Author: Andrew Fletcher

Well it is now official. Although I have suspected this might happen since being furloughed back in May, and being told two weeks ago that it was going to happen, today I have now been officially told that I am now redundant. It’s not something which I sought or something that has happened to me before, but it is a day when I reflect on my past experience of redundancy, not as someone who was made redundant, but as a child of someone who was.

Today is a good day to reflect anyway as today would have been my Dad’s 99th birthday. He never got near to making 100 and when I compare my current situation with what my Dad went through, then I know that I have no reason to complain.

My Dad lived in a totally different era. He grew up in the great depression. Back in the 1930s in the UK, free schooling ended at age 14. You could either go on to the grammar school or start work. It was 1935 and the middle of the great deression. Although my Dad was by no means dumb, his parents could not afford for him to go to grammar school, so he was sent off at 14 to join his parents and his older brothers to work in the mill. He needed to earn a wage and contribute to the family coffers. I remember him telling me that when he started work at 6am on the first morning, that he was so cold, he could barely get off his bike.

He was not a man of great physical stature. He barely made 5 foot tall. But to me, the real stature of a man goes beyond physical appearance and to who someone is as a human being. And for that, in my opinion at least, he was a man of great stature.

When he turned 18, the second world war was barely a couple of weeks old. He would soon get his call up papers and was send off to serve King and country and fight against the rise of Nazism in Europe and the evil that it encompassed. He was very much a peaceful man. That is how I remember him. In our childhood, we would never even raise his voice to us, or anyone else. Just a calming influence is what he was. How this man survived the violence of war, I just don’t know.

He would never talk about his experiences of war. Like many others, he just wanted to put it behind him. In fact an old army pal who came to his funeral, told us more about his war years than he ever did. What I do know is that he worked on anti-aircraft guns. Not the type of high tech equipment our armed forces have now, but something that would spray shells in a seemingly random direction into the sky in the vain hope that they might pierce an enemy aircraft. I can’t remember all the places he went to in the war. I know it was mainly in Africa and the Middle East and ranged from South Africa to Egypt and on to what was then Palestine. I also know that while in Africa, he learnt to speak Swahili. He just learnt it from talking to the natives and then acted as an interpreter for the army officers. Knowing my Dad as I did, I’m sure that he enjoyed that much more than firing random bullets in the sky.

When the war ended, he came back to his home in Barnoldswick, in what was then the Weat Riding of Yorkshire. From that moment on, he never wanted to leave the town again for the rest of his life. It was always a struggle getting him to go on holiday. His favourite part was when he saw the Barnoldswick sign as he returned home.

When he returned though, it was back to the mills. However that also was the start of the decline of the textile industry in the north of England. It was cheaper to manufacture textiles in Asia where labour was cheap, so the mills started to lose their customers and one by one in the town, they all started to close.

I don’t know how many times he was made redundant, most of the occasions happened before I was born or too young to remember, but he would be made redundant as a mill closed. Eventually he would get a job in another mill and then sometime later, that mill would close until the last mill closed. That was in my teenage years, so I do remember that well. He was 6 months without a job and what could a man of his age do when all the mills were gone? Eventually he got a job with Johnson and Johnson. J & J were a customer of the mill and would buy the cloth that was made which had a special non-adhesive quality. They would cut it into strips, sterilize it and make dressings out of it. As their supplier was no more, they bought a machine from the administrator and got my Dad to go and operate it. He did enjoy the final few years of his working life as he was basically his own boss and he could just concentrate on getting the job done.

As I now reflect on my own redundancy and compare that with what my Dad went through, I am mindful that there really is no comparison at all. It happened to him several times. The industry that he was in, was on the decline and he was limited to what he could get in that town. He had his education shut down at 14, but I got to go to the grammar school and eventually to University and got a good education.

One summer before the last mill closed, he got me a summer job in the mill. One of the ladies in the mill remarked to him one day “Your son doesn’t look as if he’s enjoying himself.” He replied by saying. “He’s not here to enjoy himself. He’s here to find out what life will be like if he doesn’t pass his exams.” He never got the education that he deserved and certainly wanted to make sure that I did.

