There is much excitement here is plague-ridden Brexitland. New cases of the virus are now running at over 30,000 per day, and the rolling 7-day average is up to 29,000. There is much talk of a scary new mutant version of the virus which has allegedly just been discovered. No one knows whether this new threat is a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, or an independent operative, but I fully expect Bozo to announce that he is seeking advice from Charles Xavier any day now.

The reality of the situation seems to be that there are many mutant strains of the virus, and that this one has been known about for weeks, if not months. The suspicion is that Bozo and his spinmasters are using the idea of a deadly new strain of COVID-19 as an excuse for the government’s manifest failure in ending Lockdown #2 too early in the hope of “saving Christmas”.

However, the idea of a deadly new version of the virus running unchecked in the UK has taken root elsewhere in the world. Other countries have accepted the narrative of the UK as a plague ship that must be kept quarantined. Consequently many countries have now banned travel to and from the UK. This includes closing the Channel Tunnel.

You may think that the Brexiter hordes would be cheering with glee. Huzzah! Britain is finally cut off from the Continent! We are safe from foreigners. But of course the Brexiters are Libertarians. Therefore they firmly believe that they should be free to control their own borders, but that equally no other country should be allowed to close its borders to them. There is much outrage.

All of which is largely irrelevant to your average Briton hoping to enjoy the holiday season. Londoners are already furious at new restrictions being suddenly imposed when they had been promised a free and merry Christmas. Now the entire country is worrying whether there will be enough food to last the holidays if shipments from the Continent cannot get through. Thankfully most people will already have stocked up on huge quantities of food by now, but it does look like we’ll be getting a taste of No Deal Brexit a few days early.

Talking of No Deal, we have now passed the point by which the European Parliament will be able to ratify any trade deal. Therefore No Deal has happened. Negotiations could still continue, if diplomats are able to meet, but there will at least be a short period of No Deal happening.

Given all of this, Her Majesty’s Opposition has swung into action. In order to stand up for the country, Kier Starmer has issued a demand… that under no circumstances should Brexit be delayed. There must be no extension of the transition period.

Hopeless, the lot of them.

Last week I wrote that by Christmas I expected the situation in the UK to be back where it was prior to Lockdown #2, if not worse. Well, it is no fun to be proved right, but…

Yesterday saw over 35,000 new cases, which is a record. Today was only 28,500, which is the third highest daily total since the pandemic began. The rate of deaths is now trended upwards. But Bozo has “saved Christmas” so we are all supposed to be happy.

Thankfully the local situation is still good, and I probably only need to make one more shopping trip this year.

Gosh, it has been a long time since I did one of these.

Anyway, the UK came out of Lockdown #2 on December 2nd. The rate of new cases of COVID-19 had been falling for a while, and the death rate had started to fall as well. Predictably, as soon as Lockdown ended, the rate of new cases started to rise again. We had over 20,000 yesterday. Deaths are still falling as they tend to lag a week or two behind the new cases, but by Christmas I expect things to be back where they were at the last peak, if not higher.

Thankfully the situation locally is very good. There were fewer than 10 new cases in Trowbridge in the past week, and much of the town is currently rated “supressed”. I’m not planning to go anywhere much over the holidays.

The vaccine is now being rolled out, and a few people in Bristol have already got their jabs. I am by no means vulnerable or essential, so I expect it to be many months before my turn comes around.

Meanwhile Bozo has managed to thoroughly piss off the EU leadership and major European heads of state. A “no deal” exit from the EU now seems inevitable, and indeed Bozo has been on the BBC boasting about how good this will be for the country him and his cronies. Indeed, if news reports are to be believed, they have something like £8bn staked on a collapse of the pound.

As I am paid primarily in US dollars, I’m not too worried about collapse of the economy. I am very worried about what the next year will bring for the trans community in the UK. Because of the work I do, I get to see some of what is being done behind the scenes to dismantle trans rights. You don’t need government action to take people’s rights away. Just as the value of the Equality Act has been people knowing that discrimination was illegal, so the government flagging its desire to dismantle that Act leaves people feeling free to ignore it. Or, if it is more convenient, interpreting the EA in such a way as to conclude that trans people are a danger to everyone else and need to be denied services.

