traffic calming measures

Oxford has a few lovely new low-traffic neighbourhoods, essentially closing down rat runs between main roads with modal filters (see my photos of last year's LTNs on flickr). The furious responses amplified by local media and vandalism from some parts demonstrate that people still don't understand the basic science of traffic management in cities, such as the proven fact that building more roads and more parking spaces will produce more traffic. This is called induced demand, essentially, make it easier to drive and more people will drive more. Conversely, you can make it harder to drive, people will think twice if their trip is necessary or could perhaps be done by walking or cycling.

I learned this more than 30 years ago, back in Germany, in a talk held by Hermann Knoflacher, who was then still active in traffic planning in Vienna, and also widely known as an expert on getting cars out of cities. Another thing I remember from his talk is the concept of desire lines, telling planners where people want to go.

Wikipedia reminded me of another thing he probably showed on his slides, namely his "walkmobile" - a home-built frame the size of a car, with which he sometimes walked around to demonstrate the insane space requirements of drivers. This set me thinking, and I came up with a somewhat more practical version of the idea, using a pedal car to take up space (such as the roadside space outside my house where I really don't want to see horrid huge SUVs), and maybe cycle around to slow down traffic and raise awareness for good causes (such as ban SUVs from cities).

A quick search found a lovely specimen from a company in the US, called International Surrey Company:

Source

Wikipedia calls this vehicle type a quadracycle.

Still have to find something closer to home - stop press here is a list. And figure out how to get a parking permit for something that isn't a car.

An alternative idea which I pondered earlier was converting an old truck into a mini-park, like Adam Tranter did. Just shying away from all the hassle associated with owning the vehicle.

UPDATE 20.6.2025 Just came across this very lovely convertible converted to a herb garden, complete with official parking permit.

why the vaccine-only approach will backfire

After yesterday's announcement of betting everything on the booster programme to hold the omicron variant at bay I hear that the medical staff meant to deliver a million jabs per day from today were as surprised as the rest of us to find out about it from yesterday's speech.

Nothing wrong with protecting people with a third dose of vaccine, and I've had mine a week ago, but it's a bad idea to rely only on a vaccine in the face of a raging epidemic and do nothing else. Here's just one little number crunching to show why:

If the booster (or any other vaccine applied in an ongoing epidemic) is 90% effective in preventing undesirable outcome (eg hospitalisation, or deaths) and makes people feel safe so they engage in 20x more risky behaviour (eg take the tube to work and come into close contact with 60 people per day, rather 3 if they cycle to work; or they go out clubbing rather than staying safe at home), what happens?

The 90% efficient booster divides the likelyhood of the undesirable outcome by 10, but the behaviour change multiplies it by 20, so you get twice as many cases of the undesirable outcome. Which is why relying _only_ on a vaccination with less than 100% efficiency may produce the opposite of the desired effect. Behaviour/culture eats vaccination/policy for breakfast as the old saying goes.

I remember epidemiologists warning of this backlash effect since before we even had vaccines, and it's been the reason why we've had unsustainably high numbers since September inspite of good vaccine coverage, but the UK govt still does not understand this. So, starting from a high plateau we're going straight over the cliff with omicron again, and will need another screeching U-turn to sort this out. When will they ever learn?

Update 15.12.: Here's a good opinion piece from SAGE member Stephen Reicher on the mess we're in with omicron's arrival. As Reicher points out, the booster programme is a slow-acting measure, so the important bit is to have contact reduction to slow omicron down until the boosters take effect.

omicron blues

So here we go again, for the fourth time in a row, the UK govt (acting only for England as the devolved administrations have wisely gone their own ways) is doing too little too late and spouting nonsense while blatantly advertising the most important rule of all, namely that rules don't apply to them and their friends. (Impersonating police officers, anyone? Punishable offence for most of us, but not for the shifty character recently photographed at a dawn raid.) Their rules are only made for the rest of us, and we should be grateful, apparently. After today's news of how deatheaters are basically dancing on the graves of the people they killed with their stupidity (current hashtag on twitter: #ToriesPartiedWhilePeopleDied), I'm seriously running out of effs to give.

So, well, the science from wastewater monitoring (about which I've written a new article last week, due out early next year) through to vaccine development is still brilliant, but it doesn't save us from a never-ending chain of disasters if the guys at the top eff it all up. I could throw around some numbers etc, but probably won't bother. We don't have a shortage of scientific facts and figures, we just have a surplus of dangerous lunatics in high places. The immunisation against that is yet to be discovered.

What cheered me up immensely, however, was the recent front page of the taz (disclaimer: I own a share in the cooperative) linking the change of government in Germany to the change of coronavirus variant:

Source.

Rough translation: New Merkel variant prevails.

Oh, just now I also enjoyed the subtitles on today's Channel 5 News suggesting BJ was talking about Oma Crown. Sounds like a bilingual toddler trying to define the Queen.

journey inside my guts

In January 2019, as I was 55 then, I was invited to a bowel scope screening. According to the brochure I was sent at the time, "The NHS offers bowel scope screening to all men and women aged 55." It sounded like a good idea, because "for every 300 people screened it stops 2 from getting bowel cancer and saves 1 life from bowel cancer."

While experiences may vary, I didn't find it terribly unpleasant and as a scientifically curious person I rather enjoyed the opportunity to follow the camera view on a large screen and travel through my own guts.

I just found out that the programme has since been scrapped, and its history, shall we say, adjusted to the situation. The relevant NHS website now says:

"Previously, some people aged 55 were invited for a one-off test where a healthcare professional uses a tube with a camera to look inside the bowel. This is called bowel scope screening. Bowel scope screening is no longer offered."

NB: some people were invited. When it was my turn, the official info said, as quoted above "all men and women aged 55."

For a competent analysis of the withdrawal of the screening programme, see this blog entry from a cancer charity.

