Roger Mexico

Did you actually read that? It's not what "the BMJ states" it's the opinion in one reader's letter which seems to have based the 70% on absolutely no evidence at all.

Normally yes. There are two main possible explanations, given that a later PCR was also positive. The first is that the swabbing for the PCR wasn't done properly - @rachomics original test checked this by also testing for the presence of human DNA, but I think they stopped doing that. The second is that the lab is failing to detect it in some way. This seems less likely to me given the high rates of positive they are currently producing - where there has been a lab problem, as in the Wolverhampton lab, they've been missing most positives.

Not quite as bad as you think, 'only' 73 of those 412 incidents resulted in deaths. And as Dr Campbell pointed out, the risk of such incidents is much higher from catching Covid that from vaccination. One of the problems with the reporting of side effects has been that the (rare) incidence of them has been compared with that in a population under normal circumstances. But that isn't the situation here, where there's a widely spread disease, which vaccination protects against and even more important protects against severe forms of. A pre-Covid population isn't the right thing to compare with because that can't (and doesn't) exist any longer. (That isn't ignoring his point about aspirating when doing injections, but that's got wider implications. It may help explain why we saw similar levels of the same side effects with other vaccines though).

And that I'm afraid is what passes for 'balance' in most media nowadays. Let's not bother to evaluate the information, especially if the result is "We don't know". Let's just put up what we see as two extreme views and blather about letting people decide when we're not giving them to information to do so.

We've found them! We've found Ashford's 'friend'

To be exact about these things, Douglas is actually part of Onchan (except for South Quay which is part of Braddan).

That actually about the only difference that there is between an English[1] Town and an English City. A Town has a Mayor, a City has a Lord Mayor. [1] Or Welsh. Scotland as usual has its own funny names for things and no one is really quite sure what the situation is in Ireland. As usual.

No it's much, much more complicated than that. Wiki has a long article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_status_in_the_United_Kingdom

As The Phantom pointed out most of these animals are captive-bred for generations and don't have the skills to survive in the wild. And in some cases the habitats don't even exist any more to support a viable population. But inbreeding can become even more of a problem in the wild, where populations are fragmented and isolated and movement between them can't take place.

Except that it still needs Mrs Windsor (or her local factotum, the Governor) to sign it off. So it still ends up being approved by the same people.

That's the problem - he was too successful at breeding. The danger with captive animals (or any restricted population) is that the population can become dominated by the genes of particular individuals, which leads to inbreeding and unhealthy animals. So zoos have to manage which animals mate with others and how closely related they are and do this communally so that different zoos send animals to each other under breeding programmes to make sure that the maximum genetic diversity is maintained. Otherwise you might end up more animals, but they're too unhealthy and the population eventually dies out.

That was exactly what I thought when I saw the 3FM piece. It's not even as if it's replacing buildings - just an existing area of grass. A lot of people's gardens will provide more assistance to wildlife etc that this tiny patch, but no one is calling those micro-anything. If a tenth of the effort that went into this relentless greenwash was put into actual work to reduce carbon emissions, we might see some progress. instead let's build on a flood plain and let the public sort out the resulting mess.

This just-published piece on the BBC suggests that it's possible to get an idea from the PCR test itself: The Omicron variant has lots of different mutations that haven't been seen before, and many that have. A large number of them are on the spike protein of the virus, which is the target of most vaccines, and that's the main concern. In standard tests, Omicron has what's known as an "S-gene dropout" (which Delta, in most cases, hasn't), and that gives a clue that it could be the new variant. But not all "S-gene dropouts" will necessarily be Omicron - full genomic sequencing is needed to be sure. Which ties in with comments I've seen elsewhere, eg in the FT. Of course that would require for those doing the PCR tests on the Island to know what they were looking for and there to be a system for informing those tested of the suspicions.

That's quite the little gem isn't it? I liked this especially: It is absurd that to my knowledge, of the 65 candidates for the general election, I was the only candidate in the nation to transparently publish the relevant interests and make such a declaration publicly accessible online. This is reflective of a poor culture of secrecy and unprofessionalism of other election candidates on the Isle of Man, and should be fixed. Wording he liked so much he used it all over again in the donations section. Incidentally can anyone find these declarations he made? I find his website a bit confusing, but I suppose it's on there somewhere.

But of course you will, because if it is built and then anti-flood measures are required, who is going to pay for them but the taxpayer?