Category: Health

  • Overconfidence and incompetence

    Something we’re seeing a lot of during the coronavirus crisis is the rise of the armchair epidemiologist: the men (it’s mainly men) presenting themselves as authoritative voices about things they have no expertise in. Sarah Weinman, for InsideHook.com: They are lawyers, former reporters and thriller writers, Silicon Valley technologists, newspaper columnists, economists and doctors who…

  • Don’t be an optimist

    If you’re worried about losing your mind during lockdown, here’s some advice from an expert: don’t be an optimist. Admiral Jim Stockdale was held in the “Hanoi Hilton” prison camp for seven years, where he was tortured more than twenty times. He says he came out of the camp stronger than when he went in.…

  • “All our planning was for flu”

    It’s interesting to see The Sunday Times turn its guns on the UK government and on Boris Johnson in particular. This piece by the Insight team, which hits print tomorrow, is utterly damning. Last week, a senior adviser to Downing Street broke ranks and blamed the weeks of complacency on a failure of leadership in…

  • Being led by donkeys would be an improvement

    There’s a cartoon I love by Stephen Collins about Michael Gove. It riffs on the film Independence Day, and features the MP volunteering to fly a plane to defeat an alien invasion. When quizzed about his unsuitability – “you’ve never flown a fighter plane in your life!” – Gove is adamant that he’s the right…

  • “A gamble that became an embarrassment”

    This is the kind of article that you read from behind your fingers. From the NYT: UK Paid $20 Million for New Coronavirus Tests. They Didn’t Work. The two Chinese companies were offering a risky proposition: two million home test kits said to detect antibodies for the coronavirus for at least $20 million, take it…

  • Make America Sick Again

    I fear that this extraordinary photo will become a tragedy in hindsight. It’s of protesters in Michigan, many of them armed, demanding the government lifts lockdown because “we’re tired of not being able to buy the things that we need, go to the hairdressers.” Some protesters’ cars blocked the entrances to a hospital, preventing ambulances…

  • The next two years

    Ed Yong is one of our best science writers, and this piece for The Atlantic is a clear-eyed look on where we all go from here. Whenever the lockdown is lifted – and lifting it too soon will have lethal consequences – we will not just go back to business as usual. The pandemic is not…

  • Shifting the narrative

    The Conservatives are working on their exit strategy. Not how we’ll exit the lockdown; how they’ll shift the blame for their failures onto others, such as the NHS. For example: Care homes are not run by the NHS. Care homes used to be run by councils, but years of funding cuts have seen that provision…

  • Lethal stupidity on a truly horrific scale

    The official UK coronavirus death toll will crack 10,000 today. The real death toll, which unlike the official figures includes those who died in care homes, those who died at home and those who had not already been tested positive for COVID-19, is much higher. The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine has published a good…

  • One in ten

    At the time of writing: 101,000 – total global deaths from Covid-19 8,958 – total UK deaths from the same virus, excluding hundreds more in care homes The UK has nearly one in ten of the global deaths from this virus despite being one of the most recent countries to get it. Today’s daily death…