At last year’s elections the Conservatives lost 11 seats and overall control of Mid Devon. This left them with just 18 seats and short of a majority, although they remain the largest party. The LibDems now have 12, Independents 10 and Greens 2.

Mid Devon is obviously finding governance a problem. Owl’s solution is for the opposition parties to come together and agree on a shared vision and ambition for the future, as has recently happened in East Devon. 

The newly formed Democratic Alliance in EDDC is now the largest party. The tragedy in East Devon is that Ben Ingham persuaded a number of Independents to follow him as leader of the “Independent Group”, then jumped into bed with the Conservatives. Business as usual.

Ben Ingham is now LINO (Leader in name only), having lost his majority as one by one he is deserted by his followers.

Lewis Clarke  www.devonlive.com

Following a council resolution to review the current governance arrangements in place at Mid Devon District Council, a working group of members has been created to undertake this work and recommend any changes or improvements that could be made back to council in due course.

A workshop was held on Friday, March 13, which was facilitated by the Local Government Association (LGA). This session agreed the terms of reference for the work, making it clear that this was about identifying ways in which debate and discussion could achieve balanced and effective decision making, not about whether any form of governance was inherently ‘better’ than another.

Acting chair of the working group, Cllr Andrew Moore, said: “Today’s discussion was very encouraging. I got the sense that there was a genuine willingness from all members attending to work collaboratively as we go through this process over the coming months. I know that many of us are looking forward to understanding what other options are available and visiting other councils to see how these work in practice, in order to learn how our own governance might be improved for the benefit of our residents.”

The working group is aiming to use a future meeting to explore how external partners and stakeholders can be given an opportunity to contribute to this review, with a view to concluding this work before Christmas.

Owl thinks this will become an active debate within the next few days. Maybe academic because we don’t have a stockpile. 

“It is a matter of orthodoxy at the UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) that surgical facemasks are a no-no as far as the public are concerned. Officials have long taken the view that paper masks do not protect against viruses and do not hold emergency stocks of them.”

By Paul Nuki, Global Health Security Editor, London 2 April 2020 www.telegraph.co.uk 

It is a matter of orthodoxy at the UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) that surgical facemasks are a no-no as far as the public are concerned. Officials have long taken the view that paper masks do not protect against viruses and do not hold emergency stocks of them.

That thinking, like so much else, is now being tested. On Tuesday, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) – a long standing ally of Whitehall in the no-mask camp – was reported to be about to change its advice. Surgical masks should be used, not for personal protection, but to protect others from Covid-19, it was expected to announce.

It’s another virus-fighting lesson that has been borrowed from the east and raises important questions. Might population-wide use of face masks have slowed the spread of the pandemic in the west? And were our public health officials asking the wrong question all along? 

I first thought about face masks at around 4pm on Wednesday, November 28, 2007, when a small but agitated civil servant flung open the door of my office shouting, “Take it down! Take it down!”. I was editing the NHS website and we had just published a story which suggested that face masks had helped bring the 2003/4 Sars epidemic under control in south east Asia.

The official was part of the DHSC’s pandemic planning team. She was very angry and wanted the story taken down immediately. She had just been to see the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and had explained to him, “in terms he could understand”, that there was really no need for the UK to hold a stockpile of masks, she said. The story we had just published threatened to undo all of that by giving credence to an “minor academic paper” which said the opposite. I told her to hop-off.

The issue came up again two years later at a meeting of officials in the early stages of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic. The virus was breaking out of Mexico and heading our way fast and no one was sure how lethal it was. There were officials from across the UK dialled into the meeting and someone from Scotland noted there was no stockpile of surgical masks south of the border and wondered if “colleagues in London” might like to borrow some of theirs. “That won’t be necessary,” they were told.

The DHSC, like most western health authorities, have always approached the question of surgical masks from the perspective of the individual. The question has always been, do they protect us individual citizens from infectious droplet borne diseases? 

Approached from this angle, the evidence is clear – they provide little protection from viruses and may create a false sense of security as well as wider public anxiety. They are ill-fitting and need regular adjustment, causing wearers to touch their hands to their faces. Worse, they quickly become moist, creating a potential magnet for germs. It’s for these and other reasons UK doctors and nurses are so angry about not being provided with enough proper FFP3 respirators.

But what if you turn the question around, focusing not on the individual but on society; do surgical masks slow the progression of droplet spread viruses if issued to people in their millions, as we are seeing in China, South Korea and Taiwan?

A couple of days ago Science magazine ran an rare interview with George Gao, director-general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 

“The big mistake in the US and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks,” he said. “This virus is transmitted by droplets and close contact. Droplets play a very important role – you’ve got to wear a mask, because when you speak, there are always droplets coming out of your mouth. Many people have asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others.”

There are few western experts who would disagree when put this way round. This is exactly what surgical masks are designed for – to keep droplets in rather than out, to stop them from spreading to others. It is just that in the west, with our focus on the individual, officials may not have given their society-wide use enough attention. 

There is also an element of paternalism. “Masks are not only an instrument of protection but also a symbol of fear,” notes Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the US Council on Foreign Relations.

No doubt the DHSC will take some time to come round to this view, even if their colleagues at the US CDC pivot. 

British officials will demand hard evidence that the mass-issuing of face masks can slow the spread of a virus before acting. They would add that the systematic review they didn’t want Gordon Brown to see doesn’t amount to that. And they would point out that China sits outside the cluster of mask-wearing Asian countries in the chart above which is doing the rounds on the internet.

All of this is no doubt correct but it is also academic. We don’t have a stockpile of surgical masks in Britain even if we wanted one.

What it’s like on the rural front line in the world’s richest country. 

“We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus. We moved VERY early to close borders to certain areas, which was a Godsend. V.P. is doing a great job. The Fake News Media is doing everything possible to make us look bad. Sad!” [Tweet from Donald Trump, 8 March 2020]

Khushbu Shah  www.theguardian.com

A row of pillows sat below a makeshift wooden slab standing in as a desk for Dr Enrique Lopez in his utility room. His blue plaid pajamas were flanked by masks and a thin pallet where he sleeps, separate from his family so as to avoid spreading the coronavirus.

He hasn’t hugged his four-year-old daughter in two weeks, afraid for her wellbeing after he began his 14-hour days treating the dozens of patients who have tested positive for coronavirus in Dougherty county in south-west Georgia.

“We are trying to figure how to not bring the enemy home [and] how to live our lives,” he said.

Phoebe Putney Memorial hospital in Albany, Georgia, where Lopez works in one of the three ICU-turned-Covid units, has more than 1,000 people awaiting test results for the coronavirus. More than 600 people have tested positive for the virus at the hospital – and so have a number of the staff. More than a quarter of the state’s deaths are in this rural county of 80,000.

“This is unprecedented. I mean, we have been humbled in a way that we could have never imagined,” said Lopez, who is one of the doctors operating the Covid-19 unit. “The fact is that we serve such an enormous population.”

The coronavirus pandemic spreading exponentially across the world is pushing hospitals in rural Georgia, already limited in resources and staff, to the brink. In the past decade, seven hospitals in rural communities have closed across the state, with 2019 being the worst year in seeing closures nationwide, according to a report from Chartis Center for Rural Health. It has left tens of thousands of Georgians without access to medical care in their communities.

Dougherty is already strained, with only 50 ICU beds in the entire county, according to data compiled by Kaiser Health News. Of the 38 beds at Phoebe Putney Memorial, 35 were filled with Covid-19 patients one Monday evening in March, a spokesperson for the hospital told the Guardian.

The hospital has two drive-thrus to test those potentially infected. Phoebe Putney Memorial is also surrounded by four counties with no hospital. Even before potential cases of coronavirus appeared in the community three weeks ago, healthcare struggles were commonplace in the majority African American county, like they are in much of rural America.

The county commissioner in Dougherty has asked residents to shelter-in-place, similar to mandates issued in California and New York, as medical staff at the hospital work long hours with shortages of N95 masks, ventilators, dialysis machines, medication and even nursing staff.

As the tally of cases spike each day, rural counties like this one in Georgia struggle to take care of the hundreds of people who worry they may have the coronavirus. Many of them are already dealing with serious health issues. A third of the population lives in poverty and the median income is just over $37,000.

“The patients have multiple comorbidities [and] they don’t have enough money for their heart failure medications, they’re on dialysis [and] with their strong religious beliefs they want everything to be done. And it is, it’s an enormous amount of work, even before this,” said Lopez.

The third ICU at Phoebe Putney, the surgical care unit, has now become the third Covid unit, said Dr Steven Kitchen, chief medical officer at Phoebe Putney.

“A matter of great concern is Phoebe Putney is approaching its capacity,” said Bo Dorough, the Albany mayor, in a recent live-streamed press conference as the county commissioner, Christopher Cohilas, pleaded with people to stop holding large cookouts during the shelter-in-place. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sent a medical officer to the hospital to investigate the explosion of cases in the county.

As his colleagues who test positive are quarantined, Lopez and others continue on for the community.

