I thought that once school term ended then I’d have more time to run the blog, being freed from the unpaid school teaching that I’d been forced to do, but instead I had to deal with the large number of jobs of various sorts that had piled up over the months while I had been […]
From Rick Hayward. Remember Rick did this great post last week? It featured an astonishing graph of winter-to-spring mortality for all years in England and Wales from 1993-94 to 2019-2020, with numbers from the ONS, which showed that 2019-20 was only slightly bigger than all the other years (click to enlarge): I wondered whether […]
More Covid-19 graphs from Christopher Bowyer. ONS data here (up to week 26, week ending 26 June). NHS England data here. Other Covid data here. All graphs can be clicked to enlarge. England deaths with Covid-19 by absence (yellow) or presence (green) of a pre-existing condition. Data from NHS England. Percentage of deaths […]
This is an article by Stephen Jackson, solicitor principal at Jackson Osborne Employment Lawyers, here writing in his capacity as Editor for the lockdown website laworfiction.com, arguing that health and safety risk assessments present the best opportunity to resist social distancing. Fiction: Health and safety obligations require social distancing measures to be imposed in the […]
This is an article by Charlie Spedding, whose blog can be found here. Charlie is a former pharmacist. He was also a champion long-distance runner in his younger days. He was the winner of the 1984 London Marathon, and he is an Olympic bronze medallist. The Covid-19 epidemic has run the typical course of viral […]
This is an article by Rick Hayward. [Note from Hector: this article was updated on Fri 17-7-20 to add the very interesting graph shown as figure 3(2).] 1. Introduction ‘Follow the Science’ is the phrase frequently used in both demands and justifications concerning Covid-19. This basic analysis is not about resolving issues around wider linguistic […]
This is an article by Chris Larkin. We believe that every human being is equal in the eyes of God, and that no preference can be made therefore on the grounds of race. There is no racially-based variation on the teachings of Christ. Racial prejudice still exists in society, but opinion polling clearly indicates that […]
More Covid-19 graphs from Christopher Bowyer. ONS data here (up to week 25, week ending 19 June). NHS England data here. (NHS data is more recent, see dates on graphs). All graphs can be clicked to enlarge. England deaths with Covid-19 by absence (yellow) or presence (green) of a pre-existing condition. Data from NHS […]
This is an article by Peter Divey. I knew a little about classical music, I watched the Last Night of the Proms and had enjoyed the film Amadeus. Beethoven, Bach, some of the famous composers were sketchily familiar to me. I did not listen to classical music but neither did I listen to Radio 1. […]
This is a post by Robert Watson. Robert is a retired Professor. This post analyses the ONS mortality statistics for the first 25 weeks of 2020 taking account of the demographic changes and longer-term mortality trends of the population of England & Wales. Essentially, as Covid-19 appears to be a new disease – the first […]
This is an article by Sam Case, a former police officer now working in sport and health. I carried the old-style truncheon. It was pretty useless. Smashed the odd window with it. It resided mostly in my locker, furloughed, much like the population of late. The risk with weapon deployment is that sometimes, if you […]
This is an article by Martin Sewell. Martin is a quantitative researcher and developer in the financial industry. He can be contacted on martin@martinsewell.com. Black Lives Matter. The name itself is certainly a brilliant piece of marketing (Cobley, 2020). It is both a true statement (so difficult to argue against) and consistent with the current […]
More Covid-19 graphs from Christopher Bowyer. ONS data here (up to week 24, week ending 12 June). NHS England data here. (NHS data is more recent, see dates on graphs). All graphs can be clicked to enlarge. England deaths with Covid-19 by absence (yellow) or presence (green) of a pre-existing condition. Data from NHS […]
This is an article by Tim James. Tim manages legal liabilities arising from industrial disease cases. All opinions expressed are strictly his own. In the ongoing debate over the merits of the United Kingdom’s various lockdown measures the focus has understandably been upon comparing the number of lives the lockdown has allegedly saved with the […]
Note: This is an update of my earlier post ‘This is what we screwed the world for‘. If you’ve read that one already you can just skip to the population-adjusted graph, which is what I’ve added in this post. So I have taken the ONS’s annual death figures for England and Wales and graphed them […]
Turns out the utterly useless ONS have no population data for England and Wales before 1971, not even estimates. Unbelievable. The enormous of rubbish they have on their site, yet not even the most basic population data. I will have to find some alternative sources of information, and make some careful estimates. Update: This is […]
So I have taken the ONS’s annual death figures for England and Wales and graphed them all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century. Then I thought: what if we presumed that the death toll for 2020 is the five-year average plus the Covid-19 numbers? This is likely to be a high […]
This is an article by Eva Dehlinger. Biology is a real thing. We can see its elements and name them and measure them. In humans, chromosomes, DNA, gametes, hormone levels, and primary and secondary sex characteristics can all be identified, named and measured. From that information, almost all humans can be classified as definitively belonging […]
More graphs from Christopher Bowyer. Christopher sent these to me last week but with all the Parler happenings I haven’t had time to get them up until now. (Similarly, if I haven’t replied to your e-mails it’s because I’m behind, will catch up soon.) ONS data here. NHS England data here. All graphs can be […]
Big day on social media today (ie. Saturday), which partly explains why I’ve got a bit behind here. Virtually overnight there was a massive grassroots push for all conservatives and libertarians and non-leftists to leave Twitter and move to a new free speech platform called Parler. The result was hundreds of prominent personalities who decided […]