scientific-thoughts

Briefing By Boris Johnson 20/4/21 This was a strange briefing. Normally Boris comes to deliver good news or put a gloss on bad [ at the start of the 1st lockdown was the only 1 I recall as it happens] .  This time , we had a briefing saying people should get vaccinated , and nothing else ; primarily by his GP sidekick . The nothing else bit was emphasised by Boris forgetting about the mandatory graphs and needed to be reminded at the time . In short, a bit of a mess saying nothing . Remembering that briefings were only going to be public for important things , which this categorically did NOT qualify . Finally the length was much shorter than others .  It is barely possible that HMG was trying to get UK vaccination rate above the 85+% ? it's already achieving and someone managed to persuade Boris to forget his normal reticence of staying in the foreground and delivering what to him would be something below his attention span , but does seem very unlikely. If one looks at the n...

I was wondering what serious conspiracy theories there might be . Let's consider the bug in a small amount of detail : 1. It doesnt seem to attack kids 2. It does attack older people / people with medical problems And what do these mean in terms of coronavirus being a weapon . SO  1. WEapons target armies . These tend to be young and fit. Neither of the above apply QED it aint a weapon for warfare . It could however be a delivery system to help it's host country to aid economic growth [ no care homes for instance]. The virus has been shown to almost certainly originated naturally -but these things could be wrong SO There's lots to choose from , but everybody agrees that the problem originated in CHina : 1. There is a biological weapons factory in Wuhan . It could have escaped from there . If so, [ assuming China serves its own purposes] it would have been developing it for its own people. If found out, that would bring about the downfall of its government. Prob...

Well I don't know about you , but herd immunity is a bit like, we all know what it is , 'cos we've been told - So it's easy like ????? its about 90% innit ? So far, so good. A standard definition is the amount that would stop an infection getting out of control, in that for every person infected, they, in turn , would infect [ on average] no more than one other person . For this reason epidemiologists often quote the reinfection rate for clarity. Coronavirus is 2.4 , ie for every person getting it, on average 2.4 people get it from that person [ assuming no other situations affect this] . Let's take a reinfection of 1.00 for simplicity,ie for every person catching it, they reinfect another person. So for a family of 4 , one person gets it- 1-2 family members catch it ..... Wrong.... this is about statistics [ long word, so just call it odds if you know a little about betting] . If one family member gets it, it becomes likely that the entire family may well su...

OHHHHHHHH F...........ck  :( Looks Like Trumpo is after a war now . Hopefully other countries can stop him ,but history with Donnyboy aint hopeful. Forced nationalisation , and banning sales of Covid drugs and associated paraphernalia presumably would follow quickly if not resolved; to the US , that is ..... Last night , HMG didn't acknowledge Google for the data it supplied [ see yesterday post] and passed it off almost as it's own Berlin officials say 200,000 masks have been diverted to the US under a law invoked by Donald Trump.

Figures are courtesy of Google . They will be issuing loads of data, with  different countries to show how we are responding to the virus. Data are for UK... It indicates that for the UK as a whole, trips to : retail and recreation sites were 85% down. Well mostly shut , so 85% seems a bit low almost...... grocery and pharmacies were 46% down.  Interesting , it would appear that maybe we are going for bigger shopping trips or combining , especially if you compare that with the reports of supermarkets running out of stock ? parks were 52% down .  A low reduction and maybe why HMG was concerned about people going out when the weather got warm the other weekend ?  transit stations were 75% down . well , no work and no play makes for empty buses ?  workplaces were 55% down. See above . So 45% of us still working then ?  places of residence were 15% higher. Yeah , well , people social distancing at a distance of maybe 1 seat on a sofa, or a sheet thi...

Vice President Mike Pence said yesterday that Trump did  not belittle threat of coronavirus . He then said the risk to most Americans  remained "low" . Further he blamed China for not warning against the epidemic had broken out in one of its' provinces . Apparently he had also never mislead the US population about the severity and scope of the outbreak ..... I haven't seen that speech [ slap wrist ] but will do as it does sound like fun [ if only it wasn't sooooo serious ] , why do US politicians lie so much { although it's obviously a Trump whitewash thing} . In so far as Pence goes . I recall 2 speeches by Trumpo . One said [paraphrasing when the US numbers were extremely low - mainly because no-one had been tested for the virus ...] ' It's ok we have a Beautiful wall to protect us' The other speech talking about when the US started to find out aboutthis: [ again paraphrasing] 'We'll have this thing sorted  , REAL soon ' .......

In the briefing yesterday, it was mentioned that one of the reasons why more tests weren't being done was due to lack of reagents . It was said that reagents made by the test manufacturers were obviously the best and they wanted the best ? This brought to mind 2 things : 1. in the past, the company I worked for wanted to sell an inorganic  , fairly basic chemical [ just very pure] to Japan . We weren't allowed to at the time . One of the reasons was that QA testing could only be done using chemicals manufactured in Japan , because  they were superior to the rest of the world , apparently . It was total B/S , but designed to stop competition .... and YES, Japan was superlative in keeping out competitors ....... and 2. Printer manufacturers market their own ink , which is designed for their printers. No-one in their right mind would buy non- 'optimal' ink , would they ??????????? Someone has pulled wool [ dyed?] over somebody's eyes methinks  ..........