The Government has awarded Serco and Mitie new testing contracts – worth up to £687 million collectively – to support the Test and Trace system. The contracts could run for up to 18 months.
We're reprinting a brilliant article in Lockdown Sceptics by Steve Waterson, an editor at the Australian, about the ruinous Zero Covid strategy being pursued on the QT by the Australian Government.
by Steve Waterson Personal hygiene's a funny thing. What’s important to one person is of little significance to another, which I suppose explains the range of odours that perfume public transport. Last Saturday I was waiting behind an old lady in my local greengrocers on Sydney’s north shore. She was evidently searching for the city’s most texturally perfect tomato, touching, squeezing and caressing every one her little arms could reach, between making small adjustments to her ill-fitting and slightly sodden blue-paper mask. I was tempted, as I always am in these circumstances, to lean over, point and say to her, “Excuse me, there’s one there you haven't touched.” Instead what fascinated me was that here she was, engaged in a super-smearer event, picking up whatever microbes the previous old lady had left behind, but sufficiently frightened of coronavirus to wear a useless mask: useless not because she wasn't wearing it properly, but because evidence suggests cheap masks offer at best minimal protection from the virus, whose nanometre particles go through the weave like a golf ball through the Harbour Tunnel (I know, it travels in larger droplets, but droplets dry, and then what?); at worst they concentrate and nurture whatever germs land on them in a hospitably warm and moist environment. Masks, of course, serve higher purposes: worn voluntarily, they ...
A review of 35 studies comparing changes in childhood vaccination services before and during Covid has found that Covid and lockdowns have massively disrupted vaccine roll-outs, affecting millions of children worldwide.
In 2016, there were 181,384 casualties on Britain’s roads, including 1,792 deaths. And emissions from road transport cause 4,900 early deaths every year. So should the Government prevent people from driving cars?
The Australian Government is expected make Covid vaccination mandatory for care workers, as well as for quarantine workers, due to concerns over the Delta variant.
Allies of Sajid Javid say his approach to Covid will be so different to Hancock's because he is less "nanny state-ish". But in his first speech as Health Secretary, he will tell Brits that July 5th is too soon to unlock.
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.
