"[The critics said] you couldn't have free trade with the EU unless you conformed with the EU's laws; that was having your cake and eating it. That has turned out not to be true. I want you to see that this is a cake-ist treaty. [The UK can] not only exploit the advantages of zero tariffs, a zero quota deal with the EU, do things differently, take back control of our money, our borders, and our laws, but also do free trade deals with other countries around the world."

"s/MIME functionality is built into the vast majority of modern e-mail software packages including Outlook, Mozilla Mail as well as Netscape Communicator 4.x and inter-operates among all major email software packages."

Third level students from Northern Ireland colleges will continue to be able to study in Europe under the Erasmus+ scheme after the UK leaves the EU because the Irish Government will fund them. The estimated cost will be around €2.1m per year. Last year, 649 students and staff from Northern Ireland took part in the scheme. Funding will be available to all full-time students attending third level institutions and will not be limited to those with an Irish passport, so British passport holders will also qualify.

Minister for Further and Higher Education Simon Harris said, "The Government of Ireland made a very solemn commitment to Northern Ireland that, even after Brexit, we would make sure that there were still ways for us to cooperate and collaborate in relation to higher education. I think it would have been a real missed opportunity if Brexit had happened and we didn't have this ability to collaborate across the European Union. It's really important that students in Northern Ireland can continue to access Erasmus+."

"I was in Waterstones in Bristol and happened to look at the games section. Their marketing wizard had clearly had a good think about topical board games: 'Pandemic' and 'Plague Inc.: The Board Game'. In 'Pandemic' you're the good guys, scientists fighting to save humanity from the deadly virus; 'the fate of humanity is in your hands'. A bit boring compared to 'Plague Inc' where you ARE a virus and your aim is to wipe out humanity; 'a strategic game of infection, evolution and extinction' ensuring 'repeat infections for years to come!'. I thought it was impressive that you could buy a Virus Expansion Pack which would allow you to develop new disease types and mutate your virus. You can 'infect the Olympics, trigger a nuclear strike and more!'. It's encouraging that they don't recommend it for the 0-3 age group as 'it contains small parts which could be swallowed or inhaled'."

There is good news coming in 2021.

I spent most of my time this year working with colleagues at the foundation and around the world on ways to test for, treat, and prevent COVID-19. When I think back on the pace of scientific advances in 2020, I am stunned. Humans have never made more progress on any disease in a year than the world did on COVID-19 this year. Under normal circumstances, creating a vaccine can take 10 years. This time, multiple vaccines were created in less than one year.

There are two main reasons to be hopeful. One is that masks, social distancing, and other interventions can slow the spread of the virus and save lives while vaccines are being rolled out. The other is that in the spring of 2021, the vaccines and treatments you've been reading about in the news will start reaching the scale where they'll have a global impact. Although there will still need to be some restrictions (on big public gatherings, for example), the number of cases and deaths will start to go down a lot - at least in wealthy countries - and life will be much closer to normal than it is now.

You might not have read that the success of the first two vaccines also bodes well for many of the other candidates. Virtually all of the vaccines now undergoing efficacy studies attack the same part of the novel coronavirus as the first two do. (It's the protein that spikes out of the virus, giving the coronavirus its crown-like shape as well as its name.) Now that researchers know attacking that particular protein can work, they have reason to be optimistic about other vaccines that do the same thing.

I am glad to report that the optimistic view that the world would come together to fight COVID-19 has largely turned out to be right (with some notable exceptions). There's no way we would be as far along as we are if governments, companies, and scientists around the world weren't, more often than not, working closely together.

This global cooperation is one reason why I see promise in the year ahead - and not only the promise of getting the pandemic under control. I believe the world also has a chance to take concrete steps on one of the other great challenges of our time: climate change.

Finland had Europe's lowest average of infections and deaths per capita in recent months, Johns Hopkins data shows. It managed to contain local outbreaks while sticking to some of the most relaxed restrictions on the continent. Internal movement was not restricted, those who needed to could attend school and workplaces in person, and mask-wearing was not mandatory.

"There is nothing magical about doing this - we just have a pragmatic approach," said Pekka Nuorti, an epidemiology professor at Tampere University who has worked for public health agencies for more than 25 years.

Cultural, political and geographic factors - such as low population density, less travel and high trust in government - were helpful, Nuorti said, but it was the work of the country's health agencies that made a difference.

During the summer, Finland built up "tried-and-true field epidemiology practices," Nuorti said: Testing, isolating, contact tracing, quarantining and preventing superspreading events on a local level.

The average daily testing volume nearly quadrupled from 2,900 samples in May to 11,300 in August, health ministry data shows. In late November, Finnish laboratories performed up to 23,000 tests a day, or 90% of the current capacity.

Finland used the summer to prepare for the new wave by responding with preventative measures instead of a lockdown, said Mika Salminen, director of health security at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare. Restricting international travel for most of the summer added to Finland's success in the fall, he said.

To help people isolate and stay home, the government provided economic support. Thousands of people who were exposed could quarantine because the government offered compensation for their lost income, Salminen said.

"It's not that we haven't had outbreaks," Nuorti said. Finland had local flare-ups and super spreader events, but local health authorities, coordinated by the central government, were able to contain them using real-time data, he said. But as case numbers rise, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify all transmission sources, Nuorti said.

If the situation deteriorates, Salminen said, a full lockdown has not been ruled out.

"I will easily & quickly win Georgia if Governor Brian Kemp or the Secretary of State permit a simple signature verification. Has not been done and will show large scale discrepancies. Why are these two "Republicans" saying no? If we win Georgia, everything else falls in place!"

"As I told the President this morning, I've publicly called for a signature audit three times (11/20, 11/24, 12/3) to restore confidence in our election process and to ensure that only legal votes are counted in Georgia."

"But you never got the signature verification! Your people are refusing to do what you ask. What are they hiding? At least immediately ask for a Special Session of the Legislature. That you can easily, and immediately, do."

"We will not bend.
We will not break.
We will not yield.
We will never give in.
We will never give up.
We will never back down.
We will NEVER, ever surrender!"

"We're launching a mad idea today.

"So mad that some of the media we've talked to just don't believe us - and to be fair, everybody I've ever told about this - in the 7 years we've been working on it - has looked at me in the same way. Like maybe they didn't hear me right or I'm not being serious ... but they did and I am ...

"Today we're launching a new kind of diamond - one made entirely from carbon taken from the atmosphere, from the air.

"We're calling these Sky Diamonds. Not least because everything we use to make them (everything) comes from the sky.

"We use the wind and the sun to power the equipment (sky mining and diamond mills), rainwater to make hydrogen and the most important piece - something we have too much of - carbon dioxide.

"Our process isn't just low carbon or zero carbon, it's negative carbon. It may be the first industrial process where the air coming out of our chimneys is cleaner than the air we take in.

"For me this is exactly how industry in the 21st Century needs to be - super low impact, addressing the climate crisis and general sustainability issues and at the same time enabling life as we know it.

"The green revolution that we need is held back by the idea it's about giving stuff up - it isn't, it's doing things differently. We've been pushing for change in the big areas of life - energy, transport and food - for years. Football has been an amazing platform to communicate this. Diamonds are a new frontier.

"But it's the same principle, there's 'another way' to do everything."

"When you look at what it takes to get to zero carbon, we've got the technology, there's some behaviour change required but not that much. Actually, it's more economic to use renewable energy, electric cars, plant-based eating. People are starting to make those decisions, business is starting to follow and produce things that people want and need to live that greener life; the sector that's lagging behind is government. I've lived this life and I've lived it through business. Electric transport is coming. Cars are available in abundance now; there must be fifty different models to choose from and within ten years nobody will make a conventional car.

"With food, we just have to stop eating animals. It's very simple. It's much cheaper, it's much healthier and we can free up 75% of farmland and give it back to nature, creating great carbon sinks as well as nature habitats."

Ecotricity founder Dale Vince is planning to make lab-grown diamonds 'from the sky'. The multi-millionaire claims to have created the world's first diamonds to be made from carbon, water, using wind and solar energy at a facility in Stroud. The technology uses carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere to form diamonds which are chemically identical to those mined from earth. Mr. Vince said, "Making diamonds from nothing more than the sky, from the air we breathe, is a magical, evocative idea; it's modern alchemy. We don't need to mine the earth to have diamonds, we can mine the sky." The entrepreneur has said he wants to challenge the traditional diamond mining industry with his new 'sky diamonds'. The gems have been accredited by the International Gemological Institute. A price is yet to be set on the new diamonds by Mr Vince.

"In Wisconsin, somebody has to be indefinitely confined in order to vote absentee. In the past there were 20,000 people. This past election there were 120,000 ... and Republicans were locked out of the vote counting process."

"Poll: 79 Percent of Trump Voters Believe "Election Was Stolen" They are 100% correct, but we are fighting hard. Our big lawsuit, which spells out in great detail all of the ballot fraud and more, will soon be filled. RIGGED ELECTION!"

"Should President Trump concede to Biden? Poll Results: No: 190,593 (98.9%) Yes: 2,181 (1.1%) Total Votes: 192,774. For the good of our Country we must prevail!"

"AMERICA FIRST!!!"

"The Paris accord was not designed to save the environment, it was designed to kill the American economy. I refuse to surrender millions of American jobs and send trillions of American dollars to the world's worst polluters and environmental offenders, and that's what would have happened."

"After clapping for our keyworkers this spring, it appears that their wages will be cut in real terms this winter.

"There is no doubt that keyworkers in Bristol right across the public sector deserve a meaningful pay rise - rather than the freeze being discussed ahead of the Chancellor's spending review on Wednesday.

"Our care workers continue to look after the most vulnerable, police officers have patrolled our streets and, after building new temporary hospitals, our armed forces will surely support the logistics of rolling out any vaccine. Yet reports now appear that after clapping keyworkers in the spring, the Government will be cutting their wages in real terms this winter.

"For all their talk of not returning to austerity, and with councils facing a funding gap of billions due to broken promises during the pandemic, this Government risks repeating the economic mistakes of austerity - and making some five million people worse off in the process."

"While in 2016 President Trump became the duly elected president, many sought to undermine him, discredit him, de-legitimise him and deny his victory. There were no calls for unity, there were no calls for healing. So while every legal vote is counted let us not forget the inexcusable transition, or lack thereof, that President Trump had to endure in 2016 and for years into his presidency."

"Here's the deal. Because President Trump refuses to concede and is delaying the transition, we have to fund it ourselves and need your help. If you're able, chip in to help fund the Biden-Harris transition."

"I wonder why anyone should bother working at all, when the government sprays around our taxes in this fashion. This is real money that will be paid for by the young, in future debt interest payments and higher taxes."

"Looking at the published contracts, the first two Saiger won are (1) for $42.68m of hand sanitiser and (2) for $43.71m of gloves, a total of $86m. $28m is quite a rake from $86m. And one assumes Saiger made profit too ..."

"The right question is, why did we buy, without any proper governance at all, and at all-time high prices, so much PPE, five years worth, that we are having to store it in fields in the middle of nowhere?"

"Could we not develop a personal travel helmet with its own sealed air supply? Suitably sleek and portable. We're happy to wear a helmet if we ski or ride a motorcycle. Put it on before you enter the railway station or airport. Our defence is then a personal wearable item, not a piece of expensive infrastructure re-engineering. Two metres distance between travellers is no longer required."

"To read Barack Obama's autobiography in the last, snarling days of Donald Trump is to stare into an abyss between two opposite ends of humanity and wonder once again at how the same country came to choose two such disparate men."

In the UK, older care home residents and care home staff are top of the preliminary priority list. They are followed by health workers such as hospital staff and the over 80s. People are then ranked by age, with people under 50 at the bottom of the list. The first jabs may take place before Christmas if everything goes smoothly. The vaccine will be delivered through care homes, GPs and pharmacists as well as "go-to" vaccination centres set up in venues such as sports halls.

"It's getting very busy. It felt like it had reached capacity last night and it looks like it's going to be worse - it's Covid on top of winter illnesses. As a team, I've noticed that we are bracing ourselves, and we are all coming down with aches and pains. We've talked about backache when we get home. There's just tension and we are all feeling it. The mood has changed. At the beginning it was "Come on we can do this!", but now it's "Have we got to do this again?""

"I went to live in a flat in Bradford for the first few months of the pandemic to be nearer the hospital, and because it was safer - my partner has multiple sclerosis and my daughter has learning difficulties and special needs, and I didn't want to take Covid back home. This time round I've got a caravan in between where I live in Lancashire and the hospital, so that I can be at the hospital quicker."

