vivweb01blog

  C hina seems to have got itself into a ‘spot of bother’ with Covid  recently, to put it mildly… Unlike the USA and most of Europe, where deaths and hospitalisations in most countries are now on the wane, China is currently in the thick of it, and has experienced a major resurgence of SARS-CoV-2 which has spread from an initial ‘hot spot' in Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland. The epidemic appears to be spreading rapidly across China, despite herculean efforts by the authorities there; early control measures included full lockdowns of large areas and even big industrial hubs such as Shenzen. Shanghai itself has been under full lockdown for the last 2 months, and is only now beginning to see a significant fall in case numbers - this is the major industrial hub of south China and its loss of productivity is likely already to have had serious consequences for China's economy. Why has this happened ? We need to look in detail at the history of SARS-CoV-2 to provide an explanati

S ince we are now well past the 2nd anniversary of the first UK Covid lockdown (March 23rd), I thought it might be useful to review what we've learnt from the pandemic over the last two years, and make some suggestions as to how to apply some of this to help us all prevent respiratory infections in future.   M ost of us generally suffer from 2-3 bouts of common cold symptoms each year. If we assume that each bout involves symptomatic discomfort for 8-10 days before the infection subsides, this equates to between 16 and 40 days of (albeit mild) illness per year. A ‘cure’ for the common cold would thus be a major prize for humanity – as indeed it would be for the Pharmaceutical Industry.  Unfortunately, despite much scientific effort, no one has yet come up with one, and for very good reason. The origin of most of these infections is viral, and as we have seen with SARS-CoV-2, viruses are resourceful adversaries and are positively legion in their type and properties.  To give you a

T here has been much talk recently in the media of possible military escalation in Europe  involving limited nuclear exchanges, much of it frankly quite terrifying for many of us. Having lived through the first  cold war of the 1970s and 80s myself, I’m acutely aware that once the nuclear ‘genie’ was out of the bottle, it would be virtually impossible to stop escalation to a strategic level and prevent the resulting armageddon. There is really no prospect of a limited  nuclear exchange - it's literally all or nothing. Having managed to survive the nuclear age this far, we cannot, and must not, allow the miscalculations of a single deranged individual to plunge a world of 8 billion inhabitants into a nuclear holocaust. As you'll see from a recent blog I posted, the likelihood of us finding anywhere else habitable in the solar system or beyond is basically zilch, so we have but one chance for survival - planet Earth. The West has already applied sweeping sanctions to Russia as