Day: 1 May 2020

The Telegraph leads with Boris's announcement at yesterday's Downing Street press briefing that we are now "past the peak" and he will set out a "road map" next week on restarting the economy and reopening schools. (Robert Peston has more details.) In his first briefing since his return to work, the Prime Minister said the UK was "on the downward slope", but emphasised the country must not "risk a second spike". Further on in the same story the paper reveals that some ministers want to wait until the daily number of new infections falls into the hundreds before easing restrictions "after seeing Germany's infection rate rise when it eased its own lockdown". In fact, the infection rate hasn't gone up in Germany since it eased its lockdown last week. On Monday it ticked up to just under 1, but it has since declined and using a one-day rise to claim easing has triggered a second wave of infections is misleading, to put it mildly. The latest R0 number in Germany is 0.76 according to the Robert Koch Institute. The Cambridge statistician David Spiegelhalter has a good piece in the Guardian, outlining some of the difficulties involved in counting the total number of COVID-19 deaths and comparing the death rates of different countries. In Europe, the UK currently has the third-highest ...