"When you run at something and think you're going to win it and you don't, you have nothing left really. But we know this is our life until we get a vaccine. There's a lot of stress, a lot of people off with episodes of work-related stress. The counselling we were getting ended in August, but in the last two weeks it started again, because I had staff just crying - staff texting me to say they're crying in the car, on the way home. It's the relentlessness of it. I've cried. You just cry as the day is over."

The drug maker Pfizer has announced that an early analysis of its coronavirus vaccine trial suggested the vaccine was robustly effective in preventing Covid-19, a promising development as the world has waited anxiously for any positive news about a pandemic that has killed more than 1.2 million people.

Pfizer, which developed the vaccine with the German drugmaker BioNTech, released only sparse details from its clinical trial, based on the first formal review of the data by an outside panel of experts.

The company said that the analysis found that the vaccine was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of prior coronavirus infection. If the results hold up, that level of protection would put it on par with highly effective childhood vaccines for diseases such as measles. No serious safety concerns have been observed, the company said.

Pfizer plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization of the two-dose vaccine later this month, after it has collected the recommended two months of safety data. By the end of the year it will have manufactured enough doses to immunize 15 to 20 million people, company executives have said.

'This is a historical moment,' Kathrin Jansen, a senior vice president and the head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer, said in an interview. 'This was a devastating situation, a pandemic, and we have embarked on a path and a goal that nobody ever has achieved - to come up with a vaccine within a year.'

Independent scientists have cautioned against hyping early results before long-term safety and efficacy data has been collected. And no one knows how long the vaccine's protection might last. Still, the development makes Pfizer the first company to announce positive results from a late-stage vaccine trial, vaulting it to the front of a frenzied global race that began in January and has unfolded at record-breaking speed.

"HUGE NEWS: Thanks to the public-private partnership forged by President @realDonaldTrump, @pfizer announced its Coronavirus Vaccine trial is EFFECTIVE, preventing infection in 90% of its volunteers."

"THE OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED INTO THE COUNTING ROOMS. I WON THE ELECTION, GOT 71,000,000 LEGAL VOTES. BAD THINGS HAPPENED WHICH OUR OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE. NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE. MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WERE SENT TO PEOPLE WHO NEVER ASKED FOR THEM!"

Taiwan announced its first confirmed case of COVID-19 on January 21 - a day after the United States confirmed theirs. Since then, the island nation has reported fewer than 600 cases and just seven deaths. Shops, cinemas, bars and clubs are open and the level of worry among the public is at a minimum. Daily life in Taiwan is a glimpse into the future: a "post-COVID" world in which precautions are still taken, but the fear of catching the virus, for many, is non-existent.

With almost 24 million residents and a population density of 671 people per square kilometre (far greater than the density of the UK or US), and not to mention its proximity to China, you'd expect Taiwan to have been hit far more severely by the pandemic. To sum up the success of Taiwan's COVID-19 response as simply as possible, it's down to preparation, proactive leadership and the willingness of the public to comply with all enforced virus prevention regulations. In 2003, Taiwan lost 73 lives to SARS - the highest mortality rate in the world from the virus. Since then, the country has been prepared for the next big outbreak and rolled out its response as soon as the first cases of COVID-19 were discovered in Wuhan last December.

Enforcing the wearing of masks on public transport, limiting the size of public gatherings, closing the borders to non-nationals and residents, and introducing mandatory 14-day quarantines for everyone entering the country, Taiwan managed to quickly curb the spread of the virus without the need for lockdowns or great change to everyday life.

For the majority of this year, life here has been, dare I say, normal. No known outside cases of the virus have infiltrated the local population for more than six months. Out of Taiwan's 548 confirmed cases (correct as of the 22nd of October), less than 100 of them have been transmitted domestically, with most coming from overseas. In the last few months, I've been to restaurants, bars, clubs, exhibitions, cinemas and gig venues, basically worry-free. Of course, it only takes one sick person in the wrong place at the wrong time to turn back the clock, but there are times here when you genuinely forget that we're in the middle of a global pandemic.

One strange side effect of living in Taiwan at this time is a weird sort of guilt. For a while, uploading a picture to Instagram of me at the beach or out for dinner caused a little pang of guilt in my stomach when I thought of those in other countries being unable to do the same. Obviously, I don't want to be going through any of the lockdowns or furloughs that come with a virus pandemic, but, at times, I can't help but feel that my freedom is undeserved.

Of course, my guilt is irrational and unnecessary. I'm not receiving any special treatment. I just happen to live in a country where those in charge and those living here took the situation incredibly seriously from day one. Taiwan is a glimpse into the future. A future where the virus still exists, but is being handled expertly, efficiently and empathetically.

"Morale is really low, we're really disappointed we didn't hear about this beforehand and about the fact it went up without any explanation. They're huge metal barriers, they're connected to one another and there's literally no gaps. There is fencing around the whole outside, we feel like it's completely unnecessary. It makes it feel like we're in a prison."

"It's not like living at home, we don't have a sofa, we have a kitchen and plastic chairs. There's no way you can relax there. You're in a completely different city and you do feel lonely there and trapped."

"A vote for Sleepy Joe Biden is a vote to give control of government over to Globalists, Communists, Socialists, and Wealthy Liberal Hypocrites who want to silence, censor, cancel, and punish you. Get out and VOTE tomorrow!"

"The Amish are not playing around today:"


"A parade for me in Nigeria, a great honor!"

"It's pretty clear that American people have elected @realDonaldTrump @Mike_Pence for #4moreyears. More delays and facts denying from #MSM, bigger the final triumph for #POTUS. Congratulations @GOP for strong results across the #US."

"Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the "pollsters" got it completely & historically wrong!"

"How come every time they count Mail-In ballot dumps they are so devastating in their percentage and power of destruction?"

"They are finding Biden votes all over the place - in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So bad for our Country!"

"Wow! It looks like Michigan has now found the ballots necessary to keep a wonderful young man, John James, out of the U.S. Senate. What a terrible thing is happening!"

"We're seven months on and it feels as if we are almost back where we started. Only this time the nights are closing in and people have less hope that the government knows what it's doing. The country has done everything that has been asked of it and been repaid with one of the highest death rates in the world and a £12bn test-and-trace system that the government's own scientists regard as marginally effective at best. Worse still, the prime minister has abandoned the science. He is saving neither lives nor jobs. His moral authority is shot."

"In our national fight against Covid-19, we are at a tipping point similar to where we were in March; but we can prevent history repeating itself if we all act now. People have relaxed too much. Now is the time for us to re-engage and realise that this is a continuing threat.

"ONS data show that an estimated 224,000 people have the virus - up from 116,000 last week, hospital admissions for Covid-19 are rising again, as are intensive care admissions. Sadly, just as night follows day, increases in deaths will now follow on in the next few weeks. The R for the UK is between 1.2 - 1.5. The doubling time in the UK for new infections is between 8 and 16 days and is even faster in some areas.

"We are now going into the colder, darker winter months. We are in the middle of a severe pandemic and the seasons are against us. Basically, we are running into a headwind.

"We need to help the NHS by keeping Covid-19 numbers low; and in turn the NHS will be there for us, our families and loved ones. The principles for how we keep transmission low have not changed. By restricting our contacts we reduce the number of opportunities for the virus to spread. It is an unfortunate scientific fact that the virus thrives on humans making social contact with one another. We now have much-improved testing capabilities, we know in more detail where the disease is, and we have better treatments. Earlier in the year we were fighting a semi-invisible disease, about which we had little knowledge, and it seeded in the community at great speed. Now we know where it is and how to tackle it - let's grasp this opportunity and prevent history from repeating itself."

"I thought that wasn't even a contest last night. She was terrible. She was ... I don't think you can get worse ... and totally unlikeable ... and she is ... and this monster who was on stage with Mike Pence who destroyed her last night by the way ... but this monster ..."

"You're going to beat it. We're going to be out front. As your leader, I had to do that. I knew there's danger to it, but I had to do it. I stood out front, and led. Don't be afraid of Covid. Don't let it dominate your life. We have developed under the Trump Administration some really great drugs and knowledge."

"If you look at the video from the balcony of the White House he is clearly in some distress with his breathing. That is not a man who is better. He's very braced, his shoulders are very square because he's trying to keep his lungs slightly inflated and not let them go down and then he's pulling on the neck as well. You can see at one moment he opens his mouth to take a gasp to try and keep those lungs a little bit fuller than normal, so it's very clear from a medical point of view."

"Doctors, Nurses and ALL at the GREAT Walter Reed Medical Center, and others from likewise incredible institutions who have joined them, are AMAZING!!! Tremendous progress has been made over the last 6 months in fighting this PLAGUE. With their help, I am feeling well!"

"Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!"

"Karen and I send our love and prayers to our dear friends President @realDonaldTrump and @FLOTUS Melania Trump. We join millions across America praying for their full and swift recovery. God bless you President Trump & our wonderful First Lady Melania."

"The American people are praying for our POTUS and FLOTUS! Get better, we need you!"
"You have the love and prayers of all of us. May God watch over you both."
"This is a way for him to cancel the debate and downplay the severity of Covid when they come out of their fake quarantine."
"You caused this. You and you alone. You could have stopped it. You could have saved so many lives. And if you're looking for sympathy now, you're def not getting it from me."

"I'm happy to report that Jill and I have tested negative for COVID. Thank you to everyone for your messages of concern. I hope this serves as a reminder: wear a mask, keep social distance, and wash your hands."

The world is on the brink of a scientific achievement: a safe, effective Covid-19 vaccine will likely be ready by early next year. In fact, there will probably be more than one vaccine available. This is the development that will finally give the world the chance to eliminate the threat of the pandemic - and return to normal.

Right now, most of the world's supply of Covid-19 vaccines is slated to go to rich countries. These nations have been making deals with pharmaceutical companies, securing the right to buy billions of doses as soon as they're produced. But what about low- and lower-middle income nations of the world, everywhere from South Sudan to Nicaragua to Myanmar? These nations are home to nearly half of all human beings, and they don't have the purchasing power to make big deals with pharmaceutical companies. As things stand now, these countries will be able to cover, at most, 14 percent of their people.

A vaccine can make Covid-19 a preventable disease, and no one should die from a preventable disease simply because the country they live in can't afford to secure a manufacturing deal. But you don't even have to care about fairness to see the problem with the "rich-country-only" scenario. We'd all become like Australia and New Zealand. Both have gone long stretches with very few cases inside their borders, but their economies remain depressed because their trading partners are on lockdown. And occasionally, a new carrier of the virus makes his way across the South Pacific, creating new clusters of the disease. Those clusters grow and spread. Schools and offices are shut down again. Even with an oversupply of vaccine, wealthy nations risk re-infection in this way because not everybody will choose to be vaccinated. The only way to eliminate the threat of this disease somewhere is to eliminate it everywhere.

We need the funding to pay for billions of vaccine doses for poorer nations. This is where the ACT (Access to COVID-19 Tools) Accelerator can help. It's an initiative supported by organizations like Gavi and the Global Fund. Not many people have heard of them, but they have spent two decades becoming experts in the task of financing vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics. Pharmaceutical companies have made the financing easier, foregoing profits on any Covid-19 vaccine and agreeing to make them as affordably as possible. But public funding is needed, too. The United Kingdom is a good model for what other wealthy nations should do. It has donated enough money for the Accelerator to procure, probably, hundreds of millions of vaccine doses for poor countries. I hope other nations are as generous.

Even when the world has the manufacturing capacity and funding lined up, we'll need to strengthen health systems - the workers and infrastructure that can actually deliver vaccines to people around the world. Spotting Covid-19 cases in the poorest parts of the world will take a similar network of primary health workers - one that can reach places where even roads can't. With good diagnostics, these workers can also sound the alarm if another disease jumps from a bat - or bird - to a human. In other words, in eliminating Covid-19, we can also build the system that will help reduce the damage of the next pandemic.

One thing I've learned studying the history of pandemics is that they create a surprising dynamic when it comes to self-interest and altruism: pandemics are rare cases where a country's instinct to help itself is tightly aligned with its instinct to help others. The self-interested thing and the altruistic thing - making sure poor nations have access to vaccines - are one and the same.

"I am so sorry, so heart sorry, that this time of your lives is being made as tough as it is just now - I really feel for you, but I feel especially for those of you starting university for the first time and, of course, living alone for the first time. This is an exciting time in your lives but I remember from my own experience that it's also a time of adjustment and it's also a time of home sickness as well, and that's the case for students every year without Covid-19 but it is much more difficult given the circumstances you are all facing right now. It's not your fault. I've spoken personally this morning to university principals to stress their responsibilities to you and I know it is something they take seriously, but I also know that it's something that parents will want to be assured of. Student services already have special arrangements in place including 24-hour helplines, support for food deliveries and additional mental health counsellors for those who might need that support."

