This past week I’ve been journeying from one end of the UK and back, from Devon to Edinburgh and Glasgow, via London and a side trip to Surrey. On the way I took note of how different communities maintained mask-wearing. Why wear a mask? There’s plenty of evidence that just…

I love my iPad. It’s not exactly new: it’s a 12.9 inch model from three years ago. But even so, it’s light and convenient and fast enough not to be painful. What I like about it: easy to write with (I have this keyboard) drawing with a pencil is almost…

I’ve just realised why my estimates of R do not tally with the established figures, especially after the peak. The reason is an absurdly simple case of user error, for which I can only apologise. The R0 estimate.R function accepts an epidemic curve as its primary data. An epidemic curve…

History shows that fewer hours worked does not mean lower productivity — In 2019 Microsoft Japan reported that cutting the working week to four days improved productivity by 40%: 4-Day Workweek Boosted Workers' Productivity By 40%, Microsoft Japan Says Workers at Microsoft Japan enjoyed an enviable perk this summer: working four days a week, enjoying a three-day weekend…www.npr.org The gains came partly from cost reductions. Less electricity was used and fewer documents were printed.

A few weeks ago I announced that I was determined to reach a healthy BMI this year. How am I doing? — The Plan It’s been a few weeks now since I decided that now was the time to get fit: Getting Fitter To Fight COVID-19 Anyone can publish on Medium per our Policies, but we don't fact-check every story. For more info about the coronavirus,…link.medium.com The gist of my scheme was as follows: frequent short (10 minute or less) workouts in between homeschooling lessons

Herd immunity occurs when enough of the population, by one means or another, are immune to a disease, such that chains of infection are unlikely to occur. Acquiring that immunity can be via a vaccine, or through immunity acquired by an earlier infection. We can define herd immunity in terms…

So far during the lockdown, I haven’t left the village to any great extent. Occasionally I’d cycle as far as the next village, and sometimes drive to the automatic milk vending machine a few miles away. But I never went on any major roads let alone into the city. But…

I have written previously about the R0 package and how it can be used to estimate R, and I have used this to build a Shiny app to re-calculate R on demand with the latest data. In the app, I make a rather wildly inaccurate, or rather, unstable prediction about…

My mother and father lived through WW2 – my mother as an Irish immigrant girl evacuated away from her family in London to the countryside in Britain, and my father served in the British Army Intelligence Corps in Dunkirk, North Africa, Italy among other places. My mother remembers the first…