Lockdown

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

Corona Derangement Syndrome

Everything to do with this virus is now false news. All the statistics are meaningless: we have no reliable means of calculating the spread and depth of the disease, either from country to country or even within a single country. Pompous dumbos, a vibrant and important tranche of our respective commentariats, insist we must pay no heed to anything but the ‘science’. But nobody knows what the science is. The epidemiologists disagree among themselves. Other branches of the medical profession (those whose interest is in, say, malaria, or cancer), as well as statisticians, are astonished by what they see as an overreaction to an illness which really isn’t quite punching its weight in the Grim Reaper stakes.

lockdowns derangement lockdown
Gavin Mortimer

The return of the deep shelter mentality

From our UK edition

Seven weeks confined to a city apartment changes a man. Trees, for example, have never been a particular passion of mine but recently I've spent many happy moments studying the plane tree outside my bedroom window, and in particular the magpies' nest therein. On Saturday a baby magpie emerged from the nest and edged tentatively along a branch. There it stayed for several minutes until it retreated to the security of its nest. On Sunday, the Observer reported that a similar nervousness now afflicts the British. According to the paper, fewer than one in five of the public believe the time is right to end the lockdown. Britain is not alone in its apprehension.

Patrick O’Flynn

Boris needs to start treating Brits like adults again

From our UK edition

It turns out that the biggest problem associated with lockdown hasn’t been the ‘covidiots’ – that tiny minority of people who ignored social distancing measures – but the ‘hunker in the bunker’ brigade who, after six weeks of house arrest, can barely envisage ever returning to normal life. Opinion polling shows the UK has one of the most risk averse populations in the world when it comes to the notion of restrictions being lifted. Nearly three quarters of us say we will be ‘very nervous’ about leaving home when limitations on our movement are removed, according to Ipsos Mori.

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Sweden tames its ‘R number’ without lockdown

From our UK edition

Sweden has been the world’s Covid-19 outlier, pursuing social distancing but rejecting mandatory lockdown. Schools, bars and restaurants are open – albeit with strong voluntary social distancing compliance and streets that often look almost as empty as Britain’s. Has this been enough? Sweden’s public health agency has now published a study of its R number, a metric which the UK is using to judge the success of the lockdown. The UK objective is to push R below one, by which it means it wants the number of new cases to fall. Last week, the UK’s R number was estimated at 0.8 (± 0.2 points), a figure described as an achievement of lockdown. But Sweden’s reading is 0.85, with a smaller error margin of ±0.02pts.

Kate Andrews

The problem with immunity passports

From our UK edition

Could we see 'immunity passports' in Britain? Ministers are reportedly discussing them as a route out of lockdown. According to today’s Guardian, the UK tech firm Onfido is in discussion with ministers about creating a ‘digital certificate’ that would be issued to those who have already been infected with coronavirus – who are presumably more immune – so they could return to some resemblance of normal life, including heading back into work.

Sunday

Rachel Johnson

Lockdown has proven that we’re a nation of Sufferers, not Resisters

From our UK edition

When the post office and stores closed in our village on Exmoor, my youngest stared out of the car window as we drove past and saw its dreaded ‘Closed’ sign and ‘For sale’ placard outside for the first time. ‘That’s my whole childhood,’ he wailed, ‘GONE.’ As an over-50 who’s had peak everything, I can’t complain — out loud anyway — but I find the losses for younger generations too painful to contemplate. No travel, no parties, no pubs, no clubs, no sport, no sex, no education, a life unlived online for the foreseeable. Given how badly Oliver took that one tiny but vital enterprise shutting up shop, I’ve been shocked and impressed by how well millions have adapted to the closure of the country.