"Seven or so months ago, at the start of the pandemic, many of us found it easy and natural to imagine a time when all of this would be over: a single, obvious moment when society's recreational life resumed to normal, when friends and family welcomed us into their homes with hugs and kisses, and we all talked, with excited, wounded relief, about how hard it had been, and how happy we were that the virus was behind us.

"We would do better to abandon the fantasies of a quick-fix entirely. This is not a race, not even a marathon: there's no finish line to cross, no shorter route to take. As we brace ourselves for a second wave and a second lockdown, we need a more realistic appraisal of where we are and where we're headed, a rough map to see us through the darkening winter days without taunting us with illusions that only end in disappointment. Our desire to put the pandemic behind us makes sense, but the virus and its unsettling associates - masks, social distancing rules, hand-sanitiser dispensers, quarantines, lockdowns - aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Our future plans must begin from this fact."

"It's not entirely clear if even Johnson knows who Johnson is these days, given that his performances are becoming increasingly erratic and confused. Never more so than at prime minister's questions, where Starmer continues to make the mistake of overestimating Johnson's real emotional age. He used to treat Boris as a 10-year-old, only for Johnson to act like a toddler. Now Keir has lowered his sights and treats him as a toddler, Boris has regressed further into a pre-verbal baby. At this rate of decline it won't be long before we have a prime minister who has yet to be born."

"Back in the day (as they'll say in years to come of the Covid pandemia), in Italy we got hit first and hard. Blame was even attached, but over the lockdown scenario Italy went from being pariah to role model, 'though cases are now mounting up again. One of the reasons for this, following the easing up of restrictions, has been the 'movida'. I don't know whether this term has caught on in the UK but it was coined in Italy actually before the Covid mess. What is the 'movida'? It is essentially a pub crawl, taking place on Friday and Saturday nights until the early hours in all Italian towns and cities (and in Spain, apparently with the same name-tag). Although the youngsters who take part don't reach the levels of head-banging mayhem found in the Anglo-saxon equivalent, they do lead to endless letters of complaint to the local papers from residents along the route. And of course it leads to large congregations of maskless revellers apparently believing themselves immune to the effects of Covid.

"The dreaded Salvini has been instrumental in the no-mask campaign, believing it to be a mortal threat to civil liberty. So he goes around kissing babies in selfies. Meanwhile Berlusconi's old mate Briatore, owner of the exclusive club Billionaire on the Costa Smeralda, and promoter of the "open the discotheques" campaign, has been diagnosed positive. As with Boris Johnson, we can't wish him harm, but it seems a certain rough justice is being meted out.

"On September 14^th the schools go back. There is some confusion here. Are there enough new single desks for everyone (the figures run into the millions)? Can pre-school kids be expected to wear masks? It seems not. What about separation on the school buses? What if one child proves positive - does the class go home or the school close down? These questions are giving the present government a hard time. The right-wing opposition are calling them all the names under the sun, but I doubt they could do any better. And anyway who wants Salvini and his ex-fascist allies in power? Lots of people, apparently, and that's the sad thing.

"What with this and Brexit (which I had almost forgotten about) is there anything to be happy about? Well, on this side of the channel Udinese avoided relegation and on the other side, Leeds got back to the big time. All is not lost!"

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"What we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread. It's into rural as well as urban areas. To everybody who lives in a rural area, you are not immune or protected from this virus. If you're in multi-generational households, and there's an outbreak in your rural area or in your city, you need to really consider wearing a mask at home, assuming that you're positive, if you have individuals in your households with comorbidities. If you have high case load and active community spread, just like we are asking people not to go to bars, not to have household parties, not to create large spreading events, we are asking people to distance learn at this moment so we can get this epidemic under control."

"So Crazy Nancy Pelosi said horrible things about Dr. Deborah Birx, going after her because she was too positive on the very good job we are doing on combatting the China Virus, including Vaccines & Therapeutics. In order to counter Nancy, Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!"

"A number of vaccines are now in phase 3 clinical trials, and we all hope to have a number of effective vaccines that can help prevent people from infection. However, there is no silver bullet at the moment, and there might never be. For now, stopping outbreaks comes down to the basics of public health and disease control: testing, isolating and treating patients and tracing and quarantining their contacts. Do it all."

"I defy anybody if they have been keeping their distance from people for four months to say, oh right, now you've got to go into a room full of people - unless you have got a death wish, and some people have in many ways and they just don't care. But if you are one of these people that happens to care about your health and are taking it seriously, I totally get how he feels. I would feel a bit strange walking in a room with 10 people I don't know, and I have done. I didn't feel comfortable. So I totally respect where Anthony is coming from, and where other people are coming from - they want crowds in there, they want things back to normal. We have a choice we don't have to go and play. We all run a bit of a risk. I have the option not to play but I've decided to play. Maybe with 5,000 fans I could see it's a bit of an income you're going to lose, but 200 fans, is it really? Maybe they have to start doing a test on crowds at some point and I've heard people say they're treating the snooker event a little bit like lab rats - you've got to start somewhere, start with snooker players. Less insurance to pay out for Anthony Hamilton than there is for Lewis Hamilton. It's not until you've had people close to you that have gone through it [he has], and know someone who has died. I've had nurses who I have spoken to and they say, 'People have come in with Covid-19 and they think they are going to be alright and it's not until they can't breathe that they say "please don't let me die".' Grown men and women crying their eyes out because they can't breathe. It's only when something like that happens and you hear those stories that you go 'hold on a minute, this is serious'. I don't think it has been taken seriously enough."

Among the hardest-hit regions are rural counties in the south and the Central Valley, where farmworkers have been toiling through each stage of this pandemic. California is referred to as "the breadbasket of the world" for good reason; it is the world's fifth largest supplier of food and agricultural commodities. As more Californians emerged from their homes, crowding restaurants and public spaces, "it really put our essential workers most at risk", said Ninez Ponce, director of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Health Policy Research. The vast majority - more than 90% - of farmworkers in California are Latinx, working in precariously crowded environments. More than 60% of workers involved in food preparation are Latinx as well. And it's those workers, many of whom lack access to healthcare and can't afford to stay home, who have the most to lose as the virus barrelled through the state, Ponce said. Latinx, Black and other minority groups are disproportionately infected with and dying of Covid-19 according to a tracking tool designed by UCLA and early metrics suggest that the state's reopening has exacerbated disparities. Devastating outbreaks in California's prisons and homeless shelters have further fuelled inequities. The many complicated factors driving the surge of coronavirus in California have all collided in Imperial County, a rural community along California's southern border with Mexico and Arizona. Out of every 100,000 people in the county, more than 3,700 have been infected with the coronavirus - that's several times higher than the state-wide average of 600 infections per 100,000.

February 28th: "Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus ... one of my people came up to me and said, 'Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.' That didn't work out too well. They couldn't do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. They tried anything, they tried it over and over ... and this is their new hoax." March 23rd: "America will again, and soon, be open for business - very soon - a lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting. A lot sooner. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself. We're not going to let the cure be worse than the problem." March 24th: "Easter is a very special day for me. And I see it sort of in that timeline that I'm thinking about. And I say, wouldn't it be great to have all of the churches full?" April 3rd [on mask wearing]: "It's going to be, really, a voluntary thing. You can do it. You don't have to do it. I'm choosing not to do it, but some people may want to do it, and that's OK. It may be good. Probably will. They're making a recommendation. It's only a recommendation." April 13th: "I'm going to put it very simply: The president of the United States has the authority to do what the president has the authority to do, which is very powerful. The president of the United States calls the shots." [And ...] April 17th: "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!"

"People are producing a reasonable antibody response to the virus, but it's waning over a short period of time and depending on how high your peak is, that determines how long the antibodies are staying around. Infection tends to give you the best-case scenario for an antibody response, so if your infection is giving you antibody levels that wane in two to three months, the vaccine will potentially do the same thing. People may need boosting and one shot might not be sufficient."


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"Silicon Valley had this pre-existing agenda before Covid that imagined replacing so many of our personal bodily experiences by inserting technology in the middle of them. So for the few spaces where tech is not already mediating our relationships, there was a plan - to replace in-person teaching with virtual learning, for instance, and in-person medicine with telehealth and in-person delivery with robots. All of this has been rebranded, post-Covid, as a touchless technology, as a way of replacing what has been diagnosed as the problem, which is the problem of touch. And yet, on a personal level, what we miss most is touch. And so we need to expand the menu of options about how we live with Covid, because we do not have a vaccine; it is not about to arrive. Even if there is a breakthrough, it's going to be many, many months, possibly years before it can be rolled out at the scale we would need it." "There is always this discourse whenever disasters hit: 'Climate change doesn't discriminate; the pandemic doesn't discriminate. We are all in this together.' But that is not true. That is not how disasters act. They act as magnifiers and they act as intensifiers. If you had a job in an Amazon warehouse that was making you sick before, or if you were in a long-term care facility that was already treating you as if your life was of no value, that was bad before - but all of that gets magnified to unbearable now. And if you were disposable before, you're sacrificial now." "We have this really bad track record in the climate movement of winning gains when the economy is doing relatively well, because the kind of climate solutions we get from governments tend to be these neoliberal, market-based solutions, like climate taxes or renewable energy policies that are perceived to make energy costs more expensive, or carbon taxing that makes the price of petrol more expensive. As soon as you have an economic downturn, the support for these policies reliably evaporates. We saw that after the 2008 financial crisis. Climate has got a reputation as being a bourgeois thing - the issue that you care about if you don't have to worry about putting food on the table." "It is a very small percentage of the population that wants to just fling the doors open. It is a majority that actually is much more concerned about returning to work before it is safe, sending their kids to school before it is safe. It's sometimes framed as giving people what they want, but this is not what the polling shows. There are similarities between the way Donald Trump has handled it and the way Boris Johnson has handled it. They are turning it into some test of masculinity, even in Johnson's case after having the virus. Jair Bolsonaro was talking about how he was an athlete so he knows he will handle it. Trump was talking about his good genes."

"With or without further agreement with the EU, this £705m will ensure that the necessary infrastructure, tech and border personnel are in place so that our traders and the border industry are able to manage the changes and seize the opportunities as we lay the foundations for the world's most effective and secure border."

"Child abuse is, in some sense, the expectation of 'too much' or 'not enough'. Donald directly experienced the 'not enough' in the loss of connection to his mother at a crucial development stage. Having been abandoned by his mother for at least a year, and having his father fail not only to meet his needs but to make him feel safe or loved, valued or mirrored, Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life. The personality traits that resulted - displays of narcissism, bullying, grandiosity - finally made my grandfather take notice but not in a way that ameliorated any of the horror that had come before." "Nothing is ever enough. This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism. Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be." "Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence and inaction of his siblings, destroyed my father [Fred Jr., often Freddy]. I can't let him destroy my country." "The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there. It's mind boggling. But that's all about his base. He has no principles. None!" "[He hired Joe Shapiro] a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker to take his SATs for him. Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well." "[For Freddy,] lying was defensive - not simply a way to circumvent his father's disapproval or to avoid punishment, as it was for the others, but a way to survive. [For Donald ] lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was." "He's a clown - this will never happen," Mary says her aunt Maryanne, Donald's sister, commented soon after Donald announced his presidential bid. "[The day after Trump's election victory] I was wandering around my house, as traumatized as many other people but in a more personal way; it felt as though 62,979,636 voters had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family."

Abraham Raskin's family were told in late April that it was unlikely he would survive. On 12 June he finally left the Royal London Hospital after more than 50 days in intensive care, a tracheostomy, and a month in a medically induced coma. "The very fact that I'm alive now is a miracle," he says, "I was nearly a goner." On a video call arranged by nurses on 18 May his family saw his face for the first time since he was taken into hospital in early April. He wasn't able to say anything, but he did raise an eyebrow. Abraham was severely delirious for some time after waking up. "I was talking all kinds of rubbish", he says. "Afterwards when I heard about what I was saying, I felt like I was mad or something. It's not pleasant." He is now back at home, still very tired, and following a basic exercise programme planned from him by a physiotherapist. With support from family members, he can get upstairs to sleep at night. "Some people can't really walk anymore when they come out of this," he says, "and some take months to recover. I hope I'm not one of them."