Although I was lucky in getting the screening before it disappeared, I find it upsetting that there is very little interest around here in preventing disease before it happens. The NHS is brilliant because it's free at point of use as it should be and good at treating people when they get ill, but preventative measures aren't its strongest point and they are the first to suffer when things get difficult.

To me preventing disease is the most important job of the health system. I remember my grandparents being in and out of hospitals for bowel operations repeatedly, and I'm quite sure I prefer a camera up my bum to their experience.

Checking up the numbers:

There are 900,000 people in the UK aged 55 right now. We're talking about 3,000 lives that could be saved every year and 6,000 bowel cancer cases that could be prevented according to the NHS info I cited above. This may be small fry in comparison to the numbers currently killed by the mishandling of the Covid pandemic, but I am sure those 3,000 55-year-olds would have liked to live a bit longer ...

Cover of the brochure I received in 2019. Shows it's good to keep the paperwork, because online info gets adjusted to political convenience.

how many more will die?

As the UK govt. (henceforth referred to as the Death Eaters) has now switched its Covid "strategy" to pouring fuel on the fire, I wondered how many more will die as a consequence of this reckless disregard for public health.

They say hospitalisations and deaths are now uncoupled from the case numbers thanks to the vaccination, but that's another lie. They are still coupled, just with a larger factor. If the risk of death was 2% before vaccinations, it may end up at 0.2 percent with everybody vaccinated and 90% protected by the vaccine. But let's look at where the factor stands now.

Dividing the cases in the seven days up to 23.6. (79,481) by the deaths in the seven days up to 7.7., i.e. two weeks later, that's 161 deaths, I get a factor of 494, so a 0.2 % risk of dying if you had a positive test. Not a risk I'd fancy taking, but 10 times better than before the vaccines.

This number has improved in the last five weeks:

9.6. 284
16.6. 382
23.6. 415
30.6. 489
7.7. 494

This looks like a move in the right direction, but note that the last weekly increase has shrunk significantly, so it looks as if we may have reached the limit of the improvement that we can get out of vaccines. Worth keeping an eye on that number.

So let's assume that of the people tested positive, on the order of 1/500 will die. So two million further infections by the end of this month (as admitted by the Death Eaters) may mean 4,000 additional deaths. Another 8 million in August (remember more than 20 million people will still be not fully protected), even if the curve will go down then, another 16,000. So I reckon 20,000 additional deaths before the third wave recedes are a realistic estimate.

Or if you prefer your horror in daily doses, 160,000 daily cases by August 7 would mean 320 daily deaths around August 21. The associated burden on the health system may well mean that we'll need another lockdown to avert collapse. And then there is the even bigger issue of long Covid, which the Death Eaters studiously avoid to mention.

And this is still under the optimistic / unlikely assumption that the virus doesn't evolve. In fact though, it does evolve, and it may very well find a way around the vaccine. As many people have pointed out, if you wanted to do a huge experiment to evolve a virus that is resistant to vaccines, letting it run wild in a partially vaccinated population is exactly the way you would do it (assuming you had no care for ethical concerns whatsoever).

This number looks a bit too high ... a recent anti-vaxxers demo I stumbled across at Carfax, Oxford (own photo).

Some fresh resources:

Mass infection is not an option: we must do more to protect our young (Deepti Gurdasani et al. in The Lancet)

new wave

So here we go again, the UK govt is making the same mistakes with the new variant first identified in India (B.1.617.2) as it did with the original Covid and then with the Kent variant (B.1.1.7) - play down the problem, let it spread, and only act when people die in their hundreds.

As the Death Eaters are going to deny it later, here's what we know today, 3 weeks before the planned end of all restrictions. B.1.617.2 is spreading exponentially in England. So far, this rise has been masked in the overall stats by the decline of the Kent variant, but now that B.1.617.2 is the dominant version, it is beginning to dominate the stats, and those stats are pointing upwards, at up to 30% increase week on week. I reckon that figure will still get worse as the variant spreads to places as yet unaffected. Follow Christina Pagel on twitter for the latest warnings. Also this analysis by David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters which just came out in the Observer today.

I hear the AZ vaccine which is predominantly used here, protects to 60%, so we have still 40% of the original risk. So if with B.1.617.2 as compared to the original strain, and all other things being equal, we're 2.5 times more likely to get infected, this cancels out, and we're just as screwed as we were last year with no vaccine. [Update: numbers corrected 1.6. - in the original version I stated wrongly that it would only take a 1.6 fold increase in infection risk. Still quite realistic possibility that this will happen, eg it's 60% more contagious than the Kent variant, which was 60% more contagious than the original strain, 1.6 squared is 2.56.]

Meanwhile, two English football clubs played the champions league final at Porto, Portugal, yesterday, and English fans were allowed to travel there and spread the the new variant a bit more. Spain is also welcoming tourists from the UK in June. Both countries will come to regret this before the summer is out. As Champions League games played a significant part in spreading the original Covid around Europe (First Valencia fans travelling to Covid-infested Italy, then Madrid fans travelling to Liverpool as Spain was preparing for lockdown), I really don't understand why these things are still allowed to happen.

So even though we're fully vaxxed now, we're still stuck on Mutant Island for the foreseeable future ...

street scene from the first pandemic summer, own photo.

PS: Today's figures from the govt website just in:

22474 new cases in the last 7 days, that's 4755 more than the previous week, up 26.8% in a week. 60 deaths in seven days, up 18 or 42.9%. Hospital admissions up 23% week on week.

If you ask me, don't plan anything for June 21 onwards that you wouldn't be comfortable with right now, or better still live by the rules we had before May 17th. The third wave is happening.

oxford's black history

Today there is a STEM / academia strike going on in support of Black Lives Matter, and even Nature is supporting it. So I'm not doing any science news today. Instead I'll use this entry to collect some local (and possibly wider academic) issues relating to the matter. Let's see what I can find.


gown

Rhodes Must Fall - the statue at Oriel College has been the focus of attention after the toppling of Colston at Bristol, but there is Rhodes House, the Rhodes scholarships and all that. (Although personally, I am more offended by the building hidden behind Rhodes House, the Vere Harmsworth Library of the Rothermere American Institute. Both were named after an actual fascist and his lovely family clan, and not in a distant past, but in this century.) Here is a comment from an Oriel alumnus.

