I started thinking about this when it was announced shortly after Captain Sir Tom’s death that he’d been on holiday to Barbados in December. For anyone who doesn’t know Captain Tom, he’s the centenarian who raised over £32 million for the NHS. by walking 100 laps of his garden by his one hundredth. He inspired […]
This week was the first time I’d seen a new bit of misinformation being bandied about. Evidently, some COVID deniers are now misusing data from a study conducted with data from Wuhan to support their claim that asymptomatic transmission of the virus is impossible. What makes this particularly odd is that these are the same […]
After I published yesterday’s post, my husband sent me this story by the BBC about the state and about one particular city in that state that bucked the trend. Brookings, the fourth largest city in the state, mandated masks inside businesses and on public transportation starting in September. The city also launched one of the […]
I woke up to the news on the BBC that the United States has scored another first. Yesterday, the US reported over 3,000 deaths for the day: According to Johns Hopkins’s COVID site, the number was 3,124, surpassing the toll from 9/11. The difference, of course, is that tomorrow will see roughly the same mortality […]
A friend of mine has asked why nobody is talking about Sweden, “which seems to be doing so well.” That made me go back and look at Sweden and also look at some of the articles about Sweden, because I thought, by and large, that a lot more ink had been spilled on Sweden than […]
I promised in my last post that I’d look at the UK numbers in more detail today, after the government’s warning that further lockdowns may be on the horizon. So how is the UK doing now? As of September 17 (the last day for which Northern Ireland figures are available), the UK government’s COVID-19 dashboard […]
Last Monday, as a result of Coronavirus case increases across the UK, new rules went into effect that are both simpler and stricter than the rules they replace. They are also different in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. If this difference were due to differing COVID numbers, this might make sense, but it’s due […]
I haven’t posted for a while, partly because we went away on a staycation holiday, but also because I felt like we were all caught in a Groundhog Day loop, where numbers in certain parts of the US and the UK continued to climb, a certain segment of society was ignoring scientific fact while another […]
A friend of mine sent me this thought-provoking essay, written by pediatrician and child psychiatrist (and mother) Elizabeth Pinsky, from the current issue of the Atlantic, the main point of which is that the author’s town, Somerville, Massachusetts, has done all the right things and controlled the virus to the point where it’s safe to […]
Wait a second—hasn’t most of this blog been political? Well, yes, in that it criticizes the government and advocates courses of action. But I have tried not to make it purely partisan. I’ve looked at the statistics and sometimes changed my initial position because of those statistics. In my post yesterday, for example, I looked […]
Beyond the Rhetoric 