covid19|mistakes made and lessons to be learned

We are all entitled to our opinions on how well our respective governments have handled the pandemic; mine is that it was inevitable it was handled as it was. Why? In a single word: politics. Politics with both a big and little P.

So for all the talk of following the science, the reality is there is no such thing as ‘the science’. The scientific community, that at the outset was united in caution, is now split. There are two main camps that today are almost as much in disagreement as they are in agreement. …

Covid-19|Editorial

Whilst arguments will rage on and on about whether our response to Covid-19 has been proportionate or not, there is a larger issue in play.

Few, if any, western democracies have come out of this crisis well. The political opportunities presented by the pandemic have been exploited to the full and every opportunity has been seized to drive wedges ever deeper between us.

National responses have been riddled with the kind of mistakes that arise from compromises between two opposing and intransigent partisan views. The only seeming remedy a winner takes all battle or ‘right’ vs ‘wrong’.

In my view…

Covid-19|insight

History has a way of repeating itself.

Just like the Spanish flu didn’t originate in Spain, it really doesn’t look like the ‘Kent’ variant of Covid-19 originated in Kent, South East England.

I can’t yet tell you where it originated but I can tell you that it wasn’t the UK and it most probably arrived via Holland or more precisely via Rotterdam, by boat — just like the Spanish Flu in it’s day.

This chart perhaps shows the impact of the ‘Kent’ variant within the UK. You can see how infection rates of Covid-19 in Kent ran far above the…

Covid-19|Viral transmission

I’m not sure how to start this article other than to say that it amazes me that no one around the world seems to have noticed the impact that socialising at Christmas and the New Year has had on the pandemic. It has been significant, certainly in the UK and apparently globally as evidenced by these two charts from the UK show:

Covid-19|viral spread

Introduction and Summary

How we interact with others is key to understanding how a virus like Covid-19 spreads through communities and within this article I’m going to demonstrate how this has impacted the spread of Covid-19 within England.

I am going to use actual case data to demonstrate the relentless underlying march of the virus but how different age bands see different growth rates of transmission due what I call a multiplier effect. An effect that reflects the underlying social interactions of the age group.

What emerges is a common sense picture, that time spent together and the frequency of meeting different people…

Covid-19|facts and data

It’s world cancer day today, and to me that’s a timely reminder that in the scheme of the things, there are many more important things than Covid-19. Tackling cancer being one of them.

The average age of death (by my calculations) in the UK is 80. For Covid-19 it’s 83; for Cancer, it’s 76.

This chart shows the age demographics of cumulative cancer deaths in the UK in 2019 split by type, alongside Covid-19 deaths from 2020:

There are some that will say ‘yes but the pandemic could kill far more if left unchecked’ and of course that is true…

covid-19|care homes

Introduction

Residents in UK care homes were hit hardest of all in the initial outbreak of Covid-19 resulting in Professor Martin Green, chief executive of Care England, asserting that

pandemic planning had been completely inadequate and the Government had focused on the NHS while discharging infected patients into care homes.

Since then much has been done to protect this most vulnerable element of society and stringent Covid-19 safeguarding policies and procedures are now in place; begging the question what difference has this made?

Whilst it’s difficult to answer this question definitively, we can compare the rate of Covid-19 deaths for care…