Sweden

There is a kind of conversation which sounds intelligent, and which makes sense at first hearing, but which deeper thought reveals to be stupid. A classic example of this is the dinner party trope where some poncy polyglot belittles the British or Americans for being terrible at learning foreign languages. The raw facts seem to bear this out. But further consideration reveals a reason behind this discrepancy. Seen through the lens of time, it is much harder to learn a foreign language if your first language is English than if it isn’t. How so? Well let’s imagine how a Swede, say, might approach the issue: 1. ‘Do I need to learn another language?’ 2. ‘What language should I learn first?’ Easy answers. 1. ‘Yes’ and 2.

Ask the English Sir: Toby Young rightly criticises the juvenile posturing of the devolved governments of the Union over Covid-19 (No sacred cows, 24 October). Each of these governments has implemented extreme lockdown measures without consideration of their cost to the taxpayer. As 90 per cent of British taxpayers are English, this represents an egregious example of ‘taxation without representation’. In contrast, I watched the Commons announcement of a Tier 3 lockdown in the north of England, which was followed by an opposition reply, and then a reply from the SNP. Surely I wasn’t the only Englishman to ask: ‘What’s it got to do with them?’ Toby Young is right to call for a new referendum to bring this nonsense to a halt.

Just how many people have died of Covid-19, as opposed to having died with the virus? It is a poignant question, especially after it was revealed that Public Health England had been counting a Covid death as anyone who died after testing positive for the virus, even if they swiftly recovered and went on to die of some other cause, like under a proverbial bus. A study by the health authorities in the Östergötland region of south-eastern Sweden aims to answer the question. The study looks at the cases of 122 people who have died in the region outside of a hospital setting – either at home or in accommodation for the elderly – and whose deaths were attributed to Covid-19. Half of this group were aged 88 or over.

When I worked in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur long ago, my office looked across Jalan Tun Razak, a boulevard named in honour of the country’s second prime minister and ‘father of development’. This week his son Najib Razak, its sixth prime minister (2009-2018), was convicted of charges relating to the disappearance of $4.5 billion from a sovereign wealth fund called 1MDB which he once controlled. More trials await, but 1MDB may go down not only as the world’s biggest corruption scandal but also the most vulgar — proceeds that might have helped Malaysia’s poor having been frittered on private jets, penthouses, parties in Las Vegas and the financing of The Wolf of Wall Street.

Who occupies the post of chief adviser to the prime minister is not generally an issue of great interest to the public. That Dominic Cummings has come to dominate the news for several days is partly explained by the long shadow of Brexit and his role in the referendum campaign. But it is no use attributing to that alone the furore over his decision to travel from London to Durham at the height of lockdown. People are genuinely aggrieved that when they have made personal sacrifices to conform to the ‘stay at home’ edict, a man who helped devise those rules appears not to have done the same. In vain might Mr Cummings argue that the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020 gives leeway for his journey. He acted as a responsible husband and father.

I originally had Neil Ferguson down as a kind of Henry Kissinger figure. The professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London seemed to have bewitched successive prime ministers, blinding them with his brilliance. Whenever a health emergency broke out, whether it was mad cow disease or avian flu, there he was, PowerPoint in hand, telling the leaders of the country what to do. And they invariably fell into line. In 2001, after the outbreak of foot and mouth, his team at Imperial advised Tony Blair’s government to adopt a strategy of pre-emptive culling, leading to the slaughter of more than six million animals.

It has become clear that a hard lockdown does not protect old and frail people living in care homes – a population the lockdown was designed to protect. Neither does it decrease mortality from Covid-19, which is evident when comparing the UK's experience with that of other European countries. PCR testing and some straightforward assumptions indicate that, as of April 29, 2020, more than half a million people in Stockholm county, Sweden (which is about 20–25 per cent of the region’s population) have been infected. 98 to 99 per cent of these people are probably unaware or uncertain of having had the infection; they either had symptoms that were severe, but not severe enough for them to go to a hospital and get tested, or no symptoms at all.