The Codrington Library at All Souls. Endowed by Christopher Codrington (1668–1710) with the spoils of slave work on sugar plantations in the West Indies. Then again, it's a library accessible to all members of the university, so we don't really want to burn it down. Maybe a shift of collection emphasis could do the trick?

A 2015 campaign to decolonise Oxford's curriculum. Which is where I found out about Codrington. Bit disappointing though, surely there must be many more skeletons in Oxford's closets?


town

The Black Boy in Headington - I discovered this pub and hotel when I was looking for a new pub to hold Galician sessions near the London coach stops, so I specifically looked around Headington. While the Black Boy looks nice from the outside and has a great location, the name put me off so much that I didn't even look inside. This local history page tells me that the niche above the entrance had a sculpture of a black servant until it was destroyed in 1990. Then there was painting of a chimney-sweep to replace it, now the niche is empty and there is an image of a black horse above, in an attempt to pretend the name doesn't mean what everybody understands it to mean. The name is old (documented in 1805) but not the first name this pub had, and the current building only dates from 1937, so history isn't much of an argument for keeping the name.

Update: Oxford Mail reports the owners of the pub will not change the name.


further afield

I hear the De la Beche Society at Imperial College is going to get a new name, considering that the patron, geologist Henry de la Beche (1796-1855) owned slaves in Jamaica. However, I am also told that he "inherited slaves and wealth from plantations yes, but abolished corporal punishment, gave them better working conditions, was criticised by other slave owners, and was not opposed to abolition." I gave a talk at the De la Beche society many years ago (on Life on the Edge), and have to admit that I only remember the name because I was amused by the literal meaning "of the shovel" which was very fitting for a famous geologist.

And Tower Hamlets council have removed the statue of slave trader Robert Milligan that previously stood at West India Quay yesterday, sending Tory imperialists into convulsions ...



Photo: Caitlin Hobbs - via Wikipedia

The empty pedestal of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, the day after protesters felled the statue and rolled it into the harbour. The ground is covered with Black Lives Matter placards.

the first 40,000

So the official deaths from Covid-19 in the UK passed 40,000 with those announced yesterday (the real death toll is more likely to be above 60,000, but let's stick with the official figures for now). As the mishandling of the crisis continues at full speed, I fear there will be many more to come.

According to yesterday's govt. briefing, there are now only 5,600 new infections per day - I don't believe a word of this. I follow the daily deaths announced and calculate the rolling 7-day average, which I think is the only halfway reliable figure. (Previous results and predictions here.) Unfortunately, this figure has remained roughly constant for the last ten days, probably as the result of the May 11 switch from "stay home" to "stay alert" messaging. It was 236 yesterday and 244 on May 26. (Update: Today, Saturday the figure stands at 235, the 13th day without significant decrease.) On June 2 and 3 it even appeared to be rising (by 10% and 5%, respectively) compared to the value a week earlier.

So when the govt. ministers and "scientists" are saying "it's not going down as fast as we would wish" this is misleading. In truth, it's not going down at all. And on the assumption that we are stuck on well above 200 daily deaths, that means that there must have been more than 20,000 new infections per day in recent weeks. Telling the public that we have 5,600 new infections per day without adding that this is only the tip of the iceberg and that we don't see the real figure due to insufficient testing, this is not only misleading but it gives people a false sense of security and thus contributes to producing a new wave of infections as people relax their protective measures and behaviours.

Oh and the fact that the health secretary, in the daily briefing of June 1, attempted to sweep 445 deaths under the rug and hoped that nobody would notice, that hasn't really helped to build trust. In case you missed it: the June 1 announcement had 39045 deaths including 111 new deaths. But the figure from the day before was 38489, so the difference was really 556. I tweeted about this while the briefing was still ongoing, but the govt. only "clarified" afterwards that the missing 445 deaths were "historic" ones that they had not included in the daily toll. As I haven't seen details of when these deaths happened, I'm not including them in my calculations. So I am now having to substract the 445 from the total each day for a week to get my rolling average right.

I have a nagging suspicion that the people in charge (i.e. DC, presumably) actually want the second wave to happen now. I reckon their calculation is that we got through peak one within three months, with 40k deaths, and without a total collapse of the health system. Give it four or five more rounds like this, they're thinking, and we have the infection numbers required for possible herd immunity. Fatal flaws in the argument are, of course,
1) we don't have confirmation that people are really immune after they have had the virus
2) running wild in such a huge host population, the virus could evolve into something else that may be more difficult to manage and that may not be covered by immunity produced by the initial version;
3) as I've calculated on March 13, when Vallance brought up herd immunity, this strategy would produce 400,000 avoidable deaths from Covid-19 plus additional ones from the impact it has on the health system.

But after the political fallout of the last 7 days it's clear that the govt doesn't care how many more people die. The important thing for them is to get back to their ideology-driven programme, including Brexit, privatisations etc.

In a way, it is understandable that they were caught out by the pandemic. The idea that a government might care for the wellbeing of the people was never ever on their radar, never mind their agenda.


-------------------

Some recent pieces from the media



How can any scientists stand by this government now? Richard Horton wondered in the Guardian, after the scandal around Cummings' breach of quarantine. I've been wondering that for a while, which is why I now avoid to refer to the govt muppets as scientists, and have put scientists in quote marks above.

Also, read anything by Devi Sridhar that you can get hold of (not only in the Guardian, there have been pieces in other papers as well).

numbers crunched

I do wish I didn't have to do this, but ... desperate times ...

So by today, the official coronavirus related death toll in the UK is 34,636. Comparing it to 31855 on the 10th of May, the figure has gone up by 2781 in 7 days. So averaged over a week (which is necessary as there is a dip around the weekend), we have 397 new deaths per day.

