The next pandemic – and Amazon offers

They cancelled the major exercises before Covid to concentrate on Brexit, and the Covid`Enquiry is trying to establish what happened that should and should not have happened.

And now former Chief Scientific Advisor Sir Patrick Vallance has spoken at the Hay festival in Powys:

• Another pandemic is “absolutely inevitable” and urged the incoming British government to focus on preparing for it, warning “we are not ready yet”.
• “Great we are having an election” as there are “clearly issues that need to be sorted out”.
• One of the things the next government must do is implement “better surveillance to be able to pick these things up.”
• He also reiterated what he said to G7 leaders in 2021, that “we need to be much faster, much more aligned – and there are ways to do this – at getting rapid diagnostic tests, rapid vaccines, rapid treatments, so that you don’t have to go into the extreme measures that took place” during the Covid-19 pandemic. The measures he recommends are possible to implement, Vallance believes, but “require some coordination”.
• He said that by 2023 the G7 had “sort of forgotten” about the points he had made in 2021. “You can’t forget about it,” he urged, recommending that pandemic preparations are treated similarly to the armed forces.
• The science community is warning that the next pandemic likely to be caused by flu virus. And this blog has previously mentioned that cross-species transmission of of H5N1 bird flu. Since 2003, H5N1 influenza viruses have circulated in 23 countries, primarily affecting wild birds and poultry with about 900 human cases, primarily among people who have had close contact with infected birds
• Source

Been out all day, so no domestics. Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

Amazon haven’t sent me annoy-the-neighbour offers for bagpipes, banjos, plastic trombones or the like for some time. Now they’ve started sending me offers for toolboxes as I’m trying to get organised. However, the very nice hard plastic on wheels jobbie, which would suit, maybe, comes in at seven hundred quid. Thanks, but no thanks.

Music

Antonio Bertali (1605-1669), Ciaccona, Voices of Music, Alana Youssefian, baroque violin