Ross Clark

Today is England’s last day under Plan B restrictions, brought in by the government at the beginning of last month to curb the spread of Omicron. Work-from-home guidance was scrapped last week, while mandatory face coverings in shops and on public transport — as well as the need to show vaccine passports at large venues — are to be lifted tomorrow. Was there any point in these restrictions in the first place? We will never know, of course, what would have happened had the government not brought them in — no one has conducted a controlled experiment on an identical England where Plan B was never introduced.

Warning to the working classes: the government is coming after your pleasures again. It is you who are being blamed for environmental degradation and you who will be made to pay the price. The latest wheeze of environment secretary George Eustice is to ban plastic sachets of tomato ketchup, soy sauce and whatever else from takeaways. Evidence has shown, he says, that these little sachets 'can cause considerable harm to the marine and terrestrial environment when disposed of incorrectly'.  Fair enough, in that we would all be better off if food manufacturers could find biodegradable substitutes for their packaging. But why is it always what might be described as common pleasures which ministers fixate upon when trying to solve social and environmental problems?

'A stain on our soul'. That was how Gordon Brown, in his latest missive on the subject, described the failure of the west to ensure that the whole world is vaccinated. In a previous attack on western policy — at the end of November, just as Omicron was emerging — he wrote of “hoarding” and 'vaccine nationalism'. Take Africa: it is certainly true that vaccination rates in many countries are very low. While the UK has managed to deliver 195 doses per 100 people, Nigeria has only managed seven, Ethiopia and Somalia nine, and Chad and South Sudan two. Can all this be blamed on the failure of western nations to donate vaccines?

It’s post-Christmas, and there are already murmurs about supermarkets with empty shelves. Just as with the petrol shortage in September and shortages of loo paper at the beginning of the first lockdown, these things can rapidly develop into major crises, purely as a result of panic-buying. Tesco, whose store on the Isle of Wight is reportedly especially empty post-Christmas, denies it has any problem with its supply chain — which had been threatened with disruption thanks to an industrial dispute involving the company’s lorry drivers in early December. People may, on the other hand, have stocked up more than usual in response to fears of a post-Christmas lockdown — a fear which appears for the moment to have gone away.

Public health officials in Britain and South Africa were on different planets for about a fortnight. While those in South Africa kept presenting data suggesting that Omicron caused less severe disease than earlier variants, scientists in Britain continued to claim it was too early to say. Scenarios published by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) last week pictured a frightening picture of January, suggesting that hospitalisations could peak above previous waves. An assumption was made that Omicron was just as likely to land you in hospital or kill you compared with Delta. As LSHTM admitted, quite a big assumption:- Due to a lack of data, we assume Omicron has the same severity as Delta.

There were two takeaways from last night’s press conference: firstly, the hard data showing that the number of recorded cases of Covid had surged by 19,000 – or 28 per cent – in a single day. Second was the assertion that, as a result, the NHS is in danger of being overwhelmed. What was lacking was the hard data on hospitalisations and the number of people in hospital. Although you would never have guessed from the tone of the conference, these both fell. The number of people admitted to hospital – a figure which runs a few days in arrears owing to a delay in the four constituent nations of the UK collating their data – fell from 800 to 774, the lowest figure recorded in a week.

If you haven’t yet been approached about having a Covid booster jab, your phone is about the spring into life – and it is unlikely to let you forget it until you agreed to have your third dose of the vaccine. The Prime Minister’s announcement on Sunday evening that every adult is to be offered a jab by the end of December, as opposed to the end of January as previously planned, will mean averaging a million jabs a day – even more than the peak of the inoculation programme in the spring. But there is a price to pay, and health secretary Sajid Javid admitted as much on this morning’s Today programme.

Why is the government so scared of the Omicron variant? So far, most of the evidence we have for transmissibility and virulence of Omicron is based on very limited data from South Africa, but the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has now published its own preliminary study of the variant — the results of which will presumably have been available to ministers and scientific advisers prior to Wednesday’s decision to enact ‘Plan B’. They appear to show a variant which is more transmissible, more likely to evade vaccines and more likely to reinfect people who have previously had Covid. But there is a very big caveat: they are based on tiny numbers of Omicon cases.

There was nothing but gloom about the Omicron variant at yesterday’s No. 10 press conference. But with reporters preoccupied with last year’s Christmas parties, no one thought to bring up a statement by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the WHO, who earlier told reporters that there is ‘some evidence that Omicron causes milder disease than Delta, but again it’s still too early to be definitive.’  You don’t want to make decisions before you have good evidence, but if it does turn out that Omicron is a milder disease, won’t the government’s efforts to suppress it with travel bans and restrictions be counter-productive?

London is the most congested city in the world and it’s the cycle lanes wot done it. That is the impression you will pick up from the headlines this morning.  'Cycle Lanes Blamed as City Named Most Congested,' reads a BBC headline, to take but one example. The story emerges, it turns out, from a global index published by transport consultancy Inrix, which claims that motorists in London spent an average of 148 hours in traffic jams this year, more than in any other country in the world. In the past year, the city climbed from being the 16th most-congested of those studied to the most congested of that lot.