Coronavirus Updates

To keep my main coronavirus page to a manageable length, I moved the older updates to this page...

March 5

  • Italy has closing all schools and universities at least until March 15. Iran has also closed schools.

  • We learn that the original form of the virus, type S, has mutated into a new variant, type L, which may be more contagious and more aggressive. Note though that the reason why the original SARS virus did not kill very many people was that people got very sick very quickly, before they had the chance to spread the disease to many other people. Some people have been infected by both strains simultaneously. The existence of both strains makes us worry that a vaccine that is effective against one may not be effective against the other, although the two strains are similar.

March 6

  • Men are 65% more likely to be killed by the virus than women. Women have stronger immune systems, which is this case better protects them. But sometimes women suffer from their stronger immune systems - they are more likely suffer autoimmune diseases, where the immune systems attacks healthy cells, so they are more like to suffer rheumatoid arthritis, for example.

  • We learn that preexisting conditions such as cardiovascular disease greatly increase mortality risk.

  • The WHO now estimates mortality at 3.4%, much higher than the 1-2% that has been widely reported.

  • I have read that masks may often more protection than previously reported, perhaps reducing the risk of infection by a factor of five. They certainly don't offer complete protection though, since since some virus fragments are small enough to pass through masks and since the virus can also enter the body through the eyes.

  • The number of cases globally passed 100 thousand today, meaning that 1 in every 75 000 people has been infected. That doesn't sound like much - it all depends how the outbreak progresses. When I look at the worldometer logarithmic graph of cases outside China it still looks like a straight line, meaning that the progression is still exponential (doubling every 5 days). Until that graph bends down I will continue to worry.

7 March

  • Despite the closing of schools in Italy, the number of cases is increasing especially fast there and will exceed 5000 today.

  • More than 3000 people are trapped on the Grand Princess cruise ship off San Francisco, where several people have the virus. The Grand Princess is the sister ship of the Diamond Princess which was in lockdown in Japan a fortnight ago - the effect was that the ship became a breeding ground for the virus and several people died. Now they are making the same mistake again, but Donald Trump is determined that the people on the ship should not be allowed to disembark onto American soil.

  • This Guardian article tries to reassure us by pointing out that:

    • the virus was identified within just a week of the beginning of the outbreak (as opposed to two years for the HIV virus)

    • the Covid-19 virus RNA was then then sequenced in just three day (it took)

    • a reliable test for Covid-19 was then developed in just three days

    • we know it can be contained (albeit at considerable cost)

    • catching it is not that easy (if we are careful) and we can kill it quite easily (provided we try)

    • in most cases, symptoms are mild, and young people are at very low risk

    • people are recovering from it

March 8

March 10

    • All of Italy has been placed into lockdown today as cases there exceed 10 thousand today. Of course, an Italian style 'lockdown' is not the same as a Chinese one - I understand that airports, trains, buses and supermarkets continue to operate more or less as usual. Even bars are still open, and I understand that many people are not respecting the rule that people have to be at least a meter apart.

    • Alarmingly, the mortality rate in northern Italy seems to be much higher than elsewhere, at about 5-6% whereas it is about 3% elsewhere. Italy's population is older than that of most other countries, but that can surely not fully explain the difference. I wonder whether the high mortality rate might be due to shortage of respirators on hospitals (there is not yet a shortage of hospital beds, but there will be soon). Also, as previously mentioned, the 'lockdown' in Italy is quite lax relative to the lockdown in China. As the outbreak intensifies, there will be a shortage of respirators in other countries too, raising the possibility that a mortality rate of 5 or 6% could become the norm. That would push the worst case scenario to 280 million deaths (based on 60% of the world's population being infected). for comparison, the population of the US is about 390 million.

    • The growth of cases outside China continues to be rather strictly exponential, as I pointed out higher up this page, making it rather easy to estimate the number of cases over the coming weeks. I maintain my prediction that the number of cases outside China will be about 460 thousand by the end of March. Why is no one else pointing out this relationship?

    • Italy is now second after China for the number of cases, but why are most people focusing on the absolute number of cases in each country when they should be focusing on the infection rate, by which I mean the proportion of people who have caught the virus. I note that the proportion of people in Italy who have caught the virus is 2.6 times higher than the proportion in China!

      • In Italy, there are 9172 cases for a population of 60.2 million. That's an infection rate of one person in every 6570 (or 152 people per million population).

      • In China there are 80757 cases for a population of 1.4 billion. That's an infection rate of one person in every 17300 (or 56 people per million population).

      • 17300 / 6570 = 2.63

      • In South Korea, third in the world for the absolute number of cases, the infection rate is 7513 for 52 million, or 1 person in every 6920, a slightly lower rate than in Italy but much higher than in China.

      • In Iran one person in every 117000 has caught the virus.

      • You can follow the figures for the number of cases per million population on this page.

    • Trying to look on the bright side, I'm pretty confident that so far, 'thanks to' the Covid-19 virus, fewer people have probably been killed by viruses this year than in other years. That's because I believe that the measures that have been put in place to contain the Covid-19 virus have probably saved many people from dying of seasonal flu (which normally kills several hundred thousand people every winter). I believe the number of flu deaths that have been avoided probably vastly exceeds the 4000 deaths from Covid-19 so far.

    • I worry that the companies developing a vaccine may take too long to test the vaccines for safety and efficacy. The need for a vaccine is so strong that the testing should be rushed, even if that increases the risk that the vaccine may have serious side effects in some cases. If a vaccine could save the lives of millions at a cost of killing a few thousand with side effects, then that should of course be acceptable and the drug companies should be protected against legal action in that case. Update: this article says that 'A US biotech firm has ramped up production of an experimental drug that has become a focal point for hopes of an effective treatment for coronavirus.' Remdesivir, originally developed to treat Ebola, is a frontrunner and one of the very few drugs that has a reasonable prospect of helping patients in the near-term. The drug is currently being tested but, while awaiting for the results of the tests, doctors in the US, China and Italy are already using remdesivir on a compassionate basis to treat small numbers of patients with severe Covid-19. The first US patient recovered, but the full trials are needed to assess whether the drug reduces the severity of symptoms and, crucially, mortality rates.

March 11

    • The WHO declares that the Covid 19 outbreak is now a pandemic

    • Italy has closed all of its shops (except food shops and pharmacies)! This good article says 'They first locked down Lombardy on Sunday, and one day later, on Monday, they realized their mistake and decided they had to lock down the entire country. Hopefully, we will see results in the coming days. However, it will take one to two weeks to see. In Wuhan there was a delay of 12 days between the moment when the lockdown was announced and the moment when official new daily cases started going down.