Beyond the obvious and avoidable tragedy for everybody caught up in this, the figure spells disaster for a number of reasons:

* it is still limited by the scarcity of tests, so expect the real number to be significantly higher
* it means that on the order of magnitude of 40,000 new infections per day happened three weeks ago (in the middle of lockdown)
* which means way too many infections still happening to allow any thought of going back to normal
* it hasn't gone down in the last three days, making things worse
* it only has 2 more weeks to drop further before the "stay alert" mess kicks in, and it won't go far in that time.


The figure has been dropping an average of 20% per week over the last couple of weeks, so if this trend continues despite the apparent stagnation in the last three days, we'll be at 250 average daily deaths at the beginning of June. Which is when the effect of the loosening of measures at the beginning of this week will show up in the death tolls, and they might rise again, or if we're lucky they will ony stagnate or drop more slowly.

Let's say they choose the middle way and stay more or less the same (R=1), so we'll be living with 250 people dying per day and 25,000 people getting infected per day until somebody does something about it. This situation will be workable in terms of hospital capacity, but not a good place to be in. And not easy to get out of either.


------------

The British Medical Journal on the failings of the UK govt response to the pandemic: Too little, too late, too flawed


(Correction made 17.5.: initial version said 250 deaths per day "at the end of June" - I meant beginning of June, i.e. 3 weeks after the May 11 Stay Alert phase.)

maths for dummies

So tomorrow the UK govt. is to announce some loosening of coronavirus restrictions. They are already quite loose, not nearly as draconian as what was happening in Spain and in France, but hey, I'm all in favour of letting people sunbathe in the nearest park, and if there isn't enough space, force the golf clubs to open their gates. But are we ready to come out of lockdown?

As the government is clearly struggling with elementary maths, I have taken to keeping track of numbers myself, based on the official death counts (probably only half of the real number of casualties, but let's stick with the firm figures).

So where do we stand with the figures now? By yesterday, 8.5. we had 31,241 official deaths announced. That's 3731 up within 7 days, giving an average of 533 per day (weekly averaging is necessary, because the weekend figures are artificially low).

Two weeks ago, week ending 25.4., that figure was 693, so it is coming down, but it hasn't even halved. Close to peak deaths, for the 7 days ending 18.4., I calculated an average of 798 (at that point it was hospital deaths only), there may have been higher numbers nearby, but the average didn't reach 1000. So it's come down by a third in three weeks, and at this rate it will come down by another third by the end of May, so we'll be at 357 daily deaths by the end of the month (and approaching a total of 40,000).

So what does that tell us about coming out of lockdown? If mortality among those infected is 1%, the new figure tells us that three weeks ago, right in the middle of our 6-week lockdown, there were still more than 50,000 people getting infected every single day. Applying our 33% decay from above, we should now be at 33,000 per day. Which is way too many to control.

In order to control and contain new infections, you will perhaps need 10 times more tests than you have new infections, to be able to test the contacts of each new case identified. So right now we would need 330,000 tests per day (and the people to handle them). At the moment there is no chance of that happening, so no exit from lockdown possible.

How about the end of the month? In another 3 weeks, coming down 33% again, we might be at 22,000 new infections per day, and the government promises 200,000 tests per day, so at that point it would be a struggle, but it could work under competent management. Which we don't have. But good luck if you want to try.

Oh, and one more thing, we now see very clearly that the infection rate is coming down much more slowly than it went up - essentially because the R value, even though below 1, is a lot closer to 1 than it was on the other side, when it was around 3. Which completely invalidates the govt. argument that introducing restrictions too early would mean people get tired of them too early and the lockdown would fail. On the contrary, if they had introduced the same measures 10 days earlier, when daily infection rates were ten times lower, we would have a much smaller hill to climb down from, maybe 10,000 new infections instead of 100,000 (as calculated from deaths 3 weeks after, not from the tests which are insufficient) per day, so at that point, a six week lockdown would have easily brought down the new infections from 10,000 by 33% in three weeks, then by 33% again in another three weeks to 4,400, which would be manageable with the testing capacity we have right now. And we would already be in a post-lockdown regime of testing and tracking right now.

That thing in early May about the perceived risks of locking down early may have been an error. It may very well have been a lie.



In case you need inspiration for your holiday activities, last week's Spiegel cover was quite funny.


Update 14.5. watching the decay of the death rate this week, it appears that it is coming down a bit faster than I estimated above, by 22% in seven days, which could give us a 50% decline in the three weeks from 7th to the 28h of May, so average daily deaths could drop below 275. After that, the effect of this week's chaotic loosening of restrictions will kick in and who knows what happens. Death rates may very well go up again. Last summer, when Johnson chose his first cabinet, my first thought was "deatheaters". Didn't think that this would come true quite so fast.

stuck inside

new tag: covid19

The death cult that is the populist right is beginning to clamour for an end to the UK's restrictions (it's hardly a lockdown as people around here go out and about as they please), so let's check the maths, shall we?

In the last seven days (18.-25.4.) the UK's hospital deaths went up by 4855, that's 694 per day, roughly 700. I don't trust that figure as it may well be capped by test availability and hospital availability, i.e. more people have died but haven't been tested, and/or didn't get hospital treatment when they needed it, but sadly it's the best figure we have available. So what does it tell us?

Assuming around 1% mortality and 3 weeks from infection to reported death, this tells us that around the 1st of April, 70,000 people caught the disease every freaking day. This figure is hopefully going down as long as we keep that r value below 1, but if you look at all the lovely data from lots of different countries on the Financial Times analysis page, it is typically going down very slowly. Part of the reason being that even without going out, the people unaware that they're infected will still pass it on to eg one other person in their immediate sphere, hence the r values of just below one that have been reported eg in Germany.

