Interesting Links for 01-04-2021

It's hard to draw lessons from your own failures (further on the guy who lost $10,000,000 running his company, and why he's learned the wrong lessons)

(tags:business failure )

This is my new favourite software license

(tags:software intellectual_property funny )

Biden plan eliminates billions in fossil fuel subsidies

(tags:USA coal oil subsidies GoodNews environment globalwarming )

Government communications should serve the public

(tags:propaganda UK government )

Apple commits to build "grid-scale" energy storage in California

(tags:electricity Apple California USA batteries )

If you applied Transgender size checks to the current women's rugby team 60% of them would fail

(tags:transgender sports )

Scotland to get new nature reserve as community 'achieves impossible'

(tags:nature Scotland )

Sir Keir Starmer on Labour's Brexit position: 'We have left the EU - there is no case for rejoining'

(tags:labour Europe UK )

Facebook bans 'voice of Trump' from platform

(tags:Facebook censorship USA )

PM's ethnic minority adviser quits role

(tags:uk racism )

COVID 'fuse' may have been lit weeks or months before the 'bomb' in Wuhan market (and there may be a bunch of other viruses which never make it big)

(tags:virus pandemic )

Pfizer: COVID vaccine shows 100% efficacy in adolescents 12-15

(tags:pandemic vaccine children )

Everything the Race Commission report misses, from evidence to humanity

(tags:racism uk )

49 brilliantly underwhelming local news headlines from across the UK

(tags:journalism uk )

Voxels: Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code

(tags:animation computers games history )

BMJ: Structural racism is a fundamental cause and driver of ethnic disparities in health

(tags:healthcare UK racism )

How's the pandemic doing in the first 3 months of 2021? (In Scotland)

After spending the whole of March hanging around the 500 mark (about 10/100k) we've finally dipped a bit over the last few days - bringing our 7-day average down to 460, the lowest it's been since September last year.


The case count not dropping has been worrying me a bit, but I've been cheered by some of the other stats, which show that the vaccination strategy has *really* been working.
You can see that the rate has plummeted for the over 65s, and stayed very low, which it's higher for younger people (who are less affected).


And the testing positivity rate has been very low, and slowly dropping, which is great.


Hospital admissions have also been dropping


And for the first time today, second-vaccinations outnumber the first-vaccinations, as the people who were vaccinated as part of the first batch get their second lot delivered. This should hopefully bring down the case and death rates even further amongst the elderly and in the care homes.


So it looks like opening nurseries (and some schools) a month ago brought the rate up, but the continuing vaccination has kept it steady and now it's dropping again.

Fingers crossed that things continue the way they are, if not better!

(All graphs from the ever-aweseome Travelling Tabby. There's a tracker for the whole of the UK there if you want to see that too.)