Category Coronavirus
COVID-19 | A MORAL MAZE
Pressure is mounting to enforce the lockdown-equivalent of super-gluing every citizen in the land to their living room sofa to prevent us all from dying of COVID-19. One has to question the morality of blanket, state-enforced lockdowns. Holding the Contrary View One of the drawbacks of being a lockdown sceptic – I’m one of them […]
COVID-19 | A VERY BRITISH TYRANNY
The principal reason I write about anything at all is to help shape my understanding of topics of interest to me. If in so doing your own understanding of the topic in question is also shaped in some way – possibly not in the same direction as mine – then that’s a good thing. The […]
COVID | AN EARLY CHRISTMAS MESSAGE
At the time of writing, Scotland’s National Clinical Director (who’s a dentist in fact, but there you go) has just told me to ‘get your digital Christmas ready’. How exciting! On Professor Leitch’s Wikipedia page, under ‘Awards and Honours’, Prof Leitch is attributed with being ‘The Grinch who stole Christmas 2020’. We shouldn’t be surprised […]
CORONAVIRUS | POLITICS (STILL) GOING CRAZY
This Covid-19 crisis is certainly flushing out who and what we are as a nation – with an awful lot of road to travel yet. Douglas Ross probably had no choice in resigning as a junior government minister and I respect his decision; he’s a dyed-in-the-wool constituency MP and I admire him for that. However, […]
CORONAVIRUS | THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM
This is the second post in a mini-series of three. In the first post I wanted to scope out what I thought could be the Covid-19 worst-case scenario. In this post I want to build on that theme to understand if the worst-case scenario is more or less likely to unfold. I’ve written this in […]
CORONAVIRUS | THE GOVERNMENT’S STRATEGY
This is another interim post squeezed in between Parts 1 and 2 of the series I’m publishing relating to the potential Covid-19 worst-case scenario. Part 2 will be published presently. Meantime, I realised as I was drafting the forthcoming post that the government’s strategy for tackling the Covid-19 pandemic was unclear. So, I decided to […]
CORONAVIRUS | OPEN LETTER TO GENERAL SIR NICK CARTER
This is an open letter to General Sir Nicholas Carter, Chief of the Defence Staff and a fellow alumni of mine. I have sent this letter in hard copy to General Carter at his office in the Ministry of Defence London, and copied it to the Prime Minister and also to my Member of Parliament. […]
CORONAVIRUS | WEIGHING THE RISKS
This is an interim post in the mini-series of three that I’m publishing on coronavirus contingency planning. I felt compelled to publish this in-between post after an exchange on Facebook between a doctor-friend and me. In this post I’m questioning whether exhorting one’s family, friends and acquaintances to ‘stay safe’ is in fact inimical to […]
CORONAVIRUS CONTINGENCY PLANNING | WORST-CASE SCENARIO
This is another mini-series of three posts looking at contingency planning for the Covid-19 pandemic should the health, socio-economic and geopolitical situations deteriorate. This first post describes what could be a Covid-19 worst-case scenario. The second post will look at the positive side of the pandemic and how our quality of life could conceivably be […]
CORONAVIRUS | MICROECONOMICS
The Crisis Hasn’t Started It’s always been such that one of the wild cards which could shake our complex, fragile, globalised civilisation would be a pandemic disease. Indeed, the threat of a pandemic like the one we’re experiencing now has always been a case of ‘when’ not ‘if’. Here’s Bill Gates making just such a […]
Moraymint Chatter 