Coronavirus 18

Saturday 28th March

13/03/2020	11
14/03/2020	21
15/03/2020	35
16/03/2020	55
17/03/2020	71
18/03/2020	104
19/03/2020	144
20/03/2020	177
21/03/2020	233
22/03/2020	281
23/03/2020	335
24/03/2020	422
25/03/2020	465
26/03/2020	578
27/03/2020	759
28/03/2020	1019

29/03/2020

1228

UK deaths are almost doubling every three days. If such an exponential growth continues there will be a million deaths by the end of April and everyone will be dead before May ends.

Of course that won't happen. Even if we do nothing, the virus will not be able to find new victims so the death rate will slow. There will be an inflection in the logistic curve.

And we are doing a lot, by staying at home and being very careful. Some have been irresponsibly careless, including the Prime Minister and Health Secretary by not applying their own rules on social distancing to themselves.
The Financial Times is displaying global data in a useful (and free) way.

There is still almost as much uncertainty about key factors as there was when I started writing this series in early February. We don't know how many cases there are, we don't know the R0 number, we don't know the case fatality rate.

What we can be certain about is that for the last decade and more government has not applied the Precautionary Principle, has left the health service woefully under resourced and has ignored a wealth of scientific advice and recommendations. It has all been compounded by a litany of bad decision making since January.

London has become one of the global hot-spots for Covid-19 infection yet Heathrow is still receiving and sending out flights from and to every corner of the world. Flight numbers may have reduced by over 80% but these international airports are still ensuring that the global pandemic is maintained.
You can watch it happening minute by minute at FlightRadar.

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With extraordinary prescience, Professor Tim Lang's Book,  Feeding Britain : Our Food Problems and How to Fix Them, was published this week. Written just before SARS-CoV-2 was a thing, it tells us what we really need to know about the UK's food system.

Buy the book, and read the book when you've done work in the veg plot.