Coronavirus – Day #108

The first of the month is usually an admin day for me. I get to spend it doing backups, accounting and so on. I haven’t done the Wizard’s Tower accounts yet because it is Canada Day across the Atlantic and consequently no one is at work at Kobo to run their June accounts reports.

I have put in a request to run a party at Worldcon. I wonder what that might be for?

I have also booked up for Virtual World Fantasy. After all, I can. (It is in Utah this year so I would not have been able to attend physically.)

The big news in the outside world today is of a major piece of dishonesty by the UK government. Their reporting of COVID-19 cases has been divided into two groups, the so-called “pillar 1” and “pillar 2”. Pillar 1 consists of the results of tests performed by government agencies. Pillar 2 consists of the results of tests performed by private contractors. A week or so ago there were very few pillar 2 tests. Now there are a lot, but they are not included in the official government statistics.

The official statistics say that new cases of COVID-19 have been steady at around 1000 per day for a while, and have been dropping slowly. But when you include the pillar 2 tests you see that infections are rising rapidly and the current rate is around 5000 per day.

This is not yet being relfected in the death tallies, but we know that the virus takes a while to incubate and people don’t die immediately. It seems like a spike in deaths is just around the corner.

Interestingly the rise in new cases seems to be quite localised. As you may have heard, Leicester has been very hard hit. So have a few locations in Wales. Mostly this seems to be a result of people being rushed back to work and employers not putting proper precautions in place. I’ve seen reports that at least one employer in Leicester ordered staff into work even though they were sick.

The government will doubtless blame it all on Black Lives Matter protests, even though the locations of the outbreaks are not strongly correlated with major demonstrations.

Right now there doesn’t seem to be any serious rise in cases in the South West, but I will keep my eye on the situation.