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Coronavirus Healthcare News Politics

The COVID Inquiry and the Transfer to Care Homes Case

Introduction As the official COVID-19 inquiry gets under way we see some of the core issues resurfacing: Boris Johnson’s dilettante approach to government; the profiteering VIP lane; and Matt Hancock’s purported ‘protective ring around care homes’ that nevertheless failed to prevent tens of thousands of deaths among residents.[1] The latter is perhaps the one issue […]

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Coronavirus Healthcare

Coronavirus Update 25/04/2020 – It’s Too Early to Lift Restrictions

As anticipated, the Coronavirus outbreak has definitively entered new phases in both the UK and the US, in the wake of ‘lockdown’ restrictions limiting non-essential production and consumption and encouraging populations to stay at home. These policies are centralised in the UK and State-wide in most of the US. As we can see from Chart […]

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Coronavirus Healthcare News

Coronavirus Update 09/04/2020 – Light at the End of the Tunnel?

It is notable the extent to which the UK and US patterns of Covid-19 growth are now following each other, with similar rates of case growth and of the rise in deaths from the Coronavirus epidemic. (Chart 1)

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Coronavirus Healthcare News Politics

Coronavirus Update 26/03/2020

Whilst both the UK and the US can be said to have been slow in initiating forceful measures to deal with the Coronavirus epidemics in their countries, the UK government under Prime Minister Boris Johnson has now, albeit not always with the necessary clarity, announced shutdowns of most social-mixing in Britain. Only ‘essential workers’ – […]

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Coronavirus Healthcare News Politics

The Mathematics of the Coronavirus

Epidemics and Exponential Growth Some of the most important information about the Coronavirus (Covid-19) epidemic is to be found not from medical knowledge or in the lab but from basic mathematics. The key to understanding this behaviour is in the mathematics of exponential growth. What does this mean? There are two ways in which regular […]