Oh well, in 50 years time historians will have a lot to write about.

On Monday 397 people in the UK died due to COVID-19. Yesterday the number was 492. We could easily be in a thousand a day territory by next week. I understand the Bozo spent Prime Minister’s Question Time vehemently denying that he ever said any of the things he said at the same time the week before.

As most of you will probably have heard, there are new Lockdown rules coming into force in the UK this week. At this point the government can’t really be accused of a u-turn, because it is more accurately spinning like a top. At the current rate of policy changes, it is predicted to reach tornado velocity shortly before Christmas and land us all in Oz some time in early 2021. This is not a bad thing. Being anywhere other than in post-Brexit Britain will be an improvement.

Meanwhile the virus stats keep rising fast. We had 397 deaths recorded yesterday. For comparison, that’s more people than have died in Finland in the entire pandemic.

I made my weekly visit to Tesco today. A friend in Bristol had reported stores running out of toilet roll again there yesterday, so I was relieved to see that the shelves were not completely bare. The only thing I expected to be able to find but could not was chocolate organges — the standard variety, that is, I’m trying the new white chocolate ones.

I can, if necessary, survive a couple of weeks without another trip, but hopefully that won’t be necessary. I continue to have plenty of work, some of which is even paid.

I haven’t said much about this of late, partly because I have been busy, and partly because it is terrifying. We are now closing in on 400 deaths per day, and given how sharply new cases and hospitalisations are rising, that is only going to get higher. If things are this bad at the start of winter, it is going to get pretty brutal by December and January.

I wish I could say that there was a chance of the government coming to its senses and trying to do something useless, but sadly I don’t see any chance of that. They are convinced that only poor and useless people are going to die, and they are happy with that.

My congratulations to Melbourne, which has endured a fairly severe lockdown and is now at 0 cases.

The UK is now well into its second wave of infections. New cases have been in the 15k-20k per day range for the past three days, and hospital admissions are rising very steeply. Deaths are still only in the 100-150 per day range, but will doubtless rise as the disease runs its course for the newly infected.

The governement continues to babble incoherently, issuing new emergency plans on a regular basis and changing their minds a few days later. There are only two things consistent about the statements: they always insist that they are doing a magnificent job, and any problems are the fault of other people. It reminds me of satirical send-ups of the likes of Idi Amin.

Thankfully the area where I live continues to be relatively less-badly affected. We are officially at “Medium” risk, which by goverment definition is the lowest level on the scale. I don’t think Cummings is very good at Maths.

One of the reasons why Bozo and his gang of incompetents can get away with this is that they media is still largely on their side. Yesterday one of the idiot “opinion” writers for the Telegraph noted that everyone is going to die eventually, so their is no point in wasting time and money saving people who are dying from the virus. I’m sure it won’t be long before they are claiming that it will be good for the economy if a few more people were to die earlier rather than later, and that the virus is not sufficient to encourage this. Another one of them was claiming that the right to be racist was a free speech issue. I’m sure you can see where this is going.

Another reason that they are getting away with it is that they still have sufficient support in the polls to easily win a General Election. But fear not, dear reader, the Labour Party has a cunning plan to win back the electorate. It is called, “embracing transphobia.” They seem to think that will be a huge vote winner.

I think I’ll just go and read a science fiction book or something.

Well, 200 days in, and still no sign of a competent government response.

The excitement about data errors seems to have died down. We had over 15k new cases yesterday, and over 14k today. But, as I have said before, there are reasons why that isn’t comparable with the same data for the first wave.

Rather more worrying, because the data is much more solid, is that hospital admissions have more than quadrupled since the start of September. There are now over 3000 COVID-19 patients in hospital. This is well short of the first wave peak, which was almost 20,000, but cause for concern.

The government, having decided that jobs in the entertainment industries, are “non-viable”, is trying to encourage actors, musicians, and so on to re-train in what they believe are more useful jobs. I took their test. They suggested that I might try a career as a hotel porter.