Whereas he was trying to get a job in an industry that was dying out. I am redundant in an industry which is still rapidly growing and for which, I would hope, given my experience and skills should be in demand. My redundancy was more unfortunate because I happened to be working on a contract for an airline parts manufacturer who lost all their business. My work as a software engineer will translate to any industry. I have options. My Dad had none.

Yes this is a time of uncertainty, but it is a time of opportunity. Today is a day for reflection. A time when as I always do on this day every year, think of my Dad and especially this year the heard life he had. He was dragged all over the world, longing to get home. My job has taken me all over the world and I’ve loved it. He was refused a good education. I have had all the opportunities I could have wished for.

Yes today is a day of reflection. Tomorrow is a day to earnestly begin finding a new job.

Since I stopped working on the Covid-19 tracking app, I’ve switched to writing a new app which is all about predicting the results of football matches (soccer games for people in the US).

The app is now published but is still very much in the beta testing phase. Other than the French league, which started in August, most European leagues get going in mid September, so I am hoping that enough people try this to test it for me before then. It is available at https://fletcherhome.net/fp/index.html so please go ahead and try it out.

The idea behind this is that you enter what you think the result of a game will be and points are awarded based on how near you are to the correct score. So there are 3 points if you get the result correct (pick the correct winner or pick a draw) and a bonus point is awarded for a correct team score, so if you get the correct result and scoreline, a maximum of 5 points are on offer.

Also, there are additional points on offer for predicting the overall finishing positions at the end of the season. These are the tournaments on offer.

When you go to the link you will get a logon page. If you have not yet registered, you will need to click the Sign-Up button and enter your details. and also select which leagues you want to get notifications for. You can still play without signing up for notifications, but if you do sign up for them, you will recieve an email 3 days before a match takes place, put only if you have not already entered your prediction. At any time you can turn on or off the notications from the settings (by pressing the cog button) There is an email verification process to go through, but then you should be all set.

You can also create groups so that you can play against just a few friends. At the bottom of the main page, you will see a leaderboard and if you are part of a group, then you will see a tab for that group and the total scores of all the people in that group. To create a group, press the cerate group button as shown below.

You can then give the group a name and a secret, which you only tell people who you want to invite. Then if you enter their email addresses, an email will be sent out to them inviting them to join. If they are already registered, just a simple click on the link in the email will have them join the group, otherwise they are first invited to register and then can join the group.

There are multiple tournaments that you can play. You can play as many or as few as you like. Just click the button like the one below to switch tournaments.

At this stage I am trying to get as much feedback as possible, so if you find a problem or have a suggestion, please shoot me an email at Football.predictions@fletcherhome.net

It’s been a couple of months that I have been working on a Covid-19 statistics app. At this stage I intend to just do bug fixes and start working on a completely different app. But before I move on, I think it is worthwhile reflecting on where we are with Covid-19 and not where I am with the app. The app was designed to make it easy to see the statistics and to pick up trends which we can learn from. So, what can we learn?

I must first offer a disclaimer, that I am not a doctor, have no medical training, but I do keep up with news outlets from trusted sources (not Facebook shares!) And I have also spent the last couple of months writing this app. I have looked at these statistics for so long and when there is something which I thought would be useful to know, I’ve written some functionality to get that information from the raw data.

Firstly, there are some undeniable facts (although I know that some people like to deny the undeniable).

1. Covid-19 has had a more significant impact on the world than anything else in my lifetime (and I’m no spring chicken anymore). The impact has been in terms of health, with well over 600,000 people currently killed by it and well over 15,000,000 people having caught the virus.
2. Covid-19 does not affect all people in the same way. It goes all the way from not having any symptoms for some people to death for others. In addition, we don’t know what long-term effects the disease has on everyone, including children.
3. Despite some people not taking it too seriously at the beginning and saying it will go away when the warm weather comes, the warm weather came and the virus spread faster. The daily rate of new cases is higher today than it has ever been before. Arizona is very hot and yet there is a steep incline in new cases there.
4. Despite some people claiming that the only reason for the increase in new cases is because of the increase in testing and deaths are still going down, that has proved to be false. Now deaths are increasing at a rapid rate and the daily death toll is now around what it was in April as the lockdown was starting to take effect. (Yesterday was just shy of 10,000 deaths worldwide)
5. This virus is not going away soon.

