Day: 30 December 2020

by Dr Sinead Murphy It’s that time of year when we name the best and worst. Competition is stiff, on one side of the equation at least. How many worsts there have been, each hardly conceivable before it was suddenly real. But there was a worst of all. In October in Milton Keynes. Two brothers moved to the side of their grieving mother, putting their arms around her shoulders as she sat before the box containing their dead father’s remains, only to be reminded by an official from the crematorium that they were not permitted to be within six feet of their mother during the ceremony – as if she had been lowered into the grave as their father was being raised onto the pyre. It is the simplest of mourning rituals, a consoling arm around the shoulders. A fragment of a ritual, really. And yet it too has been made to retreat before the march of Health and Safety, those twin murderers of the last vestiges of our arts of living and dying. What’s the big deal? So the Covid crew has challenged us this year. It’s hardly life or death. They are right: a consoling arm around the shoulders is not life or death. Nor is the smile of an unmasked stranger. Nor is the shake of a ...

"If The New COVID-19 Strain is More Transmissible, Why Isn’t It Taking Over in Every Region?" Joshua Loftus, Assistant Professor of Statistics at New York University (and definitely not a lockdown sceptic), poses this question in the Spectator. Let’s look at these estimates of the percent of the UK population testing positive, broken down based on whether the test result "is consistent with" the new strain or otherwise. We can download data with estimates of COVID-19 infection rates from the Office of National Statistics. First let’s see the rates in two regions, the one where the new strain grew most rapidly and another region where it hasn’t. Next, here are all the regions sorted (top left to bottom right) in the order of the maximum estimated prevalence of the new strain. If the new strain has a biological advantage that makes it more transmissible why isn’t it taking over in every region?  Loftus stresses this is not a rhetorical question. However it is a real question that needs answering, and one that's also being asked by Professor Francois Balloux on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ballouxfrancois/status/1343842042754039813?s=21 A number of media outlets have reported on the new technical briefing from Public Health England that shows considerably more being infected by carriers of the new variant than carriers of other variants. Here's the report in the Times. Contacts of ...