Recent content by MikeWM

Does look like they're trying to 'nudge' towards option 1, but it is probably the best answer anyway. Maybe a bit rubbish for pedestrians, but they're aren't a vast number of them around there.

As far as I was concerned, I think there was sufficient evidence that the 'at-risk' population was broadly similar to that of flu by the time we reached mid-March - looking back, I wrote on 13th March in an email that 'Chances are you'll get it at some point and it won't be much fun, but I...

It's rather a shame if they close the 'Ely North junction footpath' (is that the official name?) as proposed. Walking along there is an interesting experience!

Here's some delightful evidence that vaccine passports are about as useful as masks. Lithuania currently has an incredibly strict vaccine passport regime, with them required to do pretty much anything (you can see a twitter thread about just how awful it is here - can't work, can't go to a...

Gave it a second go last night, and my opinion has dropped quite a bit from viewing #1, for three reasons: All that said, I do really like the Jack London quote near the end 'The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use...

Pretty much the last thing I feel like doing is defending Sadiq Khan, but in this case I suspect he has little choice because of the threat of vaccine passports for any 'event' for more than 10,000 people under 'plan B'. The equivalent story in the Mirror contains this interesting bit of...

Oh look, apparently the app isn't currently working https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/13/nhs-app-proving-covid-vaccine-status-malfunctions-causing-travel-delays Yeah, let's make it so that living our daily lives requires having 'papers' - that even if you satisfy the conditions for...

Well, yes - people modify their behaviour when they feel it is necessary. Very heavy-handed government interventions into the behaviour of the population tend *not* to be necessary, for precisely this reason.

This 'wrong virus' thing just appears to be a convenient excuse which doesn't begin to hold up to scrutiny. While *technically* Covid isn't a 'bad flu', it has so much in common with that to render any differences that would be required from a pandemic plan for flu fairly meaningless. It...

Indeed - and as a former, and very long-standing, health secretary, bears a good load of responsibility for many of the *actual* failings we saw early in the pandemic, such as out-of-date, inadequate and insufficiently stockpiled PPE. This stinks of deflection, among many other issues.

Entirely predictable - well, I predicted it, as did many others - that the result of any 'enquiry' would be 'should have locked down quicker', despite much evidence pointing to that utterly unprecedented measure making no difference to the eventual outcome, and making many other things worse...

I'm going to break the habit of a lifetime and quote Wikipedia, because they appear to be correct with their definitions here: ie. IFR includes everything. CFR includes 'cases' - that normally wouldn't include asymptomatic people, but in this particular case we rather uniquely count someone...

IFR covers asymptomatic, yes. There's another measure CFR - Case Fatality Rate - that covers people with symptoms. That is a higher %, for fairly obvious reasons. The terms come from the quaint old days when we only said something was a 'case' if the person actually had symptoms, as opposed...

Oops, that's Monday morning for you :-) Thanks - fixed.

A quick reminder that today is the last day to answer the 'consultation' on vaccine passports under the government's 'plan B'. https://consultations.dhsc.gov.uk/61497f68de8e5f098521be3a The questions are very loaded and biased, but that isn't exactly surprising... Big Brother Watch has some...