March 12

    • The United States bans all flights to the US from European countries in the Schengen zone (which does not include the UK or Ireland).

    • French president Macron, in a speech to the nation, announces (amongst other measures) the closure of all academic institutions in France, beginning next Monday and until further notice.

    • Deaths in Italy exceed 1000.

    • The UK government confirms its worst case scenario as 80% of the population infected and 500 thousand dead (assuming mortality rate of 1%).

    • There is now enough data on individual countries for an analysis as to whether the virus is spreading exponentially or not, and, if so, what is the doubling time and what are the predictions? I add country-by-country analysis to the section of this page above in which I discuss the exponential nature of the spread of the virus outside China.

March 13

    • I've added the US to the countries for which I've calculated a doubling time above.

    • A Chinese company is making testing kits that work in 15 minutes, can be used at home, and have an accuracy of 95%. 15 minutes is much better better than the current tests that take 6 hours to give a result.

    • I just came across this Feb 24 article which says 'China announced on Monday it will ban the consumption of most wild animals and severely crack down on the illegal wildlife trade to help prevent zoonotic disease outbreaks like the new coronavirus.' Good!

    • This good Guardian article again gives the figure of 6% for the mortality rate in italy which is way higher than the 2 to 3.4% figure usually given for the planet as a whole. That would mean (if 80% of the population gets infected) nearly 3 million deaths there, most with a month, which is horrible to contemplate. If the death rate is so high there, is there some reason to think it would not be so high in neighbouring France?

    • President Trump has declared a national emergency.

    • It's been suggested that many cases are not being detected and that therefore we don't really know the true number of cases in different countries. To me, this is incomprehensible and inexcusable. Surely finding the true number of cases should be as simple as testing a sufficiently large random sample across the country and then extrapolating from there (aslo adding in the number of deaths). I'm assuming that the tests are for antibodies and will therefore detect people who have recovered as well as those who are sick.

    • This good Feb 24 article in the Atlantic, You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus says 'The emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is a new seasonal disease—a fifth “endemic” coronavirus. With the other four, people are not known to develop long-lasting immunity. If this one follows suit, and if the disease continues to be as severe as it is now, “cold and flu season” could become “cold and flu and COVID-19 season.”' The idea that we will have to face a newly-mutated form of Covid 19 every winter is scary. Will there at least be vaccinations for it?

March 14

    • Anti-inflammatories such as Ibuprofen could aggravate a Covid 19 infection so it is recommended to take paracetamol instead, if you have a fever. But many substances contain anti inflammatories, including H1 antihistamines, vitamin C etc - do we have to avoid them all?

    • I present, further up this page, the WARD PLAN to protect old people and save the world's economy.

    • France shuts down (from midnight) cafes, shops, restaurants and cinemas to stem the spread of the coronavirus outbreak, prime minister Éduoard Philippe has announced. Philippe said public transport will be kept open but asked citizens to limit their use, Reuters news agency reported. The closures will come into effect at midnight on Saturday. He told a news conference that exceptions on the shop ban would include food stores, pharmacies, banks and gas stations.

    • Right now there aren't many recovered people around but in a few weeks there will be. I wonder whether recovered people shouldn't carry something visible to indicate that they have immunity because that will be vital to know.

    • People are questioning why the UK has not announced the closing of schools. It seems that the UK is taking the very dangerous gamble of counting on 'herd immunity' rather than containing the virus with testing, tracing and self-isolation. Herd immunity occurs when so many people (at least 60 to 70%) have acquired immunity that the remaining population is protected. In other words it seems that the UK government is hoping that at least 60 to 70% of the (younger) population will get sick and recover so as to protect the remaining (older) population. Herd immunity works well, for example, when large numbers of children have been vaccinated against a disease like measles, reducing the chances that others will get it. But there are so many unknowns with Covid 19 that herd immunity may not even work - we are not even sure that someone who has recovered from Covid 19 will have immunity. See this Guardian article and also this article 'I’m an epidemiologist. When I heard about Britain’s ‘herd immunity’ coronavirus plan, I thought it was satire'. You may recognise that the UK's apparent plan is similar to the 'Ward plan' described higher up this page. The article I just mentioned, by a top epidemiologist, even characterises the UK approach as 'So the reasoning goes that even though in a perfect world we’d not want anyone to take the risk of infection, generating immunity in younger people is a way of protecting the population as a whole.' He then goes on to disagree with that approach, saying 'vulnerable people should not be exposed to a virus right now in the service of a hypothetical future.' But the whole point of the Ward Plan is to expose only the least vulnerable (younger) people, so that the truly vulnerable (older) people don't get exposed. It may be that the UK has another goal in mind: by not doing all it can to slow the progression, the outbreak will be over faster (at the expense of more lives lost due to hospitals being overwhelmed) and the UK will be able to go back to work and resume somewhat normal lives sooner.

March 15

    • France has closed all restaurants, bars and shops except for food shops, banks, petrol stations and pharmacies, and all non-essential public buildings. Public transport continues to run but people are told not to use it unless strictly necessary. Local elections will go ahead today, however, but people must bring their own pens!

    • The UK has said that it will, within the next few weeks, order all people over 70 to self-isolate for at least 4 months.

    • A glimmer of hope for Italy. When I look at the logarithmic graphs for total cases in different countries I am looking for a line becoming less steep, since that means the doubling time is increasing. I don't see that for the UK or France, but I do for Italy.

    • It seems to me that testing (and thus the availability of test kits) will be crucial in the coming weeks. Not so much now, since you can pretty certain you haven't got the virus yet, but in two or three weeks time when a large proportion of the population (of European countries) will have been infected. They will need to know whether they have acquired immunity, since if they have they can go back to work and live fairly normal lives, but if they haven't then they need to do all they can not to get it (if older than 40) or not to get it and transmit it (if younger than 40). Without proper tests you won't know whether you have acquired immunity since if you had not no symptoms that does not mean you haven't had the virus and recovered, and if you have had some symptoms it won't have been possible to distinguish them from flu without a proper test.

    • Thousands of gilet jaunes (yellow jackets) have ignored a government ban on gatherings of more than 100 people and staged a demonstration in Paris yesterday. A demonstration of incomprehension and stupidity, if you ask me.

    • Another example of what not to do during this outbreak: force thousands of passengers to wait together for hours in crowded conditions in US airports while they are quizzed about their medical history and recent movements. The photo below shows Chicago's O'Hare airport today.

