08:00 Lois and I tumble out of the shower - my turn to clean today: damn! We otherwise have only one job to do today - to order next week's groceries from Budgens, the convenience store in the village.
10:00 After that we go for a walk in Pittville Park - it's chock full of people but, apart from family groups or couples they're all socially-distancing, which is nice. It's another mild day and sunny, and the crocuses etc are all out.
we showcase parts of the park lake, and also (in the distance)
the Pittville Pump Room, built in the 1820's
We listen to the radio, the latest edition of "Last Word". We try and hear this programme every Friday, so we can find out if anyone has died this week, or not.
The comedy writer Iain Pattinson has died, sadly, at the age of 68. Iain wrote continuity jokes for the comedy radio quiz show, "I'm Sorry, I haven't a Clue".
"When we see pictures of the avuncular Harold Wilson puffing on his pipe in the Cabinet Office, you'd never guess that he was widely believed to be a Russian-funded drug user, who planned the assassination of his political secretary, with whom he was having an adulterous affair. Today, of course, a Prime Minister would never get away with smoking indoors".
Iain Pattinson
Iain was known for the ability to write deadpan reports that might seem totally innocent at first hearing, but which were capable of being interpreted differently after a few seconds' thought. And he always claimed that this was purely the fault of the listener's disgusting mind, and nothing to do with him personally - what madness!
the "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" team
He was responsible for lots of the programme's so-called background stories, many of them ostensibly about the show's "secretary" and "score-keeper", Samantha. In one of these, he reported that she had "just nipped out to meet a gentleman builder-friend who's come to insulate her roof space": and that she's "very much looking forward to getting felt laid down in the loft".
Or this one: "Samantha's just nipped out to meet a gentleman-bee-keeper-friend. She's just started keeping bees herself - three dozen or so, and she says her friend's an 'expert-handler'. Apparently he carefully takes out her 38 bees and soon has them flying around his head".
Lois and I didn't know that, although a high school drop-out, Iain was something of a history buff. In one of the many "continuity pieces" he wrote for the show, he reported that "in the 1820's, an Aylesbury man became Britain's first forensic scientist. It was Grisham Elliott who devised a system for the storage and cataloguing of stolen goods, in what we now call the 'British Museum' ".
When the show was visiting the town of Stoke-on-Trent, he reported for the show that "in the 1550's, most of the county of Staffordshire was given to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who is believed to have been the secret lover of Queen Elizabeth I. Rumours of an affair spread after Dudley's wife suspiciously died when she fell down the stairs. Notes for what may have been Dudley's carefully-formulated murder plot were later discovered. which had Step 1, Step 3, Step 7 and Step 25."
I don't know - what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, with Queen Elizabeth I
flashback to February 2015 - Lois and I see a live performance of the radio quiz
"I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" at the Centaur Theatre, Cheltenham Racecourse,
and I come away with a souvenir "Mornington Crescent" mug
20:00 We settle down on the couch and watch a TV documentary, a Horizon Special on "Coronavirus: What We Know Now".
They talk about the debated best time interval between the first and second dose of vaccine. With most vaccines, an interval of some kind seems to induce an immune response of higher quality. When you have your first dose, you activate a whole range of immune cells, some of which are better than doing the job than others. So if you go back and boost within 3-4 weeks, you are boosting all of those cells, including the rubbish ones. But if you wait 8-12 weeks, some of the not-so-good cells tend to die out, so the second dose only has to boost the very high quality cells, which gives the person overall a much higher quality response. Simples!
We all know about the R number, which for this virus would be about 3 in the absence of controls: i.e. the average infected person infects 3 other people. But there's also a K number, which looks at clusters of infections. K is relatively small for coronavirus - and if K number is small, a relatively small proportion of infected people will pass the infection on. For coronavirus only 10% of infected people account for 90% of transmissions - yikes!
The likelihood that you'll transmit the virus to others depends to some extent at least on your individual biology - such things as the thickness of your saliva, how violently you cough, and how loud you speak: my god! Luckily I speak so quietly that Lois can't also hear me when I'm sitting next to her on the sofa.
The most infectious time is the 24 hours before and after you first become aware of symptoms. This makes "superspreader events" very important in tracing programmes. And it would help if we did not just do forward tracing, but did more backward tracing, like they do in some countries e.g. Japan, to see who the infected person has been in contact with previously. Whoever gave you the virus probably gave it to several other people, who ought to be traced.
We hear a bit about ideas for future developments in testing: for example continuous sampling of sewers. When someone has an infection, billions of virus fragments are shed in their urine and faeces, and these get washed into the sewers - yuck! The plan would be that if a particular sewage treatment station sees a surge in levels they can alert the local authority to respond rapidly with a targeted testing programme and hopefully stifle any outbreak.
The good news is that there have been huge advances in our knowledge of how to treat the more seriously infected persons in hospitals, whether by drugs or other means. The risk of dying of the virus in a hospital has decreased from 35% to 15%, and even Intensive Care Unit (ICU) survival rates went up from 58% in March 2020 to over 80%, even by as early as June 2020.
The "herd immunity factor" (H), the proportion of the population needing to be vaccinated, is given by the formula H=(1-1/R)/E, where E is the percentage efficiency of the vaccine. If the vaccine efficiency is 79%, then 84% of the population needs to be vaccinated. However, if the efficiency becomes a bit less, say 77%, then the proportion of the population needing to be vaccinated goes up to 87%.
There are various unknowns, needless to say. The base rate of R for coronavirus is 3, but new variants could have a larger base R number. Newer variants like the so-called UK variant could have an R number as high as 4 or 5. If R becomes 4, and vaccine efficacy remains at 77%, then the figure for obtaining herd immunity goes up from 87% to 97% of the population needing to be vaccinated, a level which may be unrealistic.
Something like that anyway haha!
Fascinating stuff !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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