A Sad Day

Sad news today about the death of Capt Sir Tom Moore who had pneumonia and then tested positive for COVID. What an inspiring man and what an amazing last year he had. In the year he turned 100 he: raised £32.8m in over 1.5m individual donations for NHS Charities Together (a Guinness World record); lifted our spirits; had a spitfire and hurricane flypast on his birthday; was appointed an honorary Army colonel; was the oldest person to have a UK no.1 record (another Guinness record); had his biography published; had a documentary aired on his life; and was knighted by the Queen. Rest in peace Capt Sir Tom. 

Day 324 / Day 29 of Lockdown 3 (for my record only)
UK deaths up 1,449 to 108,013 (revised basis), with 16,840 new cases, 32,466 patients in hospital, 3,726 on ventilation and 2,642 new admissions. c9.6m have now received their first dose of the vaccine and over 10m in total. Listening to a podcast today I was interested that others commented on what I suspected, that the EU treated vaccine procurement as purely a procurement exercise. One person said the UK took on 7 times more pre-approval risk from the manufacturer than the EU and ran trials, contracted early without knowing if the vaccine worked, cleared the barriers to manufacturing and so on. More 'mutations of concern' have been identified today in Bristol and Liverpool and the door to door testing will be extended to those areas. The new mutations are on both the original and UK variant and are the similar to the mutation found in the South African variant, meaning they may be less affected by antibodies and vaccines. A small trial questions whether the doses of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine should be so far apart in the UK, but it only looked at antibodies. Excellent news in a non-peer reviewed report submitted the Lancet: the Oxford vaccine is 76% effective from day 22 to day 90 and 82.4% effective after the 2nd dose with the 12 week interval, plus it showed a 67% reduction in positive Covid swabs among those vaccinated. Reducing transmission would be an actual 'game-changer'! France restricts the AZ/Oxford vaccine to under 65s (joining Germany and Austria).  Late stage trials of the Sputnik V vaccine shows 92% effectiveness, excellent as it's already rolled out. The actual number of pupils attending school in England last week was 1.2m or about 15%.