1. Long Covid is the hidden health crisis of the pandemic – so why isn’t more being done to address it?
Layla Moran MP in The Independent
on long term health impacts
“Long Covid is the hidden crisis within this growing coronavirus pandemic. Its impact on so many aspects of people’s lives, and our society, will be significant. In fact, it is estimated that around 300,000 in the UK alone have it. Many feel that unless they end up in hospital then their case of coronavirus is ‘mild’. There is nothing mild about long Covid. Take Jane [not her real name]. She emailed me to say she’s 32, and was previously healthy and fit. Not your stereotypical person ‘at risk’ from coronavirus. Long Covid has affected her since April. She now has neurocognitive and mobility problems, and has crushing fatigue. Her partner, she told me, ‘has essentially become a full-time carer.’ She’s not unique, she’s not an outlier. Lots of people like Jane have emailed me.”
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2. If Brexit is ‘done’, then where's the dividend?
Martin Kettle in The Guardian
on an unfinished process
“The Conservatives and Labour each have a shared interest in treating Brexit as done. Johnson wants to tout it as his passport to history, especially amid his Covid failures. Keir Starmer can see no route to a Labour majority (or party unity) from reopening the European issue. This week he tried to close the file on freedom of movement as part of that. This may be understandable from the point of view of electoral self-interest – but that does not mean the party interest is the same as the public interest. Material issues over commerce, trade and jobs thrown up by Brexit cannot be ignored just because to talk of why they are occurring may reopen the deep and disturbing divisions of the past decade.”
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3. Impeachment only feeds divisions, elevates Trump in his supporters’ eyes
Josh Hammer in the New York Post
on the Trumpian tinderbox
“They feel besieged by every institution, especially after Big Tech’s monopolistic post-siege crackdown. Trump voters already think that Democrats and their corporate allies seek to delegitimize them out of public life. Add the (second) impeachment and Senate conviction of a president whom millions of Americans continue to support, and the social divide may just become unbridgeable. There was no reason to take this tinderbox and light the whole thing aflame — which is precisely how most Trump voters would interpret their man being impeached a second time, this time as his presidency is winding down.”
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4. Lockdown sceptics have one last chance to lead the Covid debate
Sherelle Jacobs in The Daily Telegraph
on shutdown ‘myths’
“But what the lockdown-sceptics haven’t quite articulated is that, once again, the public has been persuaded into a lockdown based on a delusion. The myth of the first lockdown was that it would only have to last three weeks. The myth of this lockdown is that life can resume in spring. But restrictions are unlikely to be lifted until the summer at the earliest for a simple reason: it is not deaths but media headlines about overwhelmed ICUs that strike fear into the hearts of ministers. A cynic might argue we have just sacrificed half a year of freedom on the NHS altar to save the skin of the Tories.”
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5. Fun-suckers put Sex and the City in their sights
Janice Turner in The Times
on a revived classic
“When news broke that [Sex and the City] is to be revived, naturally the usual fun-suckers gathered to kill this one remaining joy. OMG! Women are having orgasms and mindless fun! Boot up the Problematic-o-tron! Woke writers opined that the new SATC must be politically “sound” and adhere to diversity edicts. Would it still be funny? No one cared. SATC was never a feminist road map. It was a consumerist, hedonist fantasy reflecting the prelapsarian Nineties and its creator Darren Star, a gay man. And unlike women, gay men are enviably unapologetic about how they get their kicks.”
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