N the year 2019, especially towards the end of that year, COVID-19 was already spreading around the world (and out of China). By this point 4 years ago many people had already been infected. Looking back at what what ONS released yesterday morning, I can see that England and Wales weekly death data for week 42 are now 10.4k or more. Pre-COVID-19 the average was 9.6k, thus an almost 10% increase.

Over time, as medicine improves and treatments become better, we expect the numbers not to go up per capita, so population increases alone might play a role in any substantial increases in mortality. Did the British population explode by 10% in less than a decade? No.

So what is going on?

started this site in 2001 or in 2002. The domain schestowitz.com was registered in 2004 because the site had grown large enough to merit an independent server.

But years later I became busy with other sites and activities, even predating social control media like Digg.com.

In more recent years the sites moved to their very own system, or a static site generator that is simple and flexible enough to extend without an upstream project (always racing to break stuff and impose bloat you neither asked for nor needed).

In summer of 2022 we migrated a site founded in 2004, based on Drupal, to a new perl-based static site generator. The project was a success and the site is growing by about 50 pages per day. The site is tuxmachines.org.

This past September, just over a year later, we did the same to techrights.org, a site that turns 17 tomorrow. techrights.org ran Drupal, WordPress, and MediaWiki.

Not only was the migration successful; it resulted in page delivery times about 10 times faster and we’re able to produce more a lot faster. Details about the perl-based static site generator were presented in a conference this past summer.

Both sites are composed and edited by an international team. A lot of the editing is managed via ssh with UNIX-style permissions/access control. The scale of the perl code is a few thousands of lines of code, plus bash wrappers and aliases to simplify usage.

The code is AGPLv3-licensed and available via Git or Gemini Protocol.

he ONS data which came out 2 hours ago is interesting but not surprising anymore. Compare it to 2019 sheets to find that in the 5 years prior to COVID-19 the average number of deaths in England and Waves was 9,651 in Week 41. This year it’s like 1,000 deaths higher (same week, Week 41), or an increase of about 10%. So the pandemic isn’t over or something else is happening that our regime is reluctant to investigate and talk about. We already know cancer cases are rising sharply. To quote a BBC article from 4 days ago: “Over the last five years there has been a 9% increase in female breast cancer cases and 6% increase in lung cancer.”

That’s in Northern Ireland but probably representative of the rest of the country.

We need answers. Is medicine improving our health and making our life longer? Or did that stop? It seems like people deserve honest answers, at least some inquest.

WROTE this blog post in another site. The gist of the relevant bits is, England and Wales deaths are up from about 9.2k to about 10k (per week), based on yesterday’s ONS numbers.

So the crisis remains.

HAVE just checked this morning’s (weekly) mortality numbers across England and Wales in the official government site (ONS publishes these numbers each week).

Before the pandemic we had about 9,000 deaths on the 38^th week of the year:

Notice how it has climbed since then. This year is a lot worse than last year, too:

England and Wales became a place where people live shorter lives. Has the government checked the reasons?