“It’s a very dark time in our history, and it’s going to go down in the history books but, you know, it’s bringing out the best in all of us. The fact that we stand together. And we’re fighting for our own patients [and] we’re fighting for our lives.”

Dr James Black, the medical director for emergency medicine, who is operating the Covid-19 command center, said volunteers have mobilized to sew hundreds of mask covers due to the N95 mask shortage because there is no way to restock supplies for the dozens of staff working around the clock.

On the hospital’s Facebook page, someone from the official account posted instructions to sew together makeshift mask covers from linens.

Even the chief medical officer pushes around a cart full of treats and food and goes to every unit, whether a coronavirus unit or not, to raise spirits, Lopez said. “It’s amazing,” he added.

Lopez continues to report to work, sleeping in a cramped section of his home, living in isolation as he continues to treat patients, speaking to his family through the door, he says, replaying those hours of work at night. “I can’t sleep. I lie there thinking to myself, others have died fighting this thing. Am I next?” he asks.

Phoebe Weston  www.theguardian.com 

There is ponding on nearly every field in the valley where the rivers Severn and Vyrnwy meet on the English-Welsh border. Swollen rivers have been sluggishly sitting in the valley for months. Inhabitants’ attempts to protect their homes from flooding are part of a losing battle played out across the country.

The UK’s flooding this year is a story of desperation – but also hope, says John Hughes, development manager at Shropshire Wildlife Trust, who works in the valley. Following widespread acceptance of the climate and ecological emergency, Hughes believes people are increasingly looking to nature for solutions.

George Eustice, the environment secretary, has announced that £4bn will be spent on flood defences in the next five years and said a “big part of our focus is going to be nature-based solutions upstream”.

Hughes says: “The media normally have a distinct agenda when it comes to floods which is: ‘how miserable have you been?’ This time around the interviews I heard were talking about natural solutions and I’d never heard that before.

“I say thanks very much Extinction Rebellion and Greta [Thunberg] – you’ve done a great job. It’s the job we’ve been trying to do for 50 years. We need to take a holistic view – land can do many, many things.”

Soils

In the past, flood plains acted like sponges that soaked up water and stopped it flowing headlong into settlements downstream. Wetter habitats provided useful materials such as willow and reeds for baskets and thatched roofs. However, natural wet woodland, neutral grassland, fens and marshes were ironed out of the postwar landscape and now cover just 11% of English and Welsh flood plains. Intensive agriculture covers 70%.

 Crops such as maize, potatoes, asparagus and onions are harvested as late as October because of the milder UK climate. This means fields are often left bare over winter months after heavy machinery has compacted the soil. This leaves the land unable to soak up so much water.

“When you drive heavy vehicles on soggy soil you make a mess,” says John Quinton, professor of soil science at Lancaster University. “You’ve then destroyed the soil structure, and because of that water can’t get into the soil very quickly. The water runs over the surface of the soil and picks up the soil and deposits it in rivers or elsewhere. If soils are in good condition, the water will go into the soil and you will have a lot of storage.”

Scientists say creating grassland, giving land rest periods and avoiding the use of heavy machinery in flood-prone areas will reduce nutrient and sediment loss from fields. “Some groups of farmers are definitely moving in the right direction. When I started my career in the late 80s we weren’t talking about soil erosion or nutrient losses. Things are changing,” says Quinton.

Experts are only beginning to understand the complexity of soil ecosystems. In the flood-hit village of Eaton Bishop in Herefordshire, farm conservation adviser Caroline Hanks compares two spadefuls of soil from the same field near her house – one from the middle of the field where intensively farmed maize was harvested in October, and the other from under tussocky grass by the hedge. The first sample is root-free and heavily compacted, meaning water cannot percolate more than eight inches below the surface. The second spadeful is crumbly, full of roots and moist throughout. The two samples look – and smell – different.

“We’re trying to give people a visual way to assess their soil. It’s such a simple technique – you can tell so much from a spadeful of soil,” says Hanks, who specialises in advising farmers on creating flower-rich grassland. “Twenty years ago people expected us to focus on birds and hedgerows and field edges but these days getting a spade out and looking at soil is a core part of the visit.”

 According to Quinton’s Defra-funded research there is between three and 10 times more water run-off from compacted soils than healthy soils. “That rotten egg smell you get from compacted soils is certainly something that says to me that’s an unhealthy soil,” he says. “It shows that it’s compacted and its normal biology isn’t functioning very well. In the soil that’s aerated you’ve got fungi and bacteria which are active and sometimes after rain, you get that sweet smell of damp soil, and it’s actually a compound called geosmin.”

Creating rough landscapes

Many natural flood-management techniques involve reinstating features that were once common to fields such as ponds, hedges and leaky dams (either created by fallen trees or beavers). Creating buffer strips, wooded areas, drainage ditches and re-meandering rivers are all part of the toolkit. The overall effect is to give the landscape more structure and roughness to counterbalance the way industrialised farming has smoothed it out.

The problem is that reducing food production is currently counterintuitive to most farmers’ business plan, says Dr Marc Stutter, a soil and water scientist at the James Hutton Institute. “The biggest thing we’re fighting against is that the farmers and their fathers and grandfathers have been very proud of the way they’ve brought the land into condition for crops and quite rightfully so. Their parents have spent a lot of effort draining the land and now there’s someone telling them they want pockets of it to be wet up again.

“If we could reverse it and say they’re not just farmers of a crop but stewards of the land then we might be able to think of water quality and flood resistance as part of their overall job.”

Natural flood management has other benefits – planting trees and hedges helps to create vital habitats for nature and locks away carbon. Creating buffer strips along streams and rivers helps filter out pollutants and improves water quality.

However, nature-based solutions are no silver bullet, according to analysis by the University of Oxford which found they would be overwhelmed by the sort of floods seen in the UK this winter.

Making the land more absorbent should be used alongside traditional “hard engineering” techniques such as flood walls, says Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading.

“Putting beavers in the River Thames is not going to keep people dry and a different solution is required. However, for some of the smaller communities you could implement woody debris dams and make sure the soil upstream is able to absorb the water. Not one size fits all. It must be an open discussion between farmers and Defra and the Environment Agency and scientists. It’s not an easy problem but I think we should be confident that we can solve it,” she says.

Case studies

In 2015 Glenridding, a village at the bottom of Helvellyn in the Lake District, was one of many communities trashed by Storm Desmond.

Danny Teasdale, a mechanic from the village, decided to do something. “Flooding isn’t going to go away, we’ve got to start looking at things. There are extreme conservationists on one side and extreme farmers on the other and they keep clashing heads and nothing happens. I sit in the middle … I know the local farmers and they trust me,” he says.

In the valley above the village, Teasdale created a wiggly upstream release channel that runs parallel to the river and fills up only when the river is full. He worked with the local farmer and the Environment Agency. The £6,000 project was funded by a local flood action group.

Teasdale says: “We’ve just had really, really heavy rain with Storm Ciara and Storm Dennis – I think some of the heaviest since Storm Desmond – and it didn’t flood this time. So it’s looking like it’s been helping. It goes hand in hand with hard engineering in the village but if you can slow things down upstream you don’t need to build your walls so high.”

Teasdale’s work was so successful he created a community interest group called Ullswater Catchment Management CIC in November 2018. He has since worked in a number of different catchments around Ullswater with the Woodland Trust, Natural England and the Environment Agency, including planting 2,000 trees in Grisedale valley at a cost of £8,000 and a project to re-wiggle the river in Matterdale that cost £14,000.

“It’s peanuts compared to the money that goes into hard engineering,” explains Teasdale, who says £2m has already been spent on hard flood defences in Glenridding.

Elsewhere in the Lake District, the RSPB led a similar river re-wiggling scheme in Swindale valley. The work cost £200,000 and involved letting the river meander back into its old course after being straightened by hill farmers looking to dry out land hundreds of years ago. The valley is a kilometre long and the river is now 180 metres longer.

“It’s all about holding that water in the higher catchments for longer,” says Lee Schofield, a site manager at RSPB Haweswater. “Having a wiggly river means they move more slowly. We’re delaying flood peak – it’s a low-tech solution that delivers many other benefits and makes the landscape much more resilient.”

Paul Quinn, a senior lecturer in catchment hydrology at Newcastle University, believes more drastic landscape measures, called catchment systems engineering (CSE), are needed to compensate for the fact that flood plains are already full of houses and roads. More than 40% of rivers have been deepened or modified so that they are no longer connected to their flood plains.

“In a beautiful world that doesn’t exist, we could get our soil back into good condition and that would actually stop a lot of floods. But when the big floods come along – the kind that climate change is going to produce – soil management is not going to do it,” he says.

 “CSE is halfway between nature-based solutions and something that’s a bit like traditional flood management which is usually big dams, big ponds and big walls. We need to start spreading them out over the whole catchment system. It seems to me such a simple idea. It’s not rocket science, it’s about storing water – and large amounts of it – at every opportunity you can.”