There are also theories that scientists first believed to be the case which have changed as more knowledge and data have been gathered. This is not to say they got it wrong, but science is about coming up with a theory based on what you believe to be true and finding evidence which either proves or disproves it. At the start of the pandemic assumptions were made that the virus would behave in a particular way, based on how most viruses behave. There is no evidence one way or another at the start, but as more data becomes evident, then the initial hypothesis is either proved or disproved. Here are examples of what I am taking about.

1. Initially it was thought that the virus first infects a person, then symptoms develop and then the person becomes infectious and infects other people. That is the way that H1N1 and SARS behaved. However, it appears that with Covid-19 a person can be infectious before they develop symptoms. Indeed, they may never develop symptoms at all. This is what makes it so much more dangerous as people may be spreading it without knowing that they have the virus. The initial idea of isolating yourself at the first sign of any symptoms is the right thing to do, but it may already be too late by then as you may have infected other people already.
2. Initially most governments were saying that masks were not effective, now they insist that we should wear them. Why did that change? Did the virus change? Not at all. What changed is our view of what a mask is useful for. It is believed that the virus spreads through droplets. We pick those droplets up through touching infected surfaces and then through touching our faces. A mask will not protect us from that and that has not changed. What a mask will do however is stop us from unwittingly spreading the virus if we are infected without knowing it. The virus is also spread by droplets emitting from people’s mouths, as in sneezes or even just talking or breathing. Those droplets are caught in the fabric of the mask and do not spread to others, so the reason why we should all wear masks when in confined spaces outside of our bubble, is not to protect us, but to protect everyone else. That is why wearing of masks has to be compulsory, rather than voluntary, because it is not for our protection; it is to protect everyone else.

Then there are also a number of things that we still do not know.

1. Can people who have had the virus catch it again? In the vast majority of cases, you would have to say, not immediately. As people produce anti-bodies, then those anti-bodies will fight off the virus if it tries to re-infect us. What we don’t know though and it’s impossible to know at the moment, is how long those anti-bodies remain active. With some diseases we get lifetime immunity; with others, such as seasonal flu, we are protected for only a few months. As Covid-19 was not around a year ago, how could we possibly know if our anti-bodies could protect us for more than a few months? They may; they may not. We simply do not know.
2. Will there be a second wave worse than the first? Again, we simply cannot know at this stage. We can look back on other pandemics such as the Spanish Flu of around 100 years ago. The second and third waves of that were much more deadly than the first, before it eventually died out. If this is repeated with Covid-19, we could potentially have several million deaths worldwide.

Where do we go from here? Much of the world is emerging from lockdown, but that doesn’t mean things are going back to how they were before. The virus is still there and will be for a long time. People who have the virus still spread the virus. The only advantage that we have now over this virus that we didn’t have 6 months ago, is more knowledge.

When lockdowns throughout the world initially started, the question was “How long before we can get back to normal?” It is clear that there is no miracle cure or vaccine yet available, although some initial vaccine trials look promising. The reason for the lockdown was to stop people from mixing either socially or at work so that they do not pass on the virus. As a means of stopping the spread it has been successful. It comes though with a cost of destroying the economies and people’s livelihoods. People against the lockdowns have claimed that destroying the economy will kill more people than the virus will. I don’t feel though, that this should be an either/or question. The lockdown was to prevent the spread of the virus, so we have to look at how we can stop the virus spreading using other means and this is where the hard work starts.

With a lockdown, it’s easy to make a hard and fast rule that people have to stay home and some people may object but it’s easy to understand. If I am going to get back to life as normal, then how can I avoid getting infected? To me that is the wrong question. The right question should be “How can I avoid spreading the virus if I have it but don’t know?” If people looked at that question, which is one of selflessness, rather than the former question which is from a more selfish perspective, then we would go a long way to getting back to life as normal. Easing of lockdown has to mean that we have to change the way we behave. With all things, there is an element of risk. What we have to do is try all we can to keep that risk to a minimum. If that means wearing a mask, I’ll wear a mask. If that means avoiding public transport, I’ll avoid public transport. If I can’t avoid public transport, then what’s the least risky way I can travel?

