Since time immemorial human beings have believed in magic, in the power that words can bend people to the will of others and whilst today would laugh at the thought of it, the reality is we’ve all fallen foul to acts of bewitchery.
A form of bewitchery that has turned into a multi-billion dollar industry, it is studied in depth at Universities around the world, it is an intrinsic part of our everyday lives.
I am of course talking about marketing and the ‘science’ that underpins it, psychology.
Most of the time the effect is harmless; it can even be…
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. …
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…
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…
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:
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…
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…
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
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…
We could have a long debate about the true number of Covid-19 deaths, about whether the death is because of or due to, or indeed whether we’re comparing apples and pears when we make comparisons.
Perhaps the clearest way to get a true picture is to compare current year deaths with prior years. On this basis it becomes very clear that there were more deaths in the initial outbreak in the UK than were officially reported as being due to Covid-19.
The chart clearly reveals that after accounting for Covid-19 deaths, there remains an unexplained hump in deaths from late…