Oh frigate

I wrote recently about how fond I am of swifts and swallows and noted how the swifts spend most of their life on the wing, sleeping by switching down half their brain at a time. While on holiday (remember them?) in the Caribbean earlier in the year we heard about the remarkable frigatebird. With its wingspan of over 2 metres it has the largest wing area to body weight ratio of any bird and is found widely across tropical ocean areas.

It is known that that, while travelling huge distances across the water - flying for up to 2 months at heights up to 4000 metres - the frigatebird sleeps for 45 minutes a day in 10 second bursts. (No, I don't know how they did that research).

On land the birds sleep for one minute at a time throughout the day and night, effectively being asleep half the time. Like swifts the frigatebird performs unihemispheric sleep to keep watch while circling in rising air currents.

Frigate birds are well known for badgering smaller birds until they disgorge part digested food which the frigate bird catches in mid air. Just as well because, unusually for a marine bird, they don't come down on the sea: they snatch prey from the surface using their long hooked bills. They bathe by flying low over the ocean surface and splashing themselves but they don't swim and struggle to to take off from the water due to their short legs. They aren't great walkers either, so they sit around a lot.

Besides its heavily forked tail, a distinguishing feature of the male frigatebird is its red gular pouch, which is normally hardly visible:

but which it inflates in a preposterous courtship ritual, rather outdoing a robin:

There are five varieties of frigatebird: Ascension, Christmas, Great, Lesser and Magnificent. So when you hear reference to the magnificent frigatebird it's not a compliment, just its name.

Travel over huge distances has been frequently documented, particularly when they depart the colony where they were born. But they generally remain near the islands where they breed and prefer to stay close to land, usually within the range where they can find flying fish (no need to get wet to take them I suppose).  European sailors learned that local sailors in the tropics thought frigatebirds to be a good omen because their presence indicated land was close.

There are stories that frigatebirds could be relied on to return home and so were used in several island areas to relay messages like carrier pigeons. Polynesian poetry refers to taking pet birds on their sailing canoes as they could be relied upon to fly off in the direction of land, or return if land was not within easy flying range.

Frigatebirds are monogamous and the males and females collaborate in feeding their young for the first three months, after which the male's attendance trails off, leaving the mother to feed the chicks for another 5 or 6 months, amongst the longest duration of parental care for any birds. Which is probably why one of our tour guides on St Vincent this year referred disparagingly to her husband as being just like a "damned frigatebird". I suppose she meant that he sat around a lot half asleep, hung around for a while but then disappeared for months on end leaving her to bring up the kids.

Come to think of it Mrs H might feel I have some things in common with the frigatebird as well as the swift, though in my case I left her with the kids and went to play football. Where I would spend a lot of time shouting at my fellow defenders for being half asleep and to stay alert. Which I seem to have heard somewhere else lately....

Ministers should tell it straight

Back on 30 April I pronounced "we're long past the peak but they don't seem to want us to know that"  - and then within an hour or two Boris Johnson announced that we were past the peak. As my blog had been in draft for two days I must be a bit more dynamic. (It wasn't the words, I was struggling to get the axis right on my excel graph and import it in a decent enough form. Meanwhile they kept publishing more data...).

In that speech Johnson held out the hope of an easing of the restrictions but without risking crashing into a second mountain as we come out from the tunnel under the first, as Johnson put it. Although it sounded mangled and contrived I thought it was actually quite a good and tangible analogy. Now Johnson has stuck with the mountain analogy, saying in his much awaited TV address on Sunday that there is often more risk in coming down the mountain.

The speech has received mixed reviews and Johnson is now at some political risk in trying to move forward. The "stay alert" message is blatantly less clear than "stay home": note how they have to be two words, die hard, lethal weapon, star wars.... It is presumably designed to be useful during a period of change in the measures, so its meaning can't be as unmistakably obvious. At least yet. I take it as a proxy for "keep your wits about you, heed the current advice" as the current advice will change and, like financial investments, can move in either direction. It may or may not prove to be a good slogan, but I don't think we can tell yet.

Criticism of the PM for not giving full detail on Sunday seemed petty - in a ten minute TV address in which he said further detail would follow in his full announcement to Parliament? (Maybe that's why, traditionally, it's done the other way round, telling Parliament first, Boris). But the Times had a poll which showed why people thought what they did about Johnson's performance. While their poll showed 44% support for the changes to enable unlimited exercise and that those who can go to work should, with 43% opposed, support was stronger from males, leave voters and over 50s. In other words people who were more likely to have voted for Johnson. So whether people agree with what he said or not actually tells you more about them than about what he said.

According to Dominic Sandbrook* the procession of people critical of the government interviewed on BBC recently nearly all turn out to be a motley collection of left wingers and Corbynites. It doesn't mean they are wrong about PPE, testing or whatever but it makes one wonder about balance. Tell me how you voted in the referendum and general election and I'll tell you what you think about the job the government is doing....

A specific criticism in Scotland and Wales of the PM's TV address was that the he should have made clearer that the specific changes he was trailing apply in England, the details for other countries being devolved which, on the face of it, is a fair cop. But then the devolved administrations like nothing more than to try to bounce the PM and the national government. And you can only get an agreed position if everyone wants to agree. I think it was 100% deliberate and I don't, personally, blame him trying to railroad the devolved administrations as they try it on him all the time.

So Mark Drakeford, the First Minister of what is now known officially as the Welsh Parliament rather than Assembly (it's still the Senedd in Welsh) got his retaliation in first by speaking on Friday lunchtime. And it was immediately clear to me that I wouldn't be playing golf in Wales this week, whatever Boris announced, as Drakeford announced no change except that garden and recycling centres could open.

