Simon Thornley Gerhard Sundborn covidplanb.co.nz With a smattering of new cases emerging from returnees in hotels prompting both sides of the house to double down on our tight quarantine the key question is coming into focus: where does our nation go from here? Sir Peter Gluckman, Rob Fyfe
Byram W. Bridle University of Guelph Shayan Sharif University of Guelph The average times of the fastest sprinters in the 100-metre dash are in the ballpark of 10 seconds. So, what would you think if someone promised to run the race in one second? It typically takes a minimum
Data visualisations – “graphs”, to the unitiated – have been an incredibly useful tool for cutting through the fog of bias and misunderstanding to get at the facts. One of the most famous early data visualisations was John Snow’s graph plotting every case in the infamous Broad Street cholera outbreak of
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I grew up on science fiction stories like Robert Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo, the story of a plucky band of tech-savvy entrepreneurs (teenagers, no less – plus one token adult, their physicist uncle) who build a pioneering moon-rocket. It’s stirring stuff, complete with Space Nazis (it was written
[Editors Note: This is an English translation of the original letter so some of the phrases are not quite right] The “science” of the Pandemic During this pandemic, the term “science” has been used “ad nauseam”, that is, has been repeated to exhaustion: “Science, science, science”, “I’m pro-science”
The once-esteemed Lancet has long taken a leftward-bent trajectory and that’s why, call me cynical if you like, before reading any editorial content published by the outfit I recommend a grain of salt at the ready. In the course of the last week-and-a-bit, that
Way back when, when I was still wet enough behind the ears to be a fully-fledged catastrophic climate change believer (yes, readers – my secret shame is laid bare!), the fossil fuel lobby released an ad praising carbon dioxide. “They call it pollution. We call it life,” went the tag
On Monday I was enlightened by Siouxie, ‘cos Siouxie does facts, and this week she informed us that “Videos like these are endangering lives”. What videos, you may ask? Videos recommending the use of power saws for haircuts, perhaps? Videos with instructions for making gunpowder in your bedroom? Well; no.
Many commentators have observed that the public health, social and economic havoc wreaked by the Xi Plague are a sneak preview of the kind of world we could expect should Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg have their way. But the COVID-19 world has something else in common with climate
Do we really need any more evidence that lockdowns are perhaps the most pernicious snake-oil sold to a panicked citizenry since the Millennium Bug? At least the Millennium Bug panic left behind some upgraded computer systems. The Chinese virus panic seems to bequeath us nothing but ruined economies and
Simon Thornley covidplanb.co.nz Why does New Zealand need a serosurvey? New Zealand urgently needs to test for antibodies to COVID-19. The standard test for COVID-19 at present is a genetic test that only detects whether or not the virus is currently in the body. Serology is
Better than a fictional murder mystery, the murder of researcher Bing Liu beats any Agatha Christie plot. Christie doesn’t reveal the most pertinent information about the motive for murder until the end of the book, which is both irritating and a deterrent to reading her books. In contrast to
As civil resistance (or, at the very least, social media grumbling) to COVID–19 lockdowns grows louder, the bootlicking types are scrambling to defend the Soviet-lite technocracy we’ve suddenly found ourselves living under. “Listen to the experts!” they bleat. “Trust the science!” “Science” is the great fetish of
We used to have a democracy, long ago, with institutions robust and whose advice, although not always reliable, was reasoned and open to scrutiny. We had excellent epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists carefully preparing reports displaying methods, workings and conclusions, citing references numerous. One such example was “Potential Health Impacts
