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Free to read article in the FT which confirms Jonathan’s assertion some time back in this thread that the UK is bottom of the league on preventing deaths from Covid. UK suffers highest death rate from coronavirus | Free to read FT analysis of data from 19 countries finds Britain hit hardest...

Excellent. Thanks, Michiel. Sorry I've not been able to help.

Listened a couple of times and I’m prettying sure he said “was”. It doesn’t mention whether or not he is in spy SPI-B, but the intro confirms that he is director of the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Emergency Preparedness and Response at Kings College London...

I share SPI-B’s concerns about its advice being censored by the government (before it was later unredacted), but it seems hypocritical for SPI-B to be calling for transparency when it is still hiding the identity of 4 of its members. Unfortunately, the media seems to have dropped its interest in...

It could, although I would hope and assume that this is taken into account by those calculating the R values. Regardless of the true values, it is still interesting (to me at least) to note that the R value in the whole population can go up when the R value both in care homes and outside of...

Interesting article by Tom Chivers on Simpson’s Paradox. It explains how, counterintuitively, the R value could go up as a consequence of reducing the transmission rate in the community through lockdown. Not a great sub-heading but the content of the article is very good: ”We should be very...

To me, that graph is implausible. It suggests that easing restrictions (or adjusting measures) will have no effect on the effective reproduction rate R (or Re). In reality one would expect easing restrictions to increase Re. The angle of the gradient of the downward slope would therefore be...

Another Covd-19 article by Dr Hammond, which seems to be a little muddled. On the one hand he says he will “never understand” why we stopped testing, tracing and isolating (ie suppression strategy) and then he says we are now stuck with “staged herd immunity” (ie mitigation strategy). But we’re...

‪A more interesting question is why the president of Royal Society of Medicine (who was, and may still be, a member of SAGE) appeared to be so reluctant to follow PHE and WHO advice on self-isolating when his wife had Covid-19. On 14 March Nick Robinson informed listeners to the Today Programme...

Bonus point to the first person who manages to include ipsedixitism in a paper or letter on Covid-19 or ME/CFS. Extra bonus point to anyone who manages to combine the two!

You mean, like the sort of person who might be intimately involved with a clinical trial without actually being listed as a author; the sort of person who might advise on who should be on a research collaborative without actually being a member of the collaborative?

Ben De Peer is news editor at C4 news: All very familiar. Notable that Anthony Costello, like Jonathan, is emeritus Professor and therefore no fear of repercussions.

Interesting interview in the FT with Richard Horton, who has become a prominent critic of UK’s Covid-19 strategy: https://www.ft.com/content/8e54c36a-8311-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6714 I’m not a subscriber but I seem to be able read about one FT article a week for free. However, the second time I...

Letter in this week’s Economist from one of @dave30th ’s colleagues at Berkeley School of Public Health on prevention of future viruses spreading from animals: https://www.economist.com/letters/2020/04/23/letters-to-the-editor

Many thanks to Simon and to the organisers. A couple of comments/questions in addition to those that I asked, and were answered, on Zoom. 1. Has what is listed in the slide below under “what we have discovered so far” been published in peer-reviewed journals? How much has been replicated...

I’ve just re-read this blog. Very useful. Thanks. Two questions: 1. If the proposed ME/CFS GWAS study goes ahead, would it be able to confirm whether or not there is an association between these HLA alleles (or any other HLA alleles) and ME/CFS, or would that require whole genome sequencing...

Rosalyn J. Moran et al. Estimating required ‘lockdown’ cycles before immunity to SARS-CoV-2: Model-based analyses of susceptible population sizes, ‘S0’, in seven European countries including the UK and Ireland: https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/covid-19/Moran_arXiv_2020.pdf I'd recommend...

I wonder if the police will investigate the psychiatrist who told the BBC that he didn’t need to self-isolate when his wife had confirmed Covid-19 – the one that the BBC had to prevent coming to their studios, against his wishes. I wonder if he was still seeing patients during that time. Do we...