To be fair to Drakeford he presumably knew that Johnson was going to go further and so he either had to fall in line or speak first, as speaking after Johnson would never have worked. And there are reasons for Wales taking a more cautious approach. While Wales and Scotland have a lower death toll per 100,000 of population than England (35 for Wales v 51 for England) Wales has more total cases - 365 per 100,000 against 251 for England**. I found this surprising as Wales is doing far fewer tests so it is presumably a genuine difference. And on that point about testing, whatever you think about the slow start England go off to on testing and the rapid increase in recent weeks, Wales is in a huge hole in comparison, with a capacity to do less than half the number of tests per million of population that England can do***. This has left the first minister plaintively sticking with the argument that it isn't necessary to test everyone in care homes, while Matt Hancock was desperately trying to find more people to test from care homes or anywhere else to get up to his 100,000 target. (For the record, I agree with Drakeford and may come back to testing when I get around to finishing reading a recent Harvard Medical School report on the subject I've found online).

As well as a higher pro rata number of cases and lower testing capacity, Wales has a weaker and less resilient NHS than England and an almost total lack of private healthcare capacity in much of the country. All of which may have been why we were left still firmly in lockdown in Wales while England has started to relax ever so slightly. Even though, painfully for me, this meant golf courses in Wales would remain closed while they re-open in England, I could understand the reasoning in Wales and so accepted it without being too glum. If it is decided to devolve powers it is only to be expected that there will be some differences, otherwise what is the point in doing it?

So I found it a bit puzzling that people fretted over the anomalies and the fact that the nations couldn't agree on every last detail. The devolved administrations are bound to take a different view on many issues because their situations differ in many respects. But then it is easy for Wales, Scotland and Ireland to be cautious and let England lead in re-opening the economy. After all, they probably feel that, in the limit, the English will bail them out.

A couple of days later Wales fell a bit more into line and said golf courses could open after all from next week, which also required the revision of guidance on travelling to take exercise. There is a different emphasis, requiring people to "stay local" which I think makes good sense. My only real criticism of the Johnson approach at this stage is that it seems unnecessarily risky to say that people can travel as far as they want to exercise, but setting specific limits is difficult. I'd stick with a formula on the lines of "for exercise purposes you should not travel further than the nearest suitable large open space". This would enable the Cumbrian police to turn back folk with canoes on the car roof who have driven for more than an hour to get there, which seems irresponsible.

Indeed, the main thrust of Johnson's speech was exactly what I thought it should be: those who can go back to work should try to do so. Indeed Mrs H will confirm that I've been saying for some time that  the basis of the first relaxation message should be "if your work is not on the list of banned activities (like hairdressing, restaurants) and you can't work from home then you should speak to your employer about whether they have set up arrangements for you to be able to go back to work." Although the unions were initially hostile, when the further details came through the next day there was a sea change with a fair bit of support from many unions and some constructive dialogue about difficult issues such as transport.

But isn't it remarkable that Johnson should say "those who can go back to work should". One might ask why they haven't been working? I've noted before that many activities which were not prohibited were wound down because some businesses thought it was in their interest to furlough people. And some individuals chose, for their own reasons, to stay at home even when they weren't required to do so.  Sources say Johnson, soon after leaving hospital, said that the opportunity to not work was "well and truly taken". The government have to pull off a number of well judged manoeuvres now and one of them is to decide how to keep businesses in the game while weaning the economy of Sunak's blanket dose of financial heroin, a task which he started on Tuesday.

Meanwhile the journalists continue to have a nightmare in terms of their generally pathetic contributions at the daily briefings. Beth Rigby, Sky's political editor with the low voice and, it would seem, equally low IQ is my current bete noir. On the Thursday before the VE Day bank holiday she put it to Dominic Raab that it was confusing to people that the PM had indicated changes from Monday, which they would have read (though only through press speculation) would include more outdoor exercise and sunbathing, but he "doesn't turn up" to tell those people what the changes might be ahead of the sunny bank holiday weekend. Now I feel that the politicians have been excessively polite, with the odd exception - I think it was Matt Hancock who called one journalist's question "stupid", earning a round of applause in our house at least. Raab said the government would take the right decisions at the right time and implied that it had not yet received all the necessary advice to take the decision. I felt he should have told her to go away and reflect on what happened in San Franscisco when the Spanish flu lockdown ended in 1918. Mass gatherings recommenced, there were street parties and, soon, a substantial second wave of infections. Beth needed to be told that's exactly why the announcement was delayed until Sunday.

On Sunday Rigby said the PM had acknowledged that we may never find a vaccine. Leaving aside the thought that her choice of words implies she thought we'd find one hiding behind the sofa, no politician or expert has, to my knowledge, ever claimed that development of an effective vaccine was certain. Johnson humoured Rigby before saying he hoped "we will achieve a virus" before correcting himself a few moments later. We already knew long ago that Johnson is not very good at dealing with questions. For someone obviously bright he seems to need quite a lot of time to process the question and so his answers rarely come out crisply. Presumably he was flummoxed by the thought that someone so brain dead could actually speak.

Other questions were more useful in so far as they put questions that many other people might be thinking even though the answer is obvious. There was a harmless lady who told the PM on Sunday evening that he was telling her to go back to work but her child was still off school, there was no childcare available and she didn't know how she could safely travel. Boris quietly gave the right answer: she should talk to her employer who he hoped would be sympathetic. Meanwhile I'm screaming at the TV that the prime minister can't possibly sort out childcare and study travel options for millions of people who need to take a reasonable degree of responsibility for themselves.

Back in the day psychometric profiling at work revealed that I can, on occasion, lack empathy (really? tell me something that wasn't obvious I hear some of you say). I fear the questions at the briefing sessions have confirmed that tendency......but sometimes it is necessary to tell people to just get on with it.

The government will quite rightly leave time for people to get their minds around their situation. But I seem to be in a minority who think the guidance and advice is, for the most part, perfectly clear and that many intelligent people who say it isn't are being deliberately obtuse. Maybe it's just me - Mrs H and I disagreed quite volubly on this on Monday evening, though she came round more to my view after listening to Alok Sharma's briefing on Tuesday. Nevertheless, I wish the government would let an attack dog off the leash to spell things out for those who need it.