So if we're very lucky, and this is just a guess based on the FT curve for Italy's recovery, the rate of new infections has gone down by half this month, so we might see 35,000 new infections daily around now. With the restrictions in place. As authorities are failing to get tests up to 20,000 people per day, there is no way we could keep the spread contained if we start from this level.

Give it another month, and we might be at 17,000, and by then the govt. may have figured out the logistics and the science of testing people and chasing up their contacts, and test them too, so my guess would be, if handled well (what are the chances of that happening?), the UK could ease restrictions and return to test and trace approach at the end of May.

Obviously, if the deatheaters win the argument and lift restrictions now, we're back on the old exponential with an r significantly greater than 1, so it will be six-figure death counts and/or another lengthy lockdown.

Takehome message: As the fall in cases is much slower than the rise, every day lost in doing something may cost a week more spent in lockdown. Same is true for every day coming out of lockdown when we don't really have the ways and means of keeping the spread under control.





Daily deaths smoothed out over 7-day window, screenshot grabbed from the Financial Times today. (The page changes daily while keeping the same URL, so there isn't any other way of referencing a specific dataset, other than screenshot and paste, I'm afraid.)


PS from the day (12. or 13.3.) when I heard one of the govt. science guys mention herd immunity and realised they were attempting to drive us over a cliff, I had the suspicion that Dominic Cummings was hiding behind a curtain and telling them what to say. Yes scientists disagree on details and the best strategy, but that idea, which would easily lead to 400k unavoidable deaths, plus a malus of those produced by capacity overload, was so illiterate it could only come from the delusional brains of Cummings and kind of deatheaters he's trying to promote. This weekend, revelations from the Guardian, based on several whistleblowing members of the Sage advisory committee, have confirmed my suspicion that DC was indeed an active participant in Sage meetings.

chronicle of a disaster foretold

I need a bit of clarity about the disaster unfolding here and when and why and who knew what.

For me personally it is easy to reconstruct - I was in Germany from 5.-14.3., where case numbers were three days ahead of the UK, and where media pay a lot more attention to what happens in other EU countries such as Italy, so I had a bit of a headstart in awareness. Around March 13th, when I heard the govt. advisors mentioning herd immunity, I did the back-of-the-envelope calculation. 66 million people x 60% infection rate needed for herd immunity x 1% mortality = 396,000 people dead unavoidably. Plus avoidable deaths of those who don't get access to a ventilator when they need one. Might be as many again, so could be anything up to 800,000.

It was a complete horror show to watch how it took the government another 10 days to realise that a six-figure number of casualties would look bad on all of their CVs, until they made a screeching U-turn. In these 10 days, infections went up by a factor of 10, and the deaths went up from 30 to 330. Based on China, I calculated that after lockdown, deaths still rise by two orders of magnitude (30 to 3000 in China's case). So my expectation for the UK is 33,000. We're well on track to reach this figure. Changing course 10 days earlier would have saved 90% of these, i.e. 30,000.

So, considering that it took me nothing more than two simple multiplications to realise the govt was driving us over a cliff, I am really curious about who knew what and what they are going to say in their defence when they end up in court for killing 30,000 people by gross negligence. Based on my own notes from the events of the past weeks, and on today's comprehensive reports in the Sunday Times (paywalled but there are copies floating around on social media) and in the Observer, I've drawn up a simple timeline of how we got into this mess.

covid-19 timeline

2016 Pandemic preparation exercise Cygnus finds health system would collapse, naming many key problems including shortage of ventilators and PPE. Recommendations resulting from the analyses were never implemented.

31.12.2019 China alerts WHO that several cases of an unusual pneumonia had been recorded in Wuhan.

22.1.2020 WHO begins daily briefings on new coronavirus disease
UK government convenes first meeting of its scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) to discuss the virus

24.1. Chinese experts report in the Lancet new coronavirus disease with 800 confirmed cases and confirmed human-to-human transmission.
First Cobra meeting considering the virus happens without Johnson, chaired by Hancock who says risk to UK is low.

29.1. First cases identified on British soil: two Chinese nationals in York.

30.1. UK govt. raises risk from low to moderate. WHO raises highest level of alert.

31.1. Johnson speech on Brexit Day.

3.2. Johnson speech at Greenwich: “There’s a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage.”
”Humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the Earth to buy and sell freely among each other.”


7.2. Chinese doctor reprimanded for his early warnings dies of the disease. His death is also reported in the UK.

13.2. Cabinet reshuffle. Matt Hancock remains health secretary.
Johnson goes on 2-week half-term holiday at Chevening.

19.2. Champions League match Atalanta Bergamo v Valencia at Bergamo acts as a major spreading event, setting up new hotspots of infection in Valencia as well.

21.2. Italy imposes lockdown on many northern cities

25.2. Johnson returns to London for fundraising event, the Winter Party.

26.2. John Edmunds and colleagues present a scenario to govt. advisors that predicts 380,000 deaths and need for 220,000 intensive care beds. Their report emphasised the urgent need for a lockdown.

29.2. Johnson and Symonds at Chequers, release baby news.

1.3. Meeting of Sage, Dept. Health and NHS sees evidence from Italy suggesting 8% of people infected will need hospital treatment (up from 4-5%), raising concern re NHS ability to cope.

2.3. First Cobra meeting on coronavirus attended by Johnson, after he missed the previous five. Battle plan drawn up including plans to establish Nightingale field hospitals.

3.3. Johnson says he still shakes hands with everybody, including Covid-19 patients.

7.3. Johnson attends Rugby match at Twickenham.

9.3. Italy extends lockdown to the whole country.

10.-13.3. Cheltenham Festival goes ahead with 250,000 visitors, encouraged by govt.

11.3. WHO declares global pandemic.
Champions League game Atletico Madrid v Liverpool goes ahead in Liverpool and 3000 Atletico fans attend although Spain is already beginning lockdown measures.

12.3. Johnson at press conference: “More families, many more families, are going to lose loved ones before their time.”

13.3. UK govt. moves from contain to delay phase – emphasizing hygiene measures, but giving up contact tracing and systematic testing. Patrick Vallance, the govt. chief scientific advisor discusses herd immunity as part of the government's strategy.

