Keir’s the Antidote

Usually, a party leadership victory would ensure front-page headlines, interview spreads, and immense exposure across the various news channel. However, the extraordinary times we are in meant that until recently Keir Starmer’s leadership had been a quiet one. Nevertheless, Boris Johnson has now been served notice by his opponent that he means business.

Last week the Labour leader put the PM to the sword over the death toll in care homes, unearthing the pre-March 12 government guidance to care homes that stated: “it remains very unlikely that people receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected”. Then, referring to ONS figures that suggest at least 40% of COVID-19 deaths have occurred in care homes, he asked the PM to take responsibility and accept the government was too slow to act.

Instead of accepting, Johnson falsely claimed that the government advice put forward by Starmer was not true, but the leader of the opposition had the evidence to hand. After PMQs Starmer also issued a letter to the PM asking him to correct the record, but Johnson again refused to do so. Seemingly the PM is forgetting he is now standing across from a lawyer at the despatch box, and you would have thought he would have learned his lesson from the warning shot the previous week.

Two weeks ago, again at PMQs, the Labour leader asked the PM why he could possibly think the UK’s handling of COVID-19 has been a success considering we now had the second-highest death toll globally. When the PM responded by saying now was not the time to make international comparisons, Starmer waved around the government’s own comparison charts, highlighting his initial point.

The Turning Point on Coronavirus

Tonight, Boris Johnson is set to announce a slight easing to Britain’s lockdown after just 7 weeks. These changes look set to include a new set of slogans, increased exercise time, and the possible reopening of garden centres, should they be able to conform to social distancing. On social media, there has been a huge backlash towards the expected measures, and to many, this feels like the latest car crash in what has been catastrophic handling of the pandemic since the start.

As of today, Britain has the highest death rate in Europe, and the second-highest worldwide, after the US. The current figure stands at 31,587 deaths, although this is the minimum, the number is likely to be a lot higher. Should the lockdown be eased too early, this number could skyrocket to 100,000 by the end of the year, as highlighted by John Johnston for Politics Home today.

The big question on everybody’s lips is whether Britain is ready to ease lockdown, and most statistics point to no. It is important to remember that Britain was one of the last countries to enter lockdown, yet we are one of the first to contemplate easing lockdown. There is no doubt we have passed the peak of wave 1 of the coronavirus, which hit around 4 weeks ago, but the descent of the curve is noticeably much less steep than the ascent.

Modelling the daily numbers has always been difficult due to under-reporting at weekends, however, as per the government’s slides the 7-day rolling average is currently around 580, the peak was around 900-950, and we entered lockdown when the rolling average was around 60. If we model this with death per million persons in the graph below courtesy of Our World in Data, we can see there is still a long way to go to reach pre-lockdown levels.