Perhaps something like this:

"We are past the peak and the R value is somewhere below 1. We can't be absolutely sure by how much so we have to make small changes and see how we go.

We want to get schools open, get people back to work, allow people to have more social interaction and get pubs, restaurants, theatres and so on back open.

Given that we think R is between 0.5 and 0.9 we don't have a lot of scope to make changes without risking a second peak. So it's obvious that we have to prioritise the first two over the last two. That's why many of you could start going back to work from last Monday but we didn't want people partying in the parks over the sunny bank holiday weekend - sorry but that's just the way it is.

So we need people who work in activities that are not currently banned - and which actually have never been banned - to talk to their employer about going back to work if they aren't already working. We thought these activities were sufficiently safe to continue when the lockdown started so (surprise, surprise) we think they are capable of being made safe enough now.

Of course each employer's workplace is different and not every workplace can be adapted to meet the current guidelines. Good employers will have been addressing how best to make the workplace safe, taking account of government and industry guidance. They should also have been consulting with any relevant trade unions. Ask questions if you need to and look at reliable information sources like gov.uk and the Health and Safety Executive's website.

You will also need to think about childcare arrangements (if relevant) and how you travel to work. If public transport is your only option, talk to your employer about flexible working patterns to avoid peak hours and look again with them at how much of your work you could do from home. And, if it's practicable for you, ask about sponsored cycle to work schemes.

Oh and by the way the teachers saying it's not logical that they can teach a class while not seeing their family? Well it's a good job the ICU nurses haven't taken that view, isn't it?

We've got to minimise spread across society while using what scope we have for more interaction to save jobs and the economy. To plagiarise Bill Clinton, it's the economy, stupid rather than stupid partying.

We know this is easier for some people than others but the government can't provide every answer to every individual's questions. You are just going to have to think about some of this for yourself.

And yes, it might seem anomalous - or even unfair - but life isn't fair, coronavirus isn't fair and just what is it about all of that that you lot don't get?

No questions because you've already got more than enough answers. Just go away and get on with it."

I understand why government ministers are being emollient and polite. They need to retain public sympathy and support, which would be easy to lose. So I realise they can't address journalists and the public in that way. But I'd dearly love to see Michael Gove deliver that message. If not I'll volunteer. Alternatively it would be wonderful to tell Beth Rigby her questions are facile.....

* Amongst other things, Sandbrook claimed that all the medics and nurses who appeared on a recent edition of BBC's Panorama were Labour activists or supporters which, if true, makes his statement that the programme was 'shamelessly partisan' prima facie reasonable.  Daily Mail 12 May

** My data on coronavirus cases comes from a super interactive map for much of the world and quite a few specific countries in the New York Times. Don't worry, the UK data is from the NHS and PHE. There is  no paywall. It's at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/europe/united-kingdom-coronavirus-cases.html#states. You can click on menus to get other countries and regional data for most of them.

*** Wales test capacity 2350 per day (from BBC 9 May) equates to 783 per million of population. Scotland capacity is 8350 per day which equates to 1670 per million of population but only a third of that is actually being done (560 per million) from Herald, 10 May. UK tests done 1-7 May, from Downing Street briefing pack 7 May (available on gov.uk) has average UK tests carried out 90,000 per day. With some mixing apples (test capacity) with pears (tests done) English tests are running at around 85000 per day, about 1500 per million of population, though the capacity is somewhat higher.





Sunak has to do this while helping businesses which have a realistic chance of getting back on their feet in a reasonable time. Hello Richard Branson, this isn't Virgin Atlantic. Not because he's a billionaire - it's his decision whether his airline is worth bailing out with his own money, that's the whole point of  limited companies - but because it isn't at all clear when we'll need as much airline capacity as we currently have. There is no point in subsidising activities for which there may be no need for several years. The planes can be mothballed and Richard, or someone else, can start a new airline when the demand is there. But the problem for the government is that logic may be clear for airlines but what about retail, pubs, restaurants, entertainment and so on? I'd argue that most of these businesses (yes, including football clubs) could easily be restarted when they are needed again. If they run out of money and go bust that might be sad, especially for people who have sunk life savings and huge energy into their own restaurant or other endeavour. But that is part of the risk in starting any business: stuff can happen. Sunak is probably hoping things pick up quickly enough for him not to have to decide which businesses he really needs to sustain to restart or the economy because indefinite blanket support is not sustainable.



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The government is going to tell us next week what options there might be for easing the coronavirus restrictions. I doubt it will be much we haven't long since guessed. I'm sure many parents of school age children will be glad to see schools re-open - and probably now think teachers are underpaid. But if R is around 0.7 and opening schools might increase it by 0.2, as some have suggested, that wouldn't leave much scope for restarting the economy. And there's little point in kids going back to school if their parents are sitting at home, it's just not sustainable. One option could be to say the kids can go back if the parents are working, but I can imagine opposition to that idea. It might actually be easier to start some summer camp type options for child minding - I know a fair few youngsters who'd much prefer to be with a golf coach than a teacher and social distancing might be more practicable than at school.

A trickier aspect might be encouraging risk averse people back to work who might prefer to sit it out at home. Rishi Sunak might have to tweak his various schemes, for example putting more restrictions on which type of business can furlough staff going forward, to get the desired result.

For myself it would be good to get back to playing golf - surely one of the sports that lends itself most to social distancing other than perhaps long distance solo cross country skiing. It might also be good for Mrs H's state of mind for me to get back to golf..... Either way I doubt it will be a good idea for us to see our granddaughter yet a while even if it were allowed, notwithstanding her lovely but tearful voice message the other day, saying she can't come to build sandcastles on our local beach "because coronavirus hasn't gone yet".

While we try to get through the next 12-18 months of vaccine development, with no absolute guarantee of success, the elements of a containment strategy based around testing along with civil liberties infringing but absolutely essential track and tracing methods will be critical. This is the real reason why it is important that the government has ramped up testing capability. A lot of the pressure for increasing availability of tests seems to me misguided at best. While testing symptomatic health and other key workers who are self isolating but may not have the disease does add value by getting useful people back to work, it seems to me that randomly testing lots of asymptomatic people hardly adds any value. Unless, that is, it's part of large sample tests as described at Thursday's downing Street briefing which will provide data about spread of the disease and which there was presumably no scope for while testing capacity was limited.

