Ross Clark

Does catching the SARS-CoV-2 virus give us immunity from further infection by the virus or can we catch it a second time? The question has been given extra poignancy this week following Donald Trump’s tweet on Sunday, quickly censured by Twitter, claiming that he was immune. Before that row has had a chance to die down, a paper emerges in the Lancet Infectious Diseases reporting the possible reinfection of a 25-year-old man in Washoe County, Nevada. The timeline reported in the paper, by the university of Nevada, is as follows. The patient first developed symptoms – sore throat, cough, headache, nausea, diarrhoea – on 25 March. He tested positive for the virus at a community testing facility on 18 April. By 27 April, his symptoms had disappeared.

Two days ago, the Prime Minister told us we are at a critical point in the Covid-19 crisis as a second wave threatened to engulf us. He warned of a second national lockdown. Yesterday, in spite of evidence from Imperial College of a declining R number, Matt Hancock introduced new restrictions in Liverpool and Teeside. But is the government behind the curve, failing to notice that the second wave is already fizzling out? As I have argued here before, the daily numbers of confirmed cases are not a reliable indicator of the path of the epidemic.

So, the numbers of new Covid infections in the UK failed to register a fourth consecutive fall and instead rose to a new record of 7,143. This does not mean that the disease is spreading as rapidly as it did in the spring when far fewer tests were being undertaken, but the rise has nevertheless led morning news bulletins. Week on week, daily new infections have risen by 45.3 per cent: 42,608 in the week ending 29 September compared with 29,323 a week earlier. This is consistent with a doubling every 10 days or so. There are a few observations that have been less-well reported. Firstly, Monday’s sharp rise was exaggerated by an especially sharp rise in Scotland, where newly recorded cases nearly quadrupled from 222 on Monday to 806 on Tuesday.

New confirmed cases of Covid-19 have been rising now since early July — steadily at first and then sharply since early September. But is there any sign of an increase in deaths?    The latest weekly figures from the Office for National Statistics for deaths in England and Wales, released this morning, do record an increase in deaths where Covid-19 is mentioned on the death certificate. In week 38 (ending 18 September) there were 139 such deaths — 40 more than the previous week. To put that into perspective, they accounted for 1.5 per cent of all deaths. They continue to be dwarfed by deaths in which ‘influenza and pneumonia’ is mentioned as a cause — which accounted for 14 per cent of all deaths.

We have had plenty of anecdotes about people failing to be diagnosed with serious diseases during lockdown. This is thanks to either to hospitals cancelling appointments, GP surgeries stopping face-to-face meetings or people picking up the message that they should protect the NHS by trying not to use it.  It seems clear that the rush to lockdown had significant unintended consequences for healthcare But what about quantifying the problem? The National Institute for Health Research has attempted to do just this.

In a strategy that now appears to be one of outright suppression, the government has put huge stock in the approval of a vaccine before too long. But could the answer turn out to be not a vaccine but an anti-viral drug? Research by a team from Bristol University and published in the journal Science today has discovered a possible basis for a drug that could prevent the SARS-Cov-2 virus entering the human body.  While studying the spike protein that facilitates spread of the virus, the team, led by Imre Berger and Christiane Schaffitzel, unexpectedly found molecules of linoleic acid in a pocket of the protein.

Back in May I wrote about a study by La Jolla Institute for Immunology, which raised the possibility that exposure to coronaviruses which cause the common cold could offer some degree of immunity to Covid-19. Scientists involved in the research had discovered a reaction to Sars-CoV-2 – the virus which causes Covid-19 – in the T cells of people who had not been infected with the virus, but at the time they weren’t sure whether it was a strong enough reaction to offer any effective immunity. Since then, however, more and more evidence has emerged of T cell immune responses against Sars-CoV-2 which have been provoked by exposure to other coronaviruses, such as the common cold.

Perhaps the most reliable test of Covid-19 levels is carried out by the Office for National Statistics, which every week releases the results of random samples. The results, just published, show a striking divergence in age. Another significant rise amongst the young but, importantly, almost no rise amongst the over-70s who are those who made up the vast majority of deaths so far. For this week’s issue, out this morning, 208,730 people in England were swabbed in the mouth and throat. From this, it estimates that between 49,900 and 75,200 people are currently infected with the virus — with a central estimate of 59,800. This would equate to around one in 900 people — 0.12 per cent of the population — being infected.

It was easy to criticise Westminster for caving into Extinction Rebellion’s demands for a ‘citizen’s assembly’ on climate change when it agreed to convene just such a body at the end of last year. By appeasing the group’s law-breaking, so the argument went, parliament was emboldening XR and other direct action groups to block streets, spraypaint buildings, smash windows and so on.  But the exercise, which has just concluded in a handful of recommendations to government, has served one purpose: it has proved that the public’s views on climate change and what to do about it are nowhere near that of Extinction Rebellion.

It was only a matter of time before Covid-19 got swept up into the wider narrative of humans facing impending doom thanks to our abuse of the planet. But one might have expected better of Sir David Attenborough. His latest BBC documentary, Extinction: The Facts, broadcast on Sunday night might as well have been produced by Extinction Rebellion, so determined was it to present a hysterical picture of apocalypse caused by consumerism and capitalism. Just to ram home the point, one contributor, naturalist Robert Watson, spoke of 'many in the private sector making a huge profit at the expense of the natural world', seemingly oblivious to the far greater rape of the environment committed by the former Soviet Union and other socialist countries.