covid

Boris Johnson is running out of road

12 January 2022 5:05 am

There has been no good news for Boris Johnson today. After an email leaked on Monday evening showing that the Prime…

Masks in schools: how convincing is the government's evidence?

8 January 2022 6:00 pm

Why has the government changed its mind and asked children to wear masks in school? When Plan B was announced…

Get ready to start paying the cost of Covid

8 January 2022 1:40 am

Forget the desirability (or lack thereof) of tax hikes: can Britain survive them? That’s the economic question that kicked off…

Boris Johnson rejects lockdown (again)

5 January 2022 5:27 am

Boris Johnson latest Covid press conference was slightly confusing. The Prime Minister spent nearly an hour saying nothing particularly new.…

The problem with 'vaccine equity'

4 January 2022 5:03 am

‘A stain on our soul’. That was how Gordon Brown, in his latest missive on the subject, described the failure…

Does Warwick’s Omicron modelling make restrictions more likely?

1 January 2022 4:32 am

Two weeks ago, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and Imperial College both published modelling showing frightening…

Will Trump's pro-vaccine stance prove his undoing?

29 December 2021 2:55 am

Donald Trump famously boasted that he could ‘stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody’ and still not lose voters. That…

Remember panic-buying? Here's what will happen next time

29 December 2021 12:18 am

It’s post-Christmas, and there are already murmurs about supermarkets with empty shelves. Just as with the petrol shortage in September and…

The churches must stay open

26 December 2021 6:00 pm

Hooray for Cardinal Vincent Nichols, who used the one day of the year when his pronouncements are amplified by the…

The misery of Macron’s Covid clampdown

24 December 2021 10:16 pm

My daughter’s Christmas won’t quite be the same this year. She and I are in England but her French mother…

Sage modellers start to accept that Omicron is milder

23 December 2021 6:00 pm

Public health officials in Britain and South Africa were on different planets for about a fortnight. While those in South Africa…

Sage memo makes the case for lockdown

23 December 2021 4:55 am

On Monday, Covid restrictions were rejected after the cabinet debated the issue robustly for the first time since the pandemic…

Should businesses receive more Covid support?

22 December 2021 12:53 am

As government considers whether to lock us down once again, should it put economic support for businesses affected back on…

It’s time to end the era of forced lockdown restrictions

22 December 2021 12:47 am

Monday’s Cabinet meeting held over Zoom was a fraught affair by the sounds of it. Michael Gove and Sajid Javid…

Is Omicron now falling in South Africa?

21 December 2021 4:09 am

Man makes Covid predictionsand God laughs. Yet with the stakes this high in Britain, every bit of real-world data is…

My Twitter conversation with the chairman of the Sage Covid modelling committee

19 December 2021 7:03 am

The latest Sage papers have been published , envisaging anything from 200 to 6,000 deaths a day from Omicron depending on how…

Pubs and restaurants are being decimated by Covid uncertainty

18 December 2021 8:00 pm

The run up to Christmas is normally a merry time for the hospitality industry. Our nation’s restaurants, pubs and bars…

Omicron is now Britain’s dominant Covid strain

18 December 2021 5:41 am

If you test positive for Covid now in Britain, the odds are that it’s Omicron: it’s now the dominant strain…

Macron’s British travel ban is entirely political

17 December 2021 1:57 am

Emmanuel Macron subjected France to a two-hour primetime television interview on Wednesday evening which must have been a pre-Christmas treat…

Why Omicron may overwhelm our health service

15 December 2021 7:49 pm

What we know from the imperfect data we have is that Omicron is vastly more infectious but less virulent than…

Boris is in deep trouble

15 December 2021 8:20 am

This evening feels eerily familiar to anyone who remembers the meaningful votes of Theresa May’s premiership. The Tory rebellion on…

Labour is the real winner of tonight's vote

15 December 2021 3:33 am

Sajid Javid found himself wading through treacle as he tried to make the case for the government’s ‘Plan B’ to…

The ethics of the Omicron travel ban

12 December 2021 6:00 pm

The Omicron variant had not even been named when the government’s reflexes sprung into almost involuntary reaction last month, and…

Vaccine passports may prove a pointless distraction from Omicron

12 December 2021 2:35 am

Sajid Javid ditched vaccine passports when he became Health Secretary but he now has to bring them in again, albeit…

Why I prefer to rely on natural immunity

11 December 2021 9:00 am

‘Did you hear it?’ said a friend of mine, red-faced with the flush of a piece of news she couldn’t…