Quinn’s approach includes natural solutions as well as features such as the creation of large retention ponds and cascading channels. His team built 35 ponds and dams, and created 10 zones of oak, beech and willow plantations in the catchment attached to the village of Belford in Northumberland which has been badly affected by flooding. The scheme cost £200,000 and in the seven years since the work was completed the village has not flooded. “Every single catchment in the country will have to be done,” he says.

What next?

In terms of soils, Quinton believes people’s attitudes are already changing: “I sense a shift in the farming community with a much greater emphasis on soils and how to sustain them. I have no evidence for this, except talking to farmers and watching Twitter. I get the feeling that there is increasing recognition that protecting soils is vital for the sustainability of the farm business.”

Farmers think of food production as their primary motivation because that is what they have been subsidised to do. Rather than trying to farm flood-prone areas of land that don’t yield much, farmers may be subsidised to manage them for nature. Many feel the government is making the right noises with policies laid out in the new Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) – which will be fully implemented by 2028.

 A Defra spokesperson told the Guardian that natural flood management would be an important part of protecting the nation from flooding. “ELMS will reward farmers for the public goods that they provide, including protecting communities from environmental hazards such as flooding. Natural England and the Environment Agency do vital work and we continue to work closely with both agencies to ensure they have the right resources to continue to do so.”

Soil management has featured prominently in ELMS – with funding set to be available for measures such as no-till agriculture and maintaining water in peat soils – but conservationists are worried that the devil is in the detail.

Teasdale says: “I’ve seen what the government has done to Environment Agency and Natural England and what they’ve done to their budget, and it’s criminal. They’ve slashed it. ELMS could potentially be good but it needs to be funded properly and that’s what I’m not sure about. I’d love to be wrong.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

And now for something completely different – news of an old “friend”  – although he may have got the timing wrong this time.

THE BRITISH HONEY COMPANY CONFIRMS INTENTION TO FLOAT

Swire gets richer – along with one of his former backers:

https://www.insidermedia.com/news/central-and-east/the-british-honey-company-confirms-intention-to-float

And  the old boy network in action:

CEO Q&A with Michael Williams at The British Honey Company (NEX:BHC)

Q3: The company has an extremely strong Board, can you talk us through who is on the Board and how they became involved?

A3: I was looking for a Chairman to join us and a friend of mine put me in touch with Sir Hugo Swire, he was a Member of Parliament for East Devon and he joined me and we started to develop what I would call a substantial Board. Why would we do that? Our policy was going to be to grow this company quickly and the first thing is to have is a good Board of directors.

“Alok Sharma draws the short straw and makes an April fool of himself” – John Crace the Guardian political sketch writer (the man who coined the phrase the Maybot to describe the last Prime Minister)

John Crace  www.theguardian.com 

Well, it could have gone worse. Just.

In a parallel universe Chris Grayling could have spent his birthday – yup, Failing Grayling’s birthday really is April Fools’ Day – to be the government’s frontman at the Downing Street daily coronavirus briefing. Just imagine Grayling’s excitement at awarding a ventilator contract to a company that has no prospect of ever making a ventilator.

Still, that’s not much worse than the reality of the government having done sod all during January and February when it could have awarded contracts to companies that actually do make ventilators.

Back in No 10, there must be an inquest going on into whose bright idea it was to have a daily coronavirus press conference. What must have seemed like a show of strength and leadership when Boris Johnson and Classic Dom came up with the plan a week or so ago, now merely exposes the government’s lack of preparations and complete cluelessness every 24 hours.

What’s more, almost everyone in government knows it’s a disaster. Which is why most cabinet ministers switch their phones off for several hours every morning: because they don’t want to be the mug who winds up having to front the 45-minute embarrassment live on TV at 5pm.

So today’s press conference was fronted by Alok Sharma, who not even everyone in the cabinet knows is the current business secretary. Though he is a huge improvement on both Dominic “Psycho” Raab and Michael Gove, simply because he doesn’t have any of their associated instability and lack of trust issues. Put simply, Sharma is a man in whom the public can have complete confidence. The downside is that the confidence they have is that he can be guaranteed to know next to nothing about anything.

After stating the latest alarming death figures, Sharma lapsed into a whole range of generalities and platitudes. It’s come to something when even Donald Trump can see that the original “herd immunity” plan had been a disaster waiting to happen. Imagine being out-thought by the US Sun Bed God.

Sharma then handed over to Yvonne Doyle, the director of Public Health England, who raced through her four slides at breakneck speed. Largely because they were all so thoroughly depressing.

Believe it or not, that was actually the high point. The summit of gravitas and disinformation. Because from there on it was downhill all the way. Often these video press conferences can become atavistic with journalists asking a range of different questions that can easily be ignored. Either by merely answering the easiest question or one they wish had been asked. But now the lobby hunted as a pack, repeatedly pressing both Sharma and Doyle on the question of medical provision and testing.

And Sharma and Doyle had nothing. Not even blanks to fire. Sharma kept trying to palm off the difficult questions on to Doyle, who then did her best to refer them back to the business secretary. The medical is now political and the political is medical and neither side wants to take the blame.

To really regain the public’s trust, someone in government has to admit it basically did nothing for several months as it totally underestimated the crisis and was more interested in Boris’s sixth or seventh baby. But no one is prepared to do that so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Why had Michael Gove insisted that thousands of ventilators were on their way next week when the actual figure is 30? Both Sharma and Doyle shrugged. Why were the Germans so far ahead of us on testing? Were we really so Little England that we thought we could learn nothing from Jerry? How come we only had tested 2,000 NHS staff out of about 1 million frontline workers? Again Sharma and Doyle just looked a little sheepish. Above their pay grades.

“Have you got anything more than warm words and good intentions?” one reporter asked. Sharma nodded earnestly. His words were going to get a lot, lot warmer – red-hot, even – and his intentions were going to be the best ever. You ain’t seen nothing yet. B-b-baby. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Owl thinks it appropriate to draw attention to two heavy weight editorials today – from both the Guardian and the Times, reproduced below. Grim reading for the Government. 

The Guardian view on governing in a crisis: level with the public www.theguardian.com 

Politicians deserve some benefit of the doubt in extreme times, but to retain respect they need to be more candid about the challenges.

The creation of NHS Nightingale, assembling a 4,000-bed emergency hospital in just two weeks, is an important milestone. It is not fashionable to give ministers the benefit of the doubt, but the circumstances should allow the presumption of decent motive. They are trying to protect people. That does not make them immune from error, nor should it insulate them from criticism. It is possible to applaud government efforts without ignoring poor judgment.

It appears clear that the Covid-19 virus spread faster and wider than might have been the case, because Downing Street underestimated the risks and moved too slowly to a regime of mass testing, by which point materials were harder to procure. Shortages of personal protective equipment, for which health and social care workers are now desperate, arose from a failure to anticipate demand weeks ago, or even years. A pandemic was listed among disaster scenarios for Whitehall contingency planning long before the current outbreak. Yet testing, isolation and quarantine – basic public health interventions – were barely on the ministerial agenda.

The facts are that progress on testing is slower than people have been led to expect, and frontline workers feel unprotected, despite promises of prompt action. There is no need to wait before holding the government to account for mismanagement of expectations. Promises have been broken and clarity about the reasons for delay have not been forthcoming. On insufficient testing, an internal government briefing note contains the mystifying defence that the World Health Organization’s instruction to “test, test, test” was aimed at another audience. “Not all countries have the same infrastructure as the UK,” the note says, “and there are countries that the WHO needs to press on testing.” The implication is that the advice was for less developed nations, which is neither true nor relevant to the question of why Britain is not moving faster. Germany has been testing on a scale that far outstrips the rest of Europe.

What the government needs is consistency about its story and to admit mistakes in real time. There are questions for ministers to answer over the provision of protective equipment. We are nowhere near the 250,000 daily tests for coronavirus infections the prime minister promised. This figure looked like the worst kind of spin when Downing Street admitted on Wednesday that only 2,000 people out of 500,000 frontline NHS workers had been tested for coronavirus. Similarly, spraying around claims of 3.5m serological tests – to gauge background rates of exposure and immunity – further eroded trust, given there is little evidence of them. Ministers are making promises they cannot keep.

Politicians might inspire more confidence by admitting the scale of the challenge instead of pretending that more is being done than can realistically be achieved. Jeremy Hunt has been the government’s most effective critic, perhaps because he was health secretary when the last national pandemic flu exercise was run – and the NHS was found wanting. Yet Mr Hunt did not upgrade the health service’s capacity to cope effectively.

Downing Street’s communications strategy through the crisis has been a mix of candour and opacity. There have been moments of refreshing honesty – about the likely severity of what is to come – and a laudable public deference to science. But, under pressure, there has also been a notable default back to bad habits of waffle and misdirection.

Politicians instinctively avoid admitting when they have no answers to a question, for fear it shows weakness, but the greater danger right now is corroding public confidence with spun lines that cannot hold. This unusual situation requires a level of respect for government efforts that is unfamiliar in peacetime. But the quid pro quo is that government also respects the people with clear, honest accounts of the challenges and its decisions. So far it has largely not. There is an understandable pressure to feed a public appetite for information. Unduly optimistic claims about PPE and testing appear to be driven by the view that audiences need good news. They do, but not if it later turns out to have been fake news.

