I wrote recently about wet bulb temperatures (WBTs), and why we should be worried if they get too high. In that post, I mentioned that I had excluded data from before 1990, as I was concerned about the data quality. For the rest of that post, I assumed that the quality control of the HadISD dataset that the Met Office does would be adequate and that the episodes of extreme WBTs that I found in the dataset were real. I’ve been thinking about that some more, and I think I probably need to be a bit more careful about data quality. Although the Met Office’s quality control procedures are very thor ..read more

I’ve gotta be honest, I hadn’t heard of the concept of a “web bulb temperature” until earlier this year. I’ve heard about them quite a bit in recent months, and I’m sure we’ll all be hearing about them a lot more often from now on. If the concept is also new to you, let me explain. It’s pretty much what it says. You take a traditional thermometer with a bulb of liquid at the bottom, and you wrap the bulb in a wet cloth. The water in the cloth evaporates, and the evaporative cooling means that the thermometer will read a lower temperature than it would have done if it were dry. The amount of co ..read more

Well, 2020 was quite a year. I’m sure it’s one that most of us are glad is over. Here in the UK, we have been badly hit by the covid-19 pandemic, indeed we have one of the worst death rates in the world. It didn’t have to be this way: as an island nation with a well developed health system, we could have handled the pandemic far better. Unfortunately, we have a government of incompetent idiots who have simply not been up to the job of dealing with it. As I write this in early January 2021, covid-19 cases are at high levels and rising rapidly, following a reasonable approximation to expone ..read more

I wrote last week about how the number of cases of coronavirus were following a textbook exponential growth pattern. I didn’t look at the number of deaths from coronavirus at the time, as there were too few cases in the UK for a meaningful analysis. Sadly, that is no longer true, so I’m going to take a look at that today. However, first, let’s have a little update on the number of cases. There is a glimmer of good news here, in that the number of cases has been rising more slowly than we might have predicted based on the figures I looked at last week. Here is the growth in cases (plotted on a ..read more

One thing about the Covid-19 outbreak that has been particularly noticeable to me as a medical statistician is that the number of confirmed cases reported in the UK has been following a classic exponential growth pattern. For those who are not familiar with what exponential growth is, I’ll start with a short explanation before I move on to what this means for how the epidemic is likely to develop in the UK. If you already understand what exponential growth is, then feel free to skip to the section “Implications for the UK Covid-19 epidemic”. A quick introduction to exponential growth If we thi ..read more