What just happened
- Trump said he would leave the White House but continued to insist the US election was a fraud.
- Germany, France and Italy want all Europe’s ski resorts to stay closed over Christmas; Austria and Switzerland want to open theirs.
- Tory MPs threatened to rebel against the UK government’s latest tiered Covid restrictions.
Except in Liverpool. Anxious not to gloss over the bad news that most of the UK faces continued tough Covid restrictions at least until January, Boris Johnson buried the only uplifting portion of his statement from Downing Street yesterday. Mass testing in Liverpool has worked. This has implications for policy but could prove awkward politically.
- Voluntary free Covid tests with quick results, available to everyone, have helped bring Liverpool’s infection rate down by three quarters since mid-October, from 635 to 158 cases per 100,000 people.
- As a result, unlike most of the rest of the northwest, Liverpool will enter Tier 2 rather than Tier 3 next week. Its pubs and restaurants will be able to open subject to the same restrictions as in, say, London.
- Similar mass testing is supposed to be available to everywhere going into Tier 3 “as soon as possible”.
Reality check. “As soon as possible” for Tier 3 areas is not the same as making good on Johnson’s moonshot pledge of mass testing for the whole country. Also: it is not true, as he says, that “testing on this scale is untried” and it is misleading to caveat its potential, as he does, with the words “if it works”. Mass testing has been tried (11 million tests in Wuhan, 9 million more recently in Qingdao) and everyone knows it works. It is the only way to map the spread of a virus spread by people with no symptoms. But better late than never. If it enabled Tier 3 areas to follow Liverpool quickly down to Tier 2 it would be worth doing.
So why is mass testing not ready to roll out in Kent, Slough, Leicester and across Greater Manchester and the north east? That is a question likely to be asked repeatedly over the weekend as up to 70 Tory MPs consider whether to vote against their government when their support is sought for the new measures in a vote next Tuesday.
Wherever Tier 3 looms there are good reasons for it – local NHS resources under particular strain in Kent, for example; a lot of multi-generational homes in Slough. But in every case mass testing offers an alternative to the blunt instrument of a de facto return to lockdown. Why isn’t it ready to go? Has the government wasted the past month? We’ll be asking the same question of the summer on day two of our Covid Inquiry today. Do join us.
Ma v Zhang
Xi Jinping has been extolling the public spirited patriotism of the great 19th century Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Jian. Which in a way is odd, because at other times the Chinese Communist Party has vilified Zhang as a bloodsucking capitalist and exploiter of the working class. The reason is simple, the FT explains in a worth-your-time long read (£). Xi wants a new role model for China’s business class to replace Jack Ma, whose latest stock market flotation he personally scuppered earlier this month. Ma cavorted with foreign plutocrats at Davos and dared to criticise Xi’s regulators. Zhang made nice with officialdom, made a fortune in textiles, and restricted his political ambitions to his hometown of Nantong – to which Xi recently paid an otherwise inexplicable visit nine days after instructing his enforcers to rap Ma’s knuckles.
China vaccinating already
China has already administered Covid vaccines to a million people – even though it hasn’t finished testing them yet. Three vaccines, produced by Chinese-owned companies Sinopharm and Sinovac, are in use among civilians as well as the military as part of an emergency-use campaign. All three are still undergoing phase 3 clinical trial tests for safety and efficacy. Despite promising results from earlier trial phases and assurances from company executives that no negative reactions have been reported since the start of the campaign, the choice to start vaccinating before safety tests are over is unorthodox and potentially risky. But the roll-out of a mass vaccination campaign does give the world an interesting test case, especially for Brazil, Turkey and Indonesia – which have pre-ordered millions of doses of these vaccines.