The Times view on Britain’s response to coronavirus: Testing Negative www.thetimes.co.uk 

Each death from Covid-19 is a tragedy, and the daily numbers in Britain are accelerating. Recorded fatalities increased yesterday by 563 to a total of 2,352. To stem the spread of contagion requires a huge expansion in testing, yet the government was plainly caught unawares by the disease.

This country is lagging other western democracies. Boris Johnson has said that he hopes to reach a target of 250,000 tests daily for coronavirus infections. At present the number is less than 10,000. It urgently needs ramping up. With the prime minister and the health secretary in self-isolation, Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, indicated a target of 25,000 tests a day by the middle of this month. Meanwhile Germany is already testing 70,000 a day. Assessing where the government is failing is vital to protecting lives.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has called on governments to implement mass testing. Yet Covid-19 was deemed only a “moderate risk” to Britain by the government’s scientific advisers as recently as five weeks ago, just as cases in Italy began to spike upwards. It was a profound misjudgment of the risk; Britain is now in lockdown.

Politicians need to heed expert advice but it is also their role to think ahead about possible risks and use their judgment. Scientists will rightly change their advice if the data changes. The danger for politicians is that they are made to look indecisive and prone to U-turns. If the scientists early on were telling the government there was only a moderate risk, it would have been shrewd to anticipate the worst, just in case, and take appropriate measures. Instead they opted to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus rather than suppress it. The strategy had to be abandoned when it was clear that the virus could no longer be contained. Testing swiftly became crucial to government strategy. Yet the new approach has been beset with confusion and muddle.

It makes sense that NHS staff should be the first to be tested so that they can get on with caring for patients. Yet by yesterday only 2,000 frontline NHS staff out of about half a million had been tested. And even the currently inadequate capacity is not being fully used. According to the government, testing capacity stands at 12,750 a day, yet the total is not even close to meeting that. Moreover, photographs of one drive-in site at Chessington, Surrey, showed it standing almost empty.

Chris Witty, the chief medical officer for England, has said that “the one thing that is worse than no test is a bad test”, one that may give a false reading. The population would readily understand this caution if it were combined with a drive to acquire the equipment and build the infrastructure for good tests. Yet the government has been on the defensive. One official pleaded that Britain cannot emulate Germany because it lacks a similar 70-year history of industrial policy.

No countries foresaw the coronavirus crisis but some were better prepared than others. Having experienced the Sars epidemic in 2003, South Korea had substantial testing equipment to hand. Britain and others failed to learn that lesson and siren voices have been consistently ignored over the years. For Britain, the initial failure to gauge the nature of the crisis has left the country scrambling to catch up. The prime minister needs to show decisive and even ruthless leadership to lift the nation out of its bureaucratic muddle and morass. When Britain faced wartime peril in 1940, Winston Churchill looked outside the ranks of politicians to appoint Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper magnate, to take charge of aircraft production. It proved a tonic for public confidence and a spur to government action. Having misjudged the greatest peacetime crisis in a century, the government will need to demonstrate a coherent strategy and show that it understands the scale of the task.

Ministers were on Wednesday night unable to answer basic questions about when Britain’s testing regime for coronavirus is to be increased dramatically in scale to allow the country to plan its exit from lockdown.

After days of mounting concerns over the growing testing crisis, it is still unclear when NHS workers are to be tested, when mass testing for the population is to be rolled out or even whether the Government has a plan to end the nation’s quarantine.

By Laura Donnelly, Health Editor  www.telegraph.co.uk

Wednesday’s death toll from the virus was 563, overtaking France’s highest daily figures and bringing the total number of deaths in the UK to 2,352.

Asked repeatedly at the Downing Street press conference about why Britain lags behind other nations in testing, Alok Sharma, the Business Secretary, said “increasing testing capacity is absolutely the Government’s top priority”, but failed to explain when the numbers would increase.

There is understood to be frustration within government over Public Health England, which is responsible for testing and is not thought to be rising to the challenge. Ministers are expected to bring in the private sector and universities in the coming days.

On Wednesday night Boris Johnson released a video online in which he promised to “ramp up tests”.

He said: “This is the way through. This is how we will unlock the coronavirus puzzle”.

Health bosses on Wednesday night claimed that the country has the necessary laboratories to carry out 100,000 tests a day – eight times the current stated capacity – but does not have the swabs and reagents needed to detect the virus. Other countries are understood to have ordered the raw materials before the UK.

On Wednesday, just 10,000 tests were conducted, with NHS workers turned away from new testing sites in car parks. Mr Sharma was unable to say when the country would hit a target set by the Prime Minister last month for tests to be increased to 25,000 a day.

Germany, which is considered to be one of the best-prepared countries in tackling the crisis, is carrying out an estimated 500,000 tests per week and has a death toll of 793.

On Wednesday, the Army was deployed to help the NHS implement the rollout of tests to doctors and nurses, with hospital chief executives told they would be held “personally responsible” if any tests went unused. It followed warnings that some NHS trusts were only testing three workers a day.

In the wake of the press conference, Downing Street said on Wednesday night that Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, would on Thursday return to work from self-isolation with a five-point plan to tackle the testing issue to include increasing the number of labs able to check for the virus. However, details released on Wednesday night were still scant.

Former health secretaries and medical experts said the Government’s handling of the issue was “ridiculous”.

Jeremy Hunt said: “It is clear that the only way to avoid an Italian-style meltdown is to follow what has happened in Korea and Germany and that means mass testing in the community.”

Stephen Dorrell, the health secretary from 1995 to 1997, said: “It is ridiculous that there are NHS staff sitting at home feeling perfectly healthy and we can’t allow them to get back to work.”

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the BMA council chairman, said: “It’s been well over two weeks since the Government said it was going to roll out priority testing for healthcare staff. Many doctors have still no idea about where or how they can get tested.”

Dr Bharat Pankhania, senior consultant in communicable disease control at the University of Exeter, said: “There is no good reason why we have fallen so far behind other countries. We should have kept the lid on this disease by bringing in mass testing. My concern is that it may now be too late.”

One scientist said the country could produce 10 million tests a day, if it ramped up resources in private laboratories and universities.

There were also fears on Wednesday night that the coronavirus lockdown was beginning to fray as Department for Transport figures showed that people were beginning to ignore advice and travel again. New benefit claims since the lockdown began have reached almost one million and there are growing warnings that people cannot afford to stay at home as the Government’s financial package is not sufficient.

The warning was sounded as the number of new positive cases on Wednesday passed 4,000 for the first time, with close to 30,000 cases in total. On Wednesday NHS Digital also said more than 1.7 million NHS assessments in just 15 days have concluded that people may have had Covid-19 or are currently suffering, based on their symptoms.

On Wednesday, just 10,412 tests were carried out in England, on 9,793 people.

Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, said: “We still don’t have the clarity we need from ministers on how they plan to rapidly scale up testing to the levels needed.”

Mr Hancock is due to front the press conference on Thursday, where he will be under pressure to show the Government has got a grip on the fiasco.

His five-point plan proposes boosting testing capacity, paying private firms to conduct swab testing, rolling out antibody tests, conducting randomised sampling of the population and building up Britain’s long-term diagnostic capacity by working with pharmaceutical firms. However, he will be powerless to bring forward the stated ambition of testing 25,000 people per day, which may not be achieved until the end of this month, and antibody testing – described as a “game changer” by Mr Johnson – has still not begun because none of the nine different testing kits ordered by ministers has yet been approved for use.

NHS workers are supposedly being put at the front of the queue for tests but there is little evidence this is happening with even prisoners apparently having preferential access.

On Wednesday, Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents hospital trusts, said latest figures suggest that as many 180,000 NHS staff were “self-isolating” but that around 85 per cent of these – 150,000 workers – could be cleared to return to work. He said: “Hospitals are desperate to get staff back to work as soon as possible.”

The Prime Minister’s spokesman defended Britain’s slow testing rate by pointing to a global shortage of reagents needed to process tests.  

As the foundations of the economy begin to crumble under the onslaught of the coronavirus crisis, it is the construction industry that is posing one of the biggest challenges for the government.

[Owl noticed that David Ralph, Chief Executive, Heart of the South West (HotSW), appeared on BBC Spotlight to say that he had done some modelling on the impact the lockdown might have on our local economy – given the past performance of HotSW, Owl did not find this reassuring. Past strategies have featured build, build, build.]

Louisa Clarence-Smith  www.thetimes.co.uk 

Closing big construction sites nationwide “would have a significant impact on the entire supply chain and would result in many firms facing financial difficulties within days or weeks”, the government has been warned in an official briefing seen by The Times.

The document, prepared by officials at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, highlights the dilemma facing the government. It is trying to balance efforts to protect the economy with growing disquiet about exceptions to rules that everyone should work from home.

Photos of construction workers packed on to public transport or failing to follow social distancing guidelines on sites have led to calls from the public and politicians for the industry to be shut. However, Downing Street has so far refused to lockdown a sector that accounts for about 7.4 per cent of the national workforce and 8.6 per cent of GDP.

