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After Neil Ferguson quit as a government adviser over a personal breach of the lockdown that he did so much to ensure, there was naturally an avalanche of reaction. But perhaps the most difficult one to take was not the outright condemnation or accusations of hypocrisy, it was an expression of compassion.
Tory grandee Sir Charles Walker, one of the nicest people in parliament, put it thus (at the bottom of the Telegraph scoop): “People will be desperately missing those that they love, and I totally understand if that separation becomes too much to bear at times.”
What may have cut Ferguson to the quick was the fact that Walker’s words underlined just how much of a sacrifice others have been making during the lockdown. Think of all those grandparents not allowed to see their children’s newborn babies, let alone cuddle their toddler grandchildren. Think of all those healthy elderly people living alone, who would desperately love their children to visit them even for a few minutes.
The personal frailties of ’’Professor Lockdown” are a reminder that this pandemic is very much a human story, an arc that includes its individual relationships as well as the genius of its scientific advances. When the Sun’s Tom Newton Dunn asked last month whether people could still see their girlfriends/boyfriends in the lockdown, some ridiculed the question. But it was a great question because it had at its heart that we are not robots and need some persuasive messaging to reduce natural human contact.
“I’m clearly going to start a new career here in relationship counselling, so I will tread very carefully,” deputy medical officer Jenny Harries said at the time, before advising lovers who lived apart to “test really carefully your strength of feeling” and stay apart. Ferguson must be wishing he’d stuck to that advice.
As it happens, Charles Walker was also one of the Tory MPs who made strong pleas in the Commons on Monday for the lockdown to be eased to help rescue the economy. He also talked about the need for a frank discussion about “the ethics of trading lives tomorrow to save lives today”, not least with the indirect deaths from Covid-19 and the lockdown now likely to be a key part of the overall calculus of the success or failure of this government’s response.
And that overall calculus loomed large today as the Office for National Statistics added yet more deaths to the total tally. The ONS said more than 32,000 people in the UK have died of the virus, overtaking the latest figure of 29,079 in Italy. First secretary Dominic Raab was keen to downplay any international comparisons, saying they could not yet be made “reliably”. But when the ‘all-cause mortality’ statistics do emerge later this year, many suspect the UK will be among the worst, if not the worst.
It took deputy chief scientist Angela McLean to express some serious alarm at one of the factors for our dire death toll: the rising number of people dying care homes in the week to April 24. “I think what that shows us is that there is a real issue that we need to get to grips with about what is happening in care homes,” she said.
Her boss Sir Patrick Vallance added his own voice earlier today to those who are coalescing around the role played by the UK simply not getting its testing capacity high enough, early enough. “If we had managed to ramp testing capacity quicker, it would have been beneficial,” he told the science and technology committee. “For all sorts of reasons that did not happen.”
In the end, it was the Imperial College projection of a possible 500,000 deaths in the UK that spurred Boris Johnson into action on the lockdown. So Neil Ferguson can at least be proud that he did a huge amount to save lives, despite the flak he will get for not rigidly following government guidelines.
As it happened, it was Ferguson’s study that also triggered the White House to take action too (the forecast for US deaths was horrific without any lockdown). And again, he and his colleagues can take some heart from the lives they have saved as a result.
But what will really depress the academic and others in his field is the way many US states are easing their lockdown before any real evidence of a sustained plateauing of cases of infection. That ‘liberation’ movement, combined with Donald Trump’s litany of errors and bluster and the States’ awful inequalities in healthcare, could be the most lethal cocktail of all.
The latest modelling coming out of America that suggests that far from flattening the curve, the country is set to see its deaths rise. The ‘second spike’ we are worried about in Europe seems set to be rolled into the first spike in the States.
The New York Times has obtained research suggesting deaths could double to 3,000 a day and the continuing spread of the disease could mean 200,000 new cases every day. That’s a national tragedy as well as a threat to the global economy. And those ultimately are the figures that should really worry us all, rather than the vital statistics of Neil Ferguson’s girlfriend or how many times he saw her.
Quote Of The Day
“I’m absolutely open to that.”
Matt Hancock on the possibility of playing premier league football behind closed doors in June
Tuesday Cheat Sheet
The UK coronavirus death toll rose above 32,000 to the highest in Europe.
People could be allowed to meet a small group of friends outdoors as part of the first relaxation of the UK’s Covid-19 lockdown rules, Downing Street has signalled.
The race to appoint Labour’s new general secretary has swiftly descended into acrimony after leftwingers were accused of trying to “stitch up” the process in defiance of Keir Starmer.
Michael Gove told a Lords committee that the UK is prepared to accept potentially huge extra costs for businesses exporting to the EU as a price worth paying for taking full control of laws from Brussels.
Virgin Atlantic announced plans to cut 3,150 jobs and end its operation of Gatwick.
Nadine Dorries was promoted to minister of state in the department of health
What I’m Reading
New Model Predicts Sharp Rise In US Deaths - New York Times
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