Month: June 2020

What on earth does the Government think it's doing? What possible reason is there for reimposing a full lockdown on Leicester? In an act of sheer lunacy, Matt Hancock announced this morning that non-essential shops have been told to close today and schools asked to shut their doors to the majority of children from Thursday. Pubs, restaurants and hair salons that have been gearing up to re-open on Saturday have now been told to remain closed. The rationale, needless to say, is that Leicester has seen a "surge" in cases, with over 900 new cases in the past two weeks. Confusion surrounded this figure since the published data for Leicester recorded just 80 new positive tests between June 13th and 26th. But Hancock now says there were in fact 944. How do we know the increase in cases isn't simply an artefact of increased testing in Leicester? We don't, obviously. The 80 figure is based on Pillar 1 data, which are from tests done in hospitals; the 944 figure is based on Pillar 2 data, which are from tests done at Government centres or at home and processed by commercial labs. But surely the hospital data are more reliable than the community data – although these are all PCR tests and they're all notoriously unreliable (see this Off-Guardian piece). And ...

Holiday bookings have exploded on the eve of the Government's "air bridges" announcement, according to the Daily Mail. Over the weekend, Britain's biggest travel websites saw inquires for some European destinations rise by 350 per cent and bookings were up by as much as 80 per cent on the week before.Travellers are being tempted by promised savings of up to 76%.The reductions mean it is possible for a family of four to save more than £500 on the headline price of a sunshine break.Such was the surge in interest that the Eurostar website ground to a halt under the weight of bookings. I looked at booking a family holiday in Santorini in July on Sunday, but when I checked Greece was still conducting port-of-entry screenings and insisting that new arrivals who test negative quarantine themselves for seven days. Doesn't sound like a barrel of laughs. Beware the Jabberwocky Second Wave So how worried should we be about a second wave? Readers will know my answer to that question, not least because I wrote a piece about it for the Telegraph on Friday. Let's start with Sweden. At this point, I'm going to hand over to Freddie Sayers, the editor of UnHerd. UnHerd's coverage of the pandemic has been consistently excellent. Freddie had a good article in the Sunday Telegraph about ...

A pedestrian in Florida doing her best to protect herself from infection No update today, but am planning one for tomorrow looking at the rise in infections in those US states that were among the first to ease shutdown restrictions. In light of this rise, should we be worried about a "second wave" in the UK? You can probably guess the answer...

Bournemouth beach earlier today. Looks like the British public have decided lockdown is over Lockdown is over as far as the British public is concerned. At least, it is when it's the hottest day of the year with temperatures peaking at 33.3C, as they did today. Half a million people descended on the Dorset coastline, according to the Times, creating a "major incident". The council said it had issued 558 parking fines in 24 hours and dealt with congested roads into the early hours this morning. With campsites still closed, large numbers of people pitched camp illegally.In the area between Bournemouth’s piers eight tonnes of waste were collected yesterday on the second collection run of the day. This morning, a further 33 tonnes of waste were removed along the full stretch of coastline. The Daily Mail has more. A major incident was declared in Bournemouth today after thousands of people flocked to Britain's beaches, leaving the emergency services "stretched to the absolute hilt" on the second hottest day of the year in a row.Furious council bosses said they were "appalled" at the scenes on the Dorset coast, blasting the "irresponsible behaviour and actions of so many people" as temperatures hit 91.9F (33.3C) in southern England this afternoon.Police desperately urged people to "stay away" and "think twice before heading to the ...

by Guy de la Bédoyère I had two important things before me; the one was the carrying on of my Business and Shop; which was considerable, and in which was embark’d all my Effects in the World; and the other was the Preservation of my Life in so dismal a Calamity, as I saw apparently was coming upon the whole City; and which however great it was, my Fears perhaps as well as other People’s, represented to be much greater than it could be.Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year Defoe’s celebrated work was a form of historical fiction. Written in the manner of first-hand experience of the Plague of 1665, it first appeared in 1722. Nonetheless, it has long been recognized as an extraordinarily powerful account of life in London when the bacterium yersinia pestis wrought havoc. To put that terrible year into perspective, London’s deaths from the Plague at its height in September 1665 were in excess of 6,000 per week. Pro rata that would be the equivalent today of around 130,000 deaths in London in just seven days, and around half a million in a month. This passage focused on the dilemma Defoe’s character faced. How was he supposed to flee for safety, while at the same time prevent his business in London going under? Crucially he ...