"When I first read The Rebel, this splendid line came leaping from the page like a dolphin from a wave. I memorized it instantly, and from then on Camus was my man. I wanted to write like that, in a prose that sang like poetry. I wanted to look like him. I wanted to wear a Bogart-style trench coat with the collar turned up, have an untipped Gauloise dangling from my lower lip, and die romantically in a car crash. At the time, the crash had only just happened. The wheels of the wrecked Facel Vega were practically still spinning, and at Sydney University I knew exiled French students, spiritually scarred by service in Indochina, who had met Camus in Paris; one of them claimed to have shared a girl with him. Later on, in London, I was able to arrange the trench coat and the Gauloise, although I decided to forgo the car crash until a more propitious moment. Much later, long after having realized that smoking French cigarettes was just an expensive way of inhaling nationalized industrial waste, I learned from Olivier Todd's excellent biography of Camus that the trench coat had been a gift from Arthur Koestler's wife and that the Bogart connection had been, as the academics say, no accident. Camus had wanted to look like Bogart, and Mrs. Koestler knew where to get the kit. Camus was a bit of an actor - he thought, in fact, that he was a lot of an actor, although his histrionic talent was the weakest item of his theatrical equipment - and, being a bit of an actor, he was preoccupied by questions of authenticity, as truly authentic people seldom are. But under the posturing agonies about authenticity there was something better than authentic. There was something genuine. He was genuinely poetic. Being that, he could apply two tests simultaneously to his own language: the test of expressiveness, and the test of truth to life. To put it another way, he couldn't not apply them."

Here's my typical early morning routine. I wake up around 7am and for a few seconds I experience a moment of calm. Then I remember the coronavirus and the anxiety begins. Not just the usual free-floating anxiety that has been ever-present for much of my adult life, but something not far short of a full-on panic attack. The anxiety is physical as well as mental. It manifests itself as a gnawing ball of fear in my stomach and muscle pain in my arms, shoulders and legs. Frequently, I roll into a foetal ball. I close my eyes, hoping to go back to sleep and wake up to find the world has returned to normal. I know it's pointless, but I do it anyway. I want some escape from the inescapable. This can go on for the best part of a couple of hours. I keep telling myself that the way to beat this is to break the cycle, get out of my bed and attempt to get on with the day, but it takes me an age to get to the point where I'm able to do this. Once up, I invariably feel a bit better, though the fear never really goes away. It lingers within me, waiting to be reignited at any moment. This is where it gets weirder still. During previous episodes of acute anxiety, I have been able to take some bizarre comfort from the knowledge that it's me who is out of sync with the world. Part of me has been rational enough to know that I am the one that is mentally ill, even if I'm not well enough to do much about it. Now, though, reality has disturbingly caught up with my own anxiety. There are hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of people who are feeling the same as me. I take no comfort from that. The coronavirus is the scariest thing I have experienced in my 63-year-old lifetime. Maybe I should have been more worried about nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, but I had the blind optimism of youth that neither the US nor the Soviet Union would be stupid enough to embark on mutually assured destruction. Or maybe the only way I could cope with the consequences of such a war was total denial. Often in times of mental illness, I have found some comfort in my work. A distraction that somehow proved the mind-body split of dualist philosophers. But it's that much harder now, as the very thing I have to write about as the political sketch-writer for the Guardian is what is making me anxious. There have been a couple of days when I have just been unable to write and, on many others, hours when I have just had to switch off the news. Not to read a book, as my concentration isn't up to that - I seem to have read the first four pages of Hilary Mantel's The Mirror And The Light about five or six times now - but to watch mindless TV. Or go out on my wife's crap bike and ride up and down the same local hill ten times.

It's just as well the government thinks everything it has done to combat the coronavirus is "world beating". Given that the UK already has one of the worst coronavirus death rates in the world, I'd hate to think how many more people would have died if our response had only been "good enough". Most would think that the only area where the government is truly "world beating" is in its incompetence. It's going some to have made three major policy U-turns within a month. This week's U-turn on free school meals was a collector's item. Even if there is someone inside No 10 who believes it's genuinely a good idea for 1.3 million children to go hungry over the summer - maybe Dominic Cummings has written a 40,000-word blog on the positive effects of a poor diet on future life chances - saving £100m seems a strange hill to die on when you've already committed hundreds of billions of pounds to bailing out the economy.

It's hard not to think that this book has something to say to us in the present circumstances when the last paragraph reads: I bought the book at the beginning of lockdown but have only just read it. It was my A-level set text in French, it impressed me then aged 18 and I was pleased to find that it had lost none of its power. It was published in 1947 which was a "sweet spot" between the end of the Second World War and the start of the Cold War, when France was coming to terms with Nazi occupation and the role of Vichy France, and where Camus, an Algerian, was having treatment for tuberculosis. The book, on the surface at least, tells the story of a (fictional) plague in the town of Oran in Algeria. From the quote above, it is clear that Camus is using the plague as a metaphor, on many levels. It can be referring to the "plague" of Nazism, and the choices an invaded people make to resist, collaborate or be passive, and the reaction of the authorities. Here the "plague" is a metaphor for dogma, conformity, compliance and cowardice in all their forms. On another level it can refer to the "plague" or collective guilt that exists in all members of society when an unethical act is committed in their name. For Camus this was the death penalty, which he vehemently opposed; one of his characters says "I have been ashamed of having been - even at a distance, even with the best will in the world - a murderer in my turn. I learned that we are all in the plague." Although we do not have the death penalty in the UK, Camus's point is good if we feel that selling arms to dictatorships, extreme rendition etc. are morally wrong acts. On yet another level, it can refer to the human condition, that we are all born with the "plague" of the knowledge that we will die sometime and have to decide how we will live knowing this. The book's hero/antihero/main protagonist, Dr Rieux, is a doctor who feels that his work fighting the plague is an endless defeat, but that is no reason to give up the struggle. He is a man who "faced with suffering and a common crisis does what he must and becomes a leader and an example not out of heroic courage or careful reasoning but rather from a sort of necessary optimism." However, it is also the story of the progress of a physical plague and particularly the reaction of the inhabitants to it; I found this interesting as it seemed to mirror much of our experience of dealing with coronavirus. First there was denial; a lack of acceptance that it is the plague, or its seriousness, as the authorities know that by declaring it officially "plague" they will shut the town down with all the attendant economic consequences. Then there was a gradual realisation; the inhabitants had not really accepted the idea of the disease and were annoyed and irritated as it upset their personal habits. They blamed the authorities for not relaxing the shutdown. However, then there were a number of initiatives by the authorities: increased quarantining, people trying to break out of the town and being shot at by the guards at the gates, a curfew, and a speedy system of burials and cremations with relatives not allowed to attend. This was followed by a feeling of resignation where the greatest suffering was of exile or separation from friends, family and lovers in the outside world. However, a sense of solidarity developed, and Rieux organised "health teams" - volunteers who helped with general rescue work despite an increased danger of catching the plague. People got tired and careless and started to neglect rules of hygiene and disinfecting, which made them more vulnerable to the plague; "in short, they were gambling on chance and chance is on nobody's side." In time there is a decline of the plague and a sense of cautious optimism among the people, although "everyone agreed that the amenities of former times would not be restored overnight". But even in this time, the plague would have surges and kill people who were "the unfortunates of the plague, those who were killed when hope was high ... the coming deliverance was two-faced, combining laughter and tears." Finally, there is the "official" end of the plague and the town is full of scenes of rejoicing. "The whole town rushed outside to celebrate this crowded minute when the time of suffering had ended but the time of forgetting had not yet begun." A really interesting and thought-provoking book, uplifting. The main character continues to do his best and does his job despite all the difficulties, with "necessary optimism"; as he says, "it may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency." So, to end with another quote that I would like to think is true, referring in the book to the volunteer health teams: "Most people are better than you think - you just need to give them the opportunity."

In a healthy economy, prices tend to go up - the process called inflation. 2% inflation is seen as the sweet spot. This moderate level is generally considered a sign of health because as the economy grows, demand increases. More demand pushes prices a little higher. Workers benefit because this economic growth drives an increase in demand for labour and wages usually increase. These workers go out and buy more, so the "virtuous" cycle continues. When inflation is too low or too high a "vicious" cycle can take its place. Too much inflation can cause equivalent problems to low inflation. If left unchecked, inflation can spike or overheat, causing the economy to slow down quickly and unemployment to increase. The combination of rising inflation and unemployment is called "stagflation" and is feared by economists and central bankers, indeed most of us. It's what can cause an economic boom to turn suddenly to bust as we saw in the 1970s. Very low inflation usually signals that demand for goods and services is lower than it should be, and this tends to slow economic growth and depress wages. This low demand can even lead to a recession with increases in unemployment. Deflation, or falling prices, is particularly bad. When prices are decreasing, consumers will delay purchases. For example, why buy a new washing machine today if you could wait a few months to get it cheaper? Deflation also discourages lending because lenders can't achieve rates that give them a good return.

Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday announced the federal government's "success" in containing the US's coronavirus epidemic and slammed the press for "sounding the alarm bells over a second wave'" of Covid-19 infections. "Such panic is overblown," Pence wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed about recent reports that the country could see a resurgence of the virus. Pence celebrated that the daily average infection rate has dropped to about 20,000 new cases per day, down from a high of about 30,000 in April. "Thanks to the leadership of President Trump and the courage and compassion of the American people, our public health system is far stronger than it was four months ago, and we are winning the fight against the invisible enemy," he wrote. But the vice president failed to mention that coronavirus cases are on the rise in over 20 states, many of the same places that were quick to loosen social distancing orders and reopen businesses. Overall, new Covid-19 cases in the US have begun to plateau, not decline. "The media has tried to scare the American people every step of the way, and these grim predictions of a second wave are no different," he wrote. "We've slowed the spread, we've cared for the most vulnerable, we've saved lives, and we've created a solid foundation for whatever challenges we may face in the future. That's a cause for celebration, not the media's fear mongering." Despite Pence's claims, there is significant evidence that states across the country are seeing spikes in both infections and hospitalizations in part as a result of loosening social distancing policies.

"One of the things I think that we're having to contend with is that history is complicated and contradictory. There can be lots of things true at the same time. Churchill was a Second World War hero. I'm not an expert, but clearly, he played a pivotal role being prime minister against Hitler and fascism. Yes, Churchill was a racist. Yes, these things are true. Our job is as a population to say rather than just trying to emphasise one and hide the other, why don't we recognise all of them and then decide the extent to which we celebrate all, give places of honour or even record them as public figures?"

"One of the quips I've made recently is that I'm the first directly-elected black mayor in Europe and I turn up and suddenly the statue is my fault. How do we get to that? I was elected in the middle of austerity. You would have had to expend incredible amounts of political capital to enter into the debate over the statue. And that political capital would then take time and resource away from delivering affordable homes that are central to tackling race inequality, tackling education inequalities, tackling food poverty; we have about 20% of our kids experiencing food insecurity in Bristol. That is a pathway to tackling race inequality that we probably would have been pulled away from if we'd have put all of our resources into the statue. Conversations go on about the name of the Colston Hall and the statue but what we're not doing is saying it's on our list of top 10 activities to deliver a fairer, more inclusive, sustainable city - removing a statue is not on that list."

"You may not like what they did but it wasn't mindless. What we had was one piece of criminal damage and 10,000 people went home. They've left us in a situation now where we can have a constructive conversation in Bristol about how we build for the future, how we deal with the legacy of Bristol slavery."

"It didn't cause us any surprise for people to drive past and call us coon. It used to happen outside my school, it used to happen if we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was just life. My primary caring family are white. That didn't cause me confusion or sleepless nights, it was just the reality I lived with. That's informed my approach to identity, belonging, conflict, reconciliation. You live with difference; you live with contradiction. That's the city I navigated. One of my friends said to me: 'Marv, in a war between black and white whose side are you going to be on?' I couldn't answer that. I was a 13-year-old. In many ways it wasn't a real question, in many ways it was a ferociously real question because physical threat, physical conflict was a reality of race in the city at the time."

"This isn't from four years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago, it's not just my father going through it, my grandfather, ancestors have been going through this all the time. One of the things I always say to people is that my name is Maurice, it begins with an M, what the hell can I do when three great Ms before me have done so much? But do we see that change? I'm talking about Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, look at all the work they did, and so many others, but in 2020 we're still facing this."

"The system needs to be addressed right from the heart of the people that work within it. It does take courage and integrity to stand up and say no this is not going to happen. The people who call the shots don't like people who are 'other', and it doesn't matter what your culture is, your sexual orientation, what your religion is, it's that otherness, and that's what angers me. I became a police officer in the 1980s because I wanted to make a difference, I wanted to make the world a better place, and I still don't see it happening. It's not your fault you have to protest because another one of your friends was murdered, it's the system that's put you there, and that system needs to be addressed right from the heart of the people that work within it. Every single person is an individual, and everything that you do echoes in eternity, and you cannot stand by and let this just happen."

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." "Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing." "Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else." "Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." "We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them." "The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth." "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."

"The UK is heavily dependent on services, we're a dynamic creative economy, we depend so much on human contact. We have been very badly hit by this. We are also amazingly resilient and creative, we will bounce back."