March 16

  • There are currently 174,614 confirmed cases and 6,685 deaths from the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak. Total deaths in Italy, by far the worst hit country in the world relative to population size, will exceed 2000 today.

  • The first trial in people of a vaccine to protect against pandemic coronavirus is starting in the US later today. A group of 45 healthy volunteers will have the jab, at the Kaiser Permanente research facility, in Seattle. Experts say it will still take many months to know if this vaccine, or others also in research, will work.

  • President Macron announces that the entire French population is confined to their homes from now on with only these exceptions:

    • commuting to and from work if that work cannot be done at home

    • going to buy food

    • going to a medical appointment

    • childcare and looking after vulnerable people, while respecting the non-transmission rules

    • getting physical exercise locally alone (jogging, walking, riding your electric bike...)

    • walking the dog

    • If you go out for any of these reasons you have to carry an official attestation document. 100 thousand police officers will be out on the streets trying to enforce these rules (38 euro fine for the first offense, then 135 euros) but it will be impossible to enforce effectively of course, especially given the revolutionary traditions of the French.

    • Where in the above recommendations do you see advice that older people should take special care? Nowhere, except that 'vulnerable people' refers to them indirectly.

    • What they should have done, in my opinion, is focus strongly on sick and older people, with very strict confinement for people over, say, 65. Only a very small percentage of people younger than that are likely to get sick enough to need hospital treatment. In the spirit of the Ward plan, once the virus has swept through younger people (say, within a month) then they will have immunity and older people will be much safer already, protected by herd immunity. The very strict confinement of older people could then be relaxed a bit, but still with the requirement that they avoid contact with other old people because herd immunity would not apply within that group. Of course, strictly confining older people (over 70) is exactly what the UK is planning to do. An the UK may also be correct to delay confinement measures on the basis that 'confinement fatigue' will set in at some point, causing people to become resistant to the rules, and you don't what that to happen just when the hospitals are overwhelmed.

    • The EU bans all nonessential travel into Europe for 30 days to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

March 17

  • Here are the measures announced in the UK today, which you can compare with the French measures above:

    • Everyone should avoid gatherings with friends and family, as well as large gatherings and crowded places, such as pubs, clubs and theatres

    • People should avoid non-essential travel and work from home if they can

    • All "unnecessary" visits to friends and relatives in care homes should cease

    • People should only use the NHS "where we really need to" - and can reduce the burden on workers by getting advice on the NHS website where possible

    • By next weekend, those with the most serious health conditions must be "largely shielded from social contact for around 12 weeks"

    • If one person in any household has a persistent cough or fever, everyone living there must stay at home for 14 days

    • Those people should, if possible, avoid leaving the house "even to buy food or essentials" - but they may leave the house "for exercise and, in that case, at a safe distance from others"

    • Schools will not be closed for the moment

    • If the UK wants people to avoid crowded places, such as pubs, clubs and theatres, shouldn't they be closing these places?

    • Under the guidance, people who should be "particularly stringent" in minimising their social contact are: people over the age of 70, other adults who would normally be advised to have the flu vaccine (such as those with chronic diseases), pregnant women.

  • I added two not-to-miss videos higher up this page...

  • A report by my college, Imperial College London, is causing the UK government to change its controversial approach. I've made new paragraph 'Mitigate for Suppress?' about this, higher up this page.

  • I added interesting graphs from the Financial Times in the country-by-country section.

  • March 18

  • I had understood until recently that the virus can only survive 'a few hours' outside the human body, but this article says 'the virus could survive in droplets for up to three hours after being coughed out into the air. Fine droplets between 1-5 micrometres in size – about 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair – can remain airborne for several hours in still air. It means that the virus circulating in unfiltered air conditioning systems will only persist for a couple of hours at the most, especially as aerosol droplets tend to settle on surfaces faster in disturbed air. But the study found that the SARS-CoV-2 virus survives for longer on cardboard – up to 24 hours – and up to 2-3 days on plastic and stainless-steel surfaces. The findings suggest the virus might last this long on door handles, plastic-coated or laminated worktops and other hard surfaces.

  • My brother points out that even if the virus kills more than 10 million people globally, as expected, that is still far less than the typical annual increase in the world' population: 100 million.

  • I discovered this excellent Covid 19 tracker

  • As of today, Italy is no longer the state with the highest infection rate relative to population, it's only number 5. The top four are, in order, San Marino, Vatican City, Faeroe Islands and Iceland. But the first three are so tiny that just one or two cases will push these states way up the ranking (Vatican City only has one case of March 18), so they should really be ignored. But Iceland has a population of 360 thousand, so it can't be ignored so easily...

  • On French TV this evening I hear that '50% of cases are people less than 60", which does not surprise me, and that "7% of deaths are people under 65" which I find to be an interesting figure, though I don't know whether these figures are only for France or for the whole planet.

  • The dire news from Italy is that despite a lockdown that has been in place for 10 days across the country, the death toll from this virus has continued to rise and rise. It increased by 475 on Wednesday. Italian doctors had hoped to see infections slowing after a week of lockdown but that hasn't happened. Some say that only after two weeks - believed to be the maximum time period it takes for symptoms to show - will they truly be able to see if the virus's spread has been slowed by the drastic measures taken.

March 19

  • With now more than a quarter of a million cases and more than 10 thousand deaths, why is the mortality rate so baldy known? Some experts say it could be as low as 0.5%, but as of today this page gives the death rate as 10%! That's the same as the death rate from SARS! The 'outcomes of cases' chart on this page shows the global mortality rate reaching a low of 5.64% on March 7 before reaching 9.5% now (March 18). Could the rise be due to hospitals in Italy being overwhelmed? Update March 20: I realise that my calculation of the global death rate as 10% was based on an assumption: that it takes the same time for a case to resolve either as a death (which I think tends to happen 18 days after detection) or a recovery (I don't know how that takes, on average, after detection).

  • Another report that chloroquine is effective in treating Colvid-19. Is this the wonder drug that we need until a vaccine is made available. Chloroquine has been used since 1947 to treat malaria so its side effects and risks are well known (it's generally safe but can indeed cause fatal cardiovascular problems if overdosed, which is easy to do). Trump has announced (wrongly) that chloroquine will be available soon.

