Bias of The Independent

I see that the Remain-Supporting lawyer Jolyon Palmer is being described in a headline by the Independent as a Brexit Lawyer who clubbed a Fox to death, but in the actual online article he is accurately labelled an Anti-Brexit Lawyer.

The article is here but you can see the headline in the URL: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/no-charges-for-brexit-lawyer-who-clubbed-fox-to-death-in-wife-s-kimono/ar-BB10MVoe?ocid=msedgntp

The media can't help themselves portraying Brexiteers in a bad light.

COVID-19 Government's top Doictor admits it's out in the wild now.

Back in my Game Changer post over 3 weeks ago I aid that the virus was most liklely out in the wild and therefore more likely to spread and less likely to be controlled.

Well, Professor Chris Whitty, the Cheif Medical officer has admitted as much. There are now a handful of confirmed cases where there is no defined source of the virus. i.e. no direct link to an outbreak or pocket of the virus.



Video courtesy of the Sun.

So those people in the planes with the "super-spreader" that came over from France, the people he walked past or stood in a queue with may have the virus and not know about it. Those people he had contact with may have had further contact and it's these secondary and tertiary contacts that are cropping up when tested.

It's safe to say there are by now thousands of people with the virus. My colleague across the desk has today taken a day off sick after being in work for the past few days with a serious upper chest infection. My previous comments re: sick pay stand and he's a prime example.

Of course we have put up with things like coughs and colds in the past with very little impact because even serious influenza kills a very low percentage of people that catch it. 0.1 percent or something similar.

COVID-19 has a far higher mortality rate, initially listed as 10%. But even that is an order of magnitude higher than 'flu.

Now there are unconfirmed reports the mortality rate could be as high as 30%.

The reports that there are two strains of the virus might be the only saving grace. It looks like the UK carriers have the less deadly/aggressive strain and people are just putting up with coughs and chest infections and the number of fatalities will be low.

My only current criticism is that even Chris Whitty in the video above assumes an 80% infection rate across the country, but then goes on to say that this figure is based on the 'flu and assumes some level of immunity after infection. At that point his predictions don't bear scrutiny, because as far as is known, infection with COVID-19 imbues the sufferer with no such immunity. They can be re-infected immediately if exposed to an infection.

We still haven't clearly understood if the virus has some form of dormant state where it fails to register on tests, so it's entirely plausible that once infected, people can re-infect themselves, until the point the infection overwhelms their system and they succumb and die.

The eventual infection rate will most likely be close to 100% with no natural immunity to re-infection. So coughs and chest infections will be the future of humanity in the short term at least. As long as we keep the nasty strain away, deaths could be relatively low.

But like I said previously, even if 1% are killed off in the first wave, the ability to continually infect people over and over again means the virus has the capability to chip away at the population, 1% at a time until there is no-one left to infect. The 30% strain of the virus just means that more people die more quickly until the number of people spreads out thinly enough that infected people never meet uninfected ones.

I don't think the population was that thin back even in Medieval times. But that may be where we're heading. Back to pre-industrial population levels, but hopefully not the stone age. At least the survivors should be able to retain some form of civilisation. I'd like to hope we don't get kicked back to the hunter-gatherer stage.

The thing that keeps bugging me is the lengths to which the Chinese government has gone to limit the spread. It seems they have not told us the full picture and I think hindsight will show the W.H.O. and our governments woefully naive in believing the output of the Chinese agencies.

Why are they spraying disinfectant all over the streets? Why are they burning the bodies?

It all points to something more than we are being told at the moment. Western Governments are being left to react to an in-country infection rather than China sharing all the information it has. It clearly has more information on the virus after having at least a month more experience than the West.

Ah well, I suppose time will tell if my fears are correct. So far I'm on the money. I wish I wasn't but sadly I have a brain that can quickly analyse these things and make mostly correct assumptions and model outcomes. In cases like this, I hate it when I'm proved right.

UPDATE.

After thinking about it, the reports of two strains of Corona Virus out in the wild may just mean that there is a previously undetected Corona virus out in the wild and the full deadly Wuhan variety is a different Corona virus.

So the less lethal virus is "a" corona virus and not "the" corona virus from Wuhan.

It could well be the less lethal variety would have passed through the population and been overlooked as a 'flu infection. The full Wuhan obviously is a different beast and cannot be ignored.

