In the year and a bit since then, there haven’t been many opportunities to write straightforwardly upbeat things. So it is with great relish that I write that the vaccines are now unambiguously saving British lives.

One (so far not peer-reviewed) study looking at 5.4 million people in Scotland — that is, basically all Scottish people — found that vaccinated people were 85% less likely to end up in hospital than unvaccinated ones. The Oxford/AZ vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine were statistically indistinguishable; despite ridiculous and confected European concerns about the Oxford vaccine, it is stopping people from dying just as well as the Pfizer one. And in Scotland the AZ vaccine has been mainly used in older people, to great effect.

Another smaller, UK-wide study looking at infections in healthcare workers found that the Pfizer vaccine was about 70% effective at reducing infections 21 days after a first dose, and 85% shortly after a second dose. Further analysis suggests that even if you do get infected you’re about half as likely to get seriously ill or die, suggesting that it’s somewhere up in the 80-90% region against severe disease.

We’re not mucking around trying to reverse-engineer pharma industry press releases and proxy immune responses any more; this is the vaccine out in the field, doing what it was made to do, and doing it well. One of the most heartening graphs showed that the number of severe cases in the elderly was dropping at a far faster rate than cases in younger age groups; when we came out of Lockdown 1, they stayed stubbornly high for a long time. There was some slight concern in the Scottish data that the response started to weaken a bit once you got past 28 days from the first dose, but it wasn’t clear and it didn’t seem to appear in the other study, so I’m not very worried about it.

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When you add in that cases are dropping day by day – the seven-day rolling average is down to around 11,000 positive tests a day, the lowest it’s been since the beginning of October – I think we are allowed to be cheered.

All that might make you think that the road ahead is clear — but there are still reasons to be cautious.

The chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, in a briefing to journalists ahead of the release of the roadmap, said that it is important, as we come out of lockdown, to do it in stages: open up a few things, wait for a few weeks, and watch how R changes; the basic scientific thing of changing one variable at a time.

Schools are the big unknown. It’s nearly a year since schools were closed in the first lockdown, and despite them being opened and closed again since, we still don’t really know what impact they have on transmission. I think it’s pretty clear that they do drive R upward somewhat, but it’s not clear how much. I get different answers depending on which scientists I ask.

In the roadmap, we will open schools on 8 March (plus a few other things which are probably fairly inconsequential from a transmission point of view), and then see what impact that has. Vallance suggested we should leave four to five weeks between new measures, in order to see what the impact is: under the roadmap, we’re leaving just three weeks before further measures are introduced on 29 March, which disease models presented to SAGE suggest would be “unlikely [to] allow the effect of step 1 to be clearly discernible before step 2 takes place”.

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The measures introduced on 29 March seem unlikely to be major causes of transmission: the reintroduction of “the rule of six” outdoors, outdoor sport starting up again. And they will coincide with the start of the Easter holidays. More major changes will come at least five weeks after the schools reopen. But still, this isn’t being overly cautious: if anything, it’s sailing somewhat close to the wind. 

You might, reasonably, say that it doesn’t matter that much whether schools raise R that much, because the vaccines will stop people dying. But not everyone will be vaccinated, and the vaccines are not perfect, so a huge outbreak will lead to a gigantic surge in cases. The SAGE models suggest that if we were to reopen fully all at once, we would end up with the NHS overwhelmed far more than it was even at the peak of spring 2020. 

Slower relaxation, obviously enough, leads to slower growth in cases. And given the uncertainty, especially around schools, coming out slowly is obviously wise. I understand the wish to come out of lockdown quickly: by one measure, we currently have the most restrictive measures in the developed world. But I’d suggest that’s probably at least partly a result of coming too quickly out of previous lockdowns, not a reason to come out quickly now.

There’s another concern, which is that the more infections there are, the more chances there are for the virus to mutate. There are already somewhat vaccine-resistant strains out there. “If we see big outbreaks and exponential growth,” says Rupert Beale, leader of the Cell Biology of Infection group at the Crick Institute, “you might get a more complete vaccine-escape mutant. It’s relatively unlikely, but each new infection is like giving the virus a lottery ticket.” It only needs to be lucky once.