So I understood why Mark Drakeford, Wales's First Minister, plaintively said that there would be no value in extending testing to everybody in care homes. I smirked a bit because this was a rare example of the Welsh or Scottish administrations being bounced by the English, in this case because Matt Hancock had extended testing in England in his desperation to deploy newly available testing capacity and get close to 100,000 tests performed per day by the end of April, Wales having much less testing capacity after the well publicised fiasco at the end of March of the contract they thought they had with Roche that never was according to the company.

It strikes me that it doesn't add much value to do a single test on a asymptomatic care home worker if they don't get the result back immediately. But as usual questions buzzed around my head. How long after exposure to the virus would a test show positive? How long then before symptoms appear? And how quickly can the test results be made available - what are the limitations imposed by the RNA-DNA transformation and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) that the the most reliable type of test currently available relies on?

So I've been reading what I take to be a fairly definitive article on testing from the Harvard Medical School and some other reputable sources*. The Harvard article is in bitesize Q&A form and helpfully jargon-limited.  The PCR test is well established and reliable, with few if any false positives and false negatives mainly due to poor swab taking, not the test itself. But the method takes several hours to produce a result to which you have to add the time to batch up samples, get samples to the lab, run the test and check and return the results. Which is why it tends to take a couple of days, or longer, for people to get their test result. So you can't test someone and give them the all clear before they go on their shift. Faster genetic tests being developed, typically based on a method called loop mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP), hold out the prospect of a test result within half an hour. Still not as quick as a dipstick diabetes or pregnancy test but perhaps we can get to the point where workers get up, take the test, have breakfast and get ready to head off to work having got a negative test result. But we're not there yet.




Testing only tells you not got it at time of test (a few days ago)
....

Isolate over 60s and only have tested people interacting?
Fine as long as over 60s can golf......

* https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/if-youve-been-exposed-to-the-coronavirus

See also good articles in New Scientist:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238477-how-does-coronavirus-testing-work-and-will-we-have-a-home-test-soon/ 
and the American Association for the Advancement of Science:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/standard-coronavirus-test-if-available-works-well-can-new-diagnostics-help-pandemic#

EU courts might not be supreme over national courts after all

I've been reading about a fascinating spat between the German constitutional court and the EU. 

It was sparked when the German courts upheld several complaints against the ECB's bond purchasing programme (aka quantitative easing, QE) started in 2015 that was meant to boost the economy and push inflation up closer to 2%. (More recently coronavirus has prompted more such purchases but that wasn't covered). The German court said the programme was beyond the mandate of the ECB and said the German central bank must quit the scheme within three months unless the ECB can prove its necessity. Wolfgang Munchau comments:

"The ruling raises complex and potentially troubling issues for the EU as a whole. The German constitutional court has accused the ECB and the CJEU, the court of Justice of the European Union, of abusing their power, and of acting beyond their assigned competences. That concept is known in German constitutional law as acting ultra vires. In the German legal interpretation of European integration, all sovereignty still rests with the member states. The EU is clearly not a federal state, but a deferred power. Member states have transferred certain rights to the EU. The German court said it accepts that it is bound by CJEU rulings, but only those that occur within the EU's agreed competences. All bets are off it the CJEU goes ultra vires. And, crucially, the German court decides if and when that happens. (My emphasis)

This is the most serious challenge to the EU's legal framework we have yet come across. 

We expect the ruling to strengthen the determination by the Polish government to press ahead with judicial reform, and to resist interference by the EU into what they consider domestic legal affairs."

But on 8 May the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported that the highest court in the EU had responded:

"In order to ensure that EU law is applied uniformly, the Court of Justice (ECJ) alone ... has jurisdiction to rule that an act of an EU institution is contrary to EU law," a statement said."

"Like other authorities of the member states, national courts are required to ensure that EU law takes full effect. That is the only way of ensuring the equality of member states in the Union they created."

Going off on a temporary tangent, I thought the Germans were meant to be on a newly discovered holiday to mark the end of fascist rule in Germany on 8 May, but apparently that is just Berlin. East Germany used to recognise 8 May as the Day of Liberation and this year Berlin has declared it a holiday. There is now a petition to make it a national holiday (like it is in France) but many are opposed to celebrating the end of fascism in the country, including the AfD, who say it was "a day of defeat". I once worked in a multi-national management team in which, rather to my embarrassment,  the Brits mercilessly repeated chunks of Fawlty Towers dialogue ("I mentioned the war once but I think I got away with it") with the Germans pretending to laugh and the Americans looking on bemused. It really does still seem that many Germans would prefer to ignore that period of history rather than celebrate the fact that it ended and the modern democratic Germany was created, though I can also understand why, for them, the re-unification of Germany marks full liberation.

Returning to the original theme (if you can still remember it) the QE program is credited with having ended the eurozone debt crisis. However, some critics (I imagine especially German ones) argue it flooded markets with cheap money and encouraged government overspending.

As noted by Munchau the German ruling stoked fears that it could be used for anti-EU efforts by the nationalist governments of European Union member states such as Hungary and Poland. There are also fears the decision could help raise objections to a new bond-buying scheme meant to support Italy, Spain and others from economic ruin due to the coronavirus pandemic. But then the EU has never been big on helping out its member states in trouble, just ask the Greeks. Though I can readily understand why the Germans have always been wary of the spendthrift characteristics of most of their neighbours, especially those to the south. But this wrangle has wider implications. As Munchau notes, in the UK the courts operated under the assumption that conflicts between EU and UK law would always be settled on the basis that EU law is supreme.