18.3. School closures announced. Last day of school: Fri 20.3. ?
Pubs and restaurants also to close at the end of business on 20.3.

23.3. UK govt announces stay at home order for following day. Official hospital deaths announced by that day: 335, with more than 20% daily increases, tracking Italy’s curve with 2 weeks delay.

1.4. According to Doris Ann Williams, ceo of British In Vitro Diagnostics Association cited in the Sunday Times, this was the date her organisation was first approached by the govt. to help scale-up of testing.
The British Healthcare Trades Association (BHTA) was ready to help supply PPE in February — and throughout March — but it was only on April 1 that its offer of help was accepted.



This illustration shows the ultrastructural morphology of the novel coronavirus responsible for the 2019–2020 pandemic of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease. (Photo: Alissa Eckert, MS, Dan Higgins, MAM.)

PS after writing this it occurred to me that March 21st was the 100th day after the election. Is this the worst 100-day record of any government ever?

Some links:

Polly Toynbee's analysis on the situation after the Sunday Times report.


UPDATE 5.5.2020:
The Guardian has published an extensive report with a timeline on 30.4. From this I learned that the Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, said on March 3rd (at the press conference where Johnson said he was shaking hands with everybody) that in a worst case scenario 80% of the population could become infected and 1 % might die. Nobody seems to have done the multiplication which would have shown a result of 528,000 deaths (still not including those to the health system collapsing under the overload).

Also from the Guardian report, a couple of quotes from Patrick Vallance, 13.3.: “Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely,” Vallance explained on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity, so more people are immune to this disease, and we reduce the transmission. At the same time, we protect those who are most vulnerable to it. Those are the key things we need to do.”

Asked on Sky News what proportion of the population would need to become infected to achieve herd immunity, Vallance replied: “Probably about 60% or so.”

mind your exponentials

Science news special on coronavirus


Shout-out to the Financial Times for their brilliant data presentation in their daily Coronavirus updates (free access).

Only from semi-logarithmic plots (which convert the exponential growth curve to a straight line) you can make extrapolations (as our mind doesn't really do exponential), and because different countries are using very different approaches to testing, the case numbers aren't much use in international comparison, so I'm afraid the only good measure is provided by the death stats.

As the FT page doesn't have a permanent URL I took a screenshot of one of yesterday's graphs to demonstrate:




From this we can learn:

Based on the levelling off now seen in China, the curve appears to be committed to a 100fold increase at the point of lockdown, simply because of the time lag between infection and deaths. Thus, China locked down at 30 deaths and is levelling off at 3000. UK locked down (politely) at 335 deaths, so may be heading towards 33k. Earlier intervention could have saved 90% of these people.

The UK is still on the Italy trajectory but can hope to turn around earlier, because it has locked down after 330 deaths, compared to 800 in Italy.

Still, if the factor 100 observed in China holds, we are on track for 33,000 unavoidable deaths, and, what's more worrying, hundreds of thousands of people needing intensive care, some of whom may also die if they don't get the treatment they need.

90% of the committed deaths (inescapable due to the severity of the disease) and most of the collateral deaths (due to facilities overload) could have been avoided if the UK had taken measures a week earlier.

France and Spain may fare a bit better as they locked down slightly earlier (at 175 and 200 deaths, respectively) and at least in the case of France, more firmly.


It's very clear that the risk denialists of this world don't understand this kind of high school maths, but once the trajectories have run their course, they will provide a very clear set of data to judge government performance ...

stay home save lives

I came back from Germany on March 14 and it took me a while to realise just how badly the Coronavirus pandemic is being mismanaged here in the UK. Essentially, the UK is 2 weeks behind Italy on the same trajectory, but has done nothing to learn from the disaster unfolding in Italy.

Everything the govt has done so far has happened more than a week too late, and the exponential function of the virus spread grows by a factor of 10 every 8 days (33% daily growth rate) so stopping the spread 8 days later than you could have done means ten times as many people get infected and 10 times as many people die (possibly more, due to the health service running out of capacity).

Some of the things I realised with great horror this week:

1) key people in govt. and some reporters don't understand exponential functions. They talk about the spread entering a different phase, accelerating, or whatever - all nonsense. It obeys an exponential function which very neatly means that every freaking day there will be 33% more infections than there were the day before. And there will be 33% more deaths than the day before.We had 233 deaths by yesterday Saturday 21.3., and we will have 2330 death by this time next week, Sunday 29.3. Nothing surprising about it, that's what happens when you let an infectious agent run wild. As significant behaviour change only really started this weekend, we're already committed to those 2000 extra deaths. Any benefits from measures we see now will only show up later.

2) That herd immunity approach that the UK govt. proposed on March 12 and then dropped allegedly after hearing of new scientific data in the report from Imperial College. In my view, all that the Imperial College people did was a multiplication of 3 numbers that I had previously done in my head and I assume everybody else with multiplication skills as well: 65 million people times 60% infection rate times 1% mortality = 390,000 people dead. Plus those who would die from lack of treatment as the health system can't cope with anything near the peak, even if it is flattened by mild precautionary measures. My reading is that BJ didn't understand this, while DC did understand it and didn't care (which is also the message of the piece in the Sunday Times that is causing a bit of a stir right now). In any case, the Imperial College people made it clear to BJ in terms that he could understand. He then realised that half a million dead people would look bad on his CV and changed course. Sadly, it was a week too late.

3) as there has been far too little testing in the UK, we don't really know how many cases we have. Based on the 233 deaths, it must have been more than 20,000 infections more than a week ago. So, that means 200,000 infections now. See, exponentials are easy. You just add a zero every 8 days.

4) Commiserations to all in the US, they may very well be heading for an even bigger disaster for the same reason.

Watch this space - I'm adding new developments here rather than having repeated blog entries on the pandemic.

