The Week UK May 09 2020

52 Pages·2020·20.1 MB·English

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Robustanddurable-that’sthe

9 MAY 2020 | ISSUE 1278 | £3.80
THEWEEK

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS
theweek.co.uk

THE BEST OF THE BRITISH AND INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
The route out

British TV’s
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VE Day: the
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Is the PM on the right path?

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2 NEWS

THE WEEK 9 May 2020

The main stories…

Giles in the FT. Leaked official plans
talk of curtailing “hot-desking”,
staggering work shifts and installing
dividing screens, but that’s not going to
be feasible for many firms. There’s also
the question of whether companies
would be liable if returning staff were to
fall gravely ill. In any case, polls suggest
that many workers are still very nervous
about returning in the first place.

One recent survey suggested that 70%
of British voters believe that businesses
should stay closed until the virus is
“fully contained”, said Daniel Hannan
in The Sunday Telegraph. But that’s
a recipe for permanent lockdown:
even a vaccine won’t eradicate the
virus entirely. We’re going to have
to accept a degree of risk. When it
comes to schools, the case for reopen-
ing is certainly overwhelming, said
The Economist. The closure of classrooms is hurting all
children’s education, but is particularly damaging for those
from disadvantaged backgrounds. The risks from easing
the school lockdown, meanwhile, seem fairly modest, given
that children are relatively unaffected by the virus, and also
don’t appear to transmit it much, if at all. Researchers in
the Netherlands and Iceland
haven’t found a single case
of anyone under 18 passing
Covid-19 on to their family.

As for the rest of us, said The Guardian, we’d better get used
to the fact that life is going to change. “We won’t be shaking
a lot of hands in the near future.” Nor are we likely to see
a return of department stores and other relics of “the pre-
Covid-19 age”. In the future, there will likely be fewer waiters
and more delivery drivers. All manner of ideas are being put
forward as part of our exit strategy, said Dan Hodges in The
Mail on Sunday. The Government wants us to download a
contact-tracing app that can identify all those with whom
infected patients have been in contact. There have also been
proposals to restrict people’s contacts to a “bubble” of ten
family members and acquaintances; to introduce some form
of immunity passport to those who have already had Covid-
19; and even to impose a two-pint limit in pubs. We should
be wary of such ideas. What we’re debating here are not
exceptional measures but a new status quo. And I, for one, am
not willing to accept on a permanent basis a “new normal” in
which the state tells me who I can meet, while monitoring
when and where I meet them.

When Boris Johnson declared the
national lockdown almost seven weeks
ago, he thought he was taking one of the
toughest decisions of his premiership,
said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer.
But that was easy compared with the
choices he’s now facing about how to
ease the restrictions. On Sunday, he is
due to deliver another televised address
to the nation unveiling some of those
measures. The PM is expected to
announce plans to, among other things,
reopen more public spaces, allow more
children to start returning to school, and
get more people back to work. The
stakes for Johnson are high. He has to
balance the huge economic costs of the
lockdown against the ongoing health
risks (the UK’s official death toll from
Covid-19 overtook Italy’s this week to
become the largest in Europe). And he
has do this “half-blind because there is
still so much that “The Science” is currently unable to tell us
about this novel disease”.

The scientific unknowns massively complicate the exit strategy
exit strategy, agreed Henry Bodkin in The Daily Telegraph.
It’s still unclear, for instance, whether we need to stay two
metres apart. The UK guidance
is based on research that
originated in the 1930s. The
World Health Organisation
recommends a gap of only one
metre. Then again, a Chinese study concluded that four metres
was a safer distance. To navigate our way out of lockdown, it
would also be very useful to know how many people had
already been infected, but here, too, opinion is divided. As for
the so-called R number – the number of people every carrier is
likely to infect – it “sounds like it comes with the comforting
certainty of mathematics”, said Tom Whipple in The Times.
But this figure – thought to be currently between 0.6 and 0.9
in the UK – is hard to measure accurately.

The sheer practicalities of easing the lockdown are equally
difficult, said John Collingridge in The Sunday Times. How
can social distancing work for commuters? If people are kept
two metres apart, a 12-carriage train that typically carries
1,000 or more passengers would have room for just 200. The
capacity of a carriage on London Underground’s Victoria Line
would shrink from 125 to 21; that of a double-decker bus,
from 75 to 18. Operating workplaces under these conditions
would raise further challenges, said George Parker and Chris

The virus: the route to a new normal

COVER CARTOON: NEIL DAVIES

It wasn’t all bad

The corona-crisis appears to
have encouraged millions of
people to cut down on their
smoking, or give up entirely.
According to a YouGov survey,
2% of UK smokers have quit,
because they’re worried their
habit makes them more vulner-
able to Covid-19; a further 8%
say they are trying to give up,
and 36% say they have
cut down. Extrapolating the
findings suggests more than
850,000 people have given up
smoking, or are trying to, and
2.4 million are smoking less.

Tens of thousands of bored
sports fans tuned in to watch
three pole vaulters compete in
an event dubbed the Ultimate
Garden Clash. Cheered on by
his daughter on a nearby swing,
Olympic gold medallist Renaud
Lavillenie competed in his gar-
den in France, against the world-
record-holder Armand “Mondo”
Duplantis, in Louisiana, and
world champ Sam Kendricks in
Mississippi. The live-streamed
challenge, to clear a five-metre
bar as many times as possible
in 30 minutes, was jointly won
by Duplantis and Lavillenie,
with 36 clearances each.

