Reasonable numbers? Over 11,000 confirmed cases and over 1,000 deaths for a country with a population of 10 million.



Compare that to their neighbours, Denmark (population 5.6 million) has seen 300 deaths and 6,500 cases, Norway (5.3 million) has seen a death toll of 140 with 6,600 cases, while Finland (5.5 million) has been relatively unscathed with 64 deaths and just 3,000 cases.

But is it working?







From 1 day ago. The total deaths have now exceeded 1000. Read beyond the headlines.

You are correct, things are and will be grim for months to come. You don’t have to be an economist to see that dozens of companies will go bust. The government tax take will drop, plus personal bankruptcies will be widespread. All country’s will however be in the same predicament, obviously we can’t reduce reduce interest rates by much.

We do have one massive advantage over a raft of EU Nations we can and will print money. This has a some major risks, but will definitely solve the problem over the short term. Without wishing to return to the Brexit debate ,being unable to print money due to the euro will devastate Italy and Greece . The loans that Italy and Greece will have to take don’t address the major problems they have. The huge drop in oil prices has probably closed down any sensible debate on Scottish devolution, probably won’t shut up the snp as any shortcomings in Scotland will be blamed on the Westminster parliament.

The population is one 6th of us but they have one twelfth the deaths - which system would you say is working better - we are getting a thousand a day they are getting a hundred?



Their economy whilst damaged will not take as long to recover as ours - so which is the better option?

With the economy in such dire straits I presume the government will request an extension to the transition period rather than dump businesses in to no deal when they have been unable to prepare for it?



Or will they decide that the extra hit to the economy will be worth it for their political purposes and just tell businesses and households that they have to suck up the extra costs and red tape.

Depends to some extent on where they are on their curve. We were doing a lot better than Italy and France in terms of absolute numbers/proportion of population until quite recently.



There may be demographic influences too.



Depends... may be...



Making evidence-based decisions with what is still a pretty sp body of evidence is really tough.

It's important to remember that other countries, France chief among them, have been including care home deaths in their figures for some time - we haven't - which is why we compare 'favourably' to them, and probably why that has been a comparison the Govt has been keen to use.

If you check out various news channels you can see that a series of meetings are taking place throughout the summer. Obviously by video link,it all seems a bit insignificant compared with the life and death situation some people are in at the moment.

With how dire things are likely to be for both the UK and the EU, any contraction in the ecconomy for either side will be lost and buried in the fall out from Coronavirus.



On the basis that the UK has refused offers of help from the EU in sourcing PPE and Ventilators, it seems pretty certain that despite all the other issues, Brexit is indeed still going ahead at full pace, after all, there isn't anything else that's too important to deal with

The difference is coronavirus is a temporary shock, falling out with no/ a minimal deal is a permanent shock.



It will increase costs of doing business, lead to log jams at the border, disruption to supplies of food and other essential goods, lead to backlogs of lorries on the roads.



At a time when businesses are crippled from the coronavirus shock and desperately needing to bounce back, layering that on top of them will finish many of them off.



Also we saw what happened when panic buying started when there wasn't a disruption to food/grocery supplies. What will happen when supplies actually are disrupted.



I suspect the government thinks there is political capital to be made out of baiting Starmer in to calling for an extension, so they can say "at a time of a pandemic, the Labour establishment are still trying to overturn the result of the referendum", but then if early next year it seems that other countries are starting to get their economies moving again and we're hit with major disruption it will be hard to sell that as a political necessity.

Do we appear to have a shortage of ventilators? not according to the NHS and the shortage of PPE now seems to have been a bit of a red herring used to bash the government too.

Tour de France tot ake place in August...