Lockdown

Can the High Street recover from the Covid crisis? Even before lockdown, around 14 shops were shutting every day, and 2019 was the worst year for sales in a quarter of a century. After months of enforced closure, shops have finally reopened. But with mandatory face masks, social distancing and roped-off fitting rooms – and no indoor cafes, or restaurants to punctuate a day of retail therapy – shopping will be vastly inferior to the pre-Covid experience.  Nonetheless, there are good reasons to be bullish on the future of the high street – and too many commentators are being needlessly gloomy on its prospects. For a start, households have accumulated significant savings during lockdown.

For all that has gone wrong in America in the last year, the main thing that has gone right is our system of 50 independent states has endured and prospered. The COVID-19 pandemic was a challenge to our federalist system. The impulse in March 2020 was to have all states respond in the same way to the virus. Of course, in a country with large cities and small cities, sprawling suburbs, small towns, extremely rural areas and everything in between, that made little sense. We quickly corrected it and governors took control of COVID-19 policies for their states. The results of that have been astonishing. States that had tight lockdowns, such as New York, New Jersey and Michigan, did not see better outcomes than states which loosened their lockdowns early on.

After a year in which young people have lost their jobs, been denied time in the classroom and at university and not been allowed to see their friends, could they now be penalised again? Boris Johnson said we 'have to be very careful how you handle this and don't start a system that is discriminatory' when vaccine passports, or 'Covid status certification', were raised at a briefing this week. Yet it's hard to imagine a more grossly unfair, discriminatory system than introducing vaccine passports before young people have the opportunity to be vaccinated. Young people have sacrificed so much for a disease that they are relatively invulnerable to.

The biggest question facing Boris Johnson is the future of his so-called vaccine passports. A few months ago, the idea was dismissed by No. 10 as 'discriminatory'. Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said: 'We are not a papers-carrying country.' But now, without debate or democratic scrutiny, vaccine passports are quickly heading from unthinkable to unstoppable. Today, No. 10 released more details — hence the questions Johnson is facing. But bizarrely, the Prime Minister was unable to admit to any of it, and pretended to be confused by what he was being asked. This matters.

The 10 Downing Street press conferences on Covid-19 tend not to show graphs about cancer care. We see various charts by statisticians and epidemiologists, but the impact of lockdown on patients with time critical conditions such as cancer has been largely ignored. The disruption of cancer services is a global phenomenon, but the suspension of screening services and failure to protect cancer services in the UK has resulted in 40,000 less cancers being diagnosed last year, compared to 2019. The true scale of the cancer backlog has yet to be acknowledged by the UK government, far less prioritised with specific additional funding. Denial could cost lives.

How strange to have spent a year in a world where to hug someone outside of your household is not allowed. For the past five days, six people in England have been able to meet up outdoors again, but only in a socially distanced way. Previously, the argument for crackdown on such instinctive human behaviour centred around hospitals being overrun. Today, the Covid data tells a very positive story, with infections, hospitalisations and deaths all down by 90 per cent or more since the most recent peak. Meanwhile, the right data is going up, with over half of the UK adult population having received at least their first dose of a Covid vaccine, and the top nine priority groups still on track to have been offered a first jab in less than two weeks' time.

Has the pandemic really been good for the way the NHS treats mental health? That’s the rather startling claim I report on today in my i paper column. Ministers have started to talk — equally surprisingly, it has to be said — about the possibility that they are close to reaching parity of esteem between the treatment of mental and physical health, and that the chaos of Covid is partly responsible. Covid has certainly made it harder for the government to just offer talk and no cash on mental health Now, it slightly depends on what your definition of ‘parity of esteem’ is.

On New Year’s Eve, Emmanuel Macron promised France an economic revival by the Spring. Cancel that. Instead, as the intensive care units are saturated by a third wave of Covid, we have a new lockdown light and a new message from the president: ‘Don’t panic.’ More than a year after Macron the general took personal command of the war on the new coronavirus, the vaccination program has still to get into high gear, the doctors are threatening to triage patients, abandoning those with little hope, yet there was no hint of contrition from the president. Instead, he announced that we are to be subjected to yet another baffling set of rules which together comprise a sort of ‘confinement,’ although Macron never used the word.

Britain’s Covid data is moving in the right direction. Today’s update from the Office for National Statistics confirms this on one of the most critical measures: excess deaths. For the second consecutive week, deaths in England and Wales are below the five-year average. In the latest week ending 19 March, there were 10,311 registered deaths — 676 fewer deaths than the week before and down 8 per cent on the average. The good news doesn’t stop there. Not only are deaths down (more than 90 per cent below the peak of the latest wave) but the vaccine factor is also showing its effect.

On the day that people are finally allowed to gather in groups of six outside, tennis games get underway and wild swimmers take to Instagram en masse, Boris Johnson attempted to land a message of caution with the nation. Speaking at today's press conference, the Prime Minister spoke of the need to 'proceed with caution' as the country takes a 'small step to freedom today'.  The nerves in government point to a problem that will only grow as the vaccination programme continues at pace The PM pointed to Covid cases rising across the Channel as a cause for concern that shows the need to 'continue flat out to build the immunity of our population (and) build our defences against that wave when it comes'.