Hmm. The supremacy of the EU courts was one of my main reasons for accepting Brexit, even though I voted remain. But don't worry Brexiteers, I expect it wasn't all in vain. The legal wrangle won't be resolved anytime soon but, in the limit, I expect the EU would just produce new directives and require member states to change their laws to clarify who is really the boss if it comes to that.

Wolfgang Munchau's always fascinating blog is called Eurointelligence. There's a public and paid for version. See Eurointelligence public, 6 May; 
https://www.eurointelligence.com/public/briefings/2020-05-06.html?cHash=1ddf0cd0d27938bd36f36dc453f57cd4

The DW story is at www.dw.com/en/european-court-of-justice-slams-top-german-courts-ecb-ruling/a-53371145

Bird brain

A sad moment for me in lockdown the other day. Let's keep a sense of perspective - we haven't lost anyone close (that we know of) to coronavirus. But I found a young female blackbird lying on the ground around the back of the house, probably a casualty of one of our neighbours' cats. We've owned five cats ourselves over time - all rescue animals. So we are cat people but they are more populous than ever and callous predators of wild life so I found it ironic when an operations director of the RSPB decided to double his household's cat inventory from two to four. But then I remembered one is very old indeed and he also explained that the two new cats came from a farm and were under sentence of being homed or put down.

I've written before about the joy of listening to blackbirds singing at this time of year and was slightly concerned when, in the course of doing some major clearing work last year, we damaged a nest which we identified as belonging to blackbirds from remnants of the readily identifiable green-blue eggs with brown freckles. But apparently they tend to build new nests each time so I wasn't surprised to see a female hopping around me when I was gardening this year. And a couple of weeks ago Mrs H yelped when she was buzzed by two young male blackbirds which flew out of our hedge at great speed, one in pursuit of the other, as young males of any species, including humans, are wont to do. So picking up what I took to be the mother was depressing.

But later in the day, tending the garden around the front where I'd seen the adult female previously, one fluttered down and hopped around me with a worm in her beak, which cheered me up. No, I can't identify individual birds, though individual blackbirds can be recognised by their singing, but like Mrs H is prone to do I've made up a happy story and decided "my" blackbird family wasn't disrupted by the cat.

So now I'm looking forward to seeing the swallows which should be arriving any time now and swooping low over the golf course in north Wales I used to play before the great lockdown. I realised a couple of years ago that I wasn't sure I could tell swallows and swifts apart by their appearance. The birds swooping around me at knee height clearly had a blue patch on their backs but were flying too fast for me to see their more deeply forked tails. But they were making a softer call than the swifts I was used to hearing when we lived in rural Oxfordshire, whose piercing screeches were clearly heard once it went quiet in the evening as they swooped around high above my head. So I'd never seen a swift from above as they don't land, only being able to see their black silhouettes against the sky. But then they are actually pretty much all black. The blue flashes were a sure giveaway of swallows, as you can see from the photo below which shows a swallow swooping down to take on water.

But the blue colour isn't the only difference between them and their other doppelgangers, the swift and the house martin, though they all look quite similar in flight, especially when you can't see any white flashes against the bright sky. Swallow to the right, with the deepest forked tail:





Swift to the left here, nearly all black, and house martin to the right, least forked tail and white rump:




Swifts generally nest under the eaves of old buildings, although sometimes in tall trees. Swallows like to nest in open fronted buildings such as barns and cowsheds, close to large domestic animals like cattle. It is likely that swallows were much rarer before humans practised animal husbandry. The decline in dairy farming in Britain in favour of arable farming has not suited them. Though a few European swallows over winter in southern Spain, most winter south of the Sahara. Curiously the British swallows go further than their continental neighbours, preferring Botswana and South Africa. I don't remember seeing swallows in Oxfordshire, even though our village was quite horsey, being on the edge of the Lambourn downs. Which doesn't mean they weren't there of course, I might well not have noticed being more preoccupied in those days with profit and loss accounts.

House martins are similar in appearance to swallows and swifts but have a white rump and a much less forked tail. We would also see them in Oxfordshire, but only when we moved from the village into the town as they prefer to nest in urban areas. They can be a bit of a pain if they nest in the eaves of your house, as they did on a neighbour's house, making quite a mess. A pair stays together for the season but, while nests get reused (provided sparrows haven't taken them over) it is rare for two to pair again the following year, even if both survive. So they are serial monogamists. They feed at higher altitude to the swallow and so don't compete for food.  House martins were just called martins until a couple of centuries ago. While some house martins stay in southern Spain and Portugal for the winter most migrate further south. It's not known exactly where - because martins don't share communal roosts it's harder for many of them to be ringed. The most prevalent theory is that martins go to the Congo basin rainforests, though I've read a theory that they may "aerial roost", in other words spend the night on the wing. They have been seen flying high at dusk and descending at dawn. And when ringed birds are caught early in the morning they appear chilled. Which may be why they have evolved with feathery legs like long johns:

Swifts roost in the air so why not martins?

Despite the fact that it's the swallow and swift that look the more similar, it is swallows and martins that are related, both from the hirundinidae family. Neither are even remotely related to swifts, whose closest genetic relations are humming birds. Also migratory, swifts spend only 3 months here a year, the shortest of any bird that reproduces here apart from the cuckoo. I remember stepping outside in Oxfordshire in August at dusk and feeling sad when I realised the screams had gone and the swifts had flown south as it was a signal for the coming end of summer. They feed at a higher elevation than either swallows or house martins, which is why it was often easier for me to hear them than see them.

Swifts also spend their winters south of the Sahara, with ringed birds from Britain having been found in the Congo Basin, Malawi, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa. But the routes they use to get there still aren't known.

Swifts are evolved to be able to spend almost their entire life on the wing. They have tiny feet and almost no legs though, contrary to rumour, adults can take off from the ground, though they rarely need to and can require help. Juveniles would struggle though. So swifts pretty much never touch the ground once they have learned to fly. It's thought that once a swift flies the nest it remains airborne for two years until it is first ready to breed and so stops flying to nest.

