• Joe Biden has also been in the firing line recently after saying on 26 March that Putin “cannot remain in power” and then having this clarified by diplomats a couple of days later to assure the world that the USA was not calling for regime change in Russia. It would certainly be interesting to see how the USA would propose accomplishing and enforcing this, its record in regime change since WW2 being nothing short of lamentable. No one else has done much better – indeed I’m struggling to think of any case on my lifetime where regime change has actually worked; and yet it keeps on being regarded as a viable policy. Biden has a bit of a record for going off-message: then again, he won his first election over 50 years ago and the Presidency last year with the largest number of votes ever cast for anyone in that country so he clearly has done something right.

• The BBC’s Ros Atkins’ webcasts are always worth listening to as he takes a measured view that’s backed up with evidence. Here’s his one from 24 March on Russia’s claim that Ukraine is over-run with Nazis from whom the population needs saving. This is a trope from the 1940s which made no sense to me when Putin first advanced it just after the invasions suspicion which Ros Atkins has, to my satisfaction confirmed.

• None the less, we must be very careful about what we choose to believe about this. As I mentioned last week, our press is currently so anti-Russian that it predisposes our views to a dangerous extent. It’s hard to find any defence for what Putin has done, though I suggested that he was merely trying to make a point to a world that he felt had relegated Russia to second-class status. This, he claims, is because of the demise of the USSR and NATO’s and the EU’s encroachments into areas which, he also claims, compromises Russia’s security. In WW2 Russia was invaded by a Western power and suffered untold brutalities (which it repaid at the end of the war). The encirclement, real-and-present-danger and de-Nazification cards are thus easy ones to play and work ro an extent to which we, in our rich island nation, will never understand.

Our PM sparked outrage when earlier this month he compared Ukraine’s resistance to the UK’s 2016 Brexit vote: but it does make a kind of mad sense. The Brexit campaign was predicated on the idea that the UK was being somehow strangled by a larger neighbour. In Ukraine’s case this is actually happening. Putin’s view, however, was that NATO was about to do just the same thing to Russia. And so it goes on…

• As does Covid. Just when we thought it was over, it isn’t. Welcome to the world of viruses, I guess. The big paradox at the moment is that not only are cases going up but also lateral-flow test kits will from 1 April cease to be free. This made me wonder what the relationship was between test rates and reported cases.

If you want to reduce official Covid stats to zero, you stop testing. If you want to show the maximum figure you test everyone, every day. Neither of these are going to happen. The reality has been a level of testing that has been influenced by a number of very different considerations. These include, in no particular order, government or media pressure, personal preference, the need for evidence of testing in order to partake in certain activities, the availability of test kits or testing centres and personal self-interest.

Until I looked at the figures (which you can see here for tests and see here for cases) I thought that the last might be the most significant. It would appear not, however. During the March to June 2021 period we were regularly taking over a million tests a day, even though cases were in the low thousands. In the last six weeks, however, fewer tests are being done even though there are perhaps twenty times more reported cases. For every 1,000 people who were tested on 25 March 2021, for example, 6 would have been positive. Wind forward 365 days and it’s 77 . In the first period cases were low and, in the second, high. It seems clear that self-interest isn’t the big factor.

A year ago, testing kits were widely available: now they are not. Tests were also being demanded for many as a pre-condition of any kind of human engagement; now they are not. Then only about £25m people had been doubled jabbed; now about 50m have been. These are just some of the variations that makes any kind of generalisations about the statistics very dangerous, particularly for a non-statistician like me.

To an increasing extent, the number of cases is a lot less important than the severity of the symptoms. Everyone responds differently to any infection and our immune levels wax and wane according to a vast range of factors, few of which are understood or can be predicted. The efficacy of the vaccines and the boosters will do so too. The viral load you were exposed to will probably influence how badly you are affected, as might other factors such as temperature and diet. All the statistics also depend on people’s willingness to report either negative or positive results. Some who test positive might suppress their result for personal reasons, as might those who test negative. If no kits or testing centres are available locally you will clearly not test at all. All in all, there are a host of factors which make the whole statistical and medical exercise a bit of a guessing game.

Three things do seem clear, however. The first is that the number of cases now, in late March, is probably a good deal higher than it was two months ago, perhaps to an even greater extent than the official stats show. In the ten days from 20 March 2022, an average of 711,680 tests were done a day, detecting an average of 81,957 cases. Go back to the ten days from 11 January 2022 and an average of 1,360,002 tests were daily detecting an average of 101,024 cases. So, close to double the number of tests in the earlier period detected only about 25% more cases. Were an average of 1,360,002 tests a day to have been conducted in the 10 days from 20 March 2022, and ion all the other variables had been the same, one might fairly assume that rather than an average of about 82,000 cases a day there would actually have been something like 156,000.

Secondly, statistics about infections, hospitalisations and deaths have to be treated with some caution as they conflate “with” and “due to”. All figures – on this or any other matter – need care in any case, particularly when comparing one period (such as winter and summer, or pre- or post-jabs) or one area with another. The most positive news, however, is that the figures for patients requiring ventilators have barely increased at all in the last two months and is at about 10% of its peak in late January 2021. (That said, any patient in hospital due to or merely with Covid applies extra pressure to a health system which already has quite enough.)

In my district of West Berkshire cases per 100,000 have been above the national average for some time and I wondered if this, and in particular the recent spike, had translated into extra admissions or need for ventilators in the local hospitals. The situation here is slightly complicated by West Berkshire having no major hospital of its own, those in Reading, Oxford, Swindon and Basingstoke being the nearest. Who better to ask, I thought, than WBC’s health and wellbeing portfolio holder Graham Bridgman. “So far we don’t seem to be seeing this,” he told me on 31 March. “Although cases in the district have risen, so far as I can tell the hospitals are not being overwhelmed and, in particular, the Covid-positive numbers in intensive care are lower than they were early on.  Of course, the situation can change by the day, so we continue to keep a close eye on it.”

The third is that the end of free lateral flow tests will almost certainly reduce the number of cases that are reported and thus depress the seeming number of cases. These have clearly cost a good deal of money but doubtless a lot less than that lost to fraud during the various Covid schemes – the Office for Budgetary Responsibility suggests £5,8bn and Peer2Peer £16bn, so take your pick. From now on, tests could cost as much as £7 each: any payment is not an incentive to procure them (though it might be to using them carefully). I think this change was introduced a few months too soon. There are still some cold days ahead and it’s only been a few weeks since people stopped wearing masks. regardless of the actual cost, to stop offering free tests right now now seems a bit like pulling up 25 miles into a marathon.

• The Oscars are in many ways ridiculous. So too are most other such awards which seek to turn disparate performances in disparate films into a competition. I’m quite reconciled to the fact that England lost the Euros final on penalties to Italy as such sporting competitions are decided according to win/lose criteria we all accept at the outset. Celebrating anything creative, ranging from songwriting to acting, in the same way is essentially corporate bullshit, a fact only  George C Scott (who refused his best actor award for Patton) was brave enough to admit. At this year’s ceremony, one actor apparently hit the presenter in the face for making a joke something about some member of his family. I’m not sure that when you get to that level of fame you are any longer fully in control of yourself anyway. This is not a problem I will ever have to grapple with…

Across the area