In the book, “The Cockroach Papers: A Compendium of History and Lore” it is believed that the first mention of cockroaches being able to survive the Nagasaki and Hiroshima nuclear blasts occurred. This eventually led to the idea that if there was a nuclear war, humanity would be dead but cockroaches would continue on.
This became part of our popular culture lore. This led to studies with radiation to see just how much a cockroach could stand. The answer they found is more than a human but less then other insects. But a nuclear war is so much more than one burst of radiation. It is that, but also how can the creature handle the radiation over generations and survive in the changed post nuclear strike world?
One way to look at it is to see how animals have survived in the area around the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. While bears, foxes and wolves and other large mammals exist in the exclusion zone, there are way fewer insects and spiders than there should be.
So I am going to say that insects and especially cockroaches are unlikely to survive a nuclear war. Especially here in the temperate zones of earth where winter temperatures go below freezing. The only reason cockroaches survive our winters is because of humans being nice enough to heat space for those cockroaches in the winter. They are a tropical insect.
Meanwhile, Dr. Phil has been repeating that “study conclusion” that the overweight and obese are getting serious covid-19 cases in greater numbers than the rest of the population. That rate was 64% in Britain when being overweight or obese occurred in just 62% of the British population. So let’s make my stats more ironclad. I said (in a post from a few weeks ago) that because overweight and obesity was increasing in the population that should take us to 64% – the same rate that were overweight or obese and got serious cases of covid-19.
From 1980 to 2013, the increase in obesity of the United Kingdom was 13%. 2013 is where the 62% obese and overweight rate comes from. Assuming the same rate of increase in obesity and overweight people, we can find that 13% divided by 33 years gives .394% change per year. Multiplied by 7 years this gives a 2.76% increase in obesity and being overweight in the UK. So there should be about 64.76% of the population that is obese or overweight. This rounds up to 65% but I am going to be generous and assume that doctors are making some headway against the obesity epidemic and that the overweight and obese are 64% of the British population.
Again, there is no link between obesity and serious covid-19 cases. Dr. Phil you are wrong.
