It looks like we are definitely into a second peak here in the UK. Today’s count of new cases was over 3500 and as of Monday social gatherings will be limited to 6 people. Of course this doesn’t apply to workplaces or education, because the government thinks that would be bad for the economy, so a lot of the things responsible for the surge in infections will carry on regardless.

I’m not hugely worried at the moment. We’ve learned a lot about biosecurity since the last outbreak, and currently the sharp increase in cases don’t seem to be leading to a corresponding increase in deaths. Things may be very different when winter hits. And of course everything will be much worse in January when Brexit bites and we start to run out of food and medicine.

Hmm, four days with no posts. Partly there’s not been a lot to talk about, but also I have been waiting to see if the rise in COVID-19 cases in the UK was real or a blip. Sadly it appears to be real. In the past three days we have had over 8000 new cases. Hopefully people will be sensible and we can nip this in the bud, because for sure the government won’t be sensible about it. All they care about is how to spin it so that they can claim it is not their fault.

I can report that the car is now running fine again. And I am now the proud owner of one of those jump start battery pack things. For someone with as little mechanical skill as me, this is a major achievement.

Taking of the government, today they announced in Parliament that they would be reneging on the Withdrawl Agreement that they signed with the EU. This does not surpise me. They seem to take the view that making deals is for fools and suckers, and that they can get away with anything if they want to. If Johnny Foreigner doesn’t like it, well he’ll soon find out that getting on the wrong side of the British Empire will do him no good. What they will do when they find out that Britain no longer has an Empire is a mystery. And how they expect to sign trade deals with other countries when they make it clear that they can’t be trusted to keep their word would be an even bigger mystery, except that they have clearly signaled that they have no intention of signing any trade deals. If they did, they would not have put Tony Abbott in charge of negotiating them.

Today I had an adventure. For a couple of medical reasons I needed to travel into Bristol, so I went on a train for the first time in 6 months.

Leaving Trowbridge at around 10:00, my two-car train was pretty much empty. However, coming back around 15:00 a three-car train was much busier. That’s in part due to schools and colleges being back in business. People wore masks on the train because it is a legal requirement. They don’t seem to wear masks anywhere much else.

I’d like to be able to report that Bristol is still there, but it was enveloped in cloud for much of my visit and I didn’t feel like getting my fur wet by exploring.

Today’s excitement was that the car wouldn’t start. That’s no huge surprise. The battery loses charge at a ridiculous rate and if I can’t take it for long runs regularly this will happen. Every so often I need to spend time sorting it out.

However, today I needed to get some stuff from town, so I walked. That gave me a good view of how the town is adapting the pandemic life.

There were quite a lot of people about. Hardly anyone wore a mask outside, which wasn’t hugely worrying as most people kept their distance. Both of the main shopping malls had signs up saying that masks were obligatory, but a lot of people ignored this. Most of the culprits among shoppers were young people. However, hardly any shop staff were wearing masks, so how they expect the public to comply is a mystery.

Out in the world, the number of new virus cases continues to rise. The 7-day rolling average is now over 1300. In contrast, the number of deaths continues to fall. It is very odd. The daily death count has been below 50 since late June, but the number of new cases per day has more than doubled since the start of July, rising steadily all the time. There are a whole heap of theories as to why this might be the case, including a change in the age profile of people testing positive, improvements in how the NHS deals with patients, people being healthier in the summer, and even the 45 theory — too many tests.

The latter needs a bit of explanation. The UK has been very slow in making testing available, but the number of people getting tested has increased steadily, and the biggest rises have come from tests conducted outside of hospital. One of the ways that COVID-19 spreads so quickly is that many people who are infected are asymptotic and don’t realise that they are carriers. Initially almost all of the people who tested positive were in hopspital and already sick. Now most of the people testing positive are outside of hospital and may be quite healthy, or even asymptotic.

Who knows, really? We are still guessing a lot. There’s a whole lot more we need to learn about this virus.

I finally managed to get a physiotherapy appointment yesterday (albeit remote) and have some good advice on managing my back strain. Life is somewhat easier as a result. The short version is never believe medical advice that you read online. With any luck I will be properly mobile again in a week or so.

Meanwhile I am getting some reading done, that being about all I am good for right now.

It looks like my optimism about COVID-19 cases in the UK was misplaced. Yesterday there were over 1500 new cases, and today the government website is mysteriously unavailable, which suggests that someone is trying to massage the data before making it public.

Things have been quiet around here, partly because I’ve been busy and partly as I’ve been unwell. No COVID-19, I hasten to add. A lower back strain, which is very inconvenient when there’s no one else living with you.

I very much enjoyed NASFiC. I’ll stick a report in the next Salon Futura.

Elsewhere the rise in COVID-19 cases in the UK appears to have stalled. This is very good. I have seen it suggested that the reason we haven’t gone into a full-blown second wave, as some parts of Europe have done, is because we don’t trust our government, so when they say “go back to work” we ignore them. It may also be because our foul weather means that we don’t have as much of a cafe culture as Europe, and because our economy is largely service-industry based which is easier to do from home.

Life is trucking along here. Something very exciting happened today, but I’m afraid it isn’t something I can talk about. Suffice it to say that I broke out a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough to celebrate.

Meanwhile something interesting has happened with the COVID-19 data. Back on August 14th we were up to over 1400 new cases in the day. It looks like we were about to take off into a major new outbreak. But it didn’t happen. The weekend was part of that, but we’ve had a couple of days at around 1000, and today we are down to 800. It is a bit early to tell, but it looks like local lockdowns are working. Fingers crossed.

Of course Bozo and his pals have taken the opportunity of a pandemic to launch a major reorganisation of the health service in England, because of course this is a good time to do that. Sigh.

Thanks to the magic of virtual conventions I will be doing my first programme items at a US convention in a very long time. I have a couple of (provisional) panels at this year’s NASFiC. I’ll give more details when the schedule is ready to go live.

Back in the UK, the government continues to dig itself itself deeper and deeper holes. A few days ago I reported the fiasco of large number of estimated exam grades being lowered thanks to a mysterious algorithm that appeared to favour young people who attended private schools, or lived in well-to-do neighbourhoods. Well, the outcry has been so intense that the government has had to back down and will be going back to using the estimated grades produced by the schools.

But that’s not the end of the saga. To start with universities will be in a difficult situation because many of them have already turned down applicants whose grades were lowered by the algorithm, and accepted those whose grades were raised. What do they do now?

One thing they could do is just take more students, but the government had introduced caps on the number of students each university could take, with fines if they went over the cap. And one of the effects of using the estimated grades will be that there are more qualified students.

It might seem that the obvious thing to so would be to remove the caps, except that they are there for a purpose. They were intended to prevent the universities with good reputations from inflating their student numbers at the expense of the less well-known establishments. Without the caps, higher education would be a bit like Mortal Engines with the big universities gobbling up the students from the smaller ones and leaving the latter to starve.

So the smart thing to do would not have been to remove the caps, but to just raise the levels pro rata across all universities, right? So what did the government do?

They scrapped the caps.

But never fear, dear reader. Our glorious leader, Brave Bozo, is ready and willing to take decisive action! He has… (drum roll)

Gone on holiday.

I mean, it is not as if the country needs governing, is it?