Posts

Geography in COVID 2

Image
This is a shortish piece - I am running out of time to do much more on this but I find it so interesting I can't stop! Any comments please let me know. In my previous post  , I talked about the geographic spread of COVID-19. In particular, I wanted to look at the spread of COVID-19 across the UK. Lots has happened since then - and I wanted to look more widely, at how COVID-19 has spread around the world, and my theory (and I want to make it clear, this is a theory - backed by nothing but my thoughts and some observational evidence) about mortality differences between countries. One thing that struck me - and made me write this - was this excellent paper on genomic epidemiology of viral introductions to the UK from the COG-UK consortium. Essentially, they show multiple, seperate introductions of the virus in late February/ early March from Europe (not China!): (This image copied directly from the paper, by Pybus et al). This is felt - I think - to be the most accura...
1 comment
Read more

Geography in COVID-19

Image
This is a short piece that aims to explore the relationship between English and Welsh geography and COVID-19 deaths. For my previous piece on excess non-covid mortality, see here ( All the data should be available for you to play around with - see the blurb at the bottom) The last few weeks I have looked at non-excess deaths, now I want to look a bit broader: where is the mortality within the UK - and how does it map with COVID incidence. This has come about from conversations - largely with Danny Dorling and George Davey Smith - and thank them both for their thoughts. Errors and incorrect conclusions are entirely mine. FIrstly, COVID-19 is an infectious disease (duh) and spreads like one - from person to person. So geography is important. It started in Wuhan, China, and then made its way to the UK, via lots of routes - we don’t know them all, yet, but likely through hundreds of separate, small introductions, from Italy, from Singapore, etc. And the UK geography is at ...
10 comments
Read more