"Emergency loan schemes have helped stop firms collapsing, but left many saddled with debt. Businesses will be reluctant to hire and spend on new projects as they repair their finances, particularly as social distancing eats into demand and productivity. Firms will continue to face cashflow challenges in the months ahead."

"We have never seen anything like this. In April the economy contracted by 20.4%. In the twenty years leading up to lockdown the economy has grown, month-on-month, by an average of 0.2%. The scale and the pace of this downturn is unprecedented."

"All the economic data out of the UK for April showed the economy to be in awful shape - in fact, worse than expected. Other countries' data is improving as lockdown eases and the concern is that the UK is getting left behind and, as we are currently witnessing, equity markets are very sensitive to any threat to recovery."

"We're in the middle of the worst recession in the lifetime of anyone living. It's quite different to any previous recession we've had, we have little to go on. We haven't had a plague causing the economy to stop before so this is a very grave crisis. I think we all realise that April was going to show up just how bad it was. Most of the rest of this parliament is going to be taken up with this struggle to get the economy back to decent health. The idea we're going to have a quick bounce back, I personally would be very, very surprised if that were to happen."

"What particularly concerns me is that actually we're not just looking at one month of economic damage. There was a report that came out a couple of days ago from the OECD and it suggested that the drop in GDP for this year for the UK would actually be worse than for every other industrialised nation. We're in a very, very difficult situation as a country and we will need strong action to help us climb out of this as quickly as possible."

In terms of technology and with our dominant mindset, we're so powerful, so all pervasive, the mechanisms we have for destruction are so wholesale and so frightening that we can exterminate whole ecosystems without even noticing it. We already know that, for example, the plastics problem in the seas is wreaking appalling damage to marine life. Now the human species can go everywhere: we can go to the bottom of the sea, we can go into space, we can use drones. We can use, intrude, invade and pollute almost every aspect of the living world. Gregory Bateson, anthropologist and social scientist, said in 1972: "The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think." Inger Andersen, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme, says: "Nature is sending us a message that if we neglect the planet, we put our own wellbeing (and therefore happiness) at risk."

"On 2 March the prime minister said that "this country is very very well prepared ... with a fantastic testing system, amazing surveillance of the spread of the disease". We now know that little had been learnt from earlier warnings and that our tracking and tracing would be abandoned until three months later. We are being spun lines of UK exceptionalism, fed rhetoric about being "world class" when all we need is to learn from and work with others. "In order to cloak these outrageous distortions and the unacceptable actions of Dominic Cummings, the electorate is being thrown scraps to hide the terrible truth: that we are on the edge of an even worse public health disaster than the one our execrable leadership has bequeathed us already. "Without an effective test-track-trace system, we cannot know where the virus hot spots are and isolate it before its inexorable spread. That system is not in place and the much-vaunted app to support it will not be available until the end of June. And yet we are being "eased" into work, school and barbecues without the benefit of a strategic plan. "As far as I'm concerned, Johnson has no experience or understanding of proper planning and is incapable of thinking in such a responsible way. Surely, we should have track and trace securely in place before sending children back to school or loosening checks on social distancing? "We, of course, need to get the economy moving but this must come from a plan that is properly scheduled and not as a result of knee-jerk reactions that cover up the dreadful reality. We are as just as much in danger of a catastrophic spread of the virus as we ever were and we are being led by crowd-pleasing populists who want power without the exercise of proper responsibility. We need careful, considered, honest and open leadership but we are being deceived, presented with distorted information and led over a precipitous cliff-edge by careless opportunists."

"I think circumstances came to a head and people felt the need to take the statue down. As an elected politician I cannot condone criminal damage. I can't and won't pretend the statue of a slave trader in a city I was born and grew up in wasn't an affront to me and people like me. People in Bristol who don't want that statue in the middle of the city came together and it is my job to unite, hear those voices and hold those truths together for those people. We will get the statue back and it will highly likely end up in one of our museums. What's happened to this statue is part of this city's history and it's part of that statue's story."

"All of us here know that failing to act on climate change will cause irreversible consequences. As temperatures continue to rise, droughts and heatwaves will become more common. This will devastate nature and biodiversity. And exact a catastrophic economic cost. It is great to see cities and countries, businesses and investors, uniting against this global threat. COP26 can be a moment where the world unites behind a fairer, greener recovery from the effects of Covid-19. A recovery which delivers for both our people and our planet. "In recent years, the UK has shown that green growth is absolutely possible. Since 1990 we have grown our economy by 75% whilst cutting emissions by 43%. And in doing so, we have built entirely new industries. 20 years ago the UK had two offshore wind turbines powering just 2,000 homes. Fast-forward to 2020, and the UK has more offshore wind capacity than any other country in the world. Earlier this year construction began at the world's largest offshore wind development, Dogger Bank. A project which, when complete, will be able to power 4.5 million UK homes. Globally, the cost of wind power has fallen by 49% and that of solar power by 85% since 2010. Renewables are already cheaper than coal power in two-thirds of all countries in the world. "This progress was made possible by the countries, companies, cities and regions who led the way. Shifting investment, spurring innovation, scaling-up technologies and driving down costs. And in the lead up to COP26, we have defined five areas which need particular attention: clean energy, clean transport, nature-based solutions, adaptation and resilience and, bringing it all together, finance. From releasing capital for green projects, to making electric cars cheaper to buy, the opportunities of the green economy are broad. "And by working together, we can make progress faster. That is why the UK, in partnership with Chile and the UN, is leading the Climate Ambition Alliance. Bringing together 120 countries, 1,000 businesses, 36 investors, nearly 500 cities and regions, and more than 500 universities. The Alliance is the largest ever coalition of leaders committed to reaching net zero by 2050. It already represents over half of global GDP and covers nearly a quarter of CO2 emissions. "But we must go further. So today the High-Level Champions for the UK and Chile, Nigel Topping and Gonzalo Munoz, are launching the 'Race to Zero'. Urging businesses, investors, cities and regions around the world to commit to reaching net zero by 2050. We are off to a great start. It is great to see big names like Diageo and Rolls-Royce joining the 'Race to Zero' today. "Ladies and gentlemen, whether we live in the South, the North, the East or the West, we share one life-giving but fragile planet. As we recover from the Coronavirus, the world has an opportunity to not just rebuild what went before, but to build back better. Uniting behind a green global recovery. We must all do our part. I would urge everyone involved in today's event to join the 'Race to Zero' and commit your region, city or company to reaching net zero by 2050 at the latest."

"I'm hopeful that a year from now we are not looking back at this time and nothing has happened, I'm hopeful that change truly does come. We've seen black men killed by police before, we've seen those police convicted and sent to prison, that's happened and it still didn't change anything. "The difference this time is that you have so many people talking about this issue, the protests continue, the conversation is only about this issue, and the momentum continues to grow. This is not only black people who are sounding this alarm, everyone who understands and appreciates fairness is fed up and they are demanding change. "It's the most momentum around this decades-old issue that I've ever seen in my lifetime. From that perspective, I've found it hopeful and promising that this murder of George Floyd has highlighted an issue that has been with us in this country and something that we have been dealing with as a country for over 50 years now. That is the systemic and institutionalised racism that happens every single day in this country. "I'm hopeful that we can sustain this through the November elections when a lot of people who typically support this type of movement have not voted, and that's a problem. I'm hopeful that they understand that the biggest hammer you can swing at this is going to the ballot box and voting."

The President just used a Bible and one of the churches of my diocese as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that our church stands for. To do so, he sanctioned the use of tear gas by police officers in riot gear to clear the church yard. I am outraged. The President did not pray when he came to St. John's; nor did he acknowledge the agony and sacred worth of people of color in our nation who rightfully demand an end to 400 years of systemic racism and white supremacy in our country. We in the Diocese of Washington follow Jesus in His Way of Love. We aspire to be people of peace and advocates of justice. In no way do we support the President's incendiary response to a wounded, grieving nation. In faithfulness to our Savior who lived a life of non-violence and sacrificial love, we align ourselves with those seeking justice for the death of George Floyd and countless others through the sacred act of peaceful protest.

This sad episode [Ed: he's referring to Cummings and Durham] shows a regime that has lost its moral compass. And by regime, I don't only mean politicians and their special advisers. I mean the regime of doctors and scientists shoring up this dysfunctional government. Every day, government scientific advisers stand next to increasingly discredited politicians, acting as protective professional shields to prop up the collapsing reputations of ministers. Why did Yvonne Doyle from Public Health England agree to stand next to Johnson when he was defending Cummings on Sunday? Why did John Newton, who leads the UK government's Covid-19 testing programme, stand next to Matt Hancock as the secretary of state for health and social care again sought to defend the indefensible? Every day a cast of experts - led by the chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty - lends credibility to this government by annealing their reputations with those of ministers. This fusion of character works when we believe the collective interest is being put first. But when the government places the instincts of an individual above the tragedies of a people, it is surely time to step away. Tying the reputation of advisers to a government that is now an international laughing stock seems a mistake. It cannot be a coincidence that Vallance and Whitty have not been seen for a few days. But even so, government scientific and medical advisers should now disengage from these daily briefings immediately and completely. The relationship between scientists and ministers has become dangerously collusive. Scientists and politicians appear to have agreed to act together in order to protect a failing government. When advisers are asked questions, they speak with one voice in support of government policy. They never deviate from the political scripts.

Cummings' latest inaccuracy was spotted by Jens Wiechers, a data scientist, who ran Cummings' blog posts through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine works by sending out web crawlers to a huge number of websites and capturing what each page on that website looks like on any given day. The snapshots are then stored by the Internet Archive, a US-based digital library, and are accessible to anyone who types in the address. Not every page on the world wide web is captured by the Wayback Machine, but Cummings' blog just happened to have been captured. Yvonne McDermott Rees, lecturer in law at Swansea University, calls the Wayback Machine a vital tool for investigators. "It can be used to look up how webpages appeared in the past, even where they have since been amended or deleted, or where the domain name has expired," she says. "It's like a digital form of time travel." The Wayback Machine shows that Cummings added two paragraphs about Ebola and SARS to a post on his blog between April 9 and May 3. Another open source intelligence (OSINT) tool - and a tantalising trail of digital breadcrumbs - narrows down the data even further. XML data, generated when a page is changed, indicates that the change was made on 14 April, the day Cummings returned to London from Durham.

A huge percentage of communication is nonverbal. If I say, 'You're being a jerk', but you can see my smile, you know that I'm kidding. When you walk past someone or have an interaction where they can't see that smile because of a mask, you're losing something that conveys to other people that you're friendly and polite and approachable.

There are some emotions that are expressed solely in the lower part of the face. People discount these smiles, but they play an important role in greasing the rails of politeness.

This study demonstrates that when doctors wear a facemask during consultations this has a significant negative impact on the patient's perceived empathy and diminish the positive effects of relational continuity. Consideration should be taken in planning appropriate use of facemasks in infectious disease policy for primary care and other healthcare professionals at a national, local or practice level.

Beyond I can't look beyond
Feel the other side
I sense only yesterday
The fear and the loss
Oh to move forward
To the bright blue ahead
I'm stuck in the memory
Of what's done
What might have been
The doorbell rings
On the step he's smiling
From the other side
Free and unbound
He takes my hand
Come if you want
It's not hard over here
No pain nor regret
Just you and your dreams
It's a journey of inches
That make up a mile
Of small steps and changes
To cross the divide
Hold the light in your palm
Trust the soul
Shut your eyes
Look back in wonder
From the other side

Phase 1: Virus not yet contained but cases are falling. From 28 May you should be able to meet another household outside in small numbers. Sunbathing is allowed, along with some outdoor activities like golf and fishing. Garden centres and drive-through takeaways can reopen, some outdoor work can resume, and childminding services can begin. Phase 2: Virus controlled. You can meet larger groups outdoors, and meet another household indoors. Construction, factories, warehouses, laboratories and small shops can resume work. Playgrounds and sports courts can reopen, and professional sport can begin again. Phase 3: Virus suppressed. You can meet people from more than one household indoors. Non-essential offices would reopen, along with gyms, museums, libraries, cinemas, larger shops, pubs, restaurants, hairdressers and dentists. Live events could take place with restricted numbers and physical distancing restrictions. Schools should reopen from 11 August. Phase 4: Virus no longer a significant threat. University and college campuses can reopen in full; mass gatherings are allowed. All workplaces open and public transport is back at full capacity.

Woolacombe: Sadly every double yellow line from Woolacombe to Mortehoe is covered with cars and vans. Cars mounting pavements to get by whilst pedestrians try to cross the road. All the offences have been recorded and will be processed in due course.
Barnstaple: Traffic wardens are running out of tickets. Do not abandon your cars! Emergency vehicles can't get through. Cars will be towed away.
Ilfracombe & Braunton: Roads towards the North Devon coast are now gridlocked. There are no amenities open or toilets. We have vehicles from all over the country identified, please do not travel here. We will still be here when this is over so come back when it's safe to do so. Our valuable resources are now having to be used for traffic control all over the coastline such is the volume of traffic. We have an elderly population in this part of the world who will now be very anxious over the selfish actions of these individuals.