  • Italy death toll rises to 3,405, overtaking China

  • This trust-inspiring UK doctor predicts that the outbreak in Italy 'will peak in a few days'

  • Boris Johnson says the UK can "send coronavirus packing" within 12 weeks. Codswallop. The only way to send the virus packing is with immunity, either from most people catching the virus or from vaccination. Without immunity, even if drastic measures can slow the spread of the virus, it will be present and waiting to spread rapidly as soon as those measures are lifted.

20 March

  • California Governor Gavin Newsom told Californians they should only leave their homes when necessary during the pandemic. He earlier estimated more than half of the 40 million people in California would contract Covid-19 in just the next two months.

  • I extended the Ward Plan: see above.

  • Some people think that there will be a baby boom in about 9 months time. It's well-known that the best form of contraception is television, so my wife suggested how to reduce that risk: make the paid-for TV channels free for a few months. Canal+ in France has just done exactly that.

21 March

  • For the first time, I see a reference to the Ward Plan in a major newspaper, the Guardian. They forgot to mention my name, but the essence of the Ward Plan is there. Judge for yourself: "Isolate everyone over 60 (the age group most at risk), infect as many younger people as possible, and then hope that the disease dies out." The idea that we should infect as many young people as possible is based on the idea that only a small fraction of young people would need hospitalisation or would die. But this article in French says that a study (published February 9) of 1099 hospitalised Chinese coronavirus patients showed that half the patients hospitalised were less than 50!! According to a joint study by the University of Oxford, Imperial College and Queen Mary College London, published last week, of 1000 people who died with the virus, 1 in 5 were less than 60. The same statisticians calculated the mortality rate for over 60s as 1.33% and for under 60s as 0.39%, meaning that the mortality over 60 is about 3.5 times greater than for under 60s. With hospitalisation and death rates like these, maybe the Ward Plan isn't such a good idea?

  • I saw a chart of mortality as a function of age here, included higher up this page, based on a study by Imperial College, suggests that the overall mortality rate for infected people maybe around 0.9% and that the mortality rate for people 80+ is about 9%. These percentages are lower than those I have seen before - I think that is because it is based on an estimation of the total number of infections rather than just those that have been detected. even though the overall mortality rate is lower than figures I have seen before, it still means that in order for the planet to achieve herd immunity (assumed to occur when 60% of the population is immune) before the arrival of a vaccine or an effective treatment, 42 million people would die (7.8B x 0.6 x 0.009). Applying the same calculation to the UK we would have 66M x 0.6 x 0.009 = 350 thousand deaths. Since the UK is hoping for deaths to not exceed 20 thousand, I can only assume that the UK is NOT counting on the population achieving herd immunity before a vaccine arrives.

  • More good news: the same page says that with a policy of suppression (of the virus, not the people), we can hope to limit the number of coronavirus deaths in the UK to 20 thousand. It states that every year more than 600 thousand people die in the UK and that the announced coronavirus deaths would not be on top of this - there would be a significant overlap i.e. many of the people dying with the coronavirus would have died anyway. If half of those 20 thousand would have died anyway then the number of deaths would have been increased from 600 thousand to 610 thousand by the coronavirus, an increase of just 1.7%. I find it reassuring that the number of people that might die of coronavirus in the UK (in this best case scenario) is small compared to the normal number of deaths each year. On the other hand, 20 thousand would be much more than the number of people killed by flu each year (8000 over and above what you would expect to happen in any given year, according to the UK government's chief scientific adviser).

March 22

  • 43% of Italians think the worst is over in Italy and 41% think the worst is yet to come (which is of course the case).

March 24

  • Terrifying news from the US: with strict measures in place for just a few days, President Trump is already considering relaxing controls so that workers can go back to work, boosting the US economy (and increasing Trump's chances of reelection). But within a couple of days the US will overtake Spain to become the country with the highest number of daily new cases...

  • Swedish PM warned over 'Russian roulette-style' Covid-19 strategy. Health experts say attempt to build herd immunity is a ‘mad experiment with 10m people’. For a while it seemed that the UK and the Netherlands were going to pursue a policy of 'mitigation', allowing the virus to spread while trying to stop hospitals getting overwhelmed. Those countries have now moved to a policy of 'suppression', doing all they can to limit the spread of the virus, but Sweden seems to be continuing with a dangerous policy of mitigation.

  • A number I haven't seen before: people who die from the virus tend to do so within 2 to 8 weeks of first showing symptoms. The same video says that the death rate (comparing deaths with detected cases from 14 days earlier, as one should, since it takes a while for a detected case to become a death) is 5.7%. This is based on WHO date from March 1 and is worrying high. But it's based on detected cases and we know many cases go undetected, meaning the really mortality rate would be much lower.

  • I'm very interested in people who have recovered. Right now there are so few (126k) that they represent a drop in the ocean, but in a month's time there should be many millions of them. Being immune and unable to transmit the virus (hopefully) they should be able live fairly normal lives, working, socializing with other lucky immune people etc. But they won't be allowed to do that unless they can prove their immunity in some way. Everyone else will be very jealous of their freedom and irresponsible people who have not yet had the disease will want to fake that proof so as to have the same freedom, so the proof will have to be highly visible (so that they are not continually stopped and told to self-isolate) and impossible to transfer or duplicate. Maybe a simple plastic card with the person's face on it and a hologram to discourage forgeries? Maybe a wristband that cannot be removed without that being obvious, with a hologram on it to make it uncopyable? Maybe both? By the way, it would be reasonable to pressure the lucky people with immunity to do low-skilled frontline jobs such as working supermarket tills, so it wouldn't all be back to normal for that group. And they would also be pressured to give blood since that blood would have the antibodies that could help sick people.

  • Of the 100+ mutations of the Covid-19 virus that have been documented, one seems especially interesting. According to this page, 'A few SARS-CoV-2 viruses that were isolated from Singaporean COVID-19 patients are missing a stretch of genes that also disappeared from SARS-classic during the late stages of its epidemic. This change was thought to make the original virus less virulent, but it’s far too early to know whether the same applies to the new one. Indeed, why some coronaviruses are deadly and some are not is unclear. “There’s really no understanding at all of why SARS or SARS-CoV-2 are so bad but OC43 just gives you a runny nose,” Frieman says.' If I understand correctly, there is a mutated version of Covid-19 virus that gives just a runny nose but which might give immunity to the Covid-19 virus in general? If so then we don't need a vaccine - we just need to expose everyone to the Singaporean variant. I volunteer to be the first to deliberately self-contaminate with the Singapore variant, but will they let me fly from France to Singapore?