The first thing is that, if I show any signs or even the potential for having the virus, I need to stay isolated and get tested. Until a few years ago, I was always proud of my personal work record in that I had never had a day off sick. Yes, I’ve had plenty of colds and flus over the years. One time (years ago) a day after returning from Zimbabwe, I started with some illness which was never diagnosed, but left me hot and sweaty, with no energy and difficulty breathing. I had never felt so ill before and have never since, but I still went to work as normal and struggled through. Now when I look back on that, I see it as far less heroic and more stupid as I didn’t know what I had, nor did my doctor, and I could have infected other people. It is vital that if we have any symptoms, we don’t struggle on at work, but stay home and not risk infecting others.

From the perspective of the economy, we are going to see a radical shift in how business is done. Some sectors will do well, and some will do less well and may even fail. This actually happens all the time in the economy anyway, and has done since the days of the industrial revolution. What is different now though, is that this shift in the economy is going to happen in a matter of months, whereby it would have normally taken several years, so it will hurt. As an example, most non-essential stores were forced to close during lockdown. People still needed certain goods so would buy them online. Now that stores have reopened, not everybody is going to go back. Over the last few years there has been a gradual shift to shopping online. Covid-19 caused a rapid acceleration in this. The amount we spend on retail overall remains at a similar total value, but the split between online and in store has shifted dramatically to online. The high street stores were already struggling; this has accelerated the decline. The wearing of masks in store may eventually give people more confidence to go back in person. Limiting the number of people in stores helps stop the spread, but isn’t good for sales. Some stores will adapt and survive, others will not.

When it comes to restaurants, masks are not required there. It doesn’t mean that that the restaurant environment is safer, therefore I don’t need to wear a mask. It’s impossible to eat while wearing a mask, so if that restaurant is going to stay in business, then other ways are needed to mitigate the risk. No self-service is one mitigation. I should not be going near the food that someone else could be eating. Keeping tables further apart is another mitigation. Outdoor dining is even better, although very much weather dependent.

The travel industry is one area that has seen a dramatic shift. People flying to infected areas and bringing the virus home certainly had a big impact on the initial spread of the virus. Recirculated air in a thin tube of metal sealed off from fresh air, crammed with people breathing that same air, is the ideal environment for the virus to grow. Masks are therefore essential, although on a 10-hour flight, it’s impossible to last without eating or drinking, and I must remove my mask in order to do so. It’s certainly not easy to come up with solutions.

Education is another controversial area where there is no ideal solution, and we have to get creative. We know that children are much less affected by this virus than older people. They are not immune to it, but the risk of having a serious illness grows a lot with age. I am therefore not too concerned about the health of our children with a return to school. They will be just fine. However, I have serious concerns about the health of our teachers and the health of parents and grandparents. One big unknown is just how infectious a child is if they are not showing any symptoms. If they are infectious, then reopening schools without serious mitigation is not wise.

We have a very difficult balancing act when it comes to the education of our children. To go back to school as it was pre-lockdown risks a large spike in infections when schools return in September. Closing schools risks the long-term future wellbeing of a whole generation. Some schools and some children have done well moving learning to online. For others it has been a disaster. As in most things, the ones who have done best tend to be the wealthiest households.

While adults may find difficulty in social distancing, for children, particularly young children, it is an impossibility. There is going to be an awful lot of work this summer in schools to get them ready to take on the masses of children who will return in September. There are certainly no easy answers and we have to give the teaching community our full support and not get annoyed when things have to be revised at a moment’s notice.

Life will never return to how it was pre Covid-19. What we have to do is adapt and keep others safe.

A couple of new features have been added to my Covid 19 app. One is Maps, which you can see a screenshot of above.

On the initial screen with the table of information, there is now a Map button and that will take you to a world map which the cases are highlighted for each country. From the drop down at the top, you can select the map type, which will do Cases/100K, New Cases/100K. New Deaths, Cases rate change and Deaths Rate change.

Just for the US currently, but I intend to add more maps over time, you can click on the country and see the states. Then clicking on the state, you see the counties.

Here are the states as they are today

You can see that the new cases are quite high as a proportion of the population in all states except in the north east.

The Hotspots feature is again a button from the first page. This shows the number of new cases today (as a 7 day rolling average) compared with the number of new cases a week ago. This is generally showing where it is spreading quickest.