Day: 7 April 2021

According to a Telegraph exclusive, the number of people with protection either through vaccination or previous infection will hit 73.4% on April 12th – the herd immunity threshold.

HSBC will move more than 1,200 staff in Britain to permanent working from home contracts in an attempt to cut costs post-lockdown(s).

Britons below the age of 30 will be offered alternatives to the AstraZeneca vaccine following advice from the MHRA. The medicines agency said there is a possible link between the AZ jab and "extremely rare" blood clots.

We're publishing an original piece by a Russel Group university-trained epidemiologist looking at why a consensus emerged so quickly last spring that the only way to manage the coronavirus outbreak was to lock everyone up.

Britain's rollout of the Moderna Covid vaccine began today amid disruptions in its supply of the AstraZeneca jab. The AZ vaccine is facing scrutiny regarding its connection to rare blood clots.

by Paul Bird In assessing the impact of COVID-19 on the country, the most important statistic has been the number of deaths Covid has caused. That figure is relayed to us many times a day by the BBC and all other media. But does it really convey the impact reliably, or are we being misled? I believe it is misleading. Firstly, there is some difficulty in defining the number itself. There have been many attempts, with definitions including: primary cause on the certificate; contributory cause on the certificate; death for any reason within 28 days or 60 days of having tested positive. None is regarded as completely satisfactory. More misleading than that though is the question of interpreting the number. Does it tell us how much impact Covid is having on the UK population? How can you compare it with the impact of other diseases? Crucially, the figure says nothing about how much life the victims would have had left to live if they had not died from the disease. Quoting a number of deaths carries the implication that had the victims not succumbed to the disease then they would not have died. But we all have to die sometime. So a fatal Covid infection does not so much cause a death as bring it forward. Life is lost. In ...

The "roadmap" out of lockdown could be sped up because of the success of Britain's vaccine rollout and despite overly pessimistic modelling by SAGE, according to a Government scientist.

A summary of all the most interesting stories that have appeared about the virus in the past 24 hours – not just in Britain, but around the world.

We're publishing a guest post by Dr David McGroggan, Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School, who is unconvinced by the Govt's claims that it can do nothing to stop employers introducing vaccine passports.