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Thanks. The cynic in me notes that Spain is just re-opening to tourism from EU countries, a week or two earlier than expected. It reminds me of the civic authorities in Death in Venice: 'Sickness? What sickness?' But there may after all be some legitimate explanation. On looking again at...

Does anyone understand the mortality figures for Spain? The Worldometers table doesn't seem to show a single new death from Covid-19 since June 7. This is hardly credible. Spain has one of the highest infection and death rates in Europe. All other countries in western Europe - even Germany...

Is there any news on the nature of his injury? When I saw a pool of blood under his head I assumed that it was coming from a scalp wound on the back of his head. However, the photo in #10 in this thread seems to show blood coming out of his ear. I'm no doctor, but blood coming out of someone's...

I see that Skynet is hiding in plain sight now.

It is reported today (in the Times of London and elsewhere) that over the year before the outbreak of COVID-19 the French government ordered the destruction of a large stockpile of medical face masks, believing that they were no longer needed, partly because previous epidemics like bird flu had...

I think these countries (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, etc) are in an earlier stage of the epidemic than Europe. Their daily new infections only really started taking off around mid-April. People infected with Covid don't usually die quickly, so there is a time lag of at least a few weeks before a...

On the Gulf States situation, I should probably have noticed that they have been doing a huge number of tests. The UAE and Bahrain, notably, have actually tested more than 10% of their populations. So they may just be discovering a lot of mild or asymptomatic cases that won't necessarily...

Infections are also taking off in the Persian Gulf area: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain are all showing large daily increases in cases within the last week. This hasn't yet translated into huge numbers of deaths, but there is bound to be a time lag of a few weeks.

I came across an article which discusses the path of the sun, and how it appears in time lapse images, including the question whether or when the path is curved: The article includes a composite image showing time lapses of the sun's sunrise path at the summer and winter solstices, and the...

I haven't read the original claims, so maybe the point is addressed there, but I wonder how they deal with the pulmonary circulation, that is, the circulation through the lungs? According to conventional science, the right ventricle of the heart pumps blood up through the pulmonary artery to...

Weather satellites like Himawari-8 sometimes show the effects of non-weather events like volcanos, dust storms, wildfires, and floods. There are several good examples in YouTube videos by Australians WheresWally and WadesUnderworld. These effects could not be faked merely by computer simulation...

The speaker in the video asks why hasn't the sun reached its highest point by 1.30? First, has he allowed for daylight savings time? He doesn't say that he has, and most smartphones and other devices would have their default time display set to whatever is the official standard for their...

This obituary of Healey in The Independent newspaper has a generous selection of Healey quotes. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/denis-healey-dies-the-best-quotes-and-quips-from-the-labour-giant-a6678361.html My favourite is 'virago intacta' as a description of Margaret Thatcher. You...

I would prefer to call it curiosity rather than incredulity. If Japan (or South Korea, or Singapore, etc) really are so good at controlling the disease, the rest of us should be very curious to know how they do it. In the case of Japan, it can't be the size of their testing programme, because...

Another complication is that according to some recent reports, based on Chinese research, different regions or countries are getting infected by different versions of the virus, which has mutated about 30 times. It is claimed that Europe has got a more deadly form of the virus than the United...

Mick makes a good point about population density. A large proportion (about a third) of the UK cases and deaths are in London and south-east England. The Paris area accounts for nearly half the cases in France. In Spain Madrid and Barcelona, the two largest cities, between them account for...

Just to follow up my previous comments (#168 and #170), the latest Worldometers report includes a long and complicated note about the French data: I won't attempt to interpret this, beyond making the obvious point that yesterday's apparent large increase in 'cases' for France was not a...

Thanks. The Worldometers website does make some errors, so maybe this is just another one. Let us see what the next update looks like. The similarity of the figures 17167 and 17164 could be just a coincidence. But I doubt that the total for cases 165027 = 108847 + 56180 is a coincidence...

Is anyone here following the situation in France? On looking at today's 'Worldometers' table, I was startled to see a daily increase of 17,164 in the number of cases for France (cumulative total of 165,027 compared with 147,863 yesterday). The daily increase is way out of line with recent...

A press report today (UK Times, 14 April) says that Covid-19 patients on ventilators require fluid to be drained from the lungs much more often than for other respiratory illnesses. The designs of new ventilators are being adapted to allow for this.