* I'm seeing serious sources reporting that a sudden loss of smell is a symptom of Covid-19 infection. Knowing this can help to reduce the spread via otherwise asymptomatic carriers.

* antiviral remdesivir gets orphan drug status, slightly ironic as it might help to save millions of lives. It was originally developed against Ebola, however, which fits the bill a bit better.


So my belated message is don't wait for the govt to introduce a curfew, just stay away from other people now. Act as if getting infected could kill you. If it doesn't, it might very well kill somebody else you pass it on to before you even show symptoms.

The last gathering of more than 4 people that I attended was on March 4th. And it will remain the last for months, if not years, I'm afraid.

By lagging more than a week behind the curve, the government is causing preventable deaths. We can all save lives by doing more to stop the spread than we are being asked to do.



Related reading:

My recent feature on the animal sources of the coronaviruses that cause SARS, MERS, and the current pandemic.

A long report by John Vidal on animal links and how nature destruction makes zoonotic transfers more likely.

Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, on the UK govt's failure to act.

Epidemiologist William Hanage demolishes the UK govt. herd immunity plan.

A very clear summary by Devi Sridhar of the many ways in which the UK govt f*cked up the response to the epidemic so far (until 23.3.). These errors are on track towards causing tens of thousands of additional deaths.

get ready for brexodus

Oh well. Maybe I shouldn’t have given up the Harry Potter series in the middle of the goblet of fire. Now the death eaters are running rampant, and I don’t know what to do. Specifically: remain in the UK (and thus leave the EU) or leave the UK (and remain in the EU)? Very confusing all this. I think that generally, organisations claiming to speak for the 3 million EU27 citizens in the UK have been too craven advising people how to jump through the death eaters hoops rather than to keep open the option of packing up for brexodus.

Since the election, I’ve been changing my mind about it twice daily, so to get some clarity, I’ve made a spreadsheet for arguments for and against moving. Right now, the case against is looking stronger. It has laziness on its side, which is a strong motivator. Plus the fact that many perks we have come to appreciate in Oxford just can’t be replicated elsewhere. Plus the rather scary realisation that if we did move to Germany (or any other of the EU27 countries) the local branch of the death eaters might take over there in a few years (ie on the same timescale that a move would take) and we’d be back on square 1.

So I guess today’s plan is stay put but shed some ballast in case we have to leave. It may be different tomorrow though.



As Der Spiegel highlighted with its cover feature two weeks ago, Germany's once-mighty social democrats (SPD), with election results dropping into single figures, are now desperate enough to vote for a pair of leftwing outsiders for the new leadership. (While I may agree with the new leaders' views on some issues, it is clear that they would never have had a chance if the party was as strong as it used to be. And the idea of a job-sharing male/female leadership tandem, nicked from the greens, is also a symptom.) If that development echos the rise of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015, does that mean Germany will have a far right populist government in four years time? It could also happen in France, and in several other EU27 countries. Essentially the same crisis everywhere - centre left voters left behind by the Blairs Clintons, Schröders of this world when they rushed to embrace neoliberalism are now biting back by turning right. Not all of them, of course, but enough to tip over the old left-right balance.


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PSA: science news is on holidays now - I won't need any new topics until mid January, so I can skip all that filter feeding ...

unsettling status

So there are now 2 million EU27 citizens who have applied for settled status in the UK, and those who don't have that status after the end of 2020 are being threatened with deportation.

What I find really unsettling about this, however, is that those who apply and get through don't get proof of settled status. Thus their status could be canceled at any time and they could still be deported (as I found out from this excellent report by Amelia Gentleman). If the settled status scheme really was about our right to stay, it would provide a document confirming that right. As it stands, it is a scheme to establish where we are and to enable the authorities to do to us whatever they fancy at any given time.

So right now I really don't think it is wise to rush and get in your application. There is still the whole of the next year left for that - if indeed all this madness calms down a bit and the UK remains a reasonably safe place to stay. But we should also prepare for Brexodus in case things don't work out.



One of the winning entries in a competition organised by LedByDonkeys.com for parodies of the government's "Get ready" campaign.

free the nipple

Tumblr is set to implement its nipple ban on Monday 17th, and the petition against it is about to pass the 500,000 signatures target today, but I fear the ridiculous ban will go ahead. Even though the censorship AI is still pretty clueless about what may be art, what a political statement, or humour, or indeed porn.

As a few of us are indulging in throwing around all the nipples we can find, I am using this blog post to collect a few topless discoveries worth keeping after the shutters come down.

👀 The Swedish pop singer/songwriter Tove Lo, I learned this week, is not only a great advocate of body positivity but also prone to drop her top during her shows, especially during the song Talking body.



The longest exposure times I found on youtube (some serious research going into these blog entries!) are in the videos from the Lollapalooza 2017 Chicago (views from thefront and side of the stage are available) and at Emo's in Austin, Texas, also 2017. Stop press: just found her Glastonbury gig, where her top essentially consists of glitterpaint handprints. Everything else pales in comparison.

Funnily enough, the tumblr AI hasn't flagged these videos yet. I like to think that with all the furious posting that's happened in response to the ban, the AI has been kept so busy it didn't have time to watch videos.

👀 The Outdoor Co-Ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society (OCTPFAS). Hope I got that name right. Making generous use of the fact that in New York going topless is legal for all genders due to equality laws, the OCTPFAS engaged in public activities and have created a huge amount of photos that were everywhere on tumblr, but are bound to disappear. In 2016 they performed Shakespeare's The Tempest outdoors and with not very many costumes. Follow their amazing Wordpress blog.

👀 Naked yoga - I never quite saw the point of yoga, but since tumblr told me that you can do it without clothes, it makes a lot more sense to me.

