Still Running Round in Circles

It's nearly 4 weeks since my last post and what has changed? Well, the easy stuff first.

Just Living

In our house life goes on in our easy world somehow remote from the real one. We go out walking and running, still haven't really used a car in nearly eight weeks now except for a couple of trips to Screwfix and Halfords, one of which to get a battery charger - just in case! The weather continues to be kind and we're still finding places within 3 or 4 miles from home that we've never been before. We also seem to have an unlimited supply of things that need doing and now with access to DIY shops and garden centres, no real excuses for not doing them.

On the running side I've still been rambling along as before, going out 3 times a week and notching up around 30-35 miles. Now that we've had the OK to go out more than once a day I'll probably up that a bit for the next few weeks. I'm still sticking to the country lanes, I'm assuming that with the latest easing of restrictions the popular off-road routes nearby such as the Sandstone Trail will be crowded for a while. We don't have access to the Clwyds yet as Wales is still closed but I'm hopeful that our local forest at Delamere will open soon. What I have found over around 7 weeks now is that MAF training (if you've heard of it) does what it says on the tin, well for me at least. This period of just ticking over with no events on the near horizon seemed the ideal time to try it out. Missing the hills but I'll gradually start to get out a bit further afield than straight out of the front door over the next few weeks.

As for events, well a lot more that I had entered have been cancelled or shelved until the autumn or next year. If any do take place in the autumn I think I'll see what the overall level of infection in the country is before making a decision whether to go or not. If it's still fairly high I will personally want to avoid any events that involve bus travel which is about the only situation that the individual is unlikely to be able to control. I have hopes that the Chester 100 which was up for late May will now go ahead in late November as planned; this starts and finishes just a few miles from our house, passes within half a mile of it and follows paths that will not be generally popular at that time of year. I still think anything earlier , say from September onwards, will depend very much on the individual details and confidence of the RD whether it goes ahead or not. But a few months is not really here or there in the overall scheme of things.

Dealing with the virus

So other than doing as we are advised, how are we shaping up to the continued threat of infection? If you know me you will know that I will have been trying to fathom out what is going on and how it affects me as an individual. I'm an engineer rather than a scientist but seems to me that although the overall situation is complex you don't need a lot of scientific knowledge to draw a few conclusions and plan accordingly. The key thing is to understand that terms such as "safe" and "unsafe" are relative not absolute, the whole deal is about probability and the evaluation of risk. Sorry but you can't scan the next bit rapidly, you may have to concentrate a bit to follow me.

There are two elements to the risk presented by the virus. The first risk is, will you get infected?

Well, the figure that you hear from the official briefings, that is the number of people who have tested positive since testing started (currently around 230,000) is pretty useless as a planning tool because it contains a mix of current and historic data. What you need is an estimate of how many people have the virus at this moment, and so could pass it on to others. The best figures I could find were the ONS estimates of currently between 76.000 and 225,000 (the wide spread is because this is an unprecise game). This means that if you step out of your door today, you need to meet somewhere between 250 and 1000* people to have a statistical guarantee of seeing someone carrying the virus. These figures will be higher in some parts of the country and lower in others, but you have to start somewhere. And of course you may be unlucky in that the very first person you meet has it, and the next 999 are clear, but that is what risk is all about. This is what the "lockdown" and ongoing restrictive measures are all about. If we can get to the stage where you need to meet say 10,000 people when you go out to guarantee meeting a carrier, then things will look a lot different.

So if you do meet our hypothetical carrier, what are your chances of then becoming infected yourself? Well, we are told that the most likely form of transmission is if you breathe in air exhaled by the carrier (that contains the droplets/aerosols carrying the virus).  It seems to me that this has to be some sort of inverse square law, so there is nothing magic about being 6 feet away (other countries have different distances), but it follows that being 6 feet away is four times safer than being 3 feet away, and being 9 feet away is nine times safer than being 3 feet away. Of course it also follows that being 6 feet away from two people (either together or one after the other) is twice the risk as if you only approach one person.

But the real world is not as neat as the maths would have it, and what I just said only holds good in completely still air.  Get the air moving and it's not that all bets are off exactly, but they are significantly compromised. If you are out of doors, any air movement is likely to be in your favour, dispersing air exhaled by anyone near you much more rapidly. If you are inside, the speed at which this dispersal happens will be slowed by the fact that it is now being dispersed into a confined space. The smaller this space, the higher the risk to anyone in it (compare a supermarket sales floor to a bus, for example).

