The First Patient has shown the only way to pierce and deflate the bring-out-your-dead hysteria is to live life to its fullest and confront, rather than cower, from the virus. It is his apparent defeat of COVID-19 and positive, upbeat demeanour which might well have placed him beyond defeat in November

Sir Roger Scruton once observed how 'intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.' The Wuhan virus has given our expert class an opportunity to fulfil those yearnings and they have seized it, and the entire nation, by the throat