To Hongkongers, Britain's coronavirus response is nothing short of a disaster. Since I began self-isolating in London days before the official lockdown started on 23 March, I've received dozens of messages from loved ones back home in Hong Kong expressing their concern - and incredulity.
Despite advance warnings since January of how serious the situation was in Asia, the UK's initial approach was slow and lax even compared to many of its European counterparts. The choice to offset infections by mitigating rather than controlling the virus allowed it to spread unchecked and likely condemned the economy to a protracted lockdown, as well as a tragically higher death toll. Confusion over the government's stance on herd immunity, reluctance to implement harsher restrictions, PPE shortages, disinformation and the recent lack of clarity over updated social-distancing advice have since made a spectacle of Britain for all the wrong reasons.
The death toll has risen to over 40,000 in the UK - the highest in Europe - and 5,782 in London. By contrast, in Hong Kong - a densely-populated city with over seven million people (approximately two million less than London) bordering mainland China where the initial outbreak took place - the death toll is four.
One key difference between Hong Kong and the UK is that Hongkongers did not wait for the government to respond. From the get-go, residents spontaneously adopted near-universal masking and began grassroots organising to spread public hygiene messages and fix medical shortages without prompting from the government.

The coronavirus pandemic is piling pressure on financial markets around the globe. How is it affecting the health of your personal investments and pensions, and how can you keep them safe? The FTSE 100 - which measures the performance of the biggest companies in the UK - stood 4% (6,049 points) higher when markets closed two days ago. This is the first time the FTSE 100 has finished the day above 6,000 points this month, and the second time since early March. The economy is contracting at the fastest rate since the financial crisis over a decade ago. According to the Office for National Statistics, it plunged by 2% in the three months to March, following no growth in Q4 2019. The FTSE 100 index alone has fallen by a fifth since the start of the year so far, from 7,604 points. The Bank of England (BoE) says the coronavirus pandemic will push the UK economy towards its deepest recession on record. It said the economy was on course to shrink 14% this year, based on the lockdown being relaxed in June.
Should I be concerned about my savings in the long term? The short answer is no. While the coronavirus will likely continue to rattle markets, this doesn't necessarily mean long-term investors should be overly concerned. This is because volatility in the stock markets is normal and markets often rebound quickly once immediate issues are resolved. Jonathan Raymond, Quilter Cheviot investment director, says: "The world always carries uncertainty and there is enough of it about. Markets generally trend upwards over the longer term, even though it's not unusual for them to fall by 10% over a short time. The FTSE 100, for example, has regularly fallen by 10% since 1990, although it's relatively rare for it to fall by more than 20%." Tom Selby says that at times like this "it's important for investors not to panic." He adds: "Anyone investing in the stock market should be thinking in terms of five years or more, rather than weeks or months, and that is the context through which to view the current turbulence." Furthermore, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a series of now well-reported measures to protect the economy on 11 and 20 March, although it isn't clear how much of a positive impact this will have. Tom McGillycuddy, Tickr founder, says: "Unless the UK and US governments embark on a big fiscal program, like in some of the Nordic countries, we are in for multiple quarters of retraction. But, with some big fiscal intervention and proper short-term hardcore social distancing, we could bounce out of this much quicker. Ultimately, the long-term impact of the virus on investments is impossible to predict."

It seems many people are breathing some relief, and I'm not sure why. An epidemic curve has a relatively predictable upslope and once the peak is reached, the back slope can also be predicted. We have robust data from the outbreaks in China and Italy, that shows the backside of the mortality curve declines slowly, with deaths persisting for months. Assuming we have just crested in deaths at 70k, it is possible that we lose another 70,000 people over the next 6 weeks as we come off that peak. That's what's going to happen with a lockdown.
As states reopen, and we give the virus more fuel, all bets are off. I understand the reasons for reopening the economy, but I've said before, if you don't solve the biology, the economy won't recover.
There are very few states that have demonstrated a sustained decline in numbers of new infections. Indeed, as of May 3rd the majority are still increasing and reopening. As a simple example of the USA trend, when you take out the data from New York and just look at the rest of the USA, daily case numbers are increasing. Bottom line: the only reason the total USA new case numbers look flat right now is because the New York City epidemic was so large and now it is being contained.

So throughout most of the country we are going to add fuel to the viral fire by reopening. It's going to happen if I like it or not, so my goal here is to try to guide you away from situations of high risk.

The crisis exposes our weaknesses. Will our leaders choose reform or calamity?
In the winter of 1788-89, the desperate government of Louis XVI asked the French people to send in lists of their grievances. It was a fatal mistake. The cahiers de doléances served to articulate the public's unspoken discontent and, equally important, its hopes for a better world. A crucial psychological barrier had fallen; it became possible to imagine a very different France. And the times - the moral and actual bankruptcy of the Ancien Régime, widespread crop failures and hopeless leadership - gave shape to the public's aspirations. The fuse was lit for revolution.
France in 1789. Russia in 1917. The Europe of the 1930s. The pandemic of 2020. They are all junctures where the river of history changes direction. The Covid-19 crisis may be a pivotal rather than a revolutionary moment but it, too, is challenging the old order. Like France's cahiers, the coronavirus forces questions about what sort of future we want, what the proper role of government is and what makes a healthy society. We face a choice: to build better ways of dealing domestically and internationally with this challenge (and prepare for inevitable future ones) or let our world become meaner and more selfish, divided and suspicious.
Long before Covid-19, popular thinkers like Thomas Piketty, the late Tony Judt and Paul Krugman were warning about deep social inequalities and the shortcomings of globalisation. There were sporadic protests like Occupy Wall Street or France's gilets jaunes. Most of us (such is human nature) carried on living. We worried from time to time about climate change, that our children couldn't afford houses and that there seemed to be more obscenely rich people along with more homeless ones. Covid-19 has turned a spotlight on the dark sides of our world. We have become aware of the fragility of international supply lines, the disadvantages of offshore sources for critical goods and the limits of international bodies. The chaotic responses and blame games of certain governments have exacerbated divisions in and among societies, perhaps permanently. America has withdrawn from moral and material leadership of the world. It and China have grown more hostile to one another, not less. Rogue states such as Russia gleefully make more trouble and the UN is increasingly marginalised.
When you name things - grievances, say, as the French did - you give them form and make it harder to ignore them. We are doing that now with the flaws in our world and spelling out our hopes for something better. As the French looked at Britain and America as models, we can see that South Korea, Denmark and New Zealand have controlled the pandemic more effectively than other countries, in part because their peoples have faith in the authorities and each other. Without trust - that the water is clean, medicines are safe, or thugs won't get away with it - societies are vulnerable. Covid-19 has caused fewer deaths proportionately in Germany than elsewhere because of the country's well-funded health system and its competent state and federal governments. As history shows, those societies that survive and adapt best to catastrophes are already strong. Britain rose to the challenge of the Nazis because it was united; France was not and did not.
Much also depended then, and depends now, on leaders. As weaknesses are exposed, do leaders fix or exploit them? While Franklin Roosevelt was promising Americans a better tomorrow in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler was destroying the Weimar Republic and intoxicating Germans with promises of revenge for the Treaty of Versailles. As we know, that ended in a world war.
For every Jacinda Ardern or Angela Merkel, the leaders of New Zealand and Germany who are talking to their citizens about the difficult road ahead, there is an illiberal, populist demagogue playing to baser fears and fantasies. In Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro dismisses Covid-19 as "the sniffles". In India the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party blames it on the Muslims. President Donald Trump claimed he had "total" authority, demonstrating something about his instincts if not his knowledge of the American constitution.
Wise leaders in the past have been able to steer away from danger. In 1830 Britain was coping with unrest in Ireland, violent strikes at home and demands for more power from the growing commercial and industrial middle classes. The enlightened aristocrats of the new Whig government believed that they had a choice between revolution and reform, even if the latter was at the expense of their own power and privilege. In 1832 their Great Reform Act widened the franchise for Parliament. The Whigs did not remove all grievances, but they muted them. A century later another child of privilege, Roosevelt, brought in the New Deal which helped to save American society and capitalism.
The present crisis could be the opportunity for strategies to produce essential public goods and ensure that citizens have safe, decent and fulfilled lives. People coming out of a calamity are open to sweeping changes. Governments will find it hard to resist demands for improved social programmes now that they are spending as though John Maynard Keynes were in the room. Will the British again accept an underfunded National Health Service? And countries could invest in key organisations like the World Health Organisation and give it greater power to protect the world from disease. Perhaps, just perhaps, bodies such as the G7 and G20 could become forums for unity and not dissent.
Future historians, if there are any who can still research and speak freely, will analyse the choices that individual countries and the world made. Let us hope the story shows the better angels of our nature, in Abraham Lincoln's words. Enlightened leaders and publics creating together sane and inclusive policies, and strengthening our vital institutions at home and abroad. The alternative story will not have a happy ending.

In London, the Tube will be able to handle less than 15% of its pre-pandemic rush hour peak: 50,000 passengers every 15 minutes, compared with 325,000 before.

There are signs people will turn to their cars in greater numbers than pre-lockdown. 56% of drivers currently without a car intend to buy one post-lockdown, according to car sales company AutoTrader. In Wuhan, China, private car usage nearly doubled when lockdown ended, rising from 34% before the outbreak to 66% after lockdown. "There is an avalanche of private car usage coming if we don't do something about it," says Leo Murray from climate action charity Possible, which campaigns for green transport.

"There is no question that the enforced immobility coronavirus has imposed upon us has set my mind travelling to earlier days of movement. Being in motion makes me feel alive, rejuvenated. Looking through a train window, the fleeting glimpse of towns both walled and towered, of markets with canvas and scent, all gone in an instant with the blow of a whistle and a shrill goodbye. I sometimes think that I am at my best while in motion and at my worst when I am static, like now in this Covid-19 lockdown. Perhaps being static forces me to think of death while movement is always bringing me to the light of somewhere new. Like a gypsy. Yet many people object to gypsies; they remind them perhaps that they are no longer in motion or worse, that they are already dead.

"I have been dreaming of movement in general and trains in particular. Perhaps trains will enjoy a renaissance when this crisis is over. Instead of taking a one-hour flight from Frankfurt to Venice why not consider the night train? Clattering through the darkness, the possibility of adventure or even danger. It could happen at any time, always out of sight and round the next unseen-but-felt curve."

The virus was shown to be spreading far faster in Sweden, said Imperial College, "not because the mortality trends are significantly different from any other country" but because "no full lockdown has been ordered so far". Nor was a full lockdown ever ordered. So what did this imply for Sweden? Imperial didn't translate the above graph into deaths, but when its assumptions were published others joined the dots. A Lund university academic warned that it meant 85,000 deaths for Sweden. An Uppsala team, feeding Imperial's parameters into its own study, agreed. The modelling envisaged Sweden paying a heavy price for its rejection of lockdown, with 40,000 Covid deaths by 1 May and almost 100,000 by June.

The latest figure for Sweden is 2,680 deaths, with daily deaths peaking a fortnight ago. The virus, it turns out, has been spreading at a fraction of the speed suggested.

As Johan Norberg wrote, Imperial's model "could only handle two scenarios: an enforced national lockdown or zero change in behaviour. It had no way of computing Swedes who decided to socially distance voluntarily. But we did." Anders Tegnell, Sweden's state epidemiologist, has seen his trust ratings soar. Some Swedes are even having his face tattooed on their arm. Sweden's Prime Minister has said he relies on Folkvett - people's wit, or common sense.

"Not too much changed for me until a week ago. I already worked from home and still am. Our business is pretty much at a standstill; not a lot of school photography is going on right now. Our staff of four is all furloughed. My business partner has to do a little work, maybe half a day a week, enough that we're not allowed to furlough him. Even dormant like this I must still maintain the finances, bills and salaries must be paid and furlough money and loans applied for, and, of course, the need for new and modified software for the business is always there so I'm still pretty much working as normal.

"My biggest worry was my Mum who was effectively in solitary confinement. I was just too late by a few days in fetching her up here before the lockdown began. She lived in sheltered accommodation in Ludlow where she had her own flat. Since the lockdown she hadn't really dared to go out (she's 89) and all the other residents, naturally, were all staying in their own flats so almost no interaction at all between them. I had been ringing her to chat on almost a daily basis but it's not the same. Last Tuesday however her doctor rang me up concerned with her mental and physical well-being and suggested, if I was willing, that I should take her home to Scotland to stay with me. Finally, I had legitimate permission to go and fetch her which I duly did the next day. Bit of a marathon really as there was nowhere on route or in Ludlow where I could stop the night. I left home at 5am, picked my Mum up from Ludlow, turned around and started back. I arrived at 11:30 pm. A bit of a harsh 1000-mile drive in one day.

