Interesting one Spart. My view of it would be as it has been previously, that the most vulnerable catch it easily and some of these get it very badly. Later in the epidemic fewer catch it and those that do are less vulnerable. Probably the virus hasn’t become less potent as such but the host doesn’t replicate the virus inside them to the same extent.

Where I work we are still getting plenty of cases and a steady small number of deaths. It hasn’t completely blown through Shropshire like it pretty much has done in London.

Where populations have been tested for antibodies, the proportion possessing them has been disappointingly small, about 6%. That ought to mean that the great majority are still at risk, yet the infection rates and deaths continue to fall. It must be that there is great variability in susceptibility between individuals but what does that mean? If I haven’t yet had it, am I in some way resistant and if so, why? If I haven’t got antibodies to it could I potentially still get it? If we don’t get answers to these questions then forward planning is very difficult. It seems likely that not all who catch it generate antibodies but we don’t know what means in terms of future immunity.

No deaths from Covid 19 in Spain yesterday, first time since March.

Yes it appears that 40% get the virus and show no symptoms and a large percentage don't even catch it. It appears to be very Darwinian in its behaviour.

Bloke I was working with today has a daughter who is a nurse. Before the testing guidance changed just recently she lost her sense of taste and smell, but couldnt get a test.

The following day she "invented" a fever so she met the criteria to be tested...... and it was positive.

What a crazy situation, no wonder there are still infections.

Being female and I assume young I bet she had very few symptoms.

A hypothesis from someone at the London Hospital of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that 10-15% of people could be responsible for 80% of all infections. These superspreaders shed tons of virus is the theory. If that’s true then with numbers of cases declining we must be running out of superpreaders, or they have all been staying indoors. Rather than my idea of there being a relative ceiling of those capable of catching it easily, it suggests instead that there is a relative ceiling of those who can pass it on easily. For the nation it amounts to near enough the same thing in terms of numbers overall continuing to fall, but it would mean a higher chance of future sporadic outbreaks generated by the occasional superspreader who until now has managed to avoid the virus. If superspreaders are also supercatchers then there shouldn’t be too many of these around, except in less populous areas.

Curiouser and curiouser. As it happens, in the oncology department where I work a lot of the junior medical staff suddenly all contracted Covid a week or two ago, having escaped until now, which would fit this idea.

comment by lastapostleofvidal (U1491)
posted about 2 hours ago
A hypothesis from someone at the London Hospital of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that 10-15% of people could be responsible for 80% of all infections. These superspreaders shed tons of virus is the theory. If that’s true then with numbers of cases declining we must be running out of superpreaders, or they have all been staying indoors. Rather than my idea of there being a relative ceiling of those capable of catching it easily, it suggests instead that there is a relative ceiling of those who can pass it on easily. For the nation it amounts to near enough the same thing in terms of numbers overall continuing to fall, but it would mean a higher chance of future sporadic outbreaks generated by the occasional superspreader who until now has managed to avoid the virus. If superspreaders are also supercatchers then there shouldn’t be too many of these around, except in less populous areas.

Curiouser and curiouser. As it happens, in the oncology department where I work a lot of the junior medical staff suddenly all contracted Covid a week or two ago, having escaped until now, which would fit this idea.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I wonder if they had all been to a party Vidal?

They would certainly need to be superspreaders to shed tons of viruses.

Mr Logic is in the building.*





*Not in actual fact a real building

A ton of viruses would probably be enough to infect the population of the earth many times over.

Actually Vidal, logic is often needed. I remember chatting with a group of women who were commenting that they put on a pound if they ate a cream cake. I just commented that if the cake weighed less than a pound then that would be highly unlikely. None of them believed me.

These superspreaders weighing more than a ton should be easy to spot, or perhaps not nowadays.

The Flaming Lips disagree with you Spart. They have observed that a spoonful weighs a ton. I very much doubt that they would have said this unless they were sure of their facts.


No doubt you would find fault with some of the other titles of their legendary "The Soft Bulletin" album. What a fine piece of work it is. Here is the track listing. Go on, give it a listen:

1. "Race for the Prize"
2. "A Spoonful Weighs a Ton"
3. "The Spark That Bled" ("The Softest Bullet Ever Shot" )
4. "The Spiderbite Song"
5. "Buggin'"
6. "What Is the Light?" ("An Untested Hypothesis Suggesting That the Chemical [In Our Brains] by Which We Are Able to Experience the Sensation of Being in Love Is the Same Chemical That Caused the "Big Bang" That Was the Birth of the Accelerating Universe" )
7. "The Observer"
8. "Waitin' for a Superman" ("Is It Gettin' Heavy?" )
9. "Suddenly Everything Has Changed" ("Death Anxiety Caused by Moments of Boredom" )
10. "The Gash" ("Battle Hymn for the Wounded Mathematician" )
11. "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate"
12. "Sleeping on the Roof" (excerpt from "Should We Keep the Severed Head Awake??" )
13. "Race for the Prize" ("Sacrifice of the New Scientists" )
14. "Waitin' for a Superman" (Mokran remix)

Wont bother as music no longer sounds the same when you have hearing loss.

