This is a trimmed down version of my last article with just the cites from the Imperial college paper to show that in the UK we are indeed using a simulated flu pandemic to guide UK policy and that it differs in almost every detail from the real disease. I know this is hard to understand or believe. But please check my cites carefully and you will see they do.

Before I go any further, if you are in the UK, be sure to protect yourself. This disease is not airborne (except for certain medical procedures). For details see my

Political critics can argue that the U.S.

(Inside Science) -- Imagine putting your hand in a pile of poop. It stinks and squishes. What do you do next?

Most likely, you'll scrub that hand with plenty of soap -- and you don't need public health officials or a germ theory of disease to tell you that's the right thing to do. But when you touch the handrail on an escalator, it's much harder to remember that you could be picking up coronavirus germs.

The isolation that most of the civilized world has been subjected to, during the past few weeks, has produced a number of nasty effects, first and foremost on our economies, but it has also had a few positive ones. One of them is, at least in my case, an urge to use the extra time I have in my hands in a creative way.

Though they are called giant viruses they're still among the tiniest denizens of the microbiome. A few genes' worth of DNA or RNA folded into a shell so small you need an electron microscope to see it, more like a stripped-down husk of an organism.

Giant viruses are ten times the size of their more compact cousins and with hundreds or even thousands of genes, so unlike the rest of the family that until first cataloged in 1992, researchers had dismissed them as bacteria. 

Few of us in the UK even know that the UK government is ignoring WHO's advice. Allyson M Pollock, professor of public health at Newcastle university is the lead author of a recent paper in the British Medical Journal: Covid-19: why is the UK government ignoring WHO’s advice?.

The authors say that

The WHO talk about contact tracing in every press briefing. They constantly stress that contact tracing iis the key to suppressing COVID-19 and then stopping it. They say that contact tracing will not just delay the peak, but suppress it and crush it right down to no new cases a day.

For some reason some countries are not paying any attention to this advice. I wonder if part of it is that not many realize what it involves, and why it is so effective for this disease? It does not mean tracking random people that you walk past in supermarkets or in the street. It is about close or prolonged contacts.

During difficult times, we hope that everyone will pull together, keep calm, and work as a unit to ensure that society continues to run smoothly. Unfortunately, this is not always the case – as is particularly evident right now.

Many governments, the UK included, focus their policy on physical distancing - which is the most obvious eye catching thing that filled the news about Wuhan. Contact tracing often gets far less attention - yet it is the absolute key to stopping this virus. It is also relatively easy to do. It doesn't need health workers. Other countries are using civil servants, community organizations and volunteers.

Contact tracing is the key to winning. Physical distancing is buying time, like defensive tactics in a game of football. Having bought time in this way we can go into the attack, crush this virus and eliminate it from our country.

The locally grown effort was always fine for people fortunate enough to be born into agriculturally rich areas but for everyone else it historically meant famine, poor diets, or high costs.

Modern agriculture and free markets changed all that. A new study finds that as the world has increased its standard of living - there are fewer people in poverty than ever in history and it continues to drop fast - it can lead to concern about food system sustainability. As people get wealthier, they move out of rural areas and into cities, but as we have seen during the SARS-CoV2 panic, when 2 percent of people provide all of the food there is less food system stability. Unless there is a large free trade market.