Tuesday 20 October 2020 - Lockdown in Timperley

We are still allowed to walk along the Bridgewater Canal towpath. Very nice too at this time of year.

I've been sorting through some old postcards, and found this one.

My daughter Kate has commented that when exactly the same thing happened on a school trip to New York when she was a supervising teacher, as a result of her experience in Paris as a sixteen year old, she knew exactly what to do.

Today a walk to Altrincham and Timperley to sort out my mobile phone contract and get beef for 'meals on wheels' for Mike and Sarah, saw me strolling back along Park Road, a normally very busy thoroughfare. Judging by the volume of traffic, we have already entered a more serious phase of the Lockdown that has been a constant since March.

Meanwhile, our good, and somewhat intellectual, friend Cary, has made the following pertinent observations:

On herd immunity:

"Herd Immunity is on my mind:

A) No evidence whatsoever that herd immunity for covid is possible via natural transmission.

B ) The term is applied to vaccination for diseases like measles where decades of observational data suggests that a vaccination rate of at least 85% is needed to prevent the disease reaching those who cannot be vaccinated or the vaccine doesn’t work for.

C) People advocating natural-transmission herd immunity without being honest about what an 85% infection rate means. (As is happening in the US right now - people advocating it)

(Infection fatality rate above 1% but probably below 6%, depending on all sorts of things).

UK population at 70million ... do the math.

It’s not a choice between the economy and health: that level of death, not to mention any morbidity, will damage an economy by itself.

The really hard problem is coming up with a suitable response.

Pretending there’s an easy solution is not a suitable response."

On Trump:

"Mr President, you are almost certainly not immune for the following medical/scientific reasons:
-The immunoglobulin you were given was intended to mop up any virus in your bloodstream
-The Remdesivir was intended to stop any virus replicating
-The dexamethasone was intended to *suppress* your immune system, (and incidentally to stop your body creating an immune response to the immunoglobulin. Peculiar that no news outlets picked this up)

If acting as intended: your immune system would barely have had a chance to develop any immune response at all; there’s no proof that any immunity lasts; and there are patients who have caught it twice.

You haven’t shown any interest in the science apart from this almost unverifiable claim ... but you can probably claim to be the only person in the world to have received all these experimental treatments at once."

Thanks, Cary.