"Now I've still got to work and look after my Mum at the same time. I genuinely think she wouldn't have lasted more than another few weeks on her own down south. She was losing weight quite rapidly and getting very depressed."

It's times like these you learn to live again
It's times like these you give and give again
It's times like these you learn to love again
It's times like these time and time again

My Grandma

My Grandma ate a mango every morning in her day
each one wrapped in a plastic pack that she'd just throw away
she had strawberries in winter and apples in the spring
she must have been quite special to deserve so many things
Grandma's house had many rooms but she resided all alone
and a hideout in the countryside made up a second home
she had energy to burn at the flick of any switch
if everything she says is true she must have been quite rich
The garden of my Grandma was the prettiest you've seen
she never grew a single grain or vegetable or bean
she never had to work the land and get her clothes all mucky
she never had to lift a hand; how could she be so lucky?
Grandma had her very own car to go just where she liked
she didn't have to walk so far or take the bus or bike
she didn't need her neighbours, she knew city folk instead
I hope that she was grateful for the amazing life she led
Gran would get on aeroplanes if she fancied taking flights
She'd disappear once every year for maybe just a fortnight
She must have been contented when her life was so carefree
I like to hear her stories and pretend that it was me

The basic reproduction number R0 is the number of secondary cases which one case would produce in a completely susceptible population. It depends on the duration of the infectious period, the probability of infecting a susceptible individual during one contact, and the number of new susceptible individuals contacted per unit of time. Therefore R0 may vary considerably for different infectious diseases but also for the same disease in different populations. The key threshold result of epidemic theory associates the outbreaks of epidemics and the persistence of endemic levels with basic reproduction numbers greater than one. Because the magnitude of R0 allows one to determine the amount of effort which is necessary either to prevent an epidemic or to eliminate an infection from a population, it is crucial to estimate R0 for a given disease in a particular population. The present paper gives a survey about the various estimation methods available.

"These are strange and unsettling times indeed - 'though I find myself slightly less disturbed that I might have expected. There's even part of me that is quite intrigued to be part of what is clearly a major global disturbance, and yet to be able to observe and carry on with some sort of normality. And I am of course relieved that my children though far flung seem reasonably safe. Today was grand-daughter Alice's 9th birthday in Kathmandu and we had a video call and admired her presents and the cake. We speak to them and to Emily and her lot in Leeds very regularly.
"So what's it like for us? Well pretty quiet. We have no visitors and we only go out as far as the local parks. We have become much more observant, watching the trees blossom and leaf (if that's what you call it - nature never much my thing before). Occasionally we have little conversations with people about the ducklings or the trees, now and then we see someone we know (saw Cee Roberts last week and had long conversation with her) - though all obviously at a distance. And at 8pm on Thursday evenings we come out and wave at everyone in our street.
"Phones and electronic links have become much more important. Generally one or two calls a day, catching up with more distant family and friends. Most seem to be managing pretty well, though one old friend whose husband has Alzheimer's is clearly struggling, and my brother whose wife died last year is finding it all very hard. He has a dog to take for daily walks and a large family who keep in close contact. I suppose it makes you realise how important all these relationships are. We are also part of WhatsApp groups for the two orchestras we play in and we have chats with them too. We even recorded the parts of one of our pieces to a click track, and someone's son has promised to put it together for us. Obviously the concerts we were preparing for have been cancelled - or at least postponed indefinitely.
"We read a lot. Mike's just finished the new Hilary Mantel and I'm reading the Philip Pullman. We watch films on TV, and because I'm a member of BFI we have access to some of their archive so we have a pretty wide choice. We've been watching the National Theatre productions too which have been excellent. I also read the papers - the good old Guardian of course. It makes me angry and depressed. Even when we get over this current crisis - which we will, although how much it will continue to affect us I'm not sure - we will still have Brexit to deal with. And though I know the EU is far from perfect, our reasons for leaving and the alternatives that we are presented fill me with nothing but gloom.
"So that's roughly where we are. Do keep in touch. Maybe one day we'll even manage to meet again!"

"While browsing the New York Times I came across a presidential candidate that should have Trump quaking in his boots, standing on a platform of legalising pineapple pizza. It's good to know that the Libertarian Party have their eyes on the ball, even if I could not support their culinary preferences."

The South Korean government has access to mobile phone data [Ed: There are approximately 860,000 4G and 5G transceivers densely covering the whole country], credit card data, and CCTV data [Ed: In 2014, South Korean cities had over 8 million CCTV cameras, or one camera per 6.3 people] during epidemics. With that information, they know where people go. They then release that information publicly (stripped of personal identifiers) so that other people can figure out if they might have crossed paths with an infected person. They detail hour-by-hour, sometimes minute-by-minute, timelines of infected people's travel - which buses they took, when and where they got on and off, even whether they were wearing masks.

  
8:30am the next day, I was woken up by an early morning call. It was from the local government council to confirm where I am, that I am who I am, and check my travel history and current health issues and symptoms.
14:30 Afternoon, another random call came from local council checking with me. "Standard random checking Mr. Chen. A local officer will do an initial home visit to your place at 15:00. You feel well?"
"I'm fine. So you do random calls to ensure we stay home?" I asked.
"Yes, we do, 2-3 times per day. Please do not leave your address and take necessary precautions to protect your family. If you leave home, I am afraid the police will be on their way soon."
"But how do you know people leave home? I was not GPS-tracked as I did not receive any tracking mobile phone device to carry at the airport?"
"No. The mobile phone only will be given if you do not have one. Since you've got your own phone, please make sure you have it on at all time for the next 14 days. If you lose your signal, please contact us by other means immediately otherwise it might trigger police attendance at your door step".
"You mean I am tracked already?"
"Yes, you gave us your number and that was enough."
A message was received later at 20:30, asking me to report back to an after-hours number. I rang back and asked why as I had not breached any rule.
"You might have lost signal temporarily or did not make any movement for an extended period of time, so the system thought you might have left your phone at home and we cannot risk you going out", the after-hours service officer told me. Their system can detect you're idle if you don't move as much as expected.

University of Oxford researchers working in an unprecedented vaccine development effort to prevent COVID-19 have started screening healthy volunteers (aged 18-55) today for their upcoming ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine trial in the Thames Valley Region. The vaccine based on an adenovirus vaccine vector and the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is already in production but won't be ready for some weeks still.

The team will enrol healthy volunteers aged between 18 - 55, who, if they pass screening, will be the first humans to test the new vaccine, called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. The trial will provide valuable information on the safety aspects of the vaccine, as well as its ability to generate an immune response against the virus. Interested individuals can volunteer to participate on the COVID-19 vaccine website.

The trial, a collaboration between the University's Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group clinical teams, will recruit up to 510 volunteers, who will receive either the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine or a control injection for comparison. Whilst the team will start screening people now to see if they are eligible to take part in the study, participants will not receive the vaccine for some weeks. Detailed preclinical work is being done and the vaccine is being manufactured to clinical grade standard at the Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility at Oxford University. The trial has been approved by UK regulators and ethical reviewers. Researchers are working as quickly as possible to get the vaccine ready to be used in the trial, which includes further preclinical investigations and production of a larger number of doses of the vaccine.

Professor Adrian Hill, Director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, said, 'The Oxford team had exceptional experience of a rapid vaccine response, such as to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. This is an even greater challenge. Vaccines are being designed from scratch and progressed at an unprecedented rate. The upcoming trial will be critical for assessing the feasibility of vaccination against COVID-19 and could lead to early deployment.'

Professor Andrew Pollard, Chief Investigator on the study, said, 'Starting the clinical trials is the first step in the efforts to find out whether the new vaccine being developed at Oxford University works and could safely play a central role in controlling the pandemic coronavirus that is sweeping the globe.'

Scientists around the world are working hard to develop a vaccine to prevent COVID-19, but there is a lot to be done. The Oxford team led by Professor Sarah Gilbert, Professor Andrew Pollard, Professor Teresa Lambe, Dr Sandy Douglas and Professor Adrian Hill started work designing a vaccine on Friday 10th January 2020.

The vaccine is an adenovirus vaccine vector (ChAdOx1) and was developed at Oxford's Jenner Institute. It was chosen as the most suitable vaccine technology for a SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) vaccine as it can generate a strong immune response from one dose and it is not a replicating virus, so it cannot cause an ongoing infection in the vaccinated individual. This also makes it safer to give to children, the elderly and anyone with a pre-existing condition such as diabetes. Adenoviral vectors are a very well-studied vaccine type, having been used safely in thousands of subjects, from 1 week to 90 years of age, in vaccines targeting over 10 different diseases.

Coronaviruses have club-shaped spikes on their outer coats. Immune responses from other coronavirus studies suggest that these are a good target for a vaccine. The Oxford vaccine contains the genetic sequence of this surface spike protein inside the ChAdOx1 construct. After vaccination, the surface spike protein of the coronavirus is produced, which primes the immune system to attack the coronavirus if it later infects the body. Professor Gilbert and team have previously developed a vaccine for another human coronavirus disease, which is Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and this has shown promise in early clinical trials.

When we look back at WW2, most of us are aware of the major battles, the high points and the low points and, above all, we know that the Allies emerged as the winners. No such luxury of retrospect for those who lived through the war. They had no idea what was going to happen. They did not know if they would survive. It was always in the here and now, a constantly shifting reality without the context that retrospect can bring.

Oil producers are paying buyers to take the commodity off their hands over fears that storage capacity could run out in May. Demand for oil has all but dried up as lockdowns across the world have kept people inside. The price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the benchmark for US oil, fell as low as minus $37.63 a barrel.

The world economy's sudden halt has caused bottlenecks. Flexport, a freight forwarder, says that normally half of all air freight cargo (on some routes, up to 80%) travels in the holds of passenger planes that are no longer flying; shipping lines, meanwhile, have cancelled sailings or dropped ports from their itineraries. Vendors' commercial terms have become tighter too. Crooks are trying to get in on the act as hospitals have become desperate and prices have shot up. The FBI has warned buyers against dodgy brokers taking advance payment for non-existent equipment. International goodwill has been in short supply too. Amid several reports of jiggery-pokery, French officials claimed that American buyers redirected masks from China destined for the Grand Est region, after stopping the shipment on the tarmac at Shanghai airport and offering three times the original price. Several countries are using more conventional methods to keep hold of what they have. The European Union has restricted exports of essential goods to most non-members (some countries had even blocked exports to fellow members until the EU stepped in). On April 3rd President Donald Trump ordered restrictions on American exports of PPE, including respirators, masks and gloves. Such curbs run the risk of starting a retaliatory, beggar-thy-neighbour spiral.

I am speaking to you at what I know is an increasingly challenging time. A time of disruption in the life of our country: a disruption that has brought grief to some, financial difficulties to many, and enormous changes to the daily lives of us all. Together we are tackling this disease, and I want to reassure you that if we remain united and resolute, then we will overcome it.

I hope in the years to come everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge. And those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any. That the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet good-humoured resolve and of fellow-feeling still characterise this country. The pride in who we are is not a part of our past, it defines our present and our future. The moments when the United Kingdom has come together to applaud its care and essential workers will be remembered as an expression of our national spirit; and its symbol will be the rainbows drawn by children.

I realise that my parents grew up in the 1920s when infectious diseases were still a terrible scourge, particularly in childhood. It was the world of the 1960s TV series "Dr Finlay's Casebook". My mother's father was a pharmacist. He lost his wife, i.e. my grandmother, and their first child. My mother herself survived scarlet fever in an isolation hospital and diphtheria, the latter after a tracheostomy performed on the kitchen table. No wonder she then lasted 93 years!

We can now, just, deal with bacteria, but not viruses reliably. I suddenly got pneumonia in 2003 and spent a pretty miserable week in hospital but recovered well. That was a bacterial infection that could be treated with antibiotics.

"There have been failings in the provision of adequate resources for those people who are working hard to protect all of us from the viral pandemic. We are profoundly sorry that this has led to the deaths of our health professionals and the pain this is causing their families, friends and colleagues. Although this does not help them, I hope they - and the rest of NHS workers and the public in general - can derive some comfort from knowing that we are determined to learn from any shortcomings and take action immediately to make sure that we do not put people at further risk in the future. May I reiterate my heartfelt apology and thanks to all who have suffered on our behalf."

