Odd as it may seem, I spent part of today doing convention planning. While most of the forthcoming events have had their face-to-face component cancelled, several are continuing online and I need to work out how best to represent Wizard’s Tower at them. There will be announcements in due course.

For some time now I have been tracking the state of the C-19 pandemic in the UK via the official government data portal. I’ve been a little suspicious of it, but not greatly so. Yesterday, however, I saw people citing this site which claims a death toll from yesterday of 280, as compared to 171 on the government site. As the total number of deaths are the same on both sites, I presume this is another case of the government sneakily allocating some of the new cases to previous days so that the “today” figure doesn’t look so bad.

Today, however, people were sharing a leaked report from Public Health England which claims that the actual numbers are much higher. In particular for June 18th, when the government claims there were only 1346 new cases of infection, the actual number was 7000. That’s terrifying, especially with Lockdown restrictions being lifted.

The trouble is that this government lies so often, and so transparently, that no one believes anything they say any more.

Thankfully I have no need to go anywhere except to Tesco once a week.