Friday

Michael Tracey

We can’t stop here, this is Biden Country

One of the most eye-popping coronavirus containment measures instituted anywhere in the country can currently be found in the small, oft-neglected state of Delaware. For most Americans, if they’re familiar with it at all, Delaware is experienced only as either a pass-through for travelers on I-95 or as a domestic tax haven referenced obliquely in the text of corporate fine-print. However, there are some hidden charms: quaint little beaches and such. A pandemic would not be the most advisable time to familiarize yourself with these subtle Delawarean glories, though, because you might get pulled over for having an out-of-state license plate. As of March 30, pursuant to an Emergency Order issued by Gov.

delaware biden
Katy Balls

Why Covid cuts are off the cards

From our UK edition

How will the UK recover after lockdown? Although social distancing is expected to continue for months, talk has turned to how the government will deal with its coronavirus debts. The Treasury is seeking to raise £180 billion over the next three months to meet its pledges – putting the UK on course to see its budget deficit rise to a level never seen before in peacetime. Some estimates put borrowing this financial year at over £300 billion, far outpacing the years following the financial crash. This has led a number of public figures to predict a return to the Cameron and Osborne era with mass cuts in the years ahead.

Thursday

Laura Freeman

What do your lockdown slippers say about you?

From our UK edition

Tartan, monogram, moccasin, clog. What do your slippers say about you? Trick us all you like with your office Manolos, your Loake loafers, your Louboutin mules, it’s the shame-making slippers that will tell us the truth. Fleece-lined slob or kittenish slip-on? Millennial Mahabis or ancestral tapestry? Japanese zori or plaited huarache? In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, when Henry Higgins returns from the opera and exclaims ‘I wonder where the devil my slippers are!’ the stage directions note: ‘Eliza returns with a pair of large down-at-heel slippers.’ In My Fair Lady they become, under Cecil Beaton’s instruction, a pair of black velvets.

Rachel Johnson

Rachel Johnson: What I wish I’d said about my brother’s treatment

From our UK edition

When the post office and stores closed in our village on Exmoor, my youngest stared out of the car window as we drove past and saw its dreaded ‘Closed’ sign and ‘For sale’ placard outside for the first time. ‘That’s my whole childhood,’ he wailed, ‘GONE.’ As an over-50 who’s had peak everything, I can’t complain — out loud anyway — but I find the losses for younger generations too painful to contemplate. No travel, no parties, no pubs, no clubs, no sport, no sex, no education, a life unlived online for the foreseeable. Given how badly Oliver took that one tiny but vital enterprise shutting up shop, I’ve been shocked and impressed by how well millions have adapted to the closure of the country.

Toby Young

Did anyone really believe what my wife wrote about me?

From our UK edition

One of the nice things about having a column in The Spectator is that I get a chance to reply to all the smears and lies published about me. Which brings me to my wife’s remarks in last week’s magazine. The editor asked the partners of regular contributors to write a few words on what it’s like living with us during lockdown and Caroline was unbelievably rude. Among other things, she accused me of being a ‘complete hypochondriac’, said the pandemic had sent my anxiety levels ‘through the roof’ and ascribed my own life-and-death battle with the virus to a bout of shingles brought on by the stress. Needless to say, this was manna from heaven for all the haters out there.

John Lee

Covid’s metamorphosis: has lockdown made the virus more deadly?

From our UK edition

‘Nothing makes sense in biology, except in the light of evolution,’ the splendidly named biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in 1973. It’s a good rule of thumb. Despite near-miraculous advances in medical science we remain biological beings, subject to biological laws. None is more central to our understanding of disease than evolution. Yet this theory remains poorly understood and poorly utilised in medicine. And an evolutionary perspective raises important questions about the drastic action we have been taking to confront Covid-19. Most doctors are too busy dealing with the day-to-day deluge of cases to have much time for what they may consider abstruse academic ideas.

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson’s cautious path out of lockdown

From our UK edition

Ever since Boris Johnson was admitted to hospital on 5 April, the government has been in a holding pattern. No big decision could be taken without the Prime Minister, but he was in no position to make one. He is now back at work, though, and has a plan for what to do next. Put simply, it is to drive the coronavirus transmission rate — the reproduction number, or ‘R’, which shows the expected number of infections directly generated by one case — down as low as possible and then stay on top of it through a ‘track, trace and test’ approach. In other words, the government is going to go South Korean on the virus. This raises the question: why wasn’t this the strategy all along?