  • Limited chloroquine use against Covid-19 has been approved in France. Use of the drug chloroquine, more commonly used to treat malaria, has been officially authorised for ‘serious’ forms of Covid-19. Also read this Guardian article.

March 26

March 27

  • On March 4, when there were only about 10 thousand confirmed cases outside China, I predicted on this page, based on the exponential progression of the disease outside China, that 'If that trend were to continue then we would have 461 thousand cases outside China by April 1'. That number was reached on March 27, 5 days earlier than I predicted (after 23 days rather than 28). I'm guessing that that is one of the most accurate long term predictions of Covid-19 progression ever made public - can you find a more accurate one?

  • Boris Johnson has tested positive for the virus, as has his health secretary.

March 28

  • Statistician David Spiegelhalter has been looking into the Imperial College data and made an interesting conclusion: if you contract coronavirus, you've got the same risk of dying over the next couple of weeks as you would normally have of dying over the next year - regardless of your age and your background health i.e. the cv risk of death by age chart matches the everyday disk of death by age. I interpret that as meaning that if a person catches the virus then their risk of death within the next year would be double the normal rate. And if half the people are going to get it, as Imperial College predicts (I think) then on average the risk of death would be increased by 50% for that year over the normal value. Put another way, you are twice as likely to die in the coming year from something unrelated to the virus as you are to die from the virus. I'm assuming that all the people who are going to die from the virus are going to do so within the next year, since we can hope that a vaccine will be ready around then. I'm also assuming that it is okay to add the risks of death, which is probably valid for younger people but less so for older people.

  • I made this page around March 1 because mainstream media didn't seem to be giving enough attention to what I thought were essential concepts: exponential change, logarithmic graphs and doubling times. At last a mainstream medium, the BBC, has published a great article that focuses on all these things. That article, and regular checks on the wonderful charts from the Financial Times that are now free to view, make a better and more trustworthy information base than my page, so from now on my page will not be updated much on the assumption that you will look elsewhere.

  • BTW, that same BBC page may contain some good news. A new report suggests that Covid-19 deaths in the UK may not even reach 7000. This is much less than the 20 thousand predicted by Imperial College as a best case. It corresponds to about 1 in 10 thousand. If that rate is applicable to the planet as a whole it would mean 780 thousand deaths, about what the flu can cause in a very bad year. But the new report is based on the assumption that the outbreak in the UK will evolve in the same way as it did in China, which I think is too optimistic. It's true that when you look at the FT charts the UK trajectory is similar to China's so far, but the charts show absolute numbers of cases whereas it is surely the proportion of cases relative to population that matters, and that's already far higher for the UK than it ever was for China. A comparison of the UK with Hubei province (population 58.5M, similar to the UK) would be more meaningful. And the lockdown in Hubei was no doubt stricter than that in the UK, where even the prime minister and the health secretary have been so careless that they have both been infected.

  • Did you notice that the US is the only country to have ever reached 100k cases, and it went from 100 cases to 100k cases in as little as 23 days? Nobody's talking about Turkey, but that seems to be on an even worse trajectory than the US.

March 30

  • Looking at the charts for Spain and Italy, it seems they may have peaked in terms of daily new cases, at least until they relax their lockdowns. Good news for once!

  • A Paris hospital wants to start testing a substance extracted from worms that may be able to keep dangerously ill Covid-19 patients alive as a last-ditch strategy. Blood haemoglobin from a certain worm is able to transport 40 times more oxygen from the lungs to the body’s other tissues than ordinary human haemoglobin! See HERE.

March 31

  • I anticipate that confirmed cases outside China will reach 1 million on April 2, an increase by a factor of 10 thousand (10^4) relative to the 100 cases on Jan 29. That increase will be over a period of 64 days. Dividing 64 by 4 we can see that the number of cases has been multiplied by 10 every 16 days. If that continues to hold then confirmed cases outside China will reach 10 million on April 18 and 100 million on May 2. The increase will certainly begin to slow about then (if not before) because that might correspond to 2 billion people outside China really being infected (included undetected cases, assumed to outnumber detected case by 20 to 1) and because by then because herd immunity will begin to set in (herd immunity starts to set in at around 17% and reaches full effect at around 60-80% of the population). How does that compare with my predictions made on March 4 that we would have 25 million cases outside China by May 1? My new prediction is for 100 million on May 2, so my new predictions are more pessimistic than my predictions on March 4.

April 1

  • The Financial Times has published some great new charts showing new cases and deaths (within the last week).

April 4

  • In my March 24 update I discussed the need for people with immunity to be able to prove that they have it so that they can be excused from lockdown and lead rather normal lives. I suggested this could be done with a card or a wristband. Governments are clearly reading this page!

April 6

  • Boris Johnson has been taken into intensive care since his condition is worsening.

  • Hopes for massive testing to begin around now are being frustrated since not one of the many different types of testing kits being tested in the UK has given accurate results.

April 8

  • There is a suggestion that vaccination against tuberculosis my give some protection against Covid-19.

  • Plasma from coronavirus survivors (which contains the antibodies to fight the Covid-19 virus) has been found to help severely ill patients and there is a suggestion that it could even be given to people who do not have the virus, to protect them.

  • The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, based at the University of Washington, is the best organisation in the world at collecting data on diseases and mapping out why we fall ill. That organization has made a very worrying prediction for the UK, that by August the UK will have had more deaths (66 thousand) than Italy, Spain, France and Germany combined. Also disappointing that the figure is much higher than the 20 thousand deaths that the government was 'hoping for', and that's only up to August. The article doesn't explain why the UK is expected to do so much worse than those other countries. The organisation predicts a peak in the UK around 17 April, and things should be much better by the beginning of May.

  • Everyone assumes that the US is currently the hardest hit country and in terms of total cases it is (more than 400k). But, for total deaths so far, Spain (14 thousand deaths) and Italy (17 thousand) are faring far worse than the US (13 thousand). And in terms of daily new deaths France is doing much worse than the US compared to population, with yesterday 1400 deaths in France and 2000 in the US.

  • After 76 days under one of the toughest lockdowns on the planet, Wuhan, the source of the virus, has ended its lockdown. The highway tolls have reopened, and flights and train services are once again leaving the city. But of course the virus has not been completely eliminated there so it will interesting to see how much of a rebound there will be.

April 10

  • In one German town where they've done a lot of testing they're finding lots of people with antibodies who never had symptoms and they're calculating the mortality rate as 0.37%, by far the lowest figure I've seen. Good news! And 15% of the town has immunity, not far from herd immunity, according to the article, and already enough to slow the spread.