We are also told that a secondary but less common form of transmission is via commonly touched surfaces. The risk here depends on (a) the nature of the surface (eg polished steel is a better transmitter than fabric) , (b) the frequency with which it is touched (compare a popular shop door handle with a stile on a remote country path) and (c) the number of different people that touch it (compare the door handle on your village shop with a similar one in a city). Transmission can be reduced by regular cleaning of the surface but the surest way of lessening the risk is to wash your hands after touching the surface and before touching your face.

I think this tells you all you need to know and explains the majority of measures we are being asked to take. The answer to "Why can I do this but not that?" that you see so frequently these days often obvious if you go back to these basic principles. There are bits of advice that I don't really understand, for example the suggestion that people in certain public situations should wear home-made masks seems to me might carry more risks from face touching etc than the one event they can mitigate, that is slowing down the velocity of projection when a carrier coughs or sneezes. I can't see how a home-made mask would protect the wearer in any way. Similarly for gloves, I would guess that poor management of wearing and doffing may incur more risk than simply being rigorous with handwashing. I will do these things if someone asks me to, but if so I will take more care rather than less.

I said there were two elements to risk. The first is the likelihood of something happening which I have just covered, the second is the impact of the event if it occurs. In my seventies I may take a slightly different view of this from a twenty-five year old, so all I would ask is that we don't in our comments impose our own view on others; we are all different and must make our own judgements on what is best for us.

Reportage and comments.

Just a month ago, I wrote the following: " I've cut down the amount of both mainstream news and social media that I absorb. Though there are inspiring stories in both, I just got a bit fed up with the continual search for blame and the number of press experts and armchair critics telling everyone what has been done wrong and how exactly we should be living our lives. It seems to me that we are where we are, everyone is doing their best, some heroically so, very few have anything other than the best motives. More encouragement and less criticism would be good. "

If I hoped that things would improve in this area then I was just being naive I guess. I'm still saddened by the degree of sloppy coverage from both mainstream and social media and from from all political viewpoints. Too many snap judgements of failure, too much virtuous preaching on what should have been done, too many simplistic conclusions from complex situations, too much fault seeking and schadenfreude from those who seemingly know all the answers.

I'm sure it will take time, probably at least a year or two, to establish just how many people have died in the countries affected (both during the pandemic and its aftermath), and whether their governments could or should have done a better job. The current UK government is not one I would have chosen and not one I voted for. We will not know how they have performed for quite a while. What I would venture however is that they are neither completely in control of the situation, making the best possible decisions “guided by the science” as they themselves would claim, nor are they total unfeeling incompetents not fit to be in charge, as I see regularly from many social media experts. They will have done a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. Whether a different government would have done better or worse we will never know.

My overriding impression of these times is that understanding this disease and determining the best way to fight it and get out of it is complicated and uncertain. To fully understand policies you need a basic grasp not only of the medicine involved but also of how risk is assessed and managed. Also, things change fairly rapidly so that factors that were important yesterday are less so today and vice-versa.  Yet we have a seeming need in the media (and possibly by implication, in the population) to make it simple and fixed. So those managing the crisis not only have to deal with the pandemic but with finding ways to explain what is going on in terms that meet the almost impossibly opposed (but often voiced, even by the same people) criteria of “treat us like adults” and “keep it simple, don’t confuse us”. It seems that every time we are given guidelines on how to behave, we immediately want a comprehensive set of rules governing every possible situation. Then when we get them, we complain that they are wrong.

I think I'll just carry on trying to work out what I think is best, and keep running round in circles at home for a while. Let's see what the next four weeks brings

On a lighter note, late yesterday afternoon Jan and I drove a few miles and walked up and around one of our local hills, enjoying the woods, the late spring flowers, the dappled sunlight through the trees and the peacefulness of it all. After nearly 8 weeks at home it was, in more than one sense, a real breath of fresh air. 

* I started writing this yesterday afternoon, then learned on the news last night that the ONS has now come up with a figure of one in 400 (instead of the range of one in 250 to one in 1000 they published earlier). For an organisation whose job is statistics it seems strange that they should feel happy to collapse onto one figure without an estimated range of accuracy; unless of course they were under pressure from either the government or the media to do just that. In doing so they have drifted towards the more pessimistic end of the previous range - well, in their situation what would you do? I leave you to speculate on whether the new figure really tells us any more than the old range did..............."Treat us like adults  -  but make sure it's simple!"

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