Fascinating stuff here from noted stats nerd David Higgins: I should have made a chart of this days ago! The numbers new cases admitted to hospital with COVID-19 in Ireland peaked over a week ago. 30 March – 13131 March – 9801 April – 10702 April – 7903 April – 8504 April – 62#FlattenTheCurve pic.twitter.com/VlEARoWjtp […]
Amid the Coronavirus pandemic, palliative care specialist Dr Kathryn Mannix urges people to talk about dying; from her experience, most ‘very sick people’ – ‘[f]rom teenagers to pensioners’ – although mostly ‘afraid that their illness and death will cast a shadow over the people they love’ find themselves ‘utterly unable to discuss this worry with […]
I’m writing this on the evening of day six of our four week “lockdown” (as if we were in prison) in New Zealand. So far we have survived pretty well, something I put down to having jobs which have so far not been too disrupted by the shutting down of the entire country, and good […]
We need the full truth from the media and government with regard to protective clothing, testing, the WHO China and more Ben Scallan reports
It is said that in a war the first casualty is truth. The world is at war today in a unique way. There is not a corner of the globe that has resisted the onslaught of the lethal, microscopic,viral army. We should be united, co-operating and we should certainly suspend ‘business as usual’ when it comes […]
A Burmese Cardinal has called on the Chinese Communist Party to apologise and pay compensation, especially to poorer countries, for causing the coronavirus pandemic “through its criminal negligence and repression”. Cardinal Charles Maung Bo, Archbishop of Yangon in Myanmar and president of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences, said “international voices are being raised against […]
Healthcare workers have hit out at government plans to have people submit recordings of Ireland’s call to help front-line staff deal with the coronavirus crisis. Lat week, Tania Banotti, head of Creative Ireland, said the online initiative would show appreciation and help to inspire medical staff on the frontline. However, the response from many of those frontline […]
Credit to whatever low-paid research nerd at C-Span who is spending the crisis sitting at home and watching old political clips for coming up with this gem: President George W. Bush in 2005: "There is no pandemic flu in our country or in the world at this time. But if we wait for a pandemic […]
The latest figures from the HSPC show that a shocking 1,084 of the coronavirus cases in Ireland are associated with healthcare workers are. That’s 27% of the total number of confirmed cases – a percentage that keeps creeping upwards as new numbers are released. These numbers are horrific and completely unacceptable. The failure of the government to protect the people on the […]
For weeks now, with the coronavirus crisis ongoing, many countries have implemented travel bans, and airlines around the world have found themselves grounded in unprecedented numbers. While this is obviously a disaster for the economy, it does present a unique opportunity: could this be scientists’ chance to prove or disprove man-made climate change? To answer […]
My reading suggestion for these difficult times is probably not very original, undoubtedly challenging, but also certainly fully worth trying. It’s Dante’s La Divina Commedia. The quarantine we are experiencing or will be experiencing soon gives us much more time than we usually have; it forces us to stay inside, and it leads us to ponder […]
A GP surgery in South Wales is apologising for asking some patients ‘to complete a “do not resuscitate” form in case their conditions deteriorated due to coronavirus’; the letter from Llynfi Surgery in Maesteg ‘said that indicating they would not want to be resuscitated had “several benefits”’, informing them that ‘people with life-limiting illnesses who […]