Scores of rebel
botanists are using
chalk to identify the
weeds that grow up
walls and in the cracks
on city pavements, in
an attempt to change
people’s perceptions
of these diverse but
neglected plants. The
idea of naming wild
plants began in France,
and has spread around
Europe. Now Sophie
Leguil, who set up the UK branch of the campaign More Than
Weeds, has been given permission to chalk up the streets of
Hackney in east London. She says that she hopes the
project “could make people look at [plants] in a different way”.

“The capacity of a double-decker bus would
shrink from 75 people to 18”

Supermarkets may thrive, but cafés will struggle

© JILL MEAD/GUARDIAN/EYEVINE

NEWS 3

9 May 2020 THE WEEK

…and how they were covered

“Few thought he could do it”, said The
Times – but last week Matt Hancock defied
the sceptics and smashed his target of
delivering 100,000 Covid-19 tests a day by
the end of the month. On 30 April, 122,347
tests were completed, up from a mere
10,000 a day just four weeks earlier. The
Health Secretary had every right to laud this
as an “incredible achievement”. One can
quibble with how the figure was calculated,
said Laura Hughes in the FT: 40,369 of the
tests were regarded as “completed” simply
by virtue of having been put in the post. But
by setting a “big, hairy target”, Hancock
did undeniably change the pace of things: it
spurred the setting up of “superlabs” where
rooms full of robots have processed 20,000
tests a day. But all this to what end? Is mass testing just a PR
stunt? Will it really help us “emerge from lockdown”?

The Government’s immediate priorities are obvious, said BBC
News: all medical staff in hospitals should now be tested
weekly and, soon, care workers will be too. Those who are
eligible for testing also include anyone with symptoms who is
over 65, a key worker, or cannot work from home – as well
as anyone living with people in those categories. The plan is
for all these people to be tested at regional centres or by using
home kits that rely on swabs being sent to labs for analysis.
But questions remain as to whether enough people are able to
access the tests: home kits in particular are in “short supply”.

In any case, if we’re to get people back to work and avoid
a devastating second wave of infections, we’ll have to go a
lot further than that, said Antonio Regalado in the MIT

Technology Review. People will need to
keep testing themselves on a day-by-day
basis to ensure they’re not infected. Hence
tests will have to be as ubiquitous as mobile
phones. We’ll probably need massive testing
– “the kind done in parking lots and drive-
throughs or at home” – which lets people
know if they are infected right away.

And along with these antigen tests – which
determine whether people have the disease
– we’ll need to roll out a mass programme
of antibody tests to find out whether many
of us have had it and are thus, in principle,
no longer at risk of getting or transmitting
it, said Amitabh Chandra in the Harvard
Business Review. The problem here is that
the science is still unclear. We don’t know
how long antibodies protect people who’ve
had the virus, nor how long they may go on
infecting others after recovering themselves. For now, the only
antibody tests available outside high-powered labs are “finger-
prick” ones, said Smriti Mallapaty in Nature. And the promise
of such tests has been massively “oversold”; most aren’t accu-
rate enough to confirm with any certainty whether someone
has had the disease. When we get more accurate ones, they
could well play a key role in providing the kind of “immunity
passports” that would let people return to normal life: but
we’re not there yet.

Testing will never entirely eradicate the disease, said Tom
Chivers on UnHerd. And that leaves three possible futures.
Two of them – building up “herd immunity” through mass
infection; or letting Covid-19, like flu, become “endemic” in
the population – involve swathes of people living with, or
dying of, the virus. That leaves the third. It’s now all too clear
that “there’s no going back to normal until we get a vaccine”.

Testing in Italy

A test of science

Marooned in our homes. Uncertain how to break free. If ever there
were a time to set aside tribal differences and jointly figure out the
best way to banish our common foe, this surely is it. And yet, alas,
even on this existential issue, the old battle lines have been erected. To be in favour of an ongoing
strict lockdown is to be marked down, by many right-wing commentators, as a woke leftist intent on
increasing state control over every aspect of life. Conversely, those who favour a speedier, more
“Swedish” timetable, are vilified by many on the left as being anti-old-people and even “pro-death”,
as knaves who regard their freedom of choice as more important than the sacredness of human life.
There’s a nice irony here, since many of the right-wingers assigned to the “pro-death” camp would
advertise themselves, in another context, as being “pro-life”. Indeed, switch to the issue of abortion,
and it’s the Left who favour freedom of choice and the Right who insist human life is sacrosanct. True,
nothing in the unborn child’s life matches the rich tapestry of experience that defines that of an octo-
genarian. Yet the index policymakers use to rank the relative value of human lives – the Qaly (Quality
Adjusted Life Year) – relates not to an individual’s past experience, but to his/her potential for enjoying
good quality (i.e. healthy) years in future: and by that criterion the unborn has better claim to survival.
But do such reflections lead the two sides towards common ground? No. The will to triumph over our
adversaries is always stronger than the desire to work things out with them.

THE WEEK

Jeremy O’Grady