1/ The guidance on respiratory protection for Covid-19 is very poor; and, in the UK at least, it is extremely poorly enforced.
It is a condition of travel on Transport for London, for example, that passengers must wear a mask; yet I'm told that only a minority do so.
2/ I have seen reports of people being escorted off trains and buses in Germany for failing to do so. Why not here?
It made me wonder if there would be easier ways to enforce this.
3/ I thought about ANPR - automated number plate recognitions - and how this is used to issue fines for speeding, and charges for entering ULEZ and congestion zones.
Why could we not do something similar for face-masks?
Let's say you visit a shop, theatre or night-club.
4/ They take a photo of you before you enter. Then they have video cameras in the stairwells, on the stairs to and from seats...
It would be very easy to identify the people not wearing a mask and fine them.
Identifying people on public transport would be harder.
5/ There would be civil liberties issues with facial recognition software. But in principle it could be done.
Fining people - along the lines of speeding tickets and parking fines - would provide an incentive to follow the rules.
6/ And it would avoid confrontation with antimaskers.
And it would make people who have strong reasons to be fearful of the consequences if they were to catch Covid-19 feel much more confident about venturing out in public.
2/ It still refers to wearing a mask if you "meet people you do not normally meet", which is very silly (unless they mean "household members" - in which case, why not say so?)
It still keeps the long-out-of-date, inadequate list of (only 3) symptoms of Covid-19.
3/ We now know that - since delta variant, and particularly in people who have been vaccinated and in children - a lot more symptoms can suggest Covid-19, and not everybody gets the "classic" three symptoms.
2/ I guess it will take a lot longer - and a different sort of study - to estimate the proportion of asymptomatic infections it will prevent. Until we know how many people are prevented from being infectious, it's hard to know what effect three doses will have on transmission.
3/ BTW, can we please stop calling the third dose a "booster dose"? I'm pretty certain that this will eventually become a three-dose primary course (with subsequent reinforcing doses if necessary, eg if there's waning of immunity or if there are vaccine escape variants.)
1/ I use Endnote (20.2 (Bld 15709), to be precise.
It recently had a minor upgrade.
Now it's behaving oddly.
It's fixed one problem - previously it would revert all changes to a record if I deleted a pdf.
2/ This matters to me because it's often easier, when manually adding a reference, to copy a previous reference from the same author or publication, and then to edit the new reference. You don't have to retype a lot of details that were in the previous reference.
3/ But it's created another problem. Now, when you save a reference, the references shown disappear, and the selected reference is some random reference with a low record number.
I was just at a Covid testing centre (accompanying somebody for a PCR test prior to a procedure).
I am shocked at the PPE used.
Staff wore gowns, plastic aprons, and magic gloves, as if dealing with a predominantly fomite-spread pathogen.
1/10
I've no real problem with the gowns and aprons - although they are likely a waste of money.
The gloves are worse than useless. They should be washing their hands with soap and water regularly (say, every hour); and using alcohol hand gel between patients.
2/10
Wearing gloves provides a false sense of security, and can reduce adherence to good hand-hygiene practice - you feel protected (although the gloves can spread fomites just as easily as bare hands can, if not gelled between patients).
3/10
1/ Following the Prime Minister's decision to be photographed, in Hexham Hospital, without a mask (despite everybody around him wearing one), I thought I'd look out the current guidance.
2/ (He clearly made a point of being filmed and photographed without a mask, and ensuring that those images were widely circulated…
3/ (…Whether this is a defiant dig at the mask-wearing rules he knows are necessary, but he hates, or another of his "dead cat" distraction ploys to draw attention away from gathering scandals, it was clearly deliberate.)