We'll see in the next month or so if the Corona virus at large in the UK begins to kill people off. We may have been lucky and all of the people infected in the UK may have been fit enough to survive. But I think that's a bit of a stretch.

The conspiracy theorists may like to debate whether the non-lethal strain was released as a test to see how far it would spread without killing people to test the efficacy of the lethal version, but somehow the full monty was released accidentally instead at some point.

Novel Corona Virus 2019: The Lack of Positive Action May Condemn us All.

Okay, I accept that NCOVID-19 is a new "novel" virus in the Human herd. Given that it's a new virus that hasn't been in humans before and the fact that we know absolutely nothing about how it works in the human population I find that the World Health Organisation and Governmental responses around the World to be woefully inadequate.

This is a new virus and the full effects are not know. What we are learning about the virus we are learning while it infects people around the world. This is not a good place to be observing the effects of the virus, mainly from the point we do not know if we can control it, what the long-term effects are and on top of that the more people it infects, the more chance it has to mutate and become more deadly. It could also become less deadly, but we always assume and plan for the worst case scenario: if it has a chance of getting more deadly, then plan and act for that.

So, first of all, what DO we know about NCOVID-19?

1. It is highly infectious. Unlike other serious viruses that are transmitted by contact and therefore limited in their ability to spread, NCOVID-19 is transmitted through the air by droplets. So by sneezing and coughing, the same as a cold or flu. It can also be transmitted by surface contact, so if you touch a surface touched, sneezed on or coughed on by an NCOVID-19 carrier.

2. Like a cold, it is re-infectious. If you get it once, you do not build up an immunity. Instead you can catch it again. And again. A lady in Japan that was infected and then tested as negative then ended up with a second infection. It's not understood how she was re-infected or if the tests were false negatives, but that case alone presents serious questions about the virus.

If the lady was in quarantine, how was she re-infected?
If she went home was she re-infected from a contaminated surface?
If so, how long does the virus last on a surface?
If she tested negative, was the test adequate or accurate?
Does the virus stay dormant in the body and allow false negative tests?
If it does stay dormant, for how long?

3. It tends to have a quite flat mortality rate. It will kill anyone at any age. The only predispositions to the effective mortality is an underlying medical condition. Heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, that sort of thing. The diabetes is a surprise given that it's not a disease of the heart and lungs. The mechanism for that might take a while to understand.

And that's about it.

What we don't know about the disease is a lot bigger.

1. What is the true incubation period? Experts are sticking to 14 days, but there is anecdotal evidence that incubation can stretch to 24 days. If that's the case then current quarantine periods are inadequate. Especially if the virus can go dormant and re-emerge.

2. How easily can it be transmitted? The government is saying "wash your hands" which is fine for contact-spread viruses, but not an airborne virus.

3. If washing hands is recommended, how long does the virus survive outside the body? Experts are making guesses, but no one has come out with a definitive figure. I assume if China are burning bodies rather than burying them, the virus stays infectious for a while. If the UK government is saying wash your hands it would appear at face value the virus can last a while outside a host.

4. What affects are there from being infected? Rumours are that patients end up with cardio-vascular or pulmonary issues which then increase the mortality of the second infection. Details are very scant at best, which seems to point to a pretty bad  outcome.

5. How does a person test positive, then negative, then positive again? Does the virus lie dormant? If it does, what triggers re-emergence? Can it lay dormant for a while without symptoms and emerge weeks later?

If I was the government, I'd have put those exposed to NCOVID-19 in quarantine and kept them there until we had more information about the virus. Separated into small groups the chance of cross-infection would be minimised, but really they need to be kept away from the population at large until we are sure it's safe.

The government need to be more forthright and pro-active on this. They need to be supporting sufferers financially.

The current policy seems to be akin to crossing ones fingers and hoping for the best. It is not a pro-active policy aimed at reducing the risk to the population at large. When dealing with something that is so infectious and so new, the "suck-it-and-see" policy just won't wash. This virus is less than three months old but it has already infected hundreds of thousands and killed many thousands. This is not a trivial thing.

Watching the spread of the disease, learning about it while it infects thousands of people across the globe is certainly not the way to do things like this.