So the roadmap seems sensible: finally Boris Johnson has learned how to pass the inverted marshmallow test.

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A couple of points, though. First, it is baffling that it is “irreversible”, as briefed a few weeks ago. If we reopen schools, they drive R way above one, and we find ourselves in an unexpected new surge, then the sensible thing to do will be to close schools again. It will be awful for a lot of people, but better than a huge second outbreak and the need for a much longer lockdown.

Second, there are missed opportunities here. The number of cases is falling, and that’s a good thing. But as Adam Kucharski of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine points out, it means that we have only a short window to find things out about the virus. When there are very few cases in the community, it becomes impossible to tell what effect your interventions have: if you tested a vaccine on a population with no disease, then you’d get zero cases in your placebo arm and in your treatment arm. The same applies if you are trying to see the effect of, say, lateral-flow testing.

So now, while there are still a reasonable number of cases, would be an excellent time to do some randomisation. Try lateral-flow tests in schools in a randomly selected 50% of boroughs. Or try new ventilation techniques in half of schools but not in others. Then measure the impact. It is very unlikely that this will be the last we see of Covid, in either this form or some variant; knowing more about how it spreads, what we can afford to leave open and what we definitely need to close will help us when numbers come back up again. 

Third, there was something that Vallance said which caught me up short. We can’t expect the vaccine to be entirely successful, he said, because even if it’s 80% effective, we’re only vaccinating 80% of the population – adults – and 80% of 80% is only about 65%.

Which is of course true, but it made me think: perhaps … we … ought … to … vaccinate … children?

It’s just a thought, but 100% of 80% is 80%. The vaccines are amazingly safe in adults, and I don’t know of any reason why they’d be less safe in children. I was worried that there’d be some Joseph Heller-style situation where we can’t do safety trials on children because we don’t know that it’s safe to do so, but it turns out that Pfizer have already recruited participants. We’re going to have to live with this disease for a long time. Vaccinating people on their 16th birthday forever is not ideal, especially if it’s still circulating in schools. It might not be the most immediate priority but I’d like to know if it’s safe.

I sincerely doubt that this will be the last time I write “coronavirus” in my life, or even the last time this week. But the vaccine news does make me think that, if we do come out of things cautiously, then perhaps this time next year, I’ll at least be writing it less often.

The capital’s strictly Orthodox Jewish, or Haredi, community has an infection rate of at least 64% — UK-wide estimates range from 7% to 30%. And according to the new study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), that figure rises to a staggering 74% among adults and secondary school children.

When I visited the area in North London last week — the study’s researchers have asked the press to refrain from naming the community’s precise location for security reasons — there was little to suggest that it has endured a pandemic quite unlike any other in the world. Smartly dressed children skip down the steps of their schools into waiting minibuses; men with sidelocks and dark frock coats rush to synagogue, their wide-brimmed black hats draped with makeshift plastic coverings to protect them from the elements.

Storm Darcy is sending snow across this enclave of the city, with strong easterly winds wending their way from Ukraine — the same place from where the biggest stream in ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and its 18^th-century codes of dress, originated. Over the past few weeks, a chill wind of publicity has also been blowing through the area, home to 25,000 Haredim — the word comes from the Hebrew “to tremble” before God — the largest community in Europe.

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It culminated last month with coverage of an illegal wedding held at a state school and attended by 150 guests, though other recent stories about the community have covered everything from forced marriage to benefit fraud. But, like so much about this complex corner of London, the picture is far more nuanced than it first appears. Yes, life here is going on largely as normal, but most of the manifold physical interactions which may seem to break lockdown rules are, in fact, perfectly legal.

Unlike Christians, who may go to church once a week, Orthodox Jewish men pray three times a day, and the government has allowed communal worship in England since July 4. All Haredi children are also still allowed to attend lessons. They come under the government’s category of “vulnerable children” as they live in overcrowded households and attend schools that ban internet access at home. Even those who go to full-time unregistered “yeshivas” — which controversially escape Ofsted scrutiny because they offer a religious curriculum so restricted that they are not deemed schools under the Education Act — are allowed to continue attending, because the category also applies to “out-of-school settings”.

