Day: 15 May 2020

The Mirror leads with the preprint I flagged up yesterday estimating that by the end of April 29% of the UK population may have already had the virus (29% of 66 million is ~19 million). If we assume that roughly 50,000 people in the UK will have died from COVID-19 by May 21st – allowing for the three-week lag time between infection and death – that gives an infection fatality rate (IFR) of ~0.076%, less than half the IFR of seasonal flu. Is a seroprevalence of 29% high enough for herd immunity? Yes, according to a summary of the evidence by Nicholas Lewis about the threshold that needs to be reached that I flagged up a few days ago. According to Lewis, the variation in COVID-19 susceptibility and infectivity between individuals, arising mainly from differences in their social connectivity, lowers the herd immunity threshold to 7% - 24% of the population, much lower than the 50% - 60% previously thought. His analysis draws on a recent preprint by Gomes et al entitled ‘Individual variation in susceptibility or exposure to SARS-CoV-2 lowers the herd immunity threshold‘. New data from London suggests the city has already obtained herd immunity. According to the latest estimates by Public Health England (PHE) and Cambridge University, as reported in the Telegraph, only 24 people a day ...

By John Waters There is an ancient principle of the common law, whereby it is held that the people may do everything except that which they have expressly forbidden, and the state may do nothing except that which the people have expressly permitted. How did this principle come to be unstitched and reversed in the past three months? How did the people come to agree to its reversal? In search of answers, I have been reflecting a lot on a phrase I transcribed into a notebook years ago from Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread: " . . . a contagion of selective incuriosity, a mindgame begun in self-hypnosis and maintained by mass hysteria.” While not discounting the impact of short-term welfare payments (buying the people’s freedom with their own money) I have gotten to thinking that the answer maybe includes, as a primary factor, something along the lines of mass hypnosis—the viral entrancement of entire populations. The process at work is somewhat different to the use of hypnotic or “spell” phrases to herd individuals into a particular way of, for example, politically correct thinking. As the late Roger Scruton described it, spell words like “racist” and “homophobe” are designed to invoke a set of pre-programed demonic tags with which to threaten the subject and dissuade him from truth and common ...

by Christine Brett Christine Brett is a freelance market access consultant and holds a Master’s degree in Economic Evaluation of Healthcare from City University in London. Her career spans 25 years in the pharmaceutical industry, with experience in sales, marketing and health economics. You can see her LinkedIn profile here. Schools are due to open on June 1st for certain year groups after several weeks of lockdown (although this is looking increasingly unlikely). Anxiety and tensions are high. Parents and teachers are worried with unions calling for working conditions to be safe. There are a lot of opinions and data interpretations appearing in the media about children's susceptibility to the virus. The noise around this topic is adding to the anxiety parents naturally feel about their children returning to school after a period of absence longer than the summer holidays. All across the mainstream media and social media, we are seeing horrifying pictures of children in playgrounds in France playing solo in a chalk circle or being sprayed down before entering school buildings in other countries. Headlines are screeching that children are super-spreaders of flu and other respiratory viruses, so naturally, they must be walking biohazards for Covid. On my Facebook feed, worried friends are sharing letters from headteachers emphasising their concern about children's safety. But what are the risks ...

I'm an occupational health doctor. I run a small consultancy and my clients consist of local SMEs and some larger corporates. We do a whole range of workplace related medicals, including fitness to work decisions. I have very serious concerns about how the COVID-19 response is impacting on business. Background to the Problem COVID-19 is now being treated as a workplace health hazard, similar to asbestos or pathogens in a biological laboratory. This could have disastrous consequences for the economy which relies on people being able to attend work. The initial response of business to Covid-19 was reasonable. It posed an equal risk in any setting, and it was only natural that employers would need to accommodate the same sorts of measures to slow its spread as were required in all other aspects of life and in any other setting (i.e. frequent hand washing, minimising close contact with others, etc). Early on, employers responded quickly to enable their employees to adhere to the generic public health guidance when they were in the workplace. However, there is now an increasing tendency for COVID-19 to be regarded as a workplace hazard. This is not entirely unjustified in certain occupational groups, where early data suggest there might be some increased risk, but it is striking that front line NHS staff do not appear ...