Letter to MP
Don't just talk about it - take some action!
Here is a letter in word format that you can download and and use as basis for a letter to your MP or other political representative:
The …
more ...Why is England a special case?
slug:england_special_28Apr
Across Europe, Covid only kills the under 60's in very small numbers. For example in Italy which has had a relatively high number of deaths overall, less than 3% were under 60 years old. In England and Wales the corresponding percentage is around 7%. This difference shows up …
more ...Week 16: Situation in Sweden
Euromomo advise that the latest figures may not be reliable and should be treated with caution. However, so far so good for their less stringent lockdown policy according to the Oxford University Coronavirus Government Response Tracker
Blogmire analysis
An excellent analysis of Sweden has been written up at the www …
more ...2,500 extra non-Covid deaths in a week! Collateral damage from the lockdown?
In the last release of mortality statistics from the ONS (data to 2014-04-03) showed a sudden increase in deaths. Unsurprisingly, many of the excess deaths are attributed to COVID-19, about 3,000. What was very surprising is that,compared to the five year average, 2,500 additional non-Covid deaths occurred …
more ...Should we accept mathematical models that predict the future of COVID-19 without question?
The need for public scrutiny of government policy has never been greater, but there’s less tolerance for dissent than usual. Anyone questioning Professor Ferguson's Imperial College analysis is likely to be met with howls of disdain.
The Government should not place too much confidence in any one model, or …
more ...Predictive models of epidemics are too often wildly wrong
The COVID-19 Response Team led by Professor Neil Ferguson, has been a major influence on UK Government COVID-19 policies.
Imperial College model predictions have influenced UK government COVID-19 policies without sufficient challenge and peer review. This is surprising given past forecasting failures and the enormous costs of the policies in …
more ...Hong Kong/Chinese study: All COVID-19 outbreaks studied occurred indoors
Sharing indoor space is a major SARS-CoV-2 infection risk. All identified outbreaks of three or more cases occurred in an indoor environment
By early April 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had infected nearly one million people and had spread to nearly all countries worldwide. It is essential to understand where and …
more ...Analysis from Cardiff, Nottingham and Oxford Universities finds "very little gain" in continuing total lockdown
An academic paper from 2020-04-15 models various scenarios to investigate time-dependent strategies of handling the epidemic taking into account the needs of the elderly and those with special medical conditions. Main findings include:
Very little gain, in terms of the projected hospital bed occupancy and expected numbers of death,of …
more ...We need to take a deep breath and accept that we are not very good with numbers.
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.
more ...Pubmed COVID-19 tests: Different results each time, and many false negatives
Stability issues of RT‐PCR testing of SARS‐CoV‐2 for hospitalized patients clinically diagnosed with COVID‐19