The next edition of the Covid Diary is available:
Commentary
Exactly three years ago different groups of people were coming to terms with the outbreak of a disease, wrestling with statistics, models and claims that were in turn baffling, contradictory, sinister and nonsensical. These email exchanges reflect my membership of one such group in particular; quite difficult to characterise, I would decribe it as "scientifically literate well-meaning interested outsiders with no particular axe to grind." Yes, indeed, a definition that with hindsight seems naive, but we were not to know that three years ago. As to "scientifically literate," I may make that claim. Psychologists come in many different flavours and my own has been deeply concerned with computational modelling for many years.
Darker in tone, these ingenuous emails show how, in the course of a single month, "covid" became as tribal and as fatal an issue as "climate".
Navigate to A Covid Diary for the digest of emails covering the crucial month of April 2020.