By the way… Five years is nothing. Pandemics and many epidemic and endemic diseases wreak their damage over decades… Our short concentration span is a problem.

Yes. Yes kids should be wearing masks in schools and being given cleaner air. Those masks should be comfy and cheap. Why? Because kids are getting sick with a disease that we know very little about, and what we do know, is looking problematic.

For much of this year depression has burgled almost everything about me. I’ve made this photo to show that I’m still here, even if I’m in tiny bits: old marbles, Roman beads, a tiny 17th C fox, 1930s toy flowers, a medieval key. Making this helped my brain, looking at the details might help yours…

A Green Heron flying over the marsh on a foggy morning.

New paper from @naturehealthglobal.bsky.social scientists identifies extensive spillover risk of an under-researched group of coronaviruses in China and Southeast Asia. 🧵 naturehealthglobal.org/new-paper-id...

Is it just me, or more and more does it seem like there’s a “bug” going around that affects people’s ability to assess risk? #COVID

Pulmonary risk and so many others continue for years after any COVID reinfection. How is this mild? Also this research only lasted 3 years.**

Tens of thousands of cornflowers in a field in Wicken. Research shows that the sight of them will help you recover from sources of stress more quickly & boost dopamine release in your brain, lifting your mood…in case you need it just now:

In 2020, Arundhati Roy wrote a gorgeous, prescient essay called “The Pandemic is a Portal”. In this piece, I discuss who actually walked through it: the COVID conscious community, and why I’m proud to be a part of it. www.thegauntlet.news/p/the-pandem...

Why do N95s work? Cooper the cat shows us how. Electrostatic attraction. It works really well at attracting and capturing particles. N95 filter media is electrostatically charged, making it very efficient at grabbing even ultra-fine particles out of the air.

You can learn more about the various mechanisms N95 filter media uses to capture particles in this video by minutephysics. www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAda...

1/ Most people still don’t know how to use a rapid antigen test (RAT) correctly. So here’s a 🧵on how to get the most accurate results and avoid spreading COVID:

The CDC's airport screening program with Ginkgo Bioworks has now detected multiple cases of the new COVID-19 variant NB.1.8.1, which has been linked to a recent surge in China www.cbsnews.com/news/us-repo...

saddle up

New PET imaging data reveal the long-term impact of COVID on heart and lungs, showing changes to these organs which are not detectable by standard medical assessments.  #LongCovid healthimaging.com/topics/medic...

For an extra burst dopamine from my photo below look for the 6-petalled forget me not. If you have f-m-n in your garden look closely at the centres of the flowers. If they’re yellow they contain nectar,but when they’ve been pollinated they fade to white-tiny bees know which flowers have a snack in 🐝

Rampant Spread: You need to *click* on this image to see the *mindboggling* change in number of people waiting 12 hours for treatment when they attend urgent care.

Not testing for Covid doesn't make it go away.

Hope for anti-reservoir therapies in #longCOVID. I am hedging my bets on us one day looking back and thinking it obvious that most #longCOVID is just chronic SARS-CoV-2 infection. Many viruses linger, causing chronic disease. www.medscape.com/