Construction activity is closely correlated with overall economic activity but is three times more volatile, according to the government’s briefing. Therefore, a fall in UK GDP of 0.6 to 2.5 per cent would imply a 1.8 per cent to 7.5 per cent impact on construction.

The industry has been under pressure since the collapse of Carillion, the public sector contractor, in 2018. In contrast with housebuilders, which have been enjoying fat profits in recent years, contractors have low profit margins and are particularly exposed to a slowdown in activity.

Despite the official guidance that construction work can continue, building activity is already slowing down. Work has been suspended on 1,945 sites, which represent a quarter of the UK’s total and have a a combined value of £104 billion, according to Glenigan, a data provider. Huge infrastructure projects, including HS2 and Crossrail, are largely silent. Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon and Barratt Developments, Britain’s three biggest housebuilders, have said that they are closing sites.

Tom Hall, chief economist at Barbour ABI, an industry information provider, said: “Construction firms, expecting a windfall of public investment after March’s budget a few weeks ago, are now plunged into a period of slowdown and uncertainty.

“While the Treasury’s support package for firms, employees and the self-employed is welcome, it remains to be seen how effective it will be in stopping many firms across the construction industry from going to the wall if the crash in construction activity continues for a protracted period.”

The contagion has spread to the supply chain. Brick and paint production in Britain “has now been halted entirely for the duration of the current restrictions”, according to the government briefing.

Costain, Laing O’Rourke, Galliford Try and Kier, among the most prominent of Britain’s commercial construction groups, have all announced cost-cutting measures this week as they scramble to preserve cash. The Federation of Master Builders has warned that “hundreds of small builders face lost earnings, having to make their staff redundant and seeing their companies go to the wall”.

The business department is planning to boost the industry through measures such identifying critical projects that must proceed and issuing guidance to local authorities to bring forward local infrastructure works.

However, Jonathan Hutt, construction disputes partner at Taylor Wessing, the law firm, said that it would be a “major challenge” to keep a targeted sector working while the rest of the economy was in deep freeze.

“Labourers need assurances that they can travel and work safely and that it is right for them to do so,” he said. “Contractors need to know they will have support to access vital equipment and materials, particularly where the project has been run on a just-in-time model or relied on international deliveries. The government will also need to support the industry by encouraging liquidity and access to the legal system throughout this difficult time.”

Mid-sized construction companies fear that they will be abandoned by their banks and unable to access emergency loan schemes as their cash runs out, leaving them facing disaster.

Behind the story: Builders fear cash crunch

Corporate treasurers in the “stranded middle” — builders with annual sales of £2 billion to £3 billion — fear that a cash crunch is looming because the sector is considered high-risk.

Many do not meet the criteria for emergency schemes. The Treasury’s business interruption loan scheme is for companies with sales of up to £45 million and the Bank of England’s Covid-19 corporate financing facility requires an official investment grade credit rating.

Caroline Stockmann, chief executive of the Association of Corporate Treasurers, said: “The construction sector is feeling very vulnerable because of their history, [the collapse of] Carillion and so on.”

Banks are offering business interruption loans, which are 80 per cent guaranteed by the state and interest-free in the first year, that can revert to interest rates of up to 20 per cent after 12 months. Separately, the Bank is reviewing whether to loosen its investment grade requirement to include banks’ own internal ratings.

Construction companies want a separate loan scheme or a broader “bank agnostic” scheme that could be run by the British Business Bank to avoid the punitive interest rates that they fear they will be charged.

The government is to set up a virtual parliament to allow MPs to scrutinise its response to the coronavirus crisis following demands from the Commons Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, and opposition parties.

The move was announced on Wednesday night amid mounting concerns that the government has failed to get a grip on the crisis, with claims that health workers’ lives are at risk because of a lack of protective equipment and a shortage of tests for the virus.

Rajeev Syal  www.theguardian.com

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the House of Commons, announced the move in a statement that said the government and parliament hoped appropriate technology would be in place by 21 April, when MPs are due to return to Westminster.

He said: “Parliament’s role of scrutinising government, authorising spending and making laws must be fulfilled and in these unprecedented times that means considering every technological solution available. We are exploring options with the parliamentary authorities in readiness for parliament’s return.”

A source said the plan would be in place by the end of the month. There have been calls from across the political spectrum for MPs to be allowed to scrutinise the government remotely at a time of enormous social upheaval and as freedom of movement is being curtailed by new laws to encourage physical distancing and self-isolation.

The government came under pressure to set up a virtual parliament after an unusual intervention by Hoyle on Wednesday. In a letter to Rees-Mogg, the Speaker said MPs should still be able to take part in prime minister’s questions, and put questions to government departments and ministers even if they could not return to Westminster as scheduled on 21 April.

Hoyle argued that a trial of virtual select committee hearings had already been successful and he had asked officials to investigate how they would apply similar technology for use in the Commons chamber.

Hoyle wrote: “Once the house returns, if we are still in the grip of the crisis where the physical presence of members, or too many members, in the palace is not appropriate, I am keen that they should be able to participate in key parliamentary proceedings virtually, for example oral questions, urgent questions, statements.

“The House Service has already trialled some virtual select committee evidence sessions with witnesses, and I have asked officials to investigate how they would apply similar technology to the types of business listed above.”

The Speaker also asked if it would be possible for the government to set up a forum of MPs during the recess, possibly via select committee chairs, who could quiz senior government representatives at set times on different days.

“MPs are being swamped right now with questions and casework from distressed constituents who need answers,” he said. “Responses cannot wait for the house to sit again.”

A hundred MPs from Labour, the Scottish National party and the Green party wrote a letter last week to the Commons clerk, John Benger, asking for his support in setting up a form of digital parliament.

Parliament broke for recess a week early as the number of cases of Covid-19 around Westminster increased. MPs are due back on 21 April.

For some unaccountable reason Owl found this headline irresistible (and not just because it’s April 1). Before you all rush off to send your nominations to the police you must check the E-fit image in the article linked below, because you may be wrong.

Becca Gliddon  eastdevonnews.co.uk 

Police investigating building work fraud in Exeter seek to identify this man

A bridge that allows access to Sidmouth’s East Beach which has been hit with unprecedented amounts of cliff falls this year has been sealed off.

Daniel Clark – Local Democracy Reporter sidmouth.nub.news

The original Alma Bridge in Sidmouth was still open to the public to use as an emergency exit on and off the beach around Pennington Point.

A new bridge is currently under construction 40m upstream and was due to be finished by the end of Spring 2020, although work since the coronavirus outbreak has seen work paused.

Once finished, it will replace the Alma Bridge, which was designed by architect RW Sampson in the early 1900s. The new bridge will also include relatively short sections of ramp, matching the gradients of the existing but shut Hanger Path, to allow access to the seafront for residents east of the town.

Councillor Stuart Hughes, Devon County Council’s cabinet member for highways, and who also represents the Sidmouth ward, said that the old bridge has now been sealed off.

He added: “The Alma Bridge is now completely secured and closed off and preventing any access to East Beach which is seeing unprecedented amount of cliff falls this year.”

Signs have been placed in front of the old bridge and fencing erected to block any access to the steps leading to the beach, and a sign saying: “Danger. Unstable Cliffs Rock Falls” was already displayed by the cliffs in an attempt to stop people from walking on the beach.

Large chunks of the cliff at Pennington Point on the town’s East Beach have given way this month in a series of separate collapses.

Plans are being developed to try and protect the cliffs and the town, with the preferred beach management scheme consisting of adding a new rock groyne on East Beach and importing new shingle onto Sidmouth Beach, as well as increasing the height of the splash wall on the seafront.

The preferred Beach Management Scheme aims to maintain the 1990’s Sidmouth Coastal Defence Scheme Standard of Service and reduce the rate of beach and cliff erosion to the east of the River Sid. The plans would not stop cliff falls but would reduce the erosion from the toe of the cliffs, which would reduce the erosion rates.

Costs for construction of the scheme are estimated at £8.9million, with around £1 million still needed to be found.

A glass seawall has also been trialled on the seafront, but deliberate criminal damage was earlier this month inflicted on the glass’s landward facing surface – possibly with a hammer or similar heavy instrument.

Anyone with any information regarding the vandalism to the glass splash panel in Sidmouth is asked to contact the police quoting crime reference CR/021595/20.

Morten Morland Times cartoon: March 31 2020

The NHS is preparing to release an app that alerts users if they come into contact with someone who has tested positive for coronavirus, in a move that could pave the way towards the end of the lockdown. 

Given the source, Owl thinks it is likely to reflect the current government thinking on how to relax lockdown. However, as mentioned in the article, it does depend for success on a high level of testing. Owl also wonders how applicable this is outside a metropolitan/city environment.

By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor  www.telegraph.co.uk

The opt-in programme is likely to be rolled out as the current restrictions on movement are lifted – and, if successful at limiting the spread of the virus, could prevent the need for further clampdowns.

Experts are now expecting the British epidemic to peak around Easter, before a steady decline.