  • This article may explain why people sometimes catch the virus twice. It would be because some people fight off the virus with their 'innate' immune system, before the secondary immune system, the adaptive immune system, kicks in, the one that produces antibodies. Extract: In the German study, while older patients produced the highest levels of neutralising antibodies, many patients had low levels and 10 did not appear to generate them at all. If the findings hold up – the study has yet to be reviewed and published – they have widespread implications. The more robust immune response from older people suggests their blood plasma may work best in trials that are assessing whether convalescent plasma infusions can help seriously ill patients overcome the virus. But the findings may frustrate efforts to manufacture an accurate antibody test for the virus if many people have low or even non-existent levels of neutralising antibodies. The work also has implications for “immunity passports”, which could allow people to return to normal life if blood tests showed they had developed immunity to the virus. Nearly 6% of the recovered patients had no neutralising antibodies, suggesting that other parts of the immune system had cleared the infection, without producing long-term immunity.

  • A premium article in the Telegraph says there are three main variants: the original Chinese variant, type A, a variant B and a variant C which came from B. (The article doesn't make it clear how ABC relates to S and L). Interestingly, there seems to very little type A in the UK, meaning that the virus did not come to the UK directly from China, but probably from Singapore, S Korea or Hong Kong. I suppose some strains are more aggressive than others, so if type C is particularly aggressive and type A milder than might explain the Chinese 'miracle' and the heavy impact in the UK. (the report wasn't written by Imperial). If it's true that type A is milder, might it make sense to deliberately self-infect with that type to avoid getting the much worse type C?

  • The confirmed global death toll passes 100 thousand.

April 12

  • Good news! This article says a vaccine could be ready in small quantities in just a few weeks for health workers (and the very rich, I suppose).

  • A leading German epidemiologist who predicted the coronavirus crisis in Europe is now calling for governments to end the lockdown. Prof Alexander Kekulé warned the virus was about to engulf Europe and publicly urged Angela Merkel’s government to start screening international travellers as early as January. But he now believes the lockdown is in danger of going on too long and causing more damage than the virus, and has drawn up a three point plan for how it can be safely lifted:

  1. The elderly and those with pre-existing conditions who are most vulnerable to the virus must remain in isolation.

  2. Move from social distancing to what he calls “smart distancing”. “We need to adapt distancing to the situation. A cashier at a supermarket check-out, for instance, is going to be exposed to infection all day. He needs to wear a mask, he needs proper hygiene measures. A taxi driver needs to learn not to touch his face after handling money.”

  3. Let the young get the virus. “People under 50 are very, very unlikely to die or get seriously ill from the coronavirus,” he says. “We have to let them get infected so they can develop immunity.”

Yes, you have realised that this plan is almost exactly the same as the Ward Plan that I proposed a month ago except that he says let young people contaminate one another and I say contaminate them deliberately so that they can then be put into quarantine for a couple of weeks so that they can't contaminate old people. Read the full article HERE.

April 13

  • French president Macron tells the nation that there will be relaxation of the confinement rules beginning in May 11, including a progressive re-opening of primary and secondary schools (partly so that some parents can return to work). He promises that students and teachers will be provided with the necessary protection, even though France has so far been unable to provide even healthcare professionals with the protection they need. As a secondary school teacher I'm very unhappy about this announcement. It seems crazy to reopen schools just a month and a half before the summer vacation, given that the virus is much more present now that it was when lockdown was imposed (around 1600 confirmed new cases per day around March 17 and about 5000 new cases per day now). A classroom is a relatively dangerous place for an adult to be since there are many children present, children being the most dangerous vectors of the disease since often they are carriers without having any symptoms. Also , children are very unlikely to suffer much if they get the virus (mortality rate of 1 in 15000 for teens) so they are unlikely to respect rules for social distancing and mask-wearing as conscientiously as adults. And there are more than 12 million pupils in France - if they need to be provided with new masks morning and afternoon that would be 120 million masks per week - does anyone really think that is feasible? It seems obvious to me that schools will soon become hotbeds of propagation of the virus, and of course, not only teachers will be contaminated but also parents and grandparents. I understand that a compromise has to be found between death and suffering caused by the virus on one side and damage to the economy on the other, but there has to be a better solution. I think the important thing is to recognise that younger people are much less likely to suffer greatly from the virus, therefore everyone less than say 50 could be encouraged to get back to work while people over that age should stay confined and protected. That would mean that teachers over 50 should not be returning to work yet - they could continue to teach from home or young professionals currently out of work could replace them temporarily in school (when I say 'temporarily', older people really need to self-isolate until a vaccine or some wonder treatment is found, which might not happen for another year). We already have some experience with regions that have reopened schools. In Hokkaido, once new daily cases had fallen to just one or two (and not 5000 as now in France) they reopened schools but they were forced to declare a state of emergency and close schools again just 14 days later because the number of daily cases was rising alarmingly. See these two articles in French: 1 2.

April 15

  • In the middle of Covid19 crisis, Trump takes the incredible step of putting funding of the WHO on hold!

  • Confirmed cases pass 2 million, and deaths pass 128 thousand.

April 16

  • In the UK, more than 90% of people dying with coronavirus have an underlying health condition, The most common was heart disease, followed by dementia and respiratory illness. The average number of pre-existing conditions in those who died was 2.7.

  • The Wuhan market was closed in January and the Chinese authorities placed a temporary ban on all trade in wildlife. But according to recent news reports, some wildlife markets in southern China have reopened amid the pandemic, selling dogs, cats, lizards and scorpions and even bats among other species. Many Chinese continue to believe in the health benefits of consuming meat from wild animals. Two leading Hong Kong microbiologists last month condemned the continuing practice of consuming wild game, warning that “Sars 3.0” could materialise if people do not refrain from eating wild animals.

  • The UK stupidly refuses to extend the Brexit transition period despite the fact that lockdown must surely have slowed negotiations to a crawl. Therefore the risk of a no-deal Brexit is vastly increased.

  • Multiple studies show that that recovered coronavirus patients, especially young ones, can have very low levels of antibodies in their system. This means that the plan to use antibody testing to identify people who can safely go back to work and socialise will not work as well as hoped.

  • This article says that only about 6% of Europeans have achieved immunity, meaning that we are very far from herd immunity (which needs 60% or more the community to be immune) so we should expect many waves of infections, perhaps 10, before herd immunity is reached. In the UK that might correspond to about 50 thousand deaths, far more than the 20 thousand the UK has been 'hoping for'.

