
Covid-19 Diary : Sunday 20 December, 2020
There’s been a lot of news, the last few days, about a new strain of the coronavirus discovered in England, and its implications. In short, it seems this new strain may be more readily passed from person to person. I’ve put a copy of

Covid-19 Diary : Thursday 17 December, 2020
Covid fatigue. I think we all have a measure of that these days, but the solution is not to ignore the virus and pretend it isn’t there, but rather to double down in our efforts to rid us all of it. Do the (as of

Covid-19 Diary : Sunday 13 December, 2020
In an ongoing discussion with a friend about the virus, he raised an interesting point. In the US, the focus has been on providing expensive treatment options for patients with severe cases of Covid. In much of the rest of the world, the focus

Covid-19 Diary : Thursday 10 December, 2020
It has been a record breaking few days, with the US registering higher-than-ever-before numbers of deaths. On several days, we exceeded 2,880 deaths a day – a number which has a certain significance. That is the daily number that results from deaths occurring at

Covid-19 Diary : Sunday 6 December, 2020
The expression “a slow-motion train-wreck” is often used to describe all manner of drawn out problems. It seems like a perfect label to place on our US response to the coronavirus. Look at these two charts, showing daily new cases and daily deaths in

Covid-19 Diary : Thursday 3 December, 2020
It is hard to know what to think at present. On the one hand, we have the expensively orchestrated flow of seemingly miraculously and marvelous news from the big pharmaceutical companies, eagerly pitching their vaccines through the press to the FDA. On the other

Covid-19 Diary : Sunday 29 November, 2020
I hope you are having – or should I now say “did have” a lovely Thanksgiving, however you arranged it. I had to smile on Friday – my daughter and I were out walking our dog with one of her girlfriends, her friend’s mother,

Covid-19 Diary : Sunday 22 November, 2020
I admit it. I was wrong. A week ago, I’d predicted the US daily new case count would reach 200,000 by Thursday. It didn’t – and that’s the sort of error I’m happy to see. But on Friday, it did, getting to 204,179 in a

Covid-19 Diary : Thursday 19 November, 2020
Earlier today saw the US case count break through the 12 million point, less than a week after exceeding 11 million. Or did it? Sure, the official count, as reported by Worldometers and elsewhere, shows 12,070,712 cases as of the end of Thursday, but