Apologies for not filing an update yesterday. Been incredibly busy with Free Speech Union business for the last couple of days. As regular readers will know, we wrote to Ofcom at the beginning of June informing the broadcast watchdog that if it didn't withdraw its coronavirus guidance, which cautions its licensees against broadcasting "statements that seek to question or undermine the advice of public health bodies on the Coronavirus, or otherwise undermine people’s trust in the advice of mainstream sources of information about the disease", we would apply to the High Court to have that guidance struck down. It would be an exaggeration to say it has played a major role in suppressing public debate about the pandemic and the Government's management of it. But it has undoubtedly been a factor. Anyway, Ofcom has dug its heels in so we're pressing ahead. We had to file all the papers by close of play today and, inevitably, it was a last-minute rush. Apart from me, the team consists of two members of the FSU's Legal Advisory Council – Dan Tench and Paul Diamond, both working pro bono – and Peter Ainsworth, the FSU's Case Management Director. We had to challenge the guidance within three months of it being published and since it was published on March 23rd, the same day the Government ...

by Rudolph Kalveks This was the snapshot of the parameters that describe the shape of the Coronavirus epidemic in terms of simple SIR models, based on the death statistics up to June 7th, shown in Table 1 of Canaries in the Mine: We can repeat the analysis making use of the additional death statistics over the two weeks up to June 21st. We observe that over this two week interval: There has been no substantial change in any of the parameters in Europe, USA, Australia.In particular, the parameter gamma for fatally susceptible sub-populations has only fluctuated by a couple of percent in these countries over the two weeks.Parameters for fatally susceptible sub-populations are looking better in South Africa, but worse in Brazil and India, and also worse globally. In conclusion, although the epidemics are obviously further progressed, over the last two weeks there has been no signal for any material change in the shape of the epidemic SIR model curves in Europe, the USA and Australia. Thus, the relaxation of lockdowns (well documented elsewhere) has so far had no discernible impact on the recovery from the epidemic in these countries. This undermines the analysis by Flaxman et al (published June 8th in Nature) that continues to predict a tenfold increase in the population at risk from the relaxation of lockdown ...

Teachers Urged to Give Up Part of Six-Week Summer Holiday Boris Johnson (pictured visiting a school in Hemel Hempstead on Friday) has solemnly promised that schools will return fully in September and hinted at an imminent shift on the two-metre rule A cross-party group of former education ministers is urging teachers to give up some of their six-week summer holiday so schools can reopen in September, according to Sian Griffiths in the Sunday Times. Five former education secretaries have backed a plan to get all children back to class in September, including a demand that teachers curtail their six-week summer holiday to deal with the “national emergency”.Under the plan, put together by Lord Adonis, a former Labour minister for schools, the Government must confirm the social-distancing rules, appoint a national director of school operations to oversee safe reopening, and bring back teachers in August to get schools ready. Hang on, I thought, when I read that. Haven't we already got a "national director of school operations" in the form of Education Secretary Gavin Williamson? But as the Mail reports, he may be for the chop. Mr Williamson's soft approach with the teachers' unions had damaged his reputation."Gavin played nicely with the unions in the hope that they would sign up, and they didn't. People in there know how you take ...

Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional: week ending June 5th 2020 You can see ONS date of death statistics here (Figure 9). These data are complete up to June 5th for date of death. Delays in registration were excessive back in March and April, but they seem to have got their act together according to other ONS reports. Now most or all deaths are supposedly being registered within seven days (hence the reference to registrations up to June 13th for this Fig 9). In the graphic below I have taken seven-day averages of these same data, and plotted alongside the total deaths reported by the media according to registration date in the DHSC releases. I am not sure why the DHSC seem to be reporting fewer deaths overall (area under curve), but critically the delay in registration of deaths (especially from care homes) means that the daily briefings fail to convey just how much the daily death rate has actually fallen. And since June 5th these rates will have fallen even further. It is peculiar and disappointing that around the start of June the Government stopped releasing the number of daily COVID-19 deaths in hospitals. If that is now approaching a few tens per day, we can assume (by extrapolation) the same is true for daily COVID-19 deaths ...

by Phil Shannon The Durham Miners' Gala Preamble The contemporary left’s support for an economically devastating, authoritarian lockdown, which doesn’t even achieve its limited public health aims, is one of the more remarkable developments in current politics. With its support for extreme ‘social distancing’, the left has reached a new nadir in the ‘political distancing’ between it and its traditional working class constituency, a relationship that has been fraying badly since the democratic, national, working class populist upsurge of recent years as symbolised by the Brexit referendum, the thumping Get-Brexit-Done electoral victory of Boris Johnson, and the surprising Trump miracle. The left’s lockdown betrayal of the working class further accelerates its decline into political irrelevance. This is not a cause for celebration, especially for someone like myself, a four-decade Australian veteran of working class socialism including as a trade union activist, and member of the Communist Party of Australia and more Trotskyist grouplets than you could shake a Program of the Fourth International at, who still cooks on the left burner (see author's page here). What follows is an attempt to understand how and why the left has got into such a pickle over lockdown and how it can begin to resurrect its political integrity. Why the left (and not just the left) should oppose lockdown Science The virus is ...