  • This video in French says that a tiny French company will be able to deliver artificial antibodies to very sick patients by the end of June.

April 17

  • Coronavirus: world's biggest trial of drugs (hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin) to treat Covid-19 begin in UK.

  • A Chicago hospital treating severe Covid-19 patients with Gilead Sciences’ antiviral medicine remdesivir in a closely watched clinical trial is seeing rapid recoveries in fever and respiratory symptoms, with nearly all patients discharged in less than a week. Remdesivir was one of the first medicines identified as having the potential to impact SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, in lab tests. The entire world has been waiting for results from Gilead’s clinical trials, and positive results would likely lead to fast approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies. If safe and effective, it could become the first approved treatment against the disease. The University of Chicago Medicine recruited 125 people with Covid-19 into Gilead’s two Phase 3 clinical trials. Of those people, 113 had severe disease. All the patients have been treated with daily infusions of remdesivir. “The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We’ve only had two patients perish,” said Kathleen Mullane, the University of Chicago infectious disease specialist overseeing the remdesivir studies for the hospital.

  • Does the anti-tuberculosis vaccine (BCG) protect against Covid-19? It seems that, unlike most vaccines, the BCG (anti tuberculosis) vaccine boosts the innate immune system rather than the adaptive one, and thus it protects against much more than just tuberculosis. I've read that the innate immune system 'carpet bombs' pathogens in general whereas the adaptive immune system uses 'laser-guided bombs' (antibodies) to target specific pathogens. That might explain why the BCG could be helpful against Covid-19. Anyway, here are a couple of recent articles: livescience.com nytimes.com wired.co.uk

  • This article says: eighteen million at-risk and vulnerable people in France will still need to stay in confinement even after deconfinement measures begin on May 11, the French chief government scientific advisor has warned. Professor Jean-François Delfraissy, senior immunologist and president of national scientific advisory council Le Conseil Scientifique, specified that these would be people “of a certain age, as I am, above the age of 65 or 70”, as well as “young people would underlying conditions, and also the obese”. Professor Delfraissy added that even with the anticipated slow-down of the epidemic, estimates still predict that infections will be at “10,000 to 15,000 per day” from mid-to-late May.

April 18

  • An antibody study suggests coronavirus is far more widespread than previously thought. The study from Stanford found rate of virus may be 50 to 85 times higher than official figures. The study from Stanford University, which was released Friday and has yet to be peer reviewed, tested samples from 3,330 people in Santa Clara county and found the virus was 50 to 85 times more common than official figures indicated.At the time of the study, Santa Clara county had 1,094 confirmed cases of Covid-19, resulting in 50 deaths. But based on the rate of people who have antibodies, it is likely that between 48,000 and 81,000 people had been infected in Santa Clara county by early April – a number approximately 50 to 80 times higher. That also means coronavirus is potentially much less deadly to the overall population than initially thought. As of Tuesday, the US’s coronavirus death rate was 4.1% and Stanford researchers said their findings show a death rate of just 0.12% to 0.2%. This has to be good news, but even if the higher infection rates are true, it only means these areas have an infection rate of about 3%, nowhere near enough for herd immunity.

  • In this interview, Professor Luc Montagner (who has a Nobel prize in medicine) says (in French) that the Covid-19 virus has had fragments of the HIV virus incorporated into it!

April 21

April 22

April 23

April 25

  • This article says that R0 may have been as high as 5.7 initially, meaning that each infected person was spreading it to 5.7 other people, on average. It also says that as much as 82% immunity may be required to achieve herd immunity.

April 27

  • Worldwide cases top 3 million.

April 28

  • This article says the coronavirus could infect a billion people. If the mortality rate is 1% that would mean 10 million deaths.

April 29

  • This April 29 article says that children under 10 cannot usually catch the virus because they do not have the necessary receptors and even if they do catch it it is very unlikely that they will pass it on.

  • This article says that the UK government is relaxing the most important criterion of the five criteria it had announced for the relaxation of the lockdown? Instead of requiring that there should be minimal risk of a second wave they now require that there should be minimal risk of second wave so strong that the NHS would be overwhelmed. With that change, the make it easier for the relaxation of the lockdown to go ahead.

  • A third of patients hospitalised with the Covid-19 virus in the UK have died, according to a study. This is very frightening news, for that's about the same as for Ebola.

  • The reopening of schools in England is expected to take place in a "phased manner", says the Education Secretary Gavin Williamson.

  • About half of all workers worldwide are in danger of having their livelihoods destroyed because of the pandemic, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has warned. The figure equates to more than 1.5 billion people.

April 30

  • According to this premium Telegraph article, a Covid-19 vaccine's effectiveness could be known in less than six weeks. Human trials began last week, and the University of Oxford team hopes a million doses could be administered from September. Several hundred Britons have now been given the experimental jab, with hopes that “signals” about whether it works could emerge by mid-June. If it works a million doses could be given to the public from September.

  • The over-50s should be kept in lockdown for longer than younger groups and fined if they cannot prove their age when out and about, researchers at the University of Warwick have suggested.

  • Crazy: at a time when medical professionals are putting their lives at risk, tens of thousands of doctors in the United States are taking large pay cuts. And even as some parts of the US are talking of desperate shortages in nursing staff, elsewhere in the country many nurses are being told to stay at home without pay! See HERE.

May 5

May 6

  • A study has identified a mutation that its authors say could make the coronavirus more infectious.

  • Scientist hopes probiotic will cut Covid-19 deaths. A French researcher hopes to develop a probiotic that people can take to boost healthy gut bacteria which will help protect against Covid-19. The research, which he hopes will produce concrete results in coming weeks, is linked to findings in several Chinese hospitals that people’s blood group strongly correlates to vulnerability to catching Covid-19. People with France’s second most common group (O) were found to have 33% less risk of falling ill, whereas those with the most common group (A) had a 20% increased risk.

May 10

May 16

May 20

May 22

  • Immune clue sparks treatment hope. UK scientists are to begin testing a treatment that it is hoped could counter the effects of Covid-19 in the most seriously ill patients. It has been found those with the most severe form of the disease have extremely low numbers of an immune cell called a T-cell. T-cells clear infection from the body. The clinical trial will evaluate if a drug called interleukin 7, known to boost T-cell numbers, can aid patients' recovery.

May 26

  • US deaths officially pass 100 thousand.

