Lots of talk from politicians and others that, while not exactly triumphalist, is certainly very positive and enthusiastic about the prospect of vaccinating ourselves out of trouble. Here’s one of the earliest “light at the end of the tunnel” articles for example. And with the new Oxford/AZ vaccine there is renewed excitement. Sorry to pour…
Continuing from previously…I have done some upgrades to the method and now have some results that I think are quite acceptable. Most importantly, after thinking about (and getting half-way to implementing) appropriate covariance matrices for the overlapping fortnightly observational summaries, I decided that the most sensible thing to do was just to use a single…
I’ve grumbled for a while about the ONS analyses of their infection survey pilot (pilot? isn’t it a full-blown survey yet?) without doing anything about it. The purpose of this blog is to outline the issue, get me started on fixing it (or at least presenting my own approach to an analysis) and commit me…
Way back in the mists of time (ie, 2006), jules and I saw what was going on with people estimating climate sensitivity, and in particular how this literature was interpreted by the authors of the IPCC AR4. And we didn’t like it. We thought that any reasonable synthesis should consider the multiple lines of evidence…
Even odder than finding that our old EnKF approach for parameter estimation was particularly well suited to the epidemiological problem, was finding that someone else had independently invented the same approach more recently…and had started using it for COVID-19 too! In particular, this blogpost and the related paper, leads me to this 2013 paper wherein…
I’ve mainly focussed on Vallance, partly because he was the Govt’s Chief Scientific Advisor and also co-Chair of SAGE (along with Whitty) but also because he’s had the most to say, and been the most clearly wrong in what he did say. But it’s also interesting to compare and contrast with other prominent members of…
I’ve sent the following letter to the Public Inquiry, noting the significant and repeated inconsistencies between what Vallance has recently testified about the events in mid-March 2020, and what the contemporaneous documentary evidence of that period actually says. This evidence includes, rather amusingly, Vallance himself in one of the daily PM statements and press conferences.…
One thing that all the protagonists (myself included) agree on is that SAGE’s estimate of doubling time in mid-March was of critical importance. Vallance testified forcefully to this effect in 2020: When the SAGE sub-group on modelling, SPI-M, saw that the doubling time had gone down to three days, which was in the middle of…
Ok I’m going to do a bit of analysis of Vallance’s evidence to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, focussing specifically on the events of the mid-March 2020 period up to the imposition of the first “lockdown” on 23rd March. On Monday 20th Nov 2023 he was interviewed by the Inquiry and also provided some written testimony.…
The currently ongoing Module 2 describes its aims thusly: This module will look at, and make recommendations upon, the UK’s core political and administrative decision-making in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic between early January 2020 until February 2022, when the remaining Covid restrictions were lifted. It will pay particular scrutiny to the decisions taken by…
I can see I’m going to have to go over all this again. It’s not a task I really face with much enthusiasm, but it doesn’t seem like anyone else is prepared to do it. To say I’m disappointed at the revisionism, sleight-of-hand and downright misleading testimony from several senior scientists to the UK Covid-19…
As you may have noticed, there hasn’t been a lot of science getting done here recently. The basic reason for this is that we’ve decided to retire and close down Blue Skies Research Ltd. We set it up about 10 years ago, when we returned from Japan, and have had a lot of fun continuing…
I haven’t blogged in ages but have actually done a bit of work. Specifically, I eventually wrote up my new reconstruction of the Last Glacial Maximum. We did this back in 2012/3 (see here) but since then there have been lots more model simulations, and then in 2020 Jessica Tierney published a new compilation and…
There is currently lot of debate on how and when we lift restrictions, and the risks of this. There are several unknowns that may affect the outcome. I have extended the model in a couple of simple ways, firstly by including a vaccination effect which both immunises people, and substantially reduces the fatality rate of…
There’s been quite an amazing turnaround since my last blog post. At the time I wrote that, the Govt was insisting that schools would open as planned (indeed they did open the very next day), and that another lockdown was unthinkable. So my grim simulations were performed on that basis. Of course, the next evening,…
BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk 