It wasn't meant to be like this. Remember the Alert Levels (the 'Nandos chart')? The whole idea of that was to set some sort of policy - a roadmap if you will - of how we get out of a national lockdown. Introducing... Covid Alert Levels. 12 May 2020. And remember this? The gentle ski …
Continue reading "A review of where we are with UK Covid restrictions. With apologies to Nandos."
Letter in the Financial Times The failure of the government’s testing strategy (Report, September 22) is a lesson in confusing resources with capabilities. Commercial NHS test and trace has resources but not capabilities. NHS labs and local authority directors of public health supported by Public Health England have capabilities but not resources. In order to …
Continue reading "Media Roundup week ending 12 October 2020"
Here is the heatmap of cases for PHE week 41 using week 40 data. Studies in Spain, France, and the US have all shown that although the second wave may start in young people, it will inevitably move to older people. The remarkable thing about this disease is that the death rate increases massively with …
Continue reading "Heatmap of Cases & Deaths in the over-80s"
We know that data on the Government Coronavirus dashboard is unreliable (see this Twitter thread). We also know that we are not doing enough testing as the positivity rate is so high (7% overall for Pillar 2 tests and up to 15% in some areas such as Liverpool) (see this thread) So, how do we …
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that "New York City on Wednesday will close public schools and nonessential businesses in parts of Brooklyn and Queens that have registered a week-long spike in coronavirus cases" Let's look at New York and then compare to a UK city, Liverpool. Cases are high in some New York boroughs. …
Sky News https://youtu.be/iN0kUXK_0Ts?t=28 BBC Radio Five Live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTMW4lUjAGA Quoted on Sky News , Daily Express, Yahoo! News, Guardian BBC Local Radio, Independent Radio (Bauer Media syndicates) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuurDpf3sp0 Background to Financial Times, Reuters, LBC, Guardian
Today's analysis shows 22 cases per 100,000 in the over-80s population in England. To put this into context, the Government uses a rate of 20 cases per 100,000 in order to determine (with other factors) whether you should self isolate when you return from a country with this incidence of Covid-19. An interpretation would be: …
Continue reading "Latest Cases Heatmap Analysis: 22 cases per 100,000 over-80-year-olds"
Sky News including my cases heatmap analysis at 2:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyjc1Gh2puM Channel 5 News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30V8YuRqw5g Quoted in the British Medical Journal(BMJ 2020; 370 :m3678 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m3678 ) Quoted in The Observer / The Guardian ... BBC Local Radio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QSa5YUuLZw And interviews on BBC Look North & BBC East Midlands Today; Background to BBC News, Reuters
ITV Good Morning Britain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5RNGBlHF7k&t=4s Interviewed on BBC Five Live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3PZhuEY7L0 Sky News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRIM44Dqs4I Analysis shown on ITV Peston Daily Mail (Mail Online) and Yahoo! News UK BBC Local Radio (BBC Radio Leicester, BBC Radio Oxford, BBC Radio Berkshire) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cYHyrHbOnE and background interviews for BBC, Bloomberg, Reuters.
One thing civil servants learn is to write things down. Here is Academy of Medical Sciences 14 July report commissioned by the UK Chief Scientific Adviser. For the record. It sets out what was known in July, and clearly sets out what the Government needed to do at the time. Straight off the bat, we …
