Horrendous. My heart goes out to everybody affected by this virus.

I think we will be exceeding 1,000 mortalities per day next week and our trajectory will be worse than Spain's.

Looking thin is a good guide to whether you will live a long and healthy life free of heart disease and cancer.

Mine is below 22 and getting it below 20 would mean losing over 5kg and getting down to a weight I've not had since I was a teenager. I don't think that's achievable, TBH.

Latest daily: 4450

This is the JFF model

Just presenting the one without the periodicity until I can figure out what's going on there (perhaps it no longer exist, perhaps it never did and was just a highly unlikely concidence, who knows).

Anyway JFF model still capturing current behaviour with same parameters. I have no reason to change them. So still projecting we will reach the peak at or before April 7th.

Of course the model could be wrong and I'm somewhat skeptical it will be this early.

Worth reading this snippet from a frontline hospital doctor working in a London hospital:

I arrive at work at 7.30am after driving through the empty streets of London. After coffee and breakfast, I don my personal protective equipment (PPE) and go into the “red zone” in the adult intensive care unit, where the Covid patients are.

As a perfusionist, I ordinarily manage cardio-pulmonary bypass during cardiac surgery and something called ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) which is respiratory support for people whose heart and lungs are unable to provide an adequate amount of gas exchange to keep them alive. 

Normal is a meaningless word at the moment. All routine operations have been cancelled and last week I started on the frontline ECMO retrieval team for Covid-19 patients. 

From what I have read with regards to the Italian experience, once a corona virus patient ends up on ECMO, it is pretty well curtains for him or her. Some must pull through however, otherwise why would they try it?

I was probably wrong to think/hope that we won't match the Italian numbers. It's pretty bad and I can only hope the lockdown will turn this around during the second half of April.

This doesn’t present the whole truth.

1. Only 7.5K people were tested


2. We are still not testing testing to maximum capacity.

You would be surprised, Peter. I lost 5kg in a month on the fasting diet. But it is not a particularly pleasant experience!

The WHO report had said that the Chinese had found ECMO to be the best tool, but still far from good.

NHS calculator says a good BMI for my age is just over 18.5 to just under 25.

25 is your absolute maximum. You should aim to be in the middle of the range or just south of it.

To me it still seems we are following Italy and not France. One of the experts (possibly Harries but I can't remember for sure) recently said otherwise so I must be missing something.

Not sure about this. The other side of the U shaped curve (and it is a U shaped curve) has not been well studied. From what I gather a BMI in the early twenties up to around 25 has no significant increased morbidity risk. It goes up really fast when you are above 30 though.

People with BMIs under 20 have significant morbidity risks too. Although it seems like a low BMI (18-20 range) is okay provided you arn't malnurished, have some kind of eating disorder, or are quite old. My BMI is, I think, around 19 but I put that down to large amounts of long distance running which tends to do that to you after a while.

Upshot is, you shouldn't be worried if you have a BMI in the 23-26 range unless you have any metabolic risk factors (such as high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high levels of visceral abdominal fat e.c.t.).

And if you do have those metabolic risk factors they are a problem regardless of your BMI.

The talk about BMI makes me hungry and the fridge is too close to my office.

It probably depends on the stage reached. If ECMO is used soon enough, it can keep the patient alive, but if applied towards the end - multiple organ failure is probably already occurring.