So of course they sleep on the wing. As is now well known the way swifts - and quite a few other birds and animals - can do this is to enter a state known as unihemipheric slow wave sleep. Swifts can do this in soaring or flapping flight. So they literally have half a brain asleep and one eye open.

As you can tell I'm very fond of these birds, especially the swifts and swallows. I've discovered a smashing bite sized series of facts on them on a site called Tweetapedia....

And, while I can tell the difference between swifts, swallows and martins, chatting on our walk today I told Mrs H that I'd realised what the difference was between me and a swift. While the swift can shut down half its brain to sleep, I appear to usually only have half my brain working when I'm awake......


https://www.livingwithbirds.com/tweetapedia/21-facts-on-swallow
https://www.livingwithbirds.com/tweetapedia/21-facts-on-house-martin
https://www.livingwithbirds.com/tweetapedia/21-facts-on-swift
http://blogs.bu.edu/bioaerial2012/2012/10/14/the-common-swift-anything-but-ordinary/
https://www.audubon.org/news/scientists-finally-have-evidence-frigatebirds-sleep-while-flying
https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/outdoors/richard-collins/richard-collins-house-martins-take-their-time-230404.html

WHO needs a doctor

My favourite blogger, the academic Wolfgang Munchau*, has picked up on a "well researched series" in Le Monde which reviews the role of the World Health Organisation in the pandemic. "It's not a glorious picture" he says, concluding that the WHO was slow to react and "has been under China's influence since the beginning of the pandemic"**.

In summary, the WHO:

• did not question information provided by China
• in mid-January the WHO went with the Chinese line that the virus was "not transmissable between humans in the community, only within families"
• criticised airlines who cancelled flights to China at the end of January
• did not pursue it's own investigations, even when two Chinese whistleblowers who revealed the real state of Wuhan's hospitals disappeared
• only sent a mission to China in late February and then initially did not intend to go to the Hubei province hotspots, swallowing the Chinese line that hospital staff had other things to do than receive an international mission
• lost precious weeks before announcing a pandemic on 11 March

The WHO boss, Tendros Adhanom, has close relations with China and hailed the country for its efficiency and rapid response. He accused Taiwan - who along with Chinese whistleblowers first raised the alarm - of racism against him without proof, serving the Chinese foreign policy agenda by swallowing stories which turned out to be from Chinese internet trolls masquerading as Taiwanese citizens.

Or, in my words, the WHO has been in China's pocket.

Those who criticise the UK government - and there are clearly things to criticise - might pause and wonder just how much the UK government's advice was influenced by the WHO in January and February. And on the snippet I only picked up on recently that the well respected John Hopkins University's Global Health Security Index rated the UK second in the world in its assessment of 195 countries' preparedness for pandemics published in 2019. The much praised Germany and New Zealand scored in the middle of three categories ("more prepared") compared with the UK (in "most prepared"). The UK ranked first in the world in its ability to respond. Thinking about the Nightingales programme and the way testing capacity has ramped up by an order of magnitude in a month one can understand that assessment. However, it might have created a degree of complacency in January, when combined with the WHO briefings.

I would still like to know what Matt Hancock was asking the NHS, particularly about PPE stocks and the supply chain, at that time. But it will all come out in the eventual inevitable public inquiry, and for now it's more important to let people get on with their jobs. 

But it seems like the WHO could use a doctor themselves. As usual the best qualified one would have a time machine so they could go back and make a better fist of things.

* Well, perhaps after Opher Goodwin, the writer and chronicler whose output includes fascinating "I was there" blogs about the 60s and early 70s, including first hand accounts of Roy Harper's gigs and recording sessions. His latest musings were about the relationship between Harper and Keith Emerson, including the time the Nice jammed with Harper on "Hell's Angels", the last track on his 1969 album "Flat, Baroque and Berserk". Harper has said that the Nice turned him on to rock and he pointed Emerson in the direction of Sibelius's Karelia Suite, which became a Nice classic for group and orchestra, or just group.

** WHO and China - a dangerous liaison in this pandemic, Wolfgang Munchau, Euronitelligence Public Briefing, 30 April
http://www.eurointelligence.com/public/briefings/2020-04-30.html?cHash=f9391359d69b826677f1a891f44715df

***  The John Hopkins Global Health Security Index home page is at https://www.ghsindex.org/
where you can see their map of the world and drill down into each country. The UK summary is at https://www.ghsindex.org/country/united-kingdom/. You could spend hours looking at it, trust me.

We're long past the peak but they don't seem to want us to know that

Readers will know I got sufficiently bemused by how Covid deaths in hospital are shown on the daily briefing to do my own analysis (Spreadsheet Phil, 17 April). At first I couldn't understand why they didn't show a rolling 7 day figure to even out the acknowledged reporting delays at weekends. But I realised that there are much more general delays in reporting. For example, of the 546 deaths in hospitals in England reported on Tuesday 28th April, 93 occurred on the  27th, 213 on the 26th, 79 on the 25th, 50 on the 24th,  23 on the 23rd and 16 on the 22nd. Beyond that there are single figures of deaths on various dates stretching all the way back to 19 March.

Some deaths will be unexplained at the time and only attributed to covid later but, in the absence of being able to ask Chris Whitty, one can only wonder how they can discover that a hospital death from over a month ago should now be attributed to covid-19.  But then, as my own local health board in Wales recently realised it was only reporting covid deaths monthly, producing an enormous blip in the figures, there are obviously lots of things that can and do go wrong. One wonders what the folk in Betsi Cadwaladr health trust, from the CEO downwards, were thinking as they watched the bulletins about the daily figures. Day after day on Wales Today they were saying that the number of deaths in the trust area was not being announced because it was so small it might identify the victims, which is a comment that gets stranger the more you think about it. Quite a few folk in the trust must have been aware that there had been many more deaths in its three major hospitals than were showing in the published figures. One can see why it is a failing body that has been in special measures for 5 years.