Number 6 though
How come the chemical in our brains that gives us the sensation of being in live is the same chemical that caused the big bang when there were no chemicals prior to the big bang. Obviously if there were the Universe must already have been created. That is logic.

13. What prize do you get for disposing of your back copies of the New Scientist? Would you receive a prize for disposing of the Spectator? Only if it's a Forest one I suppose.

2. A spoonful weighs a ton. If it contains only nucleons it would weigh far more but the distortion in made in space time would make weighing it a very difficult task. Best just to use the theoretical result.

9. Suddenly everything has changed. The arrow of time tells us that everything changes all the time until time stops.

You did ask so I obliged.

I notice you are deliberately steering clear of the difficult ethical question of whether or not we should keep the severed head awake. Of course Mike the headless chicken lived a full 18 months after he had his head chopped off, in fact it was the making of his career. He did far better than his head of which there are no known accounts.

Vidal, your track list running order is different to mine but I concur, fabulous album

Incidentally a spoonful of neutron star would weigh around 1 billion tons. Is this what the superspreaders are made of.

Mike's feat is nothing compared to Donald Trumps who has conducted almost an entire presidency without a brain.

Presumably the size of the spoon will have a bearing on the weight. If you just had a demitasse spoon then probably you couldn't get more than two or three of your neutrons in before they starting spilling over the sides. A good old chowder spoon though, you could get dozens and dozens in one of those. Since we know for a fact that the Flaming Lips' spoonful weighed exactly a ton, it ought to be possible to work out how big their spoon was, assuming it was filled to the brim with these particles of yours.

Not at all, a tea spoon is just an approximate measure of volume which can be easily visualised. The demitasse tea spoon would have trillions of neutrons in it's construction. You would need other dimensions for the Flaming lips' spoon. It could just have a very heavy handle. In fact it would have to as the bowl of tea spoons is approximately equal to any other tea spoon otherwise it wouldn't be a tea spoon. Sounds a ridiculous design of tea spoon.

Well they don't say it a teaspoonful, just a spoonful. There are many sizes of spoon, hence the conjecture. Uri Geller used to have the world record for the largest spoon, over 50 yards long I think it was. If that was full of these neutrons then no wonder it kept bending. Maybe that was how he did his trick, pretending to rub the spoon but all the time dropping in neutrons out of his sleeve until it caved in under the weight. Trillions indeed. They must be absolutely tiny, which was how he got away with it. We just couldn't see them. I always suspected it wasn't actually magic and now it all makes sense.

Spoonful: Howlin' Wolf. Stirring stuff.

Who was the guy, think he was a professor at Kings College who actually believed Yuri Geller was genuine. Somebody trained some students to pretend they had the same magical powers as well and when he presented them to the media they admitted it was all faked. Now you know how it's done you can do the same other than you might have difficulty getting the neutrons to exist.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52920291

Just to be clear, this guy is nothing to do with me. I haven't appeared in hundreds of grumble flicks, nor have I knowingly persuaded anyone to fatally inhale Colorado River toad venom in a shamanistic ritual. And that's my final word on the matter.

Top stuff, to you both, keep up the good work.............

Do we believe you though Vida. It explains some of your posts. I suppose 666 must have liked you when he found your first name was Nacho.

At least the article has the grace to call him "Mr Vidal". A bit of respect never goes amiss.

Actually you are the last apostle of Vidal. Would that be Nacho Vidal and you attend his shamanistic ceremonies inhaling toad venom for a religious experience?

I am no longer the last apostle of Vidal as it happens, so perhaps I need to change my name. A couple of weeks ago, after a gap of more than thirty years, one of the original Apostles contacted me out of the blue. We once had a blazing row when just about to leave Bristol to go to London to see a Tom Waits concert. Derby were shortly to play Forest and he had expressed a hope that Forest win, despite himself being a Coventry City supporter and having no especial interest in the fixture. I demanded that he retract his statement and he refused, so in turn I refused to let him get in my VW Beetle. I can't even remember how it was resolved but in the end we traveled, each refusing to speak to the other. Finally, he has now apologised for his monstrous actions and we will put it behind us at last. So maybe I will think about becoming:

oneofthetwolastknownapostlesofvidal

Can't we re-name this thread:-

'The Doctor and Cow-fighter thread starring Vidal and Spart with supporting roles by Scouse and Heb'