‘It looks as though outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 will be a fact of life for some time to come, but “learning to live with the virus” should not mean letting it infect large numbers of people. The plan should be to make sure that very few people get infected so that new outbreaks are small and rare.’
Coronavirus
COVID-19: scapegoating begins in earnest
In his latest piece on the pandemic, Hugh Pennington examines inter alia how cuts in labs and scientists have helped damage our response to the coronavirus
No more political games
‘It’s right that we do not forget that the objective of protecting the NHS in Scotland resulted in people being denied essential care for non-COVID-19 conditions nor the mistakes made in respect of care homes…But the drawing of comparisons is not a political debating ploy. It is essential to our safety.’
Second wave scepticism
‘The current COVID-19 events are not a “second wave”, or a “second peak”, or “second spikes”. They are continuations of the ongoing epidemic. There was no second wave with SARS, a closely related coronavirus, and we are still waiting for one in Wuhan.’
If you didn’t laugh
“I wanted to upset everybody, including myself. Half the problem with the world is that half the people take themselves too seriously. The other half don’t take themselves seriously enough.”
The Ministry of Truth
In his latest piece, senior statistician James Urquhart, investigates how the UK Government uses UK data to buttress policy decisions for England and asks: manipulation or malfeasance…
Young, gifted and scarred…
As much as a third (32%) of the Scottish workforce isn’t working in the lockdown but it’s the young who are the hardest hit and faces the bleakest future – unless we adopt New Deal-style measures to prevent a “lost generation” being scarred for life.
Coronavirus, conspiracies and corrosion
‘Conspiracy theorists believe that political leaders spend their time plotting, planning and pulling strings. Journalistic accounts… suggest that, far from conspiring to pull anything off, politicians miscalculated, dithered and bumbled. The lateness of the UK lockdown has cost tens of thousands of lives. What we’ve witnessed is not conspiracy but cock-up.’
Pareto and the pandemic
Conferences, churches, weddings, Cheltenham races: clusters of cases of coronavirus may be key to the spread of the pandemic, says Prof Pennington
Poverty and coronavirus in Edinburgh: solutions in shared humanity
Edinburgh Poverty Commission is an independent group working to define the steps required to end poverty in the capital. It has been listening to people and organisations in the city over the past few weeks to hear at first hand the profound impacts of the Covid-19 emergency on people living in poverty, now and in the future, and issues its interim report today.