Whatever the quality of the data, you can see the raw figures for England each day on the NHS England website* broken down by region and trust. In order to try to understand what is actually happening I've prepared my own chart, showing English hospital deaths by the day they occurred and the day they were reported, the latter being the main COBR graph that we see on TV each day. I stop at 23 April as the deaths by day of occurrence are still totting up significantly for 4 or 5 days. After that you could add sometimes 10 or 20 but it wouldn't affect the overall picture very much.

What's clear is that we passed the peak around April 8-10. Which is actually a little before many  experts were predicting the peak would occur back at the start of the month - they were saying it would be Easter Sunday, April 12th. The real decline won't be quite as steep as my red line above as extra deaths for the days towards the right hand side get announced with the daily figures over the next month, but it will probably only affect the slope a small amount.

I can understand that the government don't want to broadcast the fact that we are already more than  two weeks past the peak. They need to be sure the decline is sustained (it is) but there are also other factors. There is a lag in patients coming through hospital at different rates, for example. They won't want behaviours to slip in anticipation of relaxation of restrictions. And deaths is only one of the five tests: it would be embarrassing if they had to say the tests were all met apart from security about provision of PPE, which most of the cabinet presumably used to think meant Politics, Philosophy and Economics, ironically the subject of Matt Hancock's Oxford degree.

Embarrassing but not actually surprising when I read that the demand for PPE has been 20 times that of a seasonal flu epidemic and China is currently exporting a fifth of its capacity because of its own needs. Hindsight is all very well but I challenge anyone to say that, if asked in advance how much PPE should be stocked for a pandemic, they would have said "oh, at least 20 times that we could need for a major flu outbreak".

One thing puzzling me is why journalists aren't asking whether the peak has been passed more clearly, indeed asserting that we have passed the peak when questioning ministers, especially given that I assume they have access to somewhat more research and analysis capability than I have. Some journalists have certainly realised it: David Smith noted last weekend that "the peak in deaths and new infections seems to have been around April 8th"**. Indeed, Smith goes on to say that the peak came "before the effects of the lockdown and reflected the voluntary social distancing that preceded it".

Wow! Smith says the government's initial response was slow, uneven and lacked leadership. But then, as he also notes, when China locked down Hubei province most folk thought that was something only an authoritarian regime could do. After all Public Health England moved the risk to the British public from "very low" just one notch to "low" on 22 January. Even when Italy moved to lockdown on 9 March there was still an element of "it could never happen here". Smith thinks the government lurched suddenly from complacency to lockdown as no-one would blame it for putting public health first. And, as I've suggested, the response to lockdown and the chancellor's measures has been a bigger shutdown than the government thought would occur, as many businesses that were not required to shut still decided to do so. I would add that the message reinforced every day has been "thanks for what you're doing, keep it up, stay at home" not "stay home but go to work if it's not something we've specifically banned and as long as you can maintain social distancing".

One can read into Smith's words (he doesn't explicitly say it) that he thinks the government panicked and went further than, with hindsight, they should have done. And, because they put the "fear of God into people" the public responded to an even greater degree. The result? The biggest hit to the economy not just since the financial crisis but since the Great Frost of 1709.

Do I agree? I'm not sure yet and I've already criticised many commentators for excessive use of hindsight together with some rewriting of history. The first real social distancing restrictions other than exhortations weren't until schools were closed on 20 March and pubs and restaurants were closed on the 21st, only three days before the first effective day of lockdown, the 24th. So I think it's a bit difficult to assert with confidence that the peak at 8 April would have happened without the lockdown. In due course we may be able to tell more by looking at examples like Sweden, where they haven't gone as far with lockdown and have relied more on social distancing advice, the position we were in from March 20-23.

The new step announcing all deaths in the daily press conference from yesterday will further disguise the fact that we have passed the peak and buy ministers time for the lockdown review next week. It will do that because the "all covid deaths" data must be even more erratic than the surprisingly erratically hospitals only figure. I thought they were right to stick to hospital deaths as they are more readily measured and represent the vast majority of cases. And it's the trend that matters.

But as with testing, where Hancock felt he had to pluck his 100,000 number out of thin air presumably on the basis that it's a big number, I think ministers felt the pressure about deaths in care homes in particular. They know as we do that many of those deaths have been advanced by very short periods but they daren't say so because of the inevitable media storm that would result. So when Jonathan Van-Tam carefully answered a question yesterday by saying that, in time, the excess deaths figure will prove the most reliable and meaningful I'm sure he was factoring in that, looked at with the perspective of time, many of the care home deaths would effectively drop out of the statistics as they would have happened in the same year anyway. So when you compare the total deaths with the 5 year average the excess deaths figure should show all of the impact of the epidemic, both directly from covid and indirectly from delayed cancer treatment and the gamut of other knock-on effects, but care home deaths that have effectively been advanced just a few months wouldn't cause a blip.

Unfortunately, troubling though it is, the care home issue is not the big story or issue here that the journalists have made it. I say that having had elderly three close relatives in die in care homes over the last decade, all having had minimal quality of life in their closing years. (I may in due course write about how I think the elderly really can be shielded, which is relevant to a broader population than care homes).

Of course, passing the peak doesn't mean we're out of the wood. In most previous pandemics the second wave has been more deadly. This is probably why the government is signalling that we'll take baby steps out of lockdown. As it seems we have to wait 6 weeks to know whether we can go further it could be a very slow exit.

I also have to declare that I got something wrong (what do you mean that's normal?). I said only 3 days ago that the current situation was outside any living person's experience. I was forgetting Hong Kong flu, even though I lived through it. What, you don't really remember it either? There were two waves, in 1968-9 and 1969-70 which caused some 80,000 deaths in the UK. Much of the post stopped being delivered and trains and buses ran to heavily reduced timetables because so many drivers were sick, people of working age being the most severely affected. Clinical staff also caught it and, for a while, the NHS was overwhelmed. The second wave was deadlier with the biggest weekly death toll,in the first week of 1970, being over 20,000, bigger than any weekly total so far in the coronavirus epidemic. It's all very being wise after the event and saying that care homes were going to be the problem - lessons learned papers from flu epidemics note that a lesson from 1970 was"not to ignore the likelihood of a seriously depleted workforce to implement policy"***. Of course there are proportionally more old people now, but that epidemic hit working age people harder, others have hot children hardest.

