EDITION 815
27 APRIL 2020

As another week of working from home slips by, here are 10 things which caught my attention and may have escaped yours. This newsletter is sent to 50,000+ subscribers each Monday at 10am. Please share on social media and forward to your colleagues and friends so they can subscribe, learn and engage. I'd be very grateful if you did.

1. How to keep calm and carry on. The coronavirus outbreak has rapidly changed the way we live, work and socialise and has brought with it new pressures and stress. What toll does this take on the workforce? [MORE]

2. The death tally is more than just a number. The UK's official tally of coronavirus-related deaths has passed 20,000 - a figure the chief scientist once said would represent a "good outcome". It's a huge number and hard to visualise. How can we grasp the scale of this loss? It is roughly the population of Newquay in Cornwall and is also the capacity of the O2 Arena in Greenwich, which is easy to visualise if you’ve been to these places. But the people who have died are more than just a number, or a component part of a national statistic. How we count the emotional loss of those they leave behind is simply beyond measure. Editor

3. Ministers were warned last year about chance viral pandemic. The UK government was warned last year about the prospect of a viral pandemic hitting the UK and urged to stockpile PPE. Ministers were told to draw up plans to monitor and contact-trace infected patients and manage a surge in deaths. The Mirror says that Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance signed off the document, which warned: “A novel pandemic virus could be highly transmissible and highly virulent.” The Guardian

4. Government poo-poos the idea of when to lift the lockdown. The Cabinet Office has denied that a date has been agreed to start lifting the lockdown; widely reported to be 11 May. The Government has said it is sticking to the five tests it has set out and communicated with the public. These rule that social distancing measures will only be lifted when: the NHS can cope; there’s a consistent fall in deaths; the rate of infection level is decreasing; there are adequate levels of tests and protective equipment; and officials are confident that there will be no second wave. The Times

5. Will the coronavirus crisis transform society? It already has. Take the mass switch to working from home: after a little more than a month, it has become institutionalised, even in professions that never contemplated it before. Court hearings have shifted online; bank workers execute transactions from home on secure systems; doctors minister to patients through virtual appointments, thereby processing many more queries and sparing patients from having to hang around in germ-filled waiting rooms. All this is likely to have a long-lasting, positive effect on levels of flexible working, commuting and traffic. The crisis has also prompted a huge rise in volunteering, both for the NHS and in neighbourhoods - a trend likely to strengthen communities and reduce loneliness, not least among the volunteers themselves. Fewer people are being needlessly jailed; cities have been forced to house their homeless. It took a crisis to unveil them, but some good ideas really were just lying around waiting to happen. Editor

6. David Attenborough teaches geography to children in lockdown. Children in lockdown can now attend geography lessons run by David Attenborough and learn physics from Brian Cox,. Manchester City striker Sergio Agüero is on hand for Spanish, and actor Danny Dyer is taking a history class. All of them, and other stars, are contributing to the BBC’s new Bitesize Daily education service, for children aged five to 14, which is also supported by 200 professional teachers. The programmes are on iPlayer and the BBC Red Button, from 9am to 11am. BBC

7. Making the most of change. While we cannot always choose when we have to confront moments of great change, we can control how we respond to them. The key is to cultivate our willingness and ability to adapt. How do we do that? Practice trying on different points of view by playing a respectful devil's advocate in meetings. Adopting different perspectives - and then casting them aside when you need to - can help you build a flexible mind. It also helps to keep a running log of the times you were wrong and shifted gears. Editor

8. Calls grow for political advisers to be barred from science meetings. Leading Tories are joining calls to bar Dominic Cummings, and other political advisers, from meetings of the secret scientific group advising on the coronavirus pandemic. As pressure grows for the committee’s deliberations to be made public, Tory grandees have said that Cummings’s presence was wrong, demanding that the government should publish the membership of Sage, remove any non-scientist members, publish their advice in full, and publish dissenting opinions with the advice. The Guardian

9. The key workers paid less than £10ph. One third of key workers earn £10 an hour or less, with the figure rising to 58% among social care workers and 71% of those working in food. The findings come from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which looked at roles designated as essential during the coronavirus pandemic. On average, key workers earn 8% less than the average worker, but the disparity is highest in the food sector, where the median wage is £8.59/hour. The research also highlighted the differing profiles of the poorest paid industries: 83% of social care workers are women, while in food, almost a third were born outside the UK. Daily Mail

10. The bottom line. As the Government’s furlough scheme launched, the Treasury confirmed that 140,000 companies had already applied for it, effectively putting a million people on the state payroll. So far, this has cost the Treasury £1bn. However, it has been estimated that eight million people could end up being furloughed, and the Office for Budget Responsibility has calculated that over three months, the bill will balloon to £42bn. The Financial Times