As someone who taught himself BASIC in the 1980s and was taught Fortran 77 in the early 1990s*, I do need to try and keep up with modern developments. One of the things I have being wanting to for a while now, is find a way of putting some simple plotting/data analysis on the web, […]
I have been reading a couple of reports looking at the UK government’s guidance on the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers whose patients may be infected with COVID-19. One report by Dinah Gould and Edward Purssell was commissioned by the Royal College of Nursing and is pretty damning of the process […]
The attack rate of an infectious disease is the % chance that you contract it. I think it is term was introduced by epidemiologists. A high attack rate is bad of course, a lower one would be better, so we want to know what the attack rate depends on. Epidemiologists typically want to know how […]
Above is Diego Velazquez’s portrait of Philip IV of Spain. He is not the best looking royal, and has what is sometimes called the Habsburg jaw, i.e., a very large jaw, attributed in this case to a lot of cousin marrying by his royal dynasty, the Habsburgs. They were rather inbred. Lab experiments on how […]
On Wednesday I watched (via Zoom of course) a webinar by Prof Jose Jimenez: Airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, and how to protect ourselves: What we know now. You can watch it on YouTube. I learnt a lot from it. Jimenez and coworkers have repurposed a model originally developed for the transmission of TB through the […]
Today I had my first dose of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. Waiting for it in the queue at the G Live vaccination centre felt a bit like Christmas morning when I was kid – the same anticipation of receiving an exciting gift, although in this case it is an 80% reduced chance of death in […]
As numerous relatives have (delightedly!) pointed out, due to my recent 50th birthday, I am now sufficiently old to be in the next or next-but-one group to be vaccinated. Turns out the advantage of getting old is not wisdom, which I don’t appear to be acquiring, but moving up the vaccine queue. So I am […]
It occurs to me that a lot, perhaps most, of the papers I am reading on COVID-19 research, are preprints, not articles in peer-reviewed journals. These are mostly not by physicists, who have been putting preprints on arXiv for over 20 years, but by scientists in a whole range of fields, including medicine. The biomedical […]
Surprisingly, it is easier to filter out (from air) particles tens of nanometres across, than it is to filter particles hundreds of nanometres across. The image above shows why. The orange and green curves show the trajectories of two particles in air flowing through a model mask. The model is a two-dimensional cross section of […]
It has not been a good year for the world, but we have achieved one remarkable and good thing. Flu infections are at historic lows. We have successfully suppressed the flu virus. We have been less successful with the, more infectious, SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, but with flu we have been successful. Presumably this […]