I'd heard of Hong Kong flu but I don't remember any consternation in January 1970. I was probably preoccupied with Everton's imperious procession towards the League title and my impending A-levels. Of course 1970 was very different from now. We didn't live with 24 hour news and the death figures weren't briefed out daily. We had hospitals and you didn't have to pay for health care, which probably still struck our grandparents (if not our parents) as a novelty. If they got overwhelmed because of something unforeseen it wasn't "somebody's fault". There appeared to be no consideration given to special public health measures (presumably the cabinet minutes have long been released) and certainly not to banning sporting fixtures. Phew! Over history it's been Everton, not Liverpool, that has been worst impacted by events (champions in 1939, team broke up; champions in 1985, Heysel stadium disaster precluded them from competing for the European cup won by the mighty Steaua Bucharest and then leading to loss of the manager and key players including Gary Lineker). It hadn't occurred to me that 1970 was a near miss......

Now that would have been a disaster.

* https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/

** David Smith's Economic Outlook column is in the Sunday Times each week. His column "Lockdowns are difficult, ending it will be the hard part" appeared on 26 April. The stuff on Hong Kong flu also mainly comes from Smith's column, though he got it from a book by Nicholas Timmins: The Five Giants, A Biography of the Welfare State.

*** Journal of Epidemiology and Infection, July 2008.   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870877/

Second peak or ripple?

I strikes me that part of the psychological problem at the moment is that the current situation is outside the experience of anyone alive. Oh, sure, Spanish flu was just over a century ago so a very small number of people still around were alive then. But they were too young then to remember it now. We look to our leaders and they don't currently have answers. The sobering fact is that we don't have much more at our disposal yet than they did in the middle ages combating plague: keeping apart and isolation. They didn't use the phrase "social distancing" then but that's what it is.

We can have hope because we do have much better hygiene standards, with cleaning products and (when available) protective clothing. The bane of our modern life, the single use plastic, is suddenly appreciated again, though I wish some of our hard pressed carers wouldn't chuck disposable plastic gloves away on the pavement. Mrs H and I have seen that rather a lot, even spotting a discarded blue plastic glove towards the top of 'one of the most important and historic hills in Wales', the 320ft bump behind our house (quote from a Welsh walking guide). And the scientific skills and know how that have been developed over the last century hold out the hope of developing strategies based around testing and, hopefully, vaccination.

There has been a lot of pressure to roll out testing but Hancock and his experts have been right to say that we need confidence in the tests. They have been rapidly developed and its not yet clear how accurate they are.

So we have to buy time for the scientists to do their stuff. And balance the needs of restarting the economy with the inevitable further waves of infections. Not just a second wave, pandemics of the past have never been like that. Which is why I worry about the fifth of the government's five tests for easing restrictions. I've heard several ministers describe it as  "there should be no risk of a second peak", which strikes me as being as unachievable as Gordon Brown's tests for joining the euro. As soon as we ease the restrictions the infection rate will increase again.  Whether that will be a second peak depends on whether we can keep the curve fairly flat, with R never going much more than 1 and generally less. One could argue, semantically, that this wouldn't mean a second "peak" I suppose, more of a ripple. But it will still be an increase.

I couldn't easily find the government announcement for the precise wording of the fifth test. But, while most sources describe the it as being avoiding a second peak (for example BBC say "being confident any adjustments would not risk a second peak") LBC quote Business Secretary Sharma saying the the test is:

“We need to be confident that any adjustments to the current measures will not risk a second peak of infections that overwhelm the NHS." (My emphasis).

Which is at least in line with the government's rationale for entering lockdown.

So therefore I don't accept the suggestion in the New Statesman* that the five tests have been deliberately set to remain unmet until Boris Johnson returned so he can adjudicate between a divided cabinet on how to end the lockdown.

Our own observations are that, while most people we encounter follow what have become the polite social distancing protocols - dancing aside, stepping off the pavement or clambering up a grassy pathside bank to make space - some younger people seem to be in a world of their own and plough past at one arm's length. (Cyclists - just because you're on a bike is no excuse. If the space is narrow you might, heaven forbid have to dismount, shock, horror! And just because you're on the road and I'm on the pavement doesn't mean that you aren't too close!).

So when the restrictions ease I think it is inevitable more people will push the boundaries and behaviours will probably slide a bit. My guess? Somewhere between a second peak and a ripple. The question that follows is whether that would lead to cycles of loosening and tightening.  As neighbouring countries all seem to be planning something a little bit different there should be plenty of experience captured over the next couple of months to learn from, though disentangling cause and effect may be difficult.

Unfortunately the political concensus that has held for a month seems to be fraying as the opposition see opportunities to chip away. There will be plenty of good ammunition in due course from the inevitable inquiry - and well before the next general election. So I find any game playing rather tiresome and rewriting of history even more so. While there were some calls for the UK to move into lockdown earlier than it did, they were muted. For example, shadow health bod Jonathan Ashworth has claimed he was doing so. I've checked what you said Jonny boy and the only thing I can find is from the Commons debate on 23 March hours before the lockdown was announced when the strongest thing you said was "something has to change". Your new leader called for "further compliance measures". And by then the government announcement was no doubt already being drafted if not ready to roll.

Not exactly shouting it, were you Jonathan? Shabby, mate.


I will accept politicians and journalists saying "why aren't we doing x or more of y or z" as long as they recognise that most people in the fray are overloaded so prioritisation is essential. Trying to make themselves look wise after the event?  Spare us your sanctimony, people are trying to do an important job.


* https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/04/why-uk-government-s-five-tests-ending-lockdown-are-so-hard-meet
** https://www.eveningexpress.co.uk/news/uk/johnson-faces-pressure-to-order-coronavirus-lockdown/