At the Government’s daily press briefing, Prof Stephen Powis, Medical Director of NHS England, said “green shoots” were emerging after new cases began to plateau.

But he warned the death toll would continue to rise in the next fortnight.

“So green shoots, but only green shoots, and we must not be complacent and we must not take our foot off the pedal,” he said.

The Government is hopeful that once the number of new cases is sufficiently reduced, the app could help it remain low, allowing the public to resume their daily lives.

It will work by using Bluetooth technology to connect users’ phones to other nearby phones, and to record people who have come into close proximity – at a distance of two metres – for 15 minutes.

If someone tests positive for coronavirus and records it on the app, it will automatically alert those who were near them in the past few weeks, and ask them to self-isolate.  

The success of the app will rely on the availability of widespread testing, which has not yet been achieved. 

The Government does not intend to make the app compulsory in order to lift the lockdown, but millions will be encouraged to use it in order to avoid lengthier and more stringent restrictions being put in place. 

If the limitations on movement are lifted and infections and deaths rise again, the country could be placed back into a strict lockdown. 

Countries across Europe, including Germany and Denmark, have started to consider when they can lift lockdown restrictions, amid growing concerns over the impact on the European economy.  

Singapore’s relatively low levels of coronavirus infection have been the result, in part, of the Government’s use of the contact tracing app TraceTogether. On Sunday, the city state recorded only its third death from Covid-19 from a total of 926 reported cases.

But there have been concerns over data protection and privacy amid fears the new app could lead to widespread surveillance of the population.

NHSX, the unit driving the digital transformation of health and social care in the UK, has been working with civil rights groups to make sure data is anonymised and not used to monitor citizens.

The Telegraph understands that NHSX has been working on a six-week development window, and the app should be ready within a month.

Developers hope a majority of the population will download it, but new modelling from Oxford University has shown that it does not need everyone to sign up to be effective.

Professor Christophe Fraser, Senior Group Leader at the Oxford Big Data Institute, said: “It’s not a niche thing – the majority of people will have to have it – but you don’t need everyone for it to work, and some people won’t have smartphones,” he said.

“We’re all in lockdown, and somehow or another we’re going to have to figure out a way to move on, and, yes, testing will be really important, but an app that helps make sure people self-isolate could solve a lot of problems.” 

Alongside a ramping up of community testing, the app could help Britain get out of lockdown sooner without risking a second peak, amid growing fears that the restrictions could cause more harm than good.

Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, was urged by one of his ministers not to “crash our economy” by imposing further lockdown measures in the first sign of a Cabinet split on the issue.

Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, said that if people who cannot work from home were stopped from going to work, “millions” would be forced into poverty, which “would do more harm than the virus itself”. 

Mr Shapps told the BBC: “One of the things we need to be careful not to do is completely crash our economy to the point where it is impossible or very difficult to pick up again afterwards.”  

The Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) also warned that lower incomes would lead to a fall in tax revenues and higher public spending, which, taken together with emergency measures to help businesses, could leave Britain facing a £200 billion deficit, compared to the £55 billion forecast in the Budget just three weeks ago.

Isabel Stockton, a research economist at IFS, said: “A 5 per cent hit to GDP this year could be an underestimate, and even that would mean £115 billion less goods and services produced this year. That’s equivalent to over £4,000 per household in the UK.” 

In a letter sent out to every household this week, Mr Johnson said he would “not hesitate to go further if that is what the scientific and medical advice tells us we must do”.

But Cabinet ministers have privately expressed concerns at the Prime Minister’s suggestion that the national shutdown might get even stricter if the current lockdown measures do not have the desired effect.

One minister told The Telegraph that while the country was currently supportive of the lockdown, “that might not be the case after Easter”. 

Downing Street distanced itself from Mr Shapps’s comments and said that the Government had put in protections for the economy.  

Civil liberties groups warned that developing a contact tracing app so quickly could put people’s privacy and data at risk.  

In the UK, 22 per cent of adults do not have a smartphone, and this rises to 45 per cent of adults over 55, which has led to fears of health inequalities as those without the app will not know they are at risk.  

Jim Killock, Executive Director of Open Rights Group, said: “At the moment, with the information we know, it sounds like a reasonable approach – but as a whole, the Government has been quite bad at communicating.

“Something like this has a lot of risks involved: privacy, technical, data security and delivery risks. In order to build a huge piece of software that’s going to be used by millions of people in a couple of weeks, is a pretty challenging endeavour.” 

Silkie Carlo, Director of the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, warned that, if abused, any automated contact-tracking data could become a form of ‘mass surveillance’.  

“Any experimental attempts at individualised tracking on a mass scale will be fraught with inaccuracies, further unnecessarily burdening our health services, and could damage trust in medical confidentiality to the point where people don’t report their symptoms.” 

The NHS is also believed to be involved in a number of other digital initiatives including a symptom tracker, data app and data store.  

An NHSX spokesperson said: “NHSX is looking at whether app-based solutions might be helpful in tracking and managing coronavirus, and we have assembled expertise from inside and outside the organisation to do this as rapidly as possible.”

On 26 March Owl posted a link to a Covid-19 tracker app. The app was the brainchild of Prof Tim Spector, a genetic epidemiologist at King’s College. He and his team were aiming at 1 million downloads in 24 hours, but managed 1.5 million. This huge data base has already produced results.

Loss Of taste, Smell Key COVID-19 Symptoms: British Scientists’ Study

Reuters  www.nytimes.com

LONDON — Losing your sense of smell and taste may be the best way to tell if you have COVID-19, according to a study of data collected via a symptom tracker app developed by British scientists to help monitor the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus.

Almost 60% of patients who were subsequently confirmed as positive for COVID-19 had reported losing their sense of smell and taste, the data analyzed by the researchers showed.

That compared with 18% of those who tested negative.

These results, which were posted online but not peer-reviewed, were much stronger in predicting a positive COVID-19 diagnosis than self-reported fever, the researchers at King’s College London said.

Of 1.5 million app users between March 24 and March 29, 26% reported one or more symptoms through the app. Of these, 1,702 also reported having been tested for COVID-19, with 579 positive results and 1,123 negative results.

Using all the data collected, the research team developed a mathematical model to identify which combination of symptoms – ranging from loss of smell and taste, to fever, persistent cough, fatigue, diarrhoea, abdominal pain and loss of appetite -was most accurate in predicting COVID-19 infection. 

“When combined with other symptoms, people with loss of smell and taste appear to be three times more likely to have contracted COVID-19 according to our data, and should therefore self-isolate for seven days to reduce the spread of the disease,” said Tim Spector, a King’s professor who led the study.

Spector’s team applied their findings to the more than 400,000 people reporting symptoms via the app who had not yet had a COVID-19 test, and found that almost 13% of them are likely to be infected.

This would suggest that some 50,000 people in Britain may have as yet unconfirmed COVID-19 infections, Spector said.

Official figures showed confirmed cases rose 14% in Britain between Monday and Tuesday to 25,150 as of Tuesday at 0800 GMT. The government said 1,789 people have died in hospitals from coronavirus as of 1600 GMT on Monday.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by Grant McCool)

Doctors and nurses who speak out about the lack of personal protection equipment for hospital staff are being threatened with dismissal, they have said, raising fears that health authorities are trying to hide the extent of the crisis.

Kat Lay | Katie Gibbons  www.thetimes.co.uk 

In a letter to the prime minister, 10,000 NHS staff demanded better protection. The government and health service chiefs insist there are adequate supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) and say remaining delivery issues are being resolved.

However, in the first acknowledgement that there is a problem when the authorities sought to assure the public there was not, Dr Jenny Harries, the deputy chief medical officer, admitted she had “optimistically” said ten days ago that issues with PPE had been resolved but they had since reoccurred.

She said: “The distribution element has been a little bit tricky at times and we have now taken a whole strand of the logistics, including with the army’s support actually, out so that we are developing a UK position on that stock and distribution flow.”

The army has been brought in to move equipment around the country, while officials have adopted a “push” model of sending supplies to hospitals even before they are requested. However, some frontline staff continue to report being without protective equipment. They also say they have concerns about whether Public Health England guidance on what to wear is sufficient, as in some cases it appears to conflict with World Health Organisation rules.

Dr Rinesh Parmar, chairman of the Doctors’ Association UK, said their inbox was filling up with emails from people concerned about the issue but “being told they are going to lose their job if they post about it on social media”.

He said: “They raise concerns internally and nothing happens. It feels like those concerns land on deaf ears. They then take to social media and get told their social media is being monitored and they are going to lose their jobs.

“At a time when we need every single doctor on the front line, doing what they can, it is just not helpful for people to be afraid.” The authorities had been expected to update PPE guidance over the weekend, but they were flooded with more than 1,000 responses to a draft sent out to professional bodies. The Times understands Public Health England expects to release a new version today. Professor Martin Marshall, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said the draft had been “vague” on exactly when GPs should wear protective equipment.