But their initial exposure to Covid-19 was also a product of bad timing. With its raucous celebrations and door-to-door gift giving, the festival of Purim fell in early March, less than a fortnight before the first lockdown was imposed. As one person who works in the community told me: “It was the Haredi Cheltenham Festival.”

As ever, there are also socioeconomic reasons for its high rate of infection. Larger families increase the risk of catching the virus and also mean higher-than-average levels of deprivation. The average Haredi woman has between six and seven children; the average British woman has fewer than two.

“Many families live in very crowded conditions, not out of choice but because there is a real dearth of housing,” explains Rabbi Herschel Gluck, as we talk in his back garden. The rabbi, his long white beard flowing from beneath his disposable mask, bristles at any suggestion that Haredim — known for being insular and resistant to modern mores — are “backwoodsmen” who simply don’t understand what’s going on. “I’m totally sick of this attitude that somehow we’re dealing with people who are not aware,” he says, pointing out that many use WhatsApp or have broadband for work.

And for those who don’t: “The message has been delivered in every way that you can think. We had a car going around with a loudspeaker, leafleting, advertising. If anything, I would say they are too aware. Because they are now also aware of all the conspiracy theories, the misinformation.”

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One of the most unusual things about LSHTM’s study, which involved 343 households and 1,759 individuals late last year, was that it was initiated by the Haredim themselves. Its Medical Advocacy and Referral Service charity approached the scientists and even offered funding. “It’s the only time it’s happened to me in my career,” says Dr Michael Marks, who co-led the study.

Since publication, he has written in a local community newspaper warning that the data is no reason to relax. For while his findings are, on a human level, truly remarkable — some might say disturbing — they also raise profound scientific questions. If, for example, three-quarters of the community’s adults and secondary school children have been infected, does that mean that it now has herd immunity to the virus? And if that’s true, how should its existence influence policy decisions over the lifting of lockdown restrictions?

Dr Marks, however, is cautious about making any assumptions. “There isn’t a strict biological threshold for herd immunity,” he says, and especially because of the chance of reinfection and new variants, “we certainly wouldn’t think that the community has achieved [it].” Moreover, in more densely populated areas such as this one, where there are greater opportunities for viral transmission, any threshold would be higher than average.

Marks says he has no reason to believe that rule-flouting was a significant factor in driving up the community’s infection rate, pointing to non-compliance nationwide, and the fact that Haredim are merely hyper-visible. “When you see people who break the rules and they look like you, you think, oh, they’re probably just taking their dog for a walk. We notice when people who don’t look like us break the rules.”

Yet for many Haredim, it is judgment from within the wider Jewish community that is the most painful. One recent comment piece in Jewish Chronicle said that “much of the lifestyle for many Haredi communities is completely incompatible with the fundamental principles of Judaism”.

It certainly has exposed fault lines in Britain’s Jewish population. Even before the pandemic, mainstream organisations had been working hard to connect with a Haredi fringe that is in the ascendancy. Roughly 20% of all Jews in Britain are Haredi (about 60,000) — and within a decade, most Jewish children in Britain will be. But bridge-building has its limits. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, representing mainstream Orthodoxy, tweeted about the recent illegal wedding story, saying the event “amounts to a brazen abrogation of the responsibility to protect life”.

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Eli Spitzer, a Haredi headteacher who knows 12 people in the community who have died from Covid, believes the runaway infection rate mainly “comes down to a lack of compliance”. He says Haredim were “just as scared as anyone else” in March and “paid an enormous price” to observe the first lockdown (you try entertaining seven children indoors without iPads or CBeebies). But he adds: “I think the horse had already bolted at that point in a community of this nature,” and it was then too late to tell people to continue turning their lives upside down to ward off a virus that had already run riot.

Though he says most have therefore “sat out” this lockdown, he is mystified by the idea that he and his neighbours have put religion above the preservation of life. “It sounds like they think there are people dropping dead all around us, that we just continue praying and we’re oblivious to mountains of corpses.”

