May 2020

Expert reaction to unpublished paper modelling what percentage of the UK population may have been exposed to COVID-19 | Science Media Centre
It’s an interesting paper but consensus seems to be that it’s not a good reason to give up lockdown (it’s ancient history from back in March now, but some discussion going on on UnHerd after they interviewed one of the researchers).
(tags: covid19 model mathematics)
James Hay on Twitter: “A recent analysis from Oxford presented a range of model scenarios consistent with observed COVID death counts. I’m going to reproduce their analysis here and then present some slight modifications to provide a conservative (if te
A good thread on what that Oxford team did.
(tags: covid19 model mathematics bayesian)
Staying alive: background tracing the NHS COVID-19 app – Reincubate
How’s the NHSX contact tracing app going to stay alive in the background on IOS? How does it work?
(tags: nhs health covid19 app nhsx android ios Bluetooth)
Knight Rider for 8 cellos – YouTube
Yay!
(tags: tv music knight-rider)
Do any Covid-19 ‘cures’ actually work? – UnHerd
All studies so far flawed, including the flaw of eliminating dead people from the stufy. Tom Chivers continues to be one of the few worthwhile things on UnHinged.
(tags: covid19 science drugs tom-chivers)

I’ve been tidying up my website a bit, and I’ve put everything which used to be on LiveJournal on Dreamwidth, with a view to closing LJ (or replacing all the stuff there with redirects) and using DW as a bit of diary/venting place now LJ’s looking increasingly dodgy. It’s odd to type stuff into a LJ-clone, feels a bit retro, but in a nice way, like a comfy old jumper. Twitter’s a cesspool and neither it nor Facebook are good for more than a few sentences of text.

I’ve also spruced up things on the proper blog a bit, adding a funky new style. I got Journalpress going to post stuff from the proper blog to Dreamwidth, and did my very first GitHub pull request to add a feature to it. This started me off on a “add all my things to GitHub” kick, currently there’s just my LJ New Comments script, but there’s a bunch of other bits I want to keep somewhere sensible rather than on my laptop.

Twust

On the subject of cesspools, has anyone done a thing for Twitter which only shows you replies from people followed by you or the people you follow? Someone really should layer a web-of-trust over the top of it, but I hear their API is designed to stop you doing interesting things with it, because you run into rate limiting. It’s so bad TwitRSSme apparently does stuff by screen-scraping instead, which is icky but possibly unavoidable.

Here’s What The UK Government Was Told By Scientists, Said In Public, And Did On The Big Coronavirus Issues
“Much of the evidence to the government has been made public, and it means we have a level of insight into where the government’s words and decisions, and the advice from the experts, come together — and diverge.These timelines explore five of the biggest issues: mass events, social distancing, school closures, isolation, and testing.”

Via the ever-interesting @TomChivers
(tags: pandemic uk sage government covid19 science)

The problem with our response to Covid-19 wasn’t that we didn’t have a plan – it was the opposite
“People make plans, but plans exert power over people. Covid-19 is not a flu virus but something new for which we don’t yet have effective medications, and it is more infectious than Sars and Mers, the other two coronaviruses to have emerged since the turn of the century. Faced with the novel problem of an untreatable, highly transmissible virus, the government’s current advisers seem to have found it hard to break with the plan they had – now unfit for purpose – and think anew.”
(tags: covid19 uk politics influenza flu)
Fatal exceptionalism and lack of humility to learn from the Asian example
“Covid-19, or how the West was undone by its assertion of civilizational difference bordering on provincial narcissism”
(tags: covid19 korea china politics epidemic)

What you need to know about the COVID-19 vaccine | Bill Gates
Bill tells us what to expect.
(tags: covid19 bill-gates medicine pandemic)
What Happens Next? COVID-19 Futures, Explained With Playable Simulations
Really cool playable simulations of the pandemic, looking at the effects of various strategies. A collaboration between an epidemiologist and a make of cool web pages.
(tags: covid19 infection simulation medicine seir model)
COVID-19 with Chris Whitty – YouTube
The UK’s Chief Medical Officer gives an excellent talk on Covid-19.
(tags: medicine chris-whitty science covid19 epidemic virus)
Where did it go wrong for the UK on coronavirus? – CNN
CNN looks at the Government’s mis-steps.
(tags: covid19 politics uk epidemic)