There have been exciting times in the data-crunching here in the UK. On Saturday the number of new COVID-19 cases leapt to over 12,000, and yesterday it was somewhere in the region of 23,000. Today is back to 12.5k, and we have learned that the massive Sunday count was a correction because Public Health England (PHE) lost a lot of data. Those numbers should actualy be spread across the previous week.

We also learned how the data came to be lost. PHE is still working on very old versions on Microsoft Office, in particular they only have the version of Excel that is capped at 65,000 rows. As some of the data that was coming in exceeded that number of rows, it was just getting lost. So old software, and crappy macros with no error trapping.

Some people on Twitter are astonished that a huge organisation like the NHS should be using Excel for data crunching, but this is symptomatic of how badly the service has been starved of cash by successive Tory governments. I visit NHS sites quite a lot to do training. Last time I used one of their computers, as opposed to bringing my laptop, they were still running Windows XP.

Meanwhile there has been excitment in Parliament. The House of Commons has its own Twitter feed, which has been used to tweet the results of votes as they happen. However, people have become increasingly incensed at the things the government has been up to. As a result the government has banned the tweeting of vote results on the grounds that it is bad for their reputation and therefore politically partial. I wonder how long it will be before we are not allowed to know what bills have been passed.

Here in plaguesville we are now running at around 7000 new cases of COVID-19 per day. Back in April, when the rate of new cases was around 6000 per day, we were seeing almost 1000 deaths per day. Currently it is less than 100. That’s an interesting anomaly. One possible explanation that I saw from a journalist on Twitter today was that in April the actual rate of new cases was around 200,000 per day, and the government fibbed about it. Fibbing about the death rate is harder.

Meanwhile Bozo and his jolly chums have passed a bill that says that they have the right to ignore international law, and the courts, and the devolved assemblies. The EU has launched a legal action against the UK. Fun times, eh?

Congratulations, Bozo, you’ve set a new record!

Yes, today’s count of new COVID-19 cases in the UK is 6634; higher than anything achieved during the initial wave of the pandemic. I’m sure that there will be champagne for all in the Cabinet today.

Well, except for Liz Truss, whom I understand got a bit of a roasting by her own MPs today on account of being even more spectacularly useless at her job than the rest of the team.

Also today we have a new track and trace app. The original one, for which the Great British Software Industry tried to go it alone and eschew any funny foreign code, has been scrapped because it didn’t work. The new one is based solidly on the Apple/Google code that most other countries are using.

Naturally everyone is wondering how much money has been paid to Cummings’ mates to produce this, and how much of our data he’ll be selling off to further line his pockets. The answer seems to be precious little, at least according to Wired. Also the app doesn’t seem to be stealing information from our phones, or doing covert surveillance, or any of the other things that Dom is so keen on.

There are problems. It only works on fairly new versions of the Apple and Android operating systems. It also keeps bluetooth on all the time, which I gather can drain your battery fairly quickly. But for people who are out and about a lot it can be useful.

Personally I’m only going to be going out once a week to shop at Tesco. My personal biobubble is me, a collection of soft toys, and rather more computers than I’m prepared to admit. Most of the time I shouldn’t need it. Also I’m giving it a few days before downloading it, just in case someone finds some hidden code that shouldn’t be there.

The second wave is well underway now in the UK. The number of new cases of COVID-19 reported here today was 6178. For comparison, the peak daily number of new cases in the first wave was 6201.

Of course these days there is much more testing. During the first wave you were only likely to get a positive diagnosis if you sought medical help. These days we are probably counting a lot of asymptotic people as new cases. But it is still very worrying, especially as the number of people in hospital and the number of deaths are now starting to tick upwards.

Even the newspapers are staring to refer to Bozo as a clown. If it wasn’t for the fact that the Brexit disaster is going to hit us in January, I’m sure that the Tories would be thinking of getting rid of him. Right now, however, no one in their right mind would want to be Prime Minister.

Apparently there is now talk of setting up a border to control entry into Kent, in order to prevent the county from being clogged up with lorries trying to get to the continent. And Gibraltar is looking to create a border with the UK in order to stay in the EU single market.