Section: Covid

The battle against Covid increasingly resembles a rather bizarre episode of Dad’s Army mocking the idea of British genius and resolve.

Supermarket shortages deepen as Britain’s supply chain is on the brink of collapse.

Molly Woodcock reflects on the trials and tribulations of student life during the pandemic lockdown and the damage it leaves behind.

The National Audit Office’s second report on test and trace services in England does not make for reassuring reading.

Even as politicians in the UK are mired in vaccine complacency and people enjoy a sense of returning normality, India is suffering a devastating new wave of Covid-19. The country is seeing not only a large and under-reported wave of deaths but also the decimation of industries and sectors of the economy. Much of that […]

Trade figures recently released for the first quarter of 2021 (1Q2021) provide worrying clues as to the impact of both COVID-19 and Brexit on the Midlands economy. One thing that is clear is that long-term planning has never been harder – previous economic trends have been blown out of the water by the pandemic lockdowns, the uncertainty of the transition period, and the confusion of post-Brexit trading.

Today sees the launch of step three of the government’s roadmap to get us out of lockdown. Today, I can go to a sauna (yeah..no), have a meal inside a pub (blessèd relief, it was snowing here last week) or stay overnight with my in-laws (I’m more likely to go for that sauna, to be honest). It all sounds wonderful. Our region has been in one sort of lockdown or another almost continually since November last year, bar a brief and lethal giddy spell over Christmas. It’s been hard but it’s worked – by the end of April, new cases, hospital numbers and deaths were all down, down, down.

In the early stages of the pandemic, excuses centred around its unexpected nature. The government was ‘doing its best’. Fast forward to the peak of lockdown one, suddenly making excuses was much harder than it had been. An enormous death toll, failure after failure, it was proving more difficult to defend the government’s actions, or rather, inactions.

Just days before a raft of Covid restrictions are due to be eased, a Derbyshire town has become England’s Covid hotspot.

Anaesthetists, on the whole, have a chip on their shoulder. We are the single largest hospital specialty in the NHS and, in our own view, we pretty much run the place. Try having surgery without an anaesthetist, or a baby or a critical illness or a chronic pain issue or an intravenous dialysis line or.. I could go on, but you get the point. In essence, we (yes we, I worked as an NHS anaesthetist for ten years) provide the physiological bedrock upon which all other specialties have to stand to perform their work.

Today is 4th May, we are deep into spring. This year’s county cricket season is three weeks’ old and Derbyshire is already languishing at the bottom of their group. Despite Covid-19, despite the Big Bash League, despite the razzamatazz of the Indian Premier League*, cricket remains the quintessential game of the English summer. The gentle […]

The vaccine environment is a complex mixture of commercial and political interests, investment in novel science and technologies, substantial commercial profit, collapsing national economies and geopolitical reputations in the context of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Thus creating ‘Vaccine Fog’.

We will have no recourse when the police silence us. No-one will have to resign or explain.

11 days ago, Sarah Everard disappeared in Clapham at about 9.30 pm. She was walking home from a friend’s house.

To celebrate this international women’s day, we wanted to identify an eminent woman from the Midlands. Given the current Covid-19 pandemic, we could pick none better than Dr Janet Lane-Claypon, a pioneer of epidemiology. She was born in Boston, Lincolnshire in 1877 and studied at the London School of Medicine for Women. She was the […]

When I arrived in the UK in November 2019, I was delighted that finally after 18 months of a hard and dangerous journey, I arrived to my dream land looking for human rights, freedom, justice and freedom of speech.

‘We are in the same storm, but not the same boat.’ The pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated inequalities in health. People living in the most deprived areas of the UK are more than twice as likely to die from contracting Covid-19, than people living in the least deprived areas. However, what we see now with […]

“our website is filling up with digital and online activities”. Some of this is work designed to be digital and interactive, and some might be made for Zoom. There is experimentation and some work that is more traditional, audio only work and also film.

will debate whether frontline workers should receive support for long Covid, the still poorly-understood consequence of Covid-19 which leaves many unable to work.

The current government’s response to Covid-19 implies that pandemics are new and unexpected but that we will survive through ‘world beating’ innovation. The government of Elizabeth I prepared for any future outbreaks of Plague in 1578 by issuing ‘Orders thought meet by Her Majesty and Her Privy Council to be executed … in such … places as are … infected with the Plague’.

Covid-19 and Brexit have one thing in common. They can fully consume our minds and displace everything else. Worse, we are defining ourselves and our fellow citizens by how we view Covid-19 and Brexit. Consensus on the contrasting views seems impossible. But one thing the opposing groups will agree on is the importance of food […]

The Covid-19 pandemic has hit the country hard with the UK plunging into its deepest recession since records began. Each day, the media reports yet another, otherwise successful, business going bankrupt or announces large scale redundancies. Hopefully a vaccination will be available soon, but even so the economic impacts of Covid are being felt here […]