Or words to that effect. We teach our children to take personal responsibility for their actions or inactions, own up to their mistakes, learn from them and try to put other people first. We do this through our belief that such behaviours underpin a civilised, moral and empathetic society. For the home secretary to say she is "sorry if people feel" is to signal that she is incapable of doing those things we expect of our children. These weasel words suggest that she is ducking responsibility and is prepared to blame others. As distressing as this is, it is the lack of a truly empathetic response that I find the most upsetting. The level of leadership we were getting before the pandemic crisis was questionable. In the last four weeks, it has been shown to be catastrophically threadbare.

Many thanks for sending me the link to your blog, which I think is a very interesting take on the daily, almost hourly, developments these days. I am taking a keen interest in these, but I think I need to ration my exposure to the 24-hour news channels, which seem to me to trivialise everything. Instead I think some of the most interesting stuff is going on in the scientific world. I am fed up with government politicians saying they are following scientific advice. The question is: whose scientific advice? It's as split on this as everyone else is politically.

I follow on Twitter a South African former doctor and ultramarathoner/coach called Tim Noakes. He's a bit of a contrarian but his posts keep me supplied with re-tweets of whistle-blowing scientific developments in this field and on, one of his other areas of interest, low-carb nutrition. His posts are peppered with links to scientific papers which contradict the received wisdom. The latest was a paper titled Antimalarial Drugs as COVID-19 Therapy by professor of biology J. Scott Turner on the utility of chloroquine and why it seems to work (although no-one quite knows why) and how it has been used with success for years as an antiviral, including the last coronavirus epidemic. So, irony of ironies, there was at least something in what President Trump has been saying even if it's not the miracle cure he made it out to be.

It all turns around the R, the transmission rate. Early on in a standard unprepared country it's somewhere between 2 and 3; during the few weeks that somebody is infected they infect between 2 and 3 other people on average. If R is above 1 infections grow exponentially into an epidemic. If it's below 1 they die down. The goal is to get R as close to zero as fast as possible to quench the epidemic. In Wuhan it is calculated that R was initially 3.9 and after the lockdown and centralized quarantine it went down to 0.32. Once you move into the Dance [the period after initial hard crackdown or Hammer] you don't need to do that anymore. You just need your R to stay below 1. You can remain below R=1 with a few simple measures.

"I've been watching Worldometer closely for three weeks and it throws up some interesting phenomena which I have been trying to understand by reading around. This was written a couple of days ago so some of the numbers need updating.

"Finland and Germany have a small fraction of our deaths (per million) despite (in Germany's case) similar infection rates (per million). Finland was well stocked with equipment, and had full plans long before the virus reared its head as part of a long term investment to be prepared for a virus (something Bill Gates warned governments about, in detail, some years ago). And Germany got organised very quickly to test enormous numbers of people early on and has undertaken about three times as many tests (per million) (and at the start six times as many), using tests to screen, isolate and treat very quickly. Germany has a lot of people categorised by Worldometer as seriously ill, far more than the UK, but very few of them die, presumably because they identified them early enough. In contrast there has been almost no testing of staff or residents in care homes in the UK at all, and most residents in care homes who die do so without having experienced any intensive care of any kind. Germany's death rate is currently 34 per million, Finland's is 9, the UK's is 145 per million. The UK has screwed up on almost everything. We were not prepared, we didn't get organised, we didn't test, we didn't lock down early enough, and we didn't protect medical staff.

"There is another interesting contrast between Norway (whose population seem as willing to follow rules as the Swiss) who compulsorily locked down without demur early on, and have kept infections and deaths very low, and Sweden, whose PM said "We are a grown up country and our people are grown ups, and it is not necessary to order people to behave sensibly", and Sweden now has four times the death rate (88) of Norway (22) (both with similarly brilliant health systems). So much for being grown up!

"Despite careful health advisors saying 'this is very much more dangerous than the flu' the 2015 flu outbreak in the UK killed more people than this virus has - at least up to the 12th April.

"An epidemiologist made an interesting point the other day. He said umpteen thousand people die every year in the USA from road accidents, and a high proportion of those are innocent people killed by others. But the government does not tell everyone not to drive or ask the police to enforce this. There are serious risks associated with lots of behaviours that are legal. And, until now, our societies would not tolerate any government taking our liberty to take risks away from us. At what point the deaths from a virus are so high that the population changes its ground rules about what the government can reasonably do is a tricky question. In Finland far more people are dying from car accidents and drinking too much at the moment than are dying from the virus, but everyone seems to be respecting a total lockdown rather than banning driving and alcohol. In the UK we have a lockdown but off licenses are considered 'essential' and are staying open, and alcohol consumption has soared. And in the USA far, far more people are dying from 'deaths of despair' (suicide, drugs, alcoholism) than are dying from the virus, but no-one has suggested throwing $4 trillion dollars at the problem. In the USA the right to own an armoury of automatic weapons is defended despite more people being shot each year than are likely to die of the virus, and as the virus has become more deadly, more people are buying more guns.

"So we have currently changed our assumptions in a quite radical way about the appropriate role of government, at least in relation to the virus, and governments have responded (to varying extents) to this change of attitude in order not to be blamed and lose the next election. We should not pretend that either the government or the population are behaving rationally."

"All pretty bleak in the US. An idiot at the helm and horrendous, unimaginable numbers of deaths in NY. I have a mate in DC where it's quieter. She is able to work from home, exercise and make occasional trips to the shops. Here in our little bubble of Orange County, the entitled of Ladera Ranch (not a ranch at all, but a 'community', a sort of estate of around 36,000) pretty much carry on as normal. Social distancing? Huh? Gangs of tiny kids career around the paths and parks on their bikes, neighbours walk the dog and stop to chat with other neighbours, teenagers hang out in groups. I try to walk for exercise a few times a week and return tense and thoroughly pissed off at having to regularly climb into bushes by the side of the path to avoid people coming towards me, totally oblivious to the situation and the restrictions. We went on a drive yesterday, north along the Pacific Coast Highway. Stunning ocean views, folk hanging out on the closed beaches. Shuttered hotels, restaurants and bars, evidence of a collapsed tourist industry. So sad.

"The REALLY scary thing is that millions of people now don't have any health insurance, as it is usually attached to jobs. So, lose your job, lose health coverage for yourself and all members of your family. How can a so-called developed country tolerate this? What it means in the current situation is that if you or any member of your family is hospitalised due to the virus you will incur a debt that you'll be paying off for life. With interest of course. How unbelievably cruel and inhuman.

"We have a great governor in California who has been on the ball from the start. This is when the US system of state and federal law comes into its own. Despite the fact that Trump has first been a denier and then more recently totally useless at leading the nation in fighting the virus (there are still 11 states which have given no guidance at all to residents), we have always had sensible compassionate support from our guy. The levelling off of the curve is still somewhere in the future for the US."

The media sycophancy towards @BorisJohnson as his @Conservative government slaughters our #NHSheroes with lack of #PPE tells you all you need to know about our corrupt, billionaire-owned mouthpiece media.

Over 10,000 people have died from #Covid19 in the UK and that doesn't include those who have died in care homes and the community. In Germany, just over 3000 have died. Why the difference? Could it possibly be anything to do with #BorisJohnson's mismanagent!? #TooLittleTooLate

As #BorisJohnson heads to #Chequers, I do wish him well but those of us with an uncharitable mind might ask if travelling to a second home is essential under his own guidelines?

Glad to see you back @BorisJohnson. But if you really have learned a lesson and now appreciate that nobody deserves to die by this ghastly disease, pick up the 'phone and sack the man who advised you that a few old and sick people dying was acceptable collateral to keep markets ticking.

21:10 BBC newsflash: Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been moved out of intensive care but remains in hospital, Downing Street has said. Mr Johnson has been receiving treatment for coronavirus at St Thomas' Hospital in London since Sunday. No 10 said he "has been moved this evening from intensive care back to the ward, where he will receive close monitoring during the early phase of his recovery".

Deaths in the UK are forecast to peak the third week of April, with an estimated 2,932 deaths on April 17. The model shows that the UK will not have enough beds and ICU beds to meet demand, with the shortage peaking at 23,745 ICU beds on April 17, and predicts 66,314 total deaths in the country by August 4.

"I saw many people with respiratory problems and even though it's cold, it's winter, we are sending these people back to wet tents in an overcrowded camp. I am worried about a pandemic breaking out. They don't have hot water, they have to wait three hours in the cold for food, they aren't getting enough vitamins so many have bleeding gums. If you read about Spanish flu it was exactly like this; it began to spread in overcrowded facilities where people had a viral infection that became a bacterial infection that killed them."

We know her as a nurse, the lady with the lamp, gliding through blood-soaked army hospitals. But maybe we should call her the lady with the bar chart, because she was at least as illuminating in the world of statistics. So, what would she think of big data? Florence loved statistics. She said she found them "more enlivening than a novel". And a friend said, "However exhausted Florence might be, the sight of long columns of figures was perfectly reviving to her." For Florence, statistics were God's work. She said, "To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose." So, although she's famous now as a nurse, she actually trained first as a statistician.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson sparked security concerns on Tuesday when he shared a screenshot of "the first ever digital Cabinet" on his Twitter feed. It revealed the country's most senior officials and ministers were using bog-standard Zoom to discuss critical issues facing Blighty. The tweet also disclosed the Zoom meeting ID was 539-544-323, and fortunately that appears to have been password protected. That's a good thing because miscreants hijack unprotected Zoom calls. Crucially, the use of the Zoom software is likely to have infuriated the security services, while also raising questions about whether the UK government has its own secure video-conferencing facilities. We asked GCHQ, and it told us that it was a Number 10 issue. Downing Street declined to comment.

Made free calls to friends and family; made video calls; paid bills and invoices; made bank transfers; bought a new shower head on-line (click-and-collect from store car park); read the news; maintained this website; exchanged video and photos; downloaded software; downloaded articles; booked a medical appointment; proofread an article by my son in Bilbao; watched Netflix films; caught up with iPlayer; posted queries on IT forums; and more besides ...

The economic rescue packages to deal with the impact of the coronavirus must also be green, a growing chorus of environmental campaigners have urged, concerned that hasty measures will lock the world into a high-carbon future.

"Governments need to put huge amounts of money into trying to sustain jobs and livelihoods," said Mary Robinson, a former Irish president and UN high commissioner for human rights, who served twice as UN climate envoy. "But they must do it with a very strong green emphasis. The threat from climate change is as real as the threat from Covid-19, though it seems far away."

"Money has poured into the fossil fuel industry since the Paris agreement [of 2015]," she said. "That can't continue."

Exchange value: The key to understanding responses to COVID-19 is the question of what the economy is for. Currently, the primary aim of the global economy is to facilitate exchanges of money.
State capitalism: State capitalism is the dominant response we are seeing across the world right now. Typical examples are the UK, Spain and Denmark. The state capitalist society continues to pursue exchange value as the guiding light of the economy. But it recognises that markets in crisis require support from the state.
Barbarism: This is the bleakest scenario. Barbarism is the future if we continue to rely on exchange value as our guiding principle and yet refuse to extend support to those who get locked out of markets by illness or unemployment. It describes a situation that we have not yet seen.
State socialism: State socialism describes the first of the futures we could see with a cultural shift that places a different kind of value at the heart of the economy. The key here is that measures like nationalisation of hospitals and payments to workers are seen not as tools to protect markets, but a way to protect life itself.
Mutual aid: Mutual aid is the second future in which we adopt the protection of life as the guiding principle of our economy. But, in this scenario, the state does not take a defining role. Rather, individuals and small groups begin to organise support and care within their communities.

16:21 BBC newsflash

NHS England medical director Professor Stephen Powis says if the death toll in the UK is kept below 20,000, "we will have done very well".

"Strong coronavirus measures today should only last a few weeks, there shouldn't be a big peak of infections afterwards, and it can all be done for a reasonable cost to society, saving millions of lives along the way. If we don't take these measures, tens of millions will be infected, many will die, along with anybody else that requires intensive care, because the healthcare system will have collapsed."

"Great news! The UK finally announces a country-wide lockdown. They could have done it 10 days ago, but the epidemiological advice the govt received was bad. It will lead to hundreds, maybe thousands of unnecessary deaths. #HammerAndDance #coronavirus"

"Yes, the situation is dire. We are not allowed to go outside our 'comune'. For us, that's the city of Udine. If you live in, say, the village of Cerneglons, your movements are very limited. We're told to stay indoors except for food shopping, newspaper buying, going to the chemist's - and walking the dog! So I can't go anywhere near the centre of the city, otherwise I can be stopped by the police and sanctioned. In any case, there's no point. All bars, restaurants, shops, cinemas, etc. are closed. Udine without osterie! This, as you can imagine, is tedious, but as these draconian measures seem to have worked in China, we'll follow the rules and hope for the best. May the UK avoid the worst! But don't count on Bojo."