Amid reports that community groups were responding to shortages with efforts such as sewing scrubs or 3d-printing visors an expert warned that new equipment could prove “worse than nothing” if not properly produced. Dr Al Edwards of Reading University said: “Poorly functioning equipment that only gives the false promise of protection could be worse than nothing.” There was no reason, however, why local small-scale production should not help if overseen by experts.

Ten thousand NHS workers are among 20,000 signatories to a letter asking for Boris Johnson to ensure all frontline medical staff have the correct face masks, goggles, gowns and gloves.

A consultant in Gloucestershire said: “Our ward covers confirmed Covid-19-positive patients. I was on it all weekend. We only have plastic aprons, gloves and surgical masks. There is one shared visor per bay [of six patients] for all healthcare workers. No gowns.”

Dr Julia Patterson, of EveryDoctor, co-ordinating the letter, said: “Patients are dying, healthcare workers are dying. It’s time to act.”

One London paramedic said the plastic apron, gloves and surgical mask that he had been issued would be more suitable for people making sandwiches. “It feels like every day I’m exposing myself and potentially my family to this virus,” he told the BBC.

A London Ambulance Service spokesman said: “We have sufficient stocks of protective equipment for staff.” An NHS spokesman said: “Staff continue to speak in a personal, trade union or professional body capacity, and it is self-evident from print and broadcast media coverage throughout this incident that staff are able and do in fact speak freely.”

As ministers face growing questions over the failure to ramp up testing, The Telegraph can disclose that officials have repeatedly ignored offers of help from many of the country’s leading scientific institutions.

By Bill Gardner and Gordon Rayner, Political Editor  www.telegraph.co.uk

The instructions from the World Health Organisation were clear.

“Our key message is: test, test, test,” WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told world leaders on March 16.

But while nations including Germany and South Korea have already tested hundreds of thousands of their citizens, Britain is lagging far behind with the number of tests actually decreasing on Tuesday to 8,240.

As ministers face growing questions over the failure to ramp up testing, The Telegraph can disclose that officials have repeatedly ignored offers of help from many of the country’s leading scientific institutions.

Meanwhile, senior health sources warned that the moment for this country to launch a successful mass community testing programme may already have been lost.

Professor Matthew Freeman, head of Oxford University’s Dunn School of Pathology, one of the country’s leading disease research institutions, revealed that his repeated offers to provide dozens of specialised machines and expert staff had been largely ignored by health officials.

He said the department had 119 of the crucial PCR machines used to identify tell-tale genetic signs of coronavirus, but only one had been requisitioned for use.

Hundreds of specialist workers and trained graduate students were on standby to help ramp up testing, he added, but despite initial signs of enthusiasm he had heard nothing more from Public Health England.

“We’re clearly not doing as well as we could be doing as a nation when it comes to testing, and therefore people like us feel a bit frustrated,” he said.

“I’m not trying to be too critical here – I’m just struggling to understand it. We have a very large workforce of people experienced in antibody testing who would be very keen to be involved.

“When they sent round a request a couple of weeks ago to supply the PCR machines there was a very specific model they wanted. Of our machines there was only one of that type, and the army came and collected it and took it off to Milton Keynes.

“But we have another 118 machines that can broadly do the same job, but they don’t appear to be part of PHE’s plans. Not all are oven ready, but a proportion are. They could be adapted easily – it’s a totally routine lab technique. 

“About two weeks ago one of my colleagues spent two days trying to be a bit irritating and chasing PHE up to offer our help. There was a lot of general enthusiasm – they said, ‘Oh that’s great and we’re really happy that you want to help’. And then nothing really came of it. That’s been the same for many institutions across the country. I can’t really understand why.”

At the Francis Crick Institute, one of the world’s leading biomedical research centres based in London, insiders told a similar story.

The institute has supplied five PCR machines to PHE labs so far, but is understood to have dozens more inside its labs. A spokesman added that no firm word had yet been received from PHE as to whether any further machines or expertise would be required.

“We have hundreds of scientists with different areas of expertise ready and willing to step in to help support the national drive to tackle the outbreak,” the spokesman told The Telegraph.

“We were approached by Public Health England for support with their testing programme, and have already sent 5 PCR machines to support it. We are supportive their work at this really difficult time, are ready and enthusiastic to help with the testing programme, and recognise that setting it up and then scaling it can’t be done overnight.”

Other institutions across the country are understood to have had similar offers of help rejected by Public Health England.

Ministers are acutely aware that Britain’s failure to carry out more tests has become the weak leak in the response to the pandemic, and are desperate to ramp up mass testing.

Boris Johnson set a deadline of mid-April for testing to increase to 25,000 per day, only for Public Health England to say it could be the end of April before that target is reached – which will still be barely a third of Germany’s current capacity.

There is also growing anger at the NHS’s failure to take advantage of spare capacity in the system to test its own staff so that those who are self-isolating as a precaution can get back to work if they are virus-free.

Britain can now carry out 12,700 tests per day, but only 8,240 tests were done in the 24 hours to Tuesday morning, meaning opportunities were missed to test up to 4,460 doctors, nurses and medical staff.

The figure for “wasted” testing opportunities was more than 1,000 more than the previous day.

With up to a quarter of staff ill or self-isolating at some hospitals, Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, made clear his frustration in a conference call with NHS and PHE bosses on Tuesday.

A rule that 85 per cent of tests had to be reserved for patients was scrapped on Tuesday by Mr Hancock, who told hospitals there was now no limit on the number of tests they could carry out on staff. “He thinks any spare capacity is unacceptable and doesn’t want any tests to go to waste,” a source close to the health secretary said on Tuesday night.

Senior health sources, however, told The Telegraph that the Government’s controversial strategy in the early stages of the pandemic may mean that Britain has already “missed the boat” on mass testing.

Initially the Government’s Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, and Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, decided with the agreement of senior ministers the disease should be mitigated rather than suppressed, sources explained.

The Government’s Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty (pictured), decided with the agreement of senior ministers the disease should be mitigated rather than suppressed Credit: GEOFF PUGH

It was agreed that under the much-maligned ‘herd immunity’ approach, widespread testing would not be required given around 60 per cent of the population was expected to catch the disease anyway. Instead, priority was given to protecting the vulnerable and ensuring the NHS did not become overwhelmed by building up intensive care capacity, and procuring ventilators to keep patients alive.

That meant laboratory capacity was not ramped up, and there was no drive to order the crucial components needed to produce thousands of testing kits. On March 12 it was decided to halt community contact tracing, and to focus testing on hospital patients instead.

Meanwhile, other countries took a different path, and began buying up large stocks of kit for mass-community testing. In Germany and South Korea, officials quickly mobilised a vast network of laboratories to start producing tests in huge numbers.

Around two weeks ago, Britain’s strategy switched after Imperial College modellers warned that leaving the disease to spread largely unchallenged could result in 250,000 deaths.

But by this time test kits were in short supply and laboratories had not been readied for action. Initially only a single Government lab, PHE’s main facility at Colindale, was charged with processing tests, with 11 more added later, along with 29 laboratory networks run by NHS Trusts.

At that early stage, thousands of swabs sent to PHE by GPs who suspected their patients had contracted the disease were destroyed before they were analysed because they did not meet strict criteria, sources revealed.

“If they had looked at those swabs earlier instead of throwing them away, we could have got a handle on this thing much earlier,” one GP told The Telegraph.

When it became clear that the herd immunity strategy risked disaster, the strategy changed and ministers and public health officials began prioritising testing amid widespread criticism.

But the about-turn may have come too late. Laboratories are now struggling to buy in key chemicals needed to produce the testing kits, with reports that NHS Trusts have been forced to “home brew” their own. One order of so-called “primers and probes” from a firm based in Luxembourg was even discovered to itself be contaminated with coronavirus, leading to a delay in production.

At the Downing Street press conference, Michael Gove insisted Boris Johnson was now personally leading efforts to source much-needed chemicals from abroad.

“The prime minister and the health secretary are working with companies worldwide to ensure that we get the material we need to increase tests of all kinds,” he said.

The Government still hopes to have millions of antibody tests to determine whether someone has ever contracted the disease available in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, other nations have ramped up their testing programmes with Germany now expecting to test up to half a million people every week.

As the pressure grows, PHE is understood to still believe that a centralised testing system will produce better, more reliable results. There are also understood to be concerns around biosafety if thousands of samples are exchanged between smaller laboratories across the country.

Officials now plan to launch “supercentres” to process the tests on a larger scale, in partnership with the private sector. A test centre for NHS workers opened on Tuesday in the car park of an Ikea store in Wembley, north-west London.

A Public Health England spokesman said: “COVID-19 only started to emerge at the beginning of the year and since then, PHE has managed to rapidly develop, validate and deliver an accurate test. PHE has since expanded to 12 other testing sites in England and supported the NHS to start testing at greater capacity in their labs. 

“This is the fastest deployment of a novel test to PHE and NHS labs in recent history, including in the Swine flu pandemic in 2009.”

British officials took part in four meetings where EU projects to bulk-buy medical kit were discussed – the earliest in January, according to official minutes that heap doubt on government claims of missing an email.

