COVID scientists, cowering and the roaring twenties were the topics raised by columnists and contributors in the newspapers.

The Daily Mail

Sarah Vine said she was in awe of scientists.

“Not just because, as far as I’m concerned, what they do is actual magic, but also because, for the most part, they make the world a better place,” she said. “Their work is invaluable. But like the rest of us, they get things wrong.”

But science was our best and only hope, she added.

She asked how, given Professor Neil Ferguson’s assertion that we would be looking back on the pandemic by October, how could we be sure that the scientists hadn’t been wrong before.

“How do we know that if we had locked down for shorter periods of time, the NHS still wouldn’t have been overwhelmed? That children could have stayed in school; that cancer screening could have gone ahead; that jobs and businesses could have been saved? The answer, of course, is we don’t.”

The Daily Express

Ann Widdecombe said Sajid Javid was right to talk about people cowering in the face of the virus.

“I cast off my mask last Monday, yet all around me people are still obsessively covered up even where there are few people and plenty of space,” she said. “Millions of people have Covid and do not even know it. If masks prevented Covid then millions (and remember the official figures cover only those who have been tested so there will probably be a few million more) would not have caught it.”

She said she asked people why they were wearing masks and they said they felt safer.

“In short they are scared, which is what Javid was, unwisely, pointing out,” she said. “Meanwhile the NHS app is telling perfectly healthy, double-jabbed, symptomless people to stay at home just in case a fleeting exposure to someone else may have caused them to catch the virus. So on the one hand the minister says “don’t cower” and on the other tells people to do just that. Mixed messages yet again.”

The Guardian

Dan Davies, an investment banking analyst, said we shouldn’t aim to repeat the “roaring 20s” ‘just because the decade starts with a two and we’re (hopefully) coming to the end of a pandemic similar to the Spanish flu.’

“The roaring 20s were not all that great for most of the population. Growth was sluggish and the falling prices of consumer goods concealed widening inequality by making everyone feel rich,” he said..

“As we make our start in the 2020s, delayed by two years of isolation, the challenge is still to face up to the great anxieties of our time with the optimism of the postwar economic miracle, not the outdated tools of the “roaring 20s”. Only then will we ensure prosperity for all.”