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To be fair my wife isn't getting hers because she's a bit busy, she read a disconcerting thread on Facebook and some of the mum's in the school playground have heard "some absolute horror stories". Oh, and she also now says she won't have anything inside her body that she doesn't want to; I'm...

Accounts now pouring out of South Africa backing up the plummeting of hospitalisation and death rates with Omicron. For all the doom and gloom, this could yet to turn out to be very positive...

Another horrific story in the news today. There are some absolute monsters; as the father of two beautiful kids I find reading these stories incredibly difficult. Imagine putting your partner through thinking she’d lost two children through natural causes before going onto murder her as well...

Fascinating, and incredibly positive.

A couple of things worth noting on this, as making sense of the relationships between cases and deaths is a little trickier than it looks at first glance. First off, it should be expected that like-for-like case:death ratios to be lower for Omicron because it spreads more quickly, so infections...

Probably (and hopefully), but I wouldn't expect the media to go out of their way to point it out.

Something to keep in mind over the course of the coming weeks. Somewhat obvious when you think about it, but easily overlooked and no doubt purposely overlooked by the frenzied media. People being hospitalised and dying WITH Covid is going to seriously increase in the days and weeks ahead. But...

Wow, that's absolutely profound given who those quotes are from. Realistically, the chief scientific advisors have to play a pessimistic card as if they came out and optimistically said "yeah, nothing to worry about this Omicron thing, it's milder than a cold" and got it wrong then the...

This is US data and not completely up to date (and therefore not Omicron-specific) but you can probably spot the pattern.

In a country I’d expect is missing a good proportion of cases out in the wild (particularly IF they are milder), compared to the UK anyway, you’d have to assume so wouldn’t you?

Why would anyone choose to present data like this on a logarithmic scale? What this graph actually tells us is that whilst cases in South Africa are currently around 20% beyond their previous peak, hospitalisations are currently around a fifth of that peak. Now of course there’s a lag, and it...

I’m increasingly of the opinion that this is going to be the case. As I posted on the press conference thread yesterday, if you assume a median 20 days from case to death, the case fatality rate in South Africa appears to have dropped from 3.9% to 0.7%, previous spike compared with this one...

Not one to quote my own post but I was planning on calling myself out and opening up to a miscalculation above. I still intend to, but now I’ve done the maths, I’ve realised it still looks quite positive. Basically the flaw in my logic was concentrating on the assumption that the connection...

That would make it even more favourable wouldn’t it? I accept cases will be missed; dead people are less inconspicuous.

I find the repeated use of this statistic a bit perplexing. Whilst technically true, it’s not like it’s due to some recent baby boom down there. The reason the median age in South Africa is 13 years lower than the UK is because the average life expectancy is 17 years lower - largely because...

Wasn’t that last year’s plan? I mean, why reinvent the wheel? Honestly, I can just about handle pubs closing, I’d be gutted about fans being barred from games (largely because that will be the end of the season for me, most likely) but I’ll be positively apoplectic if the schools shut again...

I would be inclined to agree. However, I can’t help but feel there is something entirely predictable about this whole shambolic affair.

My job remit is global and I speak to people from countries all around the world several times a day, and it’s been customary to ask how things are in their respective nations (we’ve generally had it a lot easier than most these last 6 months). As far as I can tell, things are actually pretty...

What’s the latest scientific thinking on reinfection with Omicron, as that appeared to be one of the initial concerns mooted (alongside it’s insane transmissibility). Because at that kind of run rate, everyone’s going to have had it by the end of February, but the risk of reinfection (or more...

Had a weird one earlier. Was sat working in my home office as I do all the time these days, when I suddenly felt absolutely freezing cold to the point of shaking. Muscles starting to ache out of absolutely nowhere, heart rate was about 100bpm, and I simply could not get warm even when literally...