I’ve been asked by a couple of people why it matters so much if the average person understands the facts instead of listening to the politicians and/or scientists. We’re not experts, and we don’t really have the power to change what the restrictions are going to be, so does it matter? Especially in the UK, […]
Because I want to get back to the purpose of my blog—discussing COVID-19 and the reponse to it—I’m not going to say a whole lot more about what is going on in the US right now in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. But I’ve had enough conversations sparked by my last two […]
After I published my last post, a friend sent me this tweet that I had somehow missed when I looked for Trump tweets relating to George Floyd. Sorry I missed it, because it does at least call for an investigation, but I stand by the rest of what I said.
I have an almost-written post on the need to educate ourselves about the virus as we move out of lockdown, both in the US and the UK. I even started thinking, after the (ongoing) Dominic Cummings brouhaha, that Boris was showing some Trump-like tendencies. I saved what I’d written so I could edit it and […]
First, the obvious: He is capricious when he needs to be thoughtful and careful, he has an incredibly thin skin and doubles down on statements rather than ever admitting he was wrong, he treats most interactions with the press as either campaign rallies or battles, and he’s generally continued this behavior for the whole of […]
The genesis of my blog is an essay I wrote in the first week of lockdown in the UK. It was at that time that things started to get crazy, especially on social media, and people started posting things with little regard for the facts, and with tunnel vision. It was around that time that […]
I’d written another essay that I’d planned to finish up and post today, but then woke up to this BBC news story about a new hydroxychloroquine trial. A month ago, the news was that researchers in Brazil had abandoned a high-dose chloroquine trial because of concerns for patient safety. All of this followed reports in […]
Michael Gove was on the Andrew Marr show this weekend, discussing the reopening of schools, and I thought he did a better job than usual of answering the questions put to him without trying to tap dance around the issues. One question that Marr kept repeating, though, was, “Can you guarantee that teachers will be […]
I feel a bit like the government, making promises I can’t or don’t keep. I promised on Friday that I would talk about the question “What mortality rate is acceptable?” I’d forgotten it was Friday when I said “tomorrow,” not planning to write posts over the weekend. I will still address that question, and some […]
In an earlier blog, I mentioned research going on in Germany that is getting at the true mortality rate for COVID-19. Here’s a CNBC interview with Professor Hendrik Streeck, the Director of the Institute of Virology and HIV Research at the University of Bonn. Professor Streeck and his colleagues have tested the population of Heinsberg, […]
Beyond the Rhetoric 