True or not, it’s clear that Jews across the board have been disproportionately affected by Covid. Last year, Public Health England found Jewish men aged over 65 died at twice the rate of Christians, even after adjusting for socio-demographic factors. There is no data on the mortality rate among Haredim specifically, but while their infection rate is up to nine times the national average, it is unlikely their death rate will be anywhere near as high. This is because the median age of a Haredi Jew is just 14, compared with 40 for the rest of the country.

But locals are clearly conscious of the scrutiny. Signs outside schools warning that masks are mandatory are in Yiddish, the everyday language of residents here. A second set in English is there to send a message intended for non-Haredi eyes: “Look, we are upholding the rules.”

Rabbi Gluck detects a double-standard. While other minority communities — also disproportionately affected by the virus and more likely to display “vaccine hesitancy” — have received compassion, he suggests there is a sense among some that Jews have brought it on themselves. “I think people do not have the same sympathy for the Jewish community,” says Gluck. “Many people, their parents, their grandparents, were guinea pigs for science under the Nazis. We can understand that they have a certain amount of healthy ambivalence to accepting medical opinion without question.” Gluck himself was filmed being vaccinated, “so my position is clear”.

Even so, it is difficult not to conclude that there has been a catastrophic failure by a leadership that is able to wield extraordinary power. Spitzer points out that most UK Haredi religious institutions belong to global organisations that are capable of telling you “how to wear your socks”. But now, he explains, “the leaders will not issue directives that they don’t think will be popular, because they’ll lose their position.”

Still, perhaps the community’s extraordinarily high infection rate can be best understood by taking a look at those leaders who do “issue directives”. Take the case of Rabbi Yossi Teitelbaum, who allegedly circulated leaflets in December that highlighted spurious “loopholes” to the lockdown restrictions. His punishment? Earlier this month, he was put in charge of “Covid coordination” by the community’s main umbrella group.

The question is not why the UK government originally adopted the 2 metre rule. Very little was known about Covid-19 when the pandemic first reached the UK, and 2 metres was the standard recommended distance for infectious diseases that seemed to spread through the air in droplets or a fine aerosol of fluids, inhaled or otherwise absorbed by the next victim. In a lockdown, and in the absence of any other evidence, why not adopt the standard?

The question is why, as new evidence emerged, Britain was so slow to follow France, Denmark, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and indeed the WHO in dropping the minimum recommended distance to just one metre? Emerging research suggested that Covid tends to travel by heavier, larger droplets. Physics, not biology, shows they fall to the ground rapidly, so the risk reduction of one metre separation is significant, but adding another metre has less impact. Some other countries decided to stay on the safe side with 1.5 metres, but the UK held out till this week at 6ft 6in.

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Of course, the virus doesn’t follow rules. If somebody is infectious, there is no hard limit beyond which you are safe. And, since people can be infectious before showing any symptoms, anyone represents at least a theoretical risk of infection. We are looking at degrees of risk, and what measures we’re willing to take to reduce them. Outdoors is safer than indoors. Wearing a mask is safer than not. Facing the same way and talking like spies meeting on a park bench is safer than face to face. And all this is provisional, as we’re not putting patients in labs and letting them breathe on volunteers to find out.

It could just be that the British Government wanted to wait until the disease was less prevalent before letting us get a little closer. Or it could be the latest in a long history of telling us, not what the science says, but what the public health officials think we need to be told.

Take “5 a Day”, the guideline that tells us all to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables every day (potatoes don’t count, despite being so rich in Vitamin C that their introduction to Britain ended endemic scurvy). That has a number in, so surely it must be based on scientific research? Indeed, the NHS “Why  5 A Day?” page says the campaign is based on WHO advice to eat 400g of fruit and vegetables to lower the risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer.