Katy Balls

The competitive world of Covid brides

From our UK edition

I had planned to spend this Saturday in a large white dress, sipping rosé and cutting into a three-tier rhubarb pavlova. Instead, I’ll be drinking gin on my sofa as family members dial in to offer commiserations to me and my fiancé. I am a Covid bride — one of the many whose weddings have been put on hold because of the lockdown. While the pandemic has had devastating and irreversible effects on people’s lives, it has also left many engaged couples with nowhere to go. In our case, the marriage licence application had been sent, the father of the groom’s slideshow completed, bridesmaids’ dresses finally agreed on (this may have been the hardest bit of all) and the table plan was under way.

Roger Lewis

‘Social distance shaming’ is getting nasty

From our UK edition

The Queen said in her address to the nation that what’ll get us through the lockdown and its ramifications will be our traditional British good humour. I’m not certain. Tempers are beginning to fray — and as we are looking at another week, minimum, of house imprisonment, I predict disaster. It is getting quite tense out there. A day or so ago my wife and I, peaceable elderly folk, were bumbling along the promenade, here on the south coast. A jogger went past, shouting at us: ‘Effing morons!’ On his way back past us, he again said: ‘Effing morons! Take exercise!’ Had I a gun, I’d honestly have shot his head off. Joggers are always vile anyway, and the ones wearing face masks are the worst.

Susan Hill

Do we really want to go back to normal?

From our UK edition

On the day our A-level exams began some wit wrote on the blackboard: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.’ I thought of that again yesterday when a writer friend emailed: ‘Like you, I thought I would be much more productive but I do find it very hard to focus… and I still haven’t filed those boxes of books in the sitting room.’ The days fly by and the sunshine was a real bonus, for it is pleasant and surely good for the soul to sit in it, reading, dreaming, nodding off, and topping up our Vitamin D levels. I said here at the beginning of lockdown that I would finish the book I had already started, plus some short stories, this weekly column and the occasional book review.

Lionel Shriver

If this is a war, let’s fight it like one

From our UK edition

Under the cloud of conformity that has settled over the land as a replacement for air pollution, heretics who doubt the wisdom of annihilating a nation in the name of saving it are obliged to navigate around numerous disputational booby traps. You hate old people and want them to die (though some oddballs questioning the proportionality of wholesale lockdowns are old people). You’re only concerned for individual ‘liberty’ and refuse to make personal sacrifices for the greater good, so you’re unpatriotic. All you care about is money. You’re evidently a Trump supporter, and therefore you’re stuck with endorsing his advice to cure Covid-19 by drinking bleach.

Rory Sutherland

Is this the end of commuting?

From our UK edition

The brother of a friend in Durban was once given a generous donation by a wealthy aunt. ‘I hate to see you just hanging around indoors all day. Buy an old Land Rover. Go and see the real Africa.’ The brother took the money but bought an enormous television instead. When my friend visited, he found him watching a wildlife documentary in glorious high-definition Technicolor. ‘Why would I want to go and see Africa when I can bring Africa in here?’ he explained. I have a certain sympathy for this stoner approach to life. The ability to travel within your own mind seems to be a great gift — something to be cultivated. Instead we disparage it with terms such as ‘couch potato’. Yet it is really a mark of superior intelligence.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Why shouldn’t Cummings attend SAGE?

From our UK edition

One of the key committees advising the government is SAGE — the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies. At the weekend, there was a rumpus after the Guardian reported that Dominic Cummings had been present for some of its meetings; though given the enormity of what was being discussed there would have been problems if no one from Downing Street was at these meetings. Last night, Bloomberg reported on the SAGE meeting of 18 March. Alex Morales and Suzi Ring wrote that Dominic Cummings had at that meeting raised questions, including asking ‘why a lockdown was not being imposed sooner’.

Tuesday

Alan Cornett

Coronavirus Kentucky-style with Andy Beshear

Everyone in Kentucky knows what five o’clock means. It means it’s time for Andy.Andy, of course, is Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a mild mannered Democrat who defeated incumbent Matt Bevin in November by only 5,000 votes in a heavily red state. At the time, I wrote in The Spectator why that happened, but it certainly didn’t hurt that his father was the two-term governor before Bevin.Likely no governor in the nation has thrived the way Andy Beshear has during this time of pandemic lockdowns. Every day, seven days a week, Beshear speaks to Kentuckians from the state Capitol at 5 o’clock. His presentations have been compared to fireside chats and he to Mister Rogers.

andy beshear kentucky