Jennifer Rankin  www.theguardian.com 

Last week Downing Street claimed that it failed to take part in an EU scheme to source life-saving ventilators and other kit to treat coronavirus because it accidentally missed the deadline.

No 10 initially said it did not take part because the UK was no longer a member of the EU and was “making our own efforts”. After critics accused Boris Johnson of putting “Brexit over breathing”, Downing Street clarified that missing out was an error and it would consider participating in future. It is understood the UK claimed not to have received an email from the EU asking it to participate.

EU minutes seen by the Guardian show that a British official joined eight out of 12 EU health security committee meetings dedicated to the Covid-19 outbreak since the group was set up earlier this year, shortly before China’s Hubei province was put into lockdown.

At least four of those meetings discussed EU procurement schemes on: 31 January, 4 February, 2 March and 13 March.

While the government marked Brexit day on 31 January, a British representative joined EU member states and commission officials to discuss what was then called “the cluster of pneumonia cases associated with novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China”.

At this meeting, four EU member states said the virus could require increased stocks in Europe of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as gloves, masks and goggles, and the commission said it was ready to help if asked.

The EU executive stated it was ready to help countries bulk-buy medical equipment on 4 February. By 2 March, officials at the commission’s health department reported that 20 EU countries wanted to join a procurement scheme for personal protective equipment, such as overalls, gloves and face-shields. Later that month, on 13 March, EU officials discussed the combined purchase of ventilators.

Peter Liese, a German MEP and medical doctor who sits on the European parliament’s public health committee, said there had also been telephone calls between British and EU officials about the EU procurement scheme. “I know that they [British officials] were at a working level interested in joint procurement,” he told the Guardian.

The veteran German MEP dismissed UK government claims they missed an email. “It was not that they were not aware, but it was a decision not to participate,” he said. “If you are interested you don’t wait for an email.”

The UK was also able to sign up for EU procurement schemes via the EU’s “Early Warning and Response System”, an intranet site where European countries exchange information about communicable diseases.

The government claimed last week that the UK “did not receive an invitation in time to join in four joint procurements in response to the coronavirus pandemic”. Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove repeated this account on Sunday, when he said there had been “communication confusion”, although added he was unaware of the details.

A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office did not respond to questions about how “communication confusion” mentioned by Gove was possible given UK participation in meetings where EU procurement was discussed, as shown in the EU documents. Instead, the spokesperson sent a transcript of Gove’s remarks on the Andrew Marr Show.

Behind the scenes British officials maintain the UK did not receive an invitation in time to join four EU procurement schemes – an argument made last week by Number 10.

The four bulk-buying projects were conceived at different moments over several weeks in February and March, as the coronavirus crisis in Europe escalated, raising questions about whether there ever just one invitation covering all four schemes.

The Department for Health and Social Care has not yet responded to a request for comment.

The Department of Health initially declined to comment when the Guardian reported last week that the UK had decided not to participate in any of four EU procurement schemes to buy medical equipment in response to the coronavirus crisis.

Nearly all EU countries, 25 out of 27, are taking part in the project for shared purchase of ventilators, while the same number are joining forces to buy protective kit for medical staff, such as masks and overalls. Separately, 19 are teaming up to buy laboratory equipment needed for tests.

Under then prime minister David Cameron, the government signed the EU’s joint procurement agreement in 2014, which was drawn up after some member states experienced shortages of medical kit during the H1N1 pandemic. The terms of the Brexit transition deal means the government has the right to take part in EU joint procurement until 31 December 2020.

The logic behind joint procurement is to reduce red tape, get better prices through wholesale purchase and take advantage of medical purchasing skills that may be weaker in some countries, especially smaller ones.

Liese urged the UK government to continue working with the rest of Europe on the search for better treatments and a vaccine against Covid-19. “When the scientists from Berlin, Rome, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge work together [on treatments] we are faster and better than if we would work separately. The same applies to vaccines. European cooperation is crucial.”

The European commission said on Friday the UK “is most welcome to join any future procurement launch”.

MPs from across the political spectrum are calling for a virtual House of Commons to be established to scrutinise the government’s response to coronavirus.

Kate Proctor  www.theguardian.com

Ed Davey, acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, said the UK should also look to New Zealand and create a select committee to question the government’s Covid-19 strategy.

He wants a weekly PMQs with Boris Johnson through video-conferencing and an end to the rule that stops MPs from tabling written questions during recess so that the public can get more information from government.

Parliament broke for recess a week early as the number of cases of the virus around Westminster increased. MPs are not due back in the Commons until 21 April.

One hundred MPs from Labour, the SNP and the Green party have written a letter to the clerk of the House of Commons, John Benger, asking for his support in setting up a form of digital parliament.

Davey said: “If it wasn’t a dangerous infectious virus but a major emergency, parliament would have been recalled. We wouldn’t have gone on recess.

“We think scrutiny is good for government policy. We’ve shown opposition parties are prepared to behave responsibly. I think we can find a way to get things cracking and get an online virtual parliament to serve the nation.”

He said a specialist select committee focusing on Covid-19 could mirror the one set up in New Zealand in March, named the epidemic response committee, which is chaired by the leader of the opposition.

The letter to the Commons’ clerk was initiated by Labour’s shadow minister for innovation, Chi Onwurah, who said: “People up and down the country have made huge behavioural changes in a matter of days and we must show we are capable of it too.”

Darren Hughes, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, said: “Ministers and public officials must be held to account by those with a full suite of powers to call evidence, witnesses and use the full clout of parliament.

“Cabinet is showing that politics can continue to function during this crisis. Parliament must show the same, with the Speaker leading the way in providing accountability at this urgent hour.”

The reported death toll from coronavirus in the UK is set to increase beyond the NHS’s daily tally on Tuesday when fatalities outside of hospitals are counted for the first time.

Figures from the NHS and Public Health England have so far been the key barometer of the impact of the virus but they have not included any deaths in homes, care homes and other non-hospital settings. Daily figures for Monday showed a rise in the UK death toll of 209 to 1,408 people, but these are only people who died in NHS care.

Covid-19: deaths outside hospitals to be included in UK tally for first time

Pamela Duncan  www.theguardian.com 

The Office for National Statistics will start publishing data about the rest of the deaths from 9.30am on Tuesday giving a fuller picture of the impact of Covid-19. They will tally all of the deaths from late December until 20 March which they believe occurred outside hospitals.

Unlike the NHS figures, which are limited to people who tested positive for the disease, they will also include cases where it is mentioned as a suspected cause on death certificates.

“It will be based on mentions of Covid-19 on death certificates,” said a spokeswoman for the ONS. “It will include suspected cases of Covid-19 where someone has not been tested positive for Covid-19.”

At the daily Downing Street press conference, the foreign secretary Dominic Raab was asked if the new data release showed the country has only been shown “part of the truth so far”. Raab did not answer, but Patrick Vallance, the chief medical officer, said he did not expect the increase in the death toll from the additional ONS data to be large, adding: “It’s important going forward that we have this reconciliation between all of the numbers.”

Every Tuesday the statistics authority will provide a backdated weekly count of all suspected coronavirus deaths of people who have died in their homes, care homes or hospices, which will be published in a combined form with the figures drawn from the daily death toll announced by the NHS in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The figures will be backdated to the previous week, starting with the week ending 20 March. It will include the ages of the people who died and give a regional breakdown.

Officials said that focusing so far only on hospital deaths, about which information is immediately available, has allowed the NHS and PHE to produce rapid and up-to-date figures. Deaths which occur out of hospitals can take longer to trace statistically because of the time it can take for paperwork to pass through coroners’ offices. But it has resulted in only a partial picture of the virus’s impact. Some of the hospital fatalities have also been slow to be recorded. One death reported on Monday actually occurred 17 days earlier.

The Department for Health and Social Care publishes daily UK-wide figures in a statement on its website which makes no mention that its figure of “patients in the UK who tested positive for coronavirus” do not include deaths outside hospitals.

Public Health England’s own online dashboard of the spread of the virus in the UK describes “reported cases of coronavirus in the UK”. Only if you click on a link “about the data” does it explain that it is limited to deaths in NHS services of patients who have had a positive test result for Covid-19.

A spokesperson for NHS England said it was “clear from the start these are people who have died in our hospitals”.

There are sometimes significant delays in deaths appearing in the NHS England figures. One death reported on Monday actually occurred on 13 March in Mid Essex hospital services NHS trust, a 17-day lag. Another, first reported on Saturday, actually occurred in Sandwell and West Birmingham hospitals NHS trust on 13 March.

At least 33 deaths which were reported by NHS England between Thursday and Sunday actually occurred more than a week earlier.

Of the 159 newly reported deaths recorded by NHS England today, at least 30% occurred on or before 27 March.

“There are various reasons why a hospital trust might delay reporting a death, including contact tracing, the internal validation processes and staff absences. For sheer capacity reasons, it’s occasionally necessary for some trusts to report over a longer time period,” an NHS spokesperson said.

• This article was amended on 31 March 2020. In it, we gave the UK death toll as 2,433. This has been corrected to 1,408.