Covid

In recent days, it has been striking how many people in Westminster and Whitehall now think the lab leak theory is the most plausible explanation of Covid’s origins. China’s apparent success last year at stamping out the virus at home — with technological competence and sheer brutality — while cases spiked in the West, created a fear that the future belonged to Beijing.  But, as I say in the magazine this week, the growing plausibility that the virus leaked from a lab highlights the Achilles’ heel of the Chinese system: its lack of a mechanism for error correction. It is not that a lab leak couldn’t have happened in the democratic world, but it is far harder to imagine it being covered up here.

Amidst the drama of Dominic Cummings's appearance in front of MPs last week, perhaps the most important thing the PM's former adviser said was almost entirely ignored. As well as slating his former boss, Cummings criticised the UK’s disaster planning. The pandemic has shifted attention to how Britain would deal in the future with another respiratory virus, but arguably a bigger threat to this country – and, indeed, the world – has been forgotten. When it comes to dealing with solar flares, Cummings's said, ‘the current Government plan is completely hopeless. If that happens then we’re all going to be in a worse situation than Covid’.

Did Matt Hancock’s negligence lead to Covid seeding into care homes because patients were not tested before being discharged? This was one of Dominic Cummings’s more potent charges  and it brings back memories for me because I spent a chunk of last summer looking into this. In my line of work, the success rate for stories is quite low: investigate five avenues and you’re likely to find four dead ends. So you end up with a lot of data and research that’s never used, because the original premise doesn’t hold up. I was (and remain) critical of much of government policy on Covid response: it seemed horribly plausible to me that panicked NHS discharges were behind the staggering care home death count.

It is hard to remember a time when the daily drip of Covid statistics was not part of our lives. Since March 2020, we have been greeted every afternoon with a stream of government released data filling us in on the number of infections, hospitalisations and deaths. But how necessary is it today? With a current seven-day average of only seven Covid deaths a day, the lowest level since 15 March 2020, what do we stand to gain by continuing with this current approach? It is becoming increasingly apparent that the Indian variant is not going to swamp hospitals – and that concerns about fully unlocking on 21 June are over-egged. Even if this particular variant does prove to be more transmissible, the effectiveness of the vaccines prevents it from being of much concern.

Here it was. At long last. Dominic Cummings in the flesh at the parliamentary select committee. He was dressed in the same immaculate white cotton shirt that he sported for his ‘agony in the garden’ appearance in Downing Street a year ago. But this time he wasn’t in the dock. He was like a school governor on prize-giving day, handing out gongs, and delivering the odd stiff rebuke to senior prefects. Matt Hancock got a dressing-down he won’t forget. He was accused of misleading officials and the public. ‘He should have been fired for at least 15 or 20 things,’ said Dom, ‘for lying to everyone on multiple occasions.’ Whoops. Time for Hancock to start work on his memoirs. Boris got off fairly lightly.

I am bemused by Boris Johnson’s optimism about the prospects for full unlocking on 21 June, based on the data he says he is seeing. Because the government’s own daily published data is showing worrying trends for the Indian variant. For example, there were 280 Covid infections reported for Bolton alone yesterday, 10 per cent of the UK total, and as you can see here the trend is steeply upward: That would be less worrying if there was also a steep rise in Covid testing in Bolton. But there isn't. As you can see here, the ratio of positive test results to tests carried out in Bolton – the positivity ratio – is holding fairly steady at about 7.5. It is obviously encouraging that there has not been a sharp associated rise in hospitalisations.

While the Indian variant continues to dominate the headlines, India itself seems to have dropped out of the news a bit. What is going on there?  It was reported yesterday that India notched up a record number of Covid deaths on Tuesday – 4525 – which indeed was the record of any country during the pandemic. However, that number needs to be put in the context of the country’s population of 1.3 billion. Grim as it is, it works out at 3.5 deaths per million. This is a fraction of the 27.6 deaths per million recorded in Britain on 20 January 2021. Tuesday’s figure is likely to be the high tide mark in India’s second wave of Covid Tuesday’s figure is also likely to be the high tide mark in India’s second wave of Covid.