The Spain quarantine decision shows No 10 is still in coronavirus panic mode
Mention Spain just now and Downing Street panics. It was from Spain in March that the biggest early importation of Covid-19 was thought to have come, according to an Oxford-Edinburgh working paper. Carriers were greeted at Heathrow with open arms. While the rest of Europe was clamping down its borders, Boris Johnson was relaxed. “The science” had told him herd immunity would see Britain OK. Besides, Whitehall never wants to upset Heathrow and the airline lobby.
That is history. But when last Friday’s surge in “reported cases” from Spain flashed on the radar, ministers clearly panicked. They wrenched on the handbrake and imposed a two-week quarantine on those returning from the country. The Foreign Office clearly thought it hard to punish the detached and low-risk Balearics, but that was a subtlety too far for Johnson.
The impression given by the cabinet throughout the pandemic has been constant. It is of a group of ministers and scientists in a bunker, all terrified for their headlines and reputations, blown hither and thither by unreliable data. They seem to lack any feel for the outside world, be it care homes, high streets, hospitality or entertainment. They are in thrall to Imperial College’s criticised modellers, and hostile to all regional or local differences. They know only the great god – statistics.
Nothing better illustrates this than the abuse of Covid-19 “data”, paraded nightly on the news. As the Cambridge statistician David Spiegelhalter often points out, depending on international league tables at this stage can be misleading. The most useful figure is “excess deaths” over a rolling average. As for numbers of cases, they are a function of varying forms of official testing. The World Health Organization figures for last Friday were Spain (2,255), France (931), Italy (252), Germany (781), Japan (830), Romania (1,119), Bulgaria (270) and Sweden (234). These must be close to random.
It was known earlier this month that Barcelona was seeing a hotspot, when London was still obsessed with punishing poor Portugal (313 cases last Friday). Even so, Spain’s extraordinary figure of 2,255 cases is surely suspicious, especially as more than half were “asymptomatic”. Was Catalonia merely testing and tracing with an understandable intensity?
The answer is nobody seems to know. The rest of Spain was normal, but the British government does not do local and so all Spain – and some 1.8 million British tourists – must suffer, without the courtesy of a day’s notice.
This pandemic is encircling the world with a trail of unreliable data. Yet that data is converted into policies with enormous personal and economic consequences. Spain’s early test-and-trace precautions were reportedly poor, but its foreign minister points out that they are now stringent. As long as the pandemic kills people, extra vigilance is needed. But vigilance should embrace common sense and public confidence. Death rates across most of Europe are approaching the seasonal norm. It makes no sense to crowd planes but quarantine their destinations, to open cinemas but not theatres, to pack supermarkets but not cricket stadiums.
Seeking to explain the weekend’s shambolic treatment of Spanish holidaymakers, the health minister Helen Whately said the intention was to be “clear, decisive and robust”. In other words, it was the defining feature of Johnson’s government: don’t trust people, bully them.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
