In the 2003 documentary the Fog of War ^[1], former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara distils the lessons from the disastrous Vietnam War into eleven basic tenets. His rule number one: Empathise with your enemy.

Without sufficient empathy, you …

The UK remains in lockdown because, according to the Government, more than a thousand new cases of Covid are being found each day.

As recently as 10 June, Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said that we are still in the middle of a pandemic and "Covid-19 is a very long …

Thinking about the current COVID-19 pandemic and what policies we should ask governments to pursue is not a simple problem. It involves lots of big numbers and trade-offs over time. These are things that we are not instinctively good at.

Here is a comparison of news headlines from the past week in 2020 and the headlines from a time in 2018 when mortality rates were peaking due to a bad flu season.

Make up your own mind. Do the headlines reflect the gravity of the situations in an equivalent way …

Events in Italy, where emotionally driven over-reactions to events have caused more additional deaths, may reflect a bigger global pattern, where reason has lost to hysteria.

Good article drawing upon Italian experience and explaining, among other things, how emotional overreaction to circumstances can be deadly.

"The decision to transfer patients …