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There is research linking more fruit and vegetables to lower risks of some diseases, but that’s not the origin of the campaign. In 1980s California, the state’s Department of Health Services found a happy harmony between the desire to improve public health through diet, and the economic benefit to the region’s farmers from increased sales. In the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the Department’s then Director, Ken Kizer, summarised its success:

“The 5 a Day-for Better Health! Campaign had several distinctive features, including its simple, positive, behavior-specific message to eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetables every day as part of a low-fat, high fiber diet; its use of mass media; its partnership between the state health department and the produce and supermarket industries; and its extensive use of point-of-purchase messages.”

Professor Tim Lang was advising the UK government in the late 1990s when he was told of the US campaign and felt “we needed something”. Tony Blair’s Labour government was looking for specific policy targets, and five was “a nice round number”. The scientific precision of 400g was retrofitted later to give the “simple, positive, behaviour-specific message” more scientific authority.

Or take government guidelines for how much alcohol we should drink, revised in 2016 to “You are safest not to drink regularly more than 14 units per week.” This was cut down from the old guidelines, which were 14 units for women and 21 for men, recognising the differences in average physiology. They in turn were revised downwards in 1984 from 56 units per week, almost a bottle of wine per day. Our parents were made of sterner stuff.

But the new guidelines are based on better science, right?

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Well, it depends what you mean by science. Like most public health questions, it would be unethical to apply randomised controlled trial methods to habits that you suspect are unhealthy. Nobody assigned human adults randomly to drink nearly a bottle of wine a day or no alcohol at all, and recorded their time and cause of death. Health advice is based on a mixture of ‘ecological’ observation (real humans drinking in the wild and then reporting their intake) and mathematical modelling.

The new guidelines took an extreme position on the protective effects of small amounts of alcohol (around a unit a day) against cardiovascular diseases, for which there is robust evidence. Light drinkers are around 20% less likely to die of anything in a given period than teetotallers, even excluding people who have stopped drinking because they’re ill.

Arguing that deaths from cardiovascular disease have fallen significantly, the Chief Medical Officers argued that this made the protective effect less important, and that it was only significant in women over 55. They may have based this on a paper published in the BMJ claiming that such benefits were limited to women over 65, a claim that the statistician Professor David Spiegelhalter described as misleading, commenting that “a more appropriate headline would have been ‘Study supports a moderate protective effect of alcohol’ … This is a poor use of statistics, and I am surprised it got past the referees and into the journal.”

The new, lower drinking guidelines are not a change in public message that reflects a change in scientific research. The research has been selected, or even commissioned, to justify new, lower guidelines. A more honest public health message would be: “Depending on who you are, a drink a day is probably good for you, and every subsequent drink increases your risk of illness and death”. But that would muddy the “simple, positive, behavior-specific message”.

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Public health campaigns are, by nature, broad brush and aimed at mass populations. Most of us want rules of thumb, not scientific papers, when we’re weighing up what to eat, drink or smoke, whether to go for a run, how close to stand in the supermarket queue. We understand that advice is to be taken in context, not as a protective spell that will guard us from all harm.

In a pandemic, as new understanding emerges by the day, clarity is even more important. As early as February, scientific advice to the government about how to handle the Covid-19 pandemic included the importance of being clear and definitive, coherent and consistent, not only to improve compliance with helpful actions, but to discourage pointless or counterproductive ones.

But this is no excuse for dishonesty about the basis for official advice or rules. Where the scientific basis for policies was uncertain, it would have been far better to say that the science was uncertain, but the government had made a decision for these reasons: erring on the side of caution until more was known, or recognising that human life is about more than medical health.

When the WHO switched its advice to one metre, what was the rationale for sticking with two? Fear of looking indecisive? Lack of faith in British people to know what a metre looks like? In mid-March, the UK’s scientific advisory group, SAGE, was invoking behavioural science to argue that the public is mostly rational and altruistic in a crisis:

“The behavioural science points to openly explaining to the public where the greatest risks lie and what individuals can do to reduce their own risk … Greater transparency will help people understand personal risk and enable personal agency, send useful signals about risk in general and build public trust. Citizens should be treated as rational actors, capable of taking decisions for themselves and managing personal risk.”

Of all the expert advice given to the government, it’s a pity this paragraph has been so often ignored.