  • A drug treatment called remdesivir that appears to shorten recovery time for people with coronavirus is being made available on the NHS. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said it was probably the biggest step forward in the treatment of coronavirus since the crisis began. Remdesivir is an anti-viral medicine that has been used against Ebola. UK regulators say there is enough evidence to approve its use in selected Covid-19 hospital patients. The drug is currently undergoing clinical trials around the world, including in the UK. Early data suggests it can cut recovery time by about four days, but there is no evidence yet that it will save more lives.

June 1

  • More than 6 million people have had the virus and more than 40 thousand have died with it in the UK.

  • A French study on a drug named “anakinra” has shown “encouraging results” and “provides hope” in treating patients with severe forms of Covid-19. The study suggests that the drug, which is currently used for rheumatic conditions, appears to reduce the risk of death from Covid-19, and means patients with severe forms of the illness are less likely to need a ventilator. The study was completed by rheumatologist Dr. Thomas Huet and the team at the Groupe Hospitalier Paris Saint-Joseph (14th arrondissement, Paris), and published on May 28 in specialist medical journal The Lancet Rheumatology. The team injected 52 severe Covid-19 patients with anakinra for a period of 10 days. The results showed that “anakinra [achieved] significantly reduced requirement for invasive mechanical ventilation and death in patients who received anakinra compared with historical controls who received usual care”. Of the 52 patients in the study, one quarter either died or required transfer to an intensive care unit. This is in comparison to 73% of the 44 patients who were being cared for in the same institution, who were not given the same drug.

June 3

June 5

  • I remember when the UK said that if they can limit Covid deaths to 20 thousand then they will have done a good job. Today the number of Covid deaths passed 40 thousand, with thousands more to come.

June 10

  • This oncologist says that he expects overall deaths in 2020 to be not significantly higher than in previous years since he suggests that nearly everyone dying with Covid would have died within a few weeks or months anyway. To back this up, Prof Sikora said that deaths for June were already "below what you'd expect for the yearly average in the summer".

June 16

  • At last, a major breakthrough! A cheap steroid drug called dexamethasone can greatly cut the risk of death from Covid-19. For patients on ventilators, it cut the risk of death from 40% to 28%. For patients needing oxygen, it cut the risk of death from 25% to 20%.

June 24

  • A safe form of ultraviolet light kills airborne coronavirus. Ceiling fixtures emitting a safe form of ultraviolet light called far-UVC would be very efficient at killing airborne coronaviruses, according to a study by researchers at Columbia University. "A very low exposure to far-UVC light killed well over 99.9% of the exposed virus," lead researcher Dr. David Brenner told Reuters.

  • A vaccine against Covid-19 may not work well in older people who are most at risk of becoming seriously ill and dying from the disease, say scientists, which may mean immunising others around them, such as children.

June 28

  • Global cases exceed 10 million, deaths with Covid exceed 500 thousand and recoveries exceed 5 million.

July 1

  • A Swedish study says that for every person who has antibody immunity there is another person who has T-cell immunity, meaning the number of people with immunity may be twice as high as previously thought. Little T-cell testing is being done because it's much slower and more difficult than antibody testing. The first line of defence against pathogens is the innate immune system which gives a generic response to pathogens. Like antibodies, T-cells are part of the adaptive (acquired) immune system, the second line of defense.

July 4

  • It's really remarkable how linear the graphs of total deaths have been since about May 1, with about 4500 people dying every day since then with no sign of any decline:

July 17

  • In a study published July 13 in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, researchers from the University of Oxford the Rosalind Franklin Institute in England announced the creation of two nanobodies that could block the novel coronavirus from entering human cells. Llamas, camels and alpacas produce nanobodies, which are cousins of the antibody that are smaller, more stable and easier to produce, according to a statement from the University of Reading. Like human antibodies, nanobodies found in llamas can detect and attach to certain proteins, like the ones that cover the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Antibodies from humans and other animals bind to these spike proteins, blocking them from entering the cell. Because they are smaller, however, nanobodies can bind to little pockets in the protein that larger antibodies might miss. Additionally, nanobodies can maintain their shape in extreme environments, such as the acid-filled stomach, where human antibodies are less stable. “These [nanobodies] can block—do block quite potently—the interaction between the virus and the human cell,” Ray Owens, a professor of molecular biology at the University of Oxford and one of the study’s senior authors, tells Grace Huckins of Wired. “They basically neutralize the virus.”

July 20

  • The preliminary results of a clinical trial suggest a new treatment for Covid-19 dramatically reduces the number of patients needing intensive care, according to the UK company that developed it. The treatment from Southampton-based biotech Synairgen uses a protein called interferon beta which the body produces when it gets a viral infection. The protein is inhaled directly into the lungs of patients with coronavirus, using a nebuliser, in the hope that it will stimulate an immune response. The initial findings suggest the treatment cut the odds of a Covid-19 patient in hospital developing severe disease - such as requiring ventilation - by 79%. Patients were two to three times more likely to recover to the point where everyday activities were not compromised by their illness, Synairgen claims.

July 23

1 August

  • Russia says it will begin mass producing a coronavirus vaccine in October. It will first be distributed to teachers and doctors.

12 August

  • Cases top 20 million and deaths top 750 thousand. Daily deaths have been very steady since the beginning of April at about 5000 per day.

30 August

  • Cases top 28 million and deaths top 850 thousand.

29 September

  • Global Covid deaths exceed 1 million, with 33 million cases recorded.

7 October

14 October (Some good recent articles)

7 November

15 January

  • It's been a very long time since I updated these pages. Here's where we now stand:

  • There have been more than 95 million cases of Covid-19 recorded.

  • More than two million globally have died with the virus.

  • Several vaccines are now approved and in use, including the vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna, Oxford/Astra-Zeneca, China, Russia (Sputnik5). As of today, this chart shows who is leading the vaccination race (get the latest version and choose your own countries of interest HERE.)

  • It's painful to me to see that France is one of the worst on this list, but the prime minister has promised that by the end of January it will have caught up with its neighbours (yeah, right). Hats off to Israel, the UK and the US.

  • Excess deaths, the best way to measure the true impact of the virus, were about 14% for the UK in 2020, meaning that for every 7 people who would have died in a normal year, 8 people died in 2020.

  • Excess deaths in France in 2020 were about 9%, meaning that for every 11 people who would have died in a normal year, 12 people died in 2020.

  • Here are daily mortality rates per 100k for selected countries on a log scale. Get the latest version and choose your own countries of interest HERE. Some countries seem to have a very recent sharp drop but I think it's too soon for this to be caused by vaccination (there is a 5 week delay between catching the virus and dying from it).