which they don’t, with God Bless You.

Kate Andrews

Backsliding on a lockdown end-date has begun already

From our UK edition

Will England’s lockdown end on 2 December? Even before this morning’s media round there was good reason to suspect it might not. The first national lockdown - we were originally told - would be for three weeks, with the explicit aim of building more capacity in the National Health Service. But the goalposts shifted and three weeks turned into more than three months: despite daily Covid deaths peaking in April, pubs and restaurants didn’t reopen until early July. Weeks later gyms and other leisure sectors followed, and public transport guidance changed to encourage employees back to their offices.

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: new lockdown ‘could be extended’

From our UK edition

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: https://twitter.com/RidgeOnSunday/status/1322825323625484288?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw 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: Is that 'yes'? MG: Yes.

James Kirkup

The country’s biggest teaching union would deny kids their education

From our UK edition

Britain’s first lockdown hammered our kids. Being away from school for months widened the educational gap between rich and poor and harmed the prospects and wellbeing of children from low-income homes. Knowing that, what do you call people who want to close schools again? Here’s the punchline, although it’s not funny: teachers. Or more accurately, teachers’ unions. You might have missed this on a grim Saturday afternoon, but even before Boris Johnson had confirmed Lockdown 2, the National Education Union was calling for schools to be included. That would mean another month (at least) away from school for millions of kids, followed by reduced schooling.

Thursday

The Spectator

Where is there water in the solar system?

From our UK edition

The Moon under water Nasa scientists using spectrometers claim to have found good evidence of water on the surface of the Moon. Where else in the solar system could you potentially go for a dip? — Signs of hidden oceans have been detected on Jupiter’s moons Ganymede, Europa and Callisto and on Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus. The latter is also believed to have icy geysers. Water is also believed to exist in craters on Mercury. — There are signs of ample water having been on Mars in the past, although most is believed to have been stripped away along with its atmosphere. The planet may, however, still have water beneath its surface and locked in ice caps at its poles. Free school meals How many children qualify for free school meals? In January, 15.

Monday

Ross Clark

Covid or no Covid, social distancing could be here to stay

From our UK edition

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 on FluNet, the global influenza surveillance and response system and found remarkably low levels of the disease this year.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

I removed my mask and all hell broke loose

From our UK edition

The girl in the posh soap shop put her right arm out, palm flat in my face, and shouted: ‘Stand back! Step away from me now if you are going to remove your mask!’ I had been advancing on the Vetiver handwash, having failed to make myself clear through my mask to the assistant in her mask that this was what I wanted to buy and, being prevented from picking it up myself as the shop had a no-touch policy, I was driven to the brink of lawlessness. ‘Vetiver!’ I had begun pleading through my face mask as the girl lifted the wrong product off the shelves, over and over again. She set Bergamot in front of me. She set Eucalyptus in front of me. ‘Vetiver!’ I begged, but all that was coming out was ‘e-i-ur!

Martin Vander Weyer

Who’d want the job of vaccinating the nation?

From our UK edition

Is that a light at the end of the tunnel — or a second lockdown thundering unstoppably towards us? News of a viable vaccine is the one development in the Covid drama that could drag the national mood out of the current despair that’s pulverising economic recovery; it would also provoke a euphoric stock market rally. And it’s clearly getting closer. But how close? The chance of a magic potion for Christmas remains ‘slim’, according to Vaccine Taskforce chair Kate Bingham; spring next year is a safer bet, says chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, adding that ‘we should not overpromise’.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Can I still socialise with my virus-denying friends?

From our UK edition

Q. An old friend offered to treat me to a birthday lunch, provided I choose and book the restaurant myself. (He has always hated admin.) On booking, the restaurant asked me for a £50 deposit — this to deter no-shows — and I was told this would be refundable on our arrival. When the bill was presented my friend characteristically just handed over his card without even glancing at it. The next day, on noting that my deposit had not been refunded, I rang up this agreeable local restaurant. It turned out there had been a misunderstanding. They had not refunded my account but had instead reduced my friend’s bill by £50. It’s not that I want the £50 back.