Countries across Europe are tightening up or extending their lockdowns in a bid to suppress the latest more contagious strain of the virus.
In Germany, Angela Merkel warned the country’s tough anti-Covid measures might have to last another 10 weeks to contain the big rise in infections and curb the death toll which is running at between 900 and 1,000 people a day. Numbers may be even higher because they were under-reported during the Christmas holidays.
Merkel added that unless the latest measures – the closure of all schools and non-essential shops – are enforced for longer, she fears that infections may rise 10-fold by Easter. At the same time, Germany has just ordered extra doses of vaccines for when they are finally approved by the EU.
The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, is due to decide this week whether to extend the country’s national lockdown into next month. In Belgium – which saw its highest excess death rate last year since the Spanish flu in 1918 – the authorities are also considering tighter rules.
In Italy, which was so badly hit during last winter’s first wave, the authorities are also tightening up measures again throughout the northern regions.
Here in the UK the daily death toll of 1,243 was the second highest since the pandemic started last year. In other grim news, the latest provisional figures from the ONS showed that the rise in the number of excess deaths last year was at its highest since World War Two.
In 2020, 697,000 deaths were registered, compared with an average of 606,000 each year between 2015 and 2019.
However, when you look at the age and the size of the UK’s population – what’s called ‘age-standardised mortality’ – the death rates are on a par with a decade ago.
On a brighter note, we have now had two consecutive days where newly diagnosed cases have hovered around the 46,000 mark. Up to the weekend, the average was close to 60,000. Hospital cases are still rising – patients being admitted at the moment are the ones who were infected a week or so ago – particularly in the North West. So now is precisely the time to crack down even harder to keep levels low.
Which is why Priti Patel, in her press briefing today at No 10, went out of her way to back the police to keep cracking down on enforcing England’s coronavirus rules because of the “horrifying number of deaths” and to call for a “truly national effort.” She’s right, and she was also right that the rules are pretty clear. You stay at home, you exercise near to your home and you see as few people as possible. That means Boris was fine to ride his bike seven miles away. He has helped set a new limit.
Miracle retail
What is astonishing looking at the latest UK retail sales figures from the British Retail Consortium is that they are not a million times worse. The headline number suggests that retail sales suffered the biggest fall in 25 years last year.
Dig a little deeper and the actual number is a 0.3% fall compared to the previous one. You might say that’s a miracle, considering most of us were holed up at home and didn’t need those extra high-heels, or much else for that matter.
Unsurprisingly, sales of non-food items in physical shops – mainly fashion and homeware products – were down 24% and non-food down by about 5%.
In contrast, spending on food and drink rose by 5.4% as we stocked up on goodies to tide us through the worst of the lockdown and couldn’t go to the pub or restaurants.
What did people do instead? Well, an awful lot of them bought the fantasy role-playing Warhammer game. To be precise: 4.7 million people worldwide now use the Warhammer community website, up 200,000 on the previous year. The Nottingham-based owner, Games Workshop, just reported record sales of £186m and profits up a third despite all its 500 shops being closed.
The earth moved…
Around lunchtime the most deafening boom echoed around the house, shaking the windows and terrified us all as it sounded just like a bomb going off.
Within minutes, Twitter was alight with reports that a Spitfire had blown up over Duxford but that was soon dismissed. But then came reports from the amateur geeks that the noise, which was heard across Essex, Cambridgeshire and east London, was indeed supersonic.
They were right: it’s been confirmed that the boom came from an RAF Typhoon aircraft that had been launched from RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire to escort a rogue private jet to Stansted Airport which had lost ‘communications’ . Or it was the Russians playing games again and we just haven’t been told?
Maggie Pagano,
Executive Editor
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