Viruses have the ability to spontaneously mutate. They pick up attributes from other viruses in the hosts. The more people get infected with NCOVID-19 the more chance there is of a mutation picked up by the virus that makes it more deadly, harder to stop or impossible to vaccinate against.

What starts out as a mainly benign virus can be something else entirely by the time it's spread around the world. There is absolutely no guarantee that something as new as this will stay the same once it's infected the whole of humanity.

I'm watching the progress of the virus intently.

The government's response is to tell people to wash their hands and wait to see how deadly the thing becomes. After all they have bunkers to retreat to (as long as they don't take an unsuspectingly infected individual along with them).

Well, humanity will be okay if we all die off. Once there are no more hosts to infect and they and the virus die out, the descendants of the population of North Sentinel Island will have a whole planet to inherit.

It's happened before; humanity has weathered catastrophies before. Scientists are now coming to agree that there was a great catastrophe 11-12,000 years ago that wiped out a significant portion of the population. Male DNA has a big reduction in diversity around that time a significant proportion of the male population died off. The females, safe in their caves were able to survive with less trauma to the ancestral record.

The what, why and where of the catastrophic reduction in world population is still being hotly debated. The theories that there was at least one advanced civilisation around at that time are currently fringe. But so were the theories about the catastrophe that wiped out a huge chunk of the world population. before we could read the DNA data in our bodies.

As a race, humanity will survive, it always has. Whether you or I survive is something entirely different.

Electric Vehicles: Pricing the Poor out of Personal Transport.

First, let me state where I'm coming from om this blog. I've driven cars since 1991. Since that time I've never paid more that £2500 for a car. I've always bought used and the prices have ranged from £175 for a Little Red Fiat Uno back in the early naughties to £2500 for my current Lexus RX300 4x4 luxo-barge.

The wife recently made noises about wanting a car of her own, and I started looking at cheap small cars for her. Given that tons and cities around the country are looking to ban diesel and eventually petrol carts, I started looking and elderly Hybrids like the 1st gen. Toyota Prius. It seems the Prius is holding it's value well, no doubt buoyed by scarcity and the demand in London for use within the ULEZ.

Elderly, high mileage Prius'are fetching well over a grand, even cars with worn out batteries, because even though it spends most of it's time on the petrol engine, it's still a hybrid right? So Hybrids were out. In the end with nothing environmentally acceptable, I went for a £300 quid Hyundai Getz. Not a bad little car as it turns out. Reminds me of the Uno, but even at 1.3L  a little more gutless that the 999cc Uno. I assume because of the safety gubbins installed in the car and the automatic gearbox sapping the power.

But the price of used Prius' got me thinking about the prices and availability of cheap electric cars when all the internal combustion cars die off.

As a start, lets look at my "Typical" shitbox car: over 100K miles, over 10 years old.

Now, transferring that to electric cars, first off the mileage isn't that much of an issue because I'm sure the powertrain will be capable of doing that sort of mileage.

The thing that would worry me is like the Prius, the battery. Unlike the Prius with it's petrol engine, an EV is totally reliant on the battery and batteries have a finite number of charge cycles and have a lifespan limited by previous usage.

There are plenty of Nissan leafs out there with knackered batteries already, because Nissan designed the battery without any temperature management. I'm not sure I want an EV with a sub-50 mile range.

So straight away there is a dillemma. I could buy an EV that no-one will touch with a sub-optimal battery, but that would cost more than a grand to replace. So straight away we're well over the grand or two that I'd pay for a IC-engined snotter.

I could go for a EV that has a lease battery. But then I'm paying endless payments to the manufacturer in order to guarantee range. Unlike a comparable ICE car.

It strikes me that anyone with my car buying power is going to struggle to get into EVs. Either buying a car that needs a 5 grand battery, or hopefully a recon battery for half that. Maybe the aftermarket will eventually cut in with cheap Chinese batteries :-)

Or I buy a car with a lease battery and pay endless payments and hope the manufacturer continues to support that model of EV 15, 20 or 25 years into the future. With their previous track record, I have the feeling that EVs are going to expire not due to the car wearing out, but the reluctance of manufacturers to keep supplying batteries.

I think the era of cheap personal transport is coming to an end. It's a shame that progress yet again excludes the poor.

Yes they can get buses and trains, but in the past 50 years we've had the option to use them or the car. In future I think car ownership for the poor won't be an option.

And that, to me is not progress.