Some photographers who used to share work on tumblr and are now to be found elsewhere:

👀 Giovanni Pasini
👀 Tom Sutherland
👀 Yoram Roth
👀 Mr Chill



Some of the many freelance models presenting amazing work on tumblr:
👀 Roarie Yum
👀 Kelsey Dylan
👀 Trish Davis
👀 Sekaa
👀 Mona Poses




Articles about the tumblr purge and alternatives:

👀 This article in the Daily Dot discusses twitter, patreon, mastodon and pillowfort as alternatives.



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Updates / additions


Articles about the state of nipple freedom

👀 Rhiannon Lucy Coslett about the state of topless sunbathing in summer 2019.

prepare for brexodus

Like many other non-British EU citizens in the UK, I am sensing a strong vibe that foreigners from continental Europe will be made to feel unwelcome here (not by all, of course, but by the UKIP-inspired government and its supporters) in the near future. I have lived in the country for nearly 24 years now, but as things are going now, I may be out before the end of the 26th year.

The parliamentary debate over the Brexit Bill has shown that there is no efficient opposition that would moderate the government’s worst efforts leading us towards a traincrash Brexit and aligning the country with Trumpism. Even our local MP Andrew Smith, Labour, representing Oxford which voted 70% remain, voted with the government on the brexit bill, which was kind of the last nail in the coffin.

So far the government has resisted all calls, including the one from the majority in the House of Lords, to offer the 3 million non-British EU citizens living here any kind of reassurance that we will still be allowed to stay. My guess is that they will eventually come up with some conditional thing which will be tailored for people who have highly-paid jobs, maybe tacking on an exception for nurses once they realise that the health provision would collapse without them. But if resident foreigners ever lose their job, or happen to be freelancers or unpaid carers, it’s too bad and they’ll just have to go.

Specifically, there is the £35k rule currently in force for non-EU citizens, meaning that a work permit renewal after the first five years of residence requires you to earn more than £35k per year (see Stop35k).

Second, there have been cases of EU people applying for permanent residence permits (which we don't need yet, but they did so either as a precaution, or as a first step towards applying for British citizenship) and being rejected on the grounds that they should have had private health insurance rather than relying on NHS during their stay so far. Essentially this means that the home office doesn't recognise the NHS as a health insurance. This may sound crazy, but it happened to several people.

Not to mention that the residence permit application is a form with more than 80 pages to fill in (I am told it's five pages in Ireland, two in Germany), and additionally requiring you to document every time you left he country and returned (for me that would be over 100 trips to document) _and_ to send in your passport with the application, so being unable to travel while it is being processed. And if hundreds of thousands of people are having to go through this at the same time, the administration will by swamped with applications and who knows how long it could take. In the meantime, people have neither passport nor residence permit and may end up in the immigration detention centres.

I do appreciate that it is a huge privilege that we have been enjoying over the past 23 years thanks to the EU free movement policy, and that many people from other parts of the world have had it a lot harder. We regularly get examples in the news of how the Home Office treats people who don’t have that privilege (see the recent case of Irene Clennell, deported although she has been married to a British citizen for 27 years) and we’re not keen on getting a taste of that treatment when our privilege expires.

Moreover, apart from quite possibly not being allowed to stay, I am not really sure whether it will be safe to stay once the word spreads among racists and other fringe lunatics that Trump's attitudes to foreigners and other minorities (and women, obv.) are now ok, even in the UK.

There will be a Brexodus of people the UK can't afford to lose. According to a recent survey, a majority of doctors from the continent are already considering to leave, and BMW may decide to build the electric version of the Mini on the continent rather than in Oxford. As people leave, the international atmosphere of places like Oxford will disappear as well, so, well, sorry for the rant, back to packing ...





source

the counted

I am a huge fan of the Guardian's interactive database "The Counted" which has listed all people who died at the hands of US police since the beginning of 2015. It goes to show what a powerful statement you can make just by compiling data.

No matter if you look at the stats per time (3 people killed every single day) or per population, with vast differences according to skin colour, or if you read individual stories behind the photos. Whichever way you look at it is deeply distressing and very powerful.

Set against the dark mood, I was a tiny little bit cheered to see that the total number of deaths has dropped slightly in 2016 against 2015 (1091 and 1146, respectively). While both numbers are equally horrifying (for comparison, the equivalent number for Germany, with 1/3 of the population, is typically in single digits), I'd like to think that the 5.5 % decline is due to the growing awareness thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement and also perhaps thanks to the monitoring efforts of this database. The relative incidence of deaths among black citizens has also dropped from 7.69 per million to 6.64 (white: 2.95 to 2.9). Still scandalous but at least moving in the right direction. So maybe compiling data can save lives.

On the other hand, Native Americans have suffered a much higher incidence of police killings than the previous year, which might support the argument that historic crimes are allowed to continue under the cover of law enforcement.

screenshot taken on Jan 3rd. Update: checking back on Jan 14th, the count has gone up to 1091. I've updated the figures above, but the conclusions still hold.

the end of the world

it is the end of the world as we know it, and it may lead to the end of the world full stop. Children born this year have a theoretical life expectancy that would take them close to next century, but I'm now fairly sure that our civilisation will not survive that long. Rather than adding to the general tsunami of comment, I'll just compile a few links here, both to my own earlier articles and to recent opinion pieces that I found helpful. (last updated: 25.11.2016 - updates will appear at the top of the lists)

Mon 9.1.2017 my feature on the trumpocalypse and the post-truth world is out now.

George Monbiot: The 13 impossible crises that humanity now faces

George Monbiot: Neoliberalism: the deep story that lies beneath Donald Trump’s triumph

"Hitler's only kidding about the antisemitism" New York Times, 1922

Naomi Klein: It was the Democrats' embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump

Gloria Steinem: After the election of Donald Trump, we will not mourn. We will organize

Simpsons writer says President Trump episode was 'warning to US'

My features on related topics:

Will our civilisation survive this century?
Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 23, R1017-R1020, 2 December 2013

Angry voters may turn back the clock
Current Biology Volume 26, Issue 15, pR689–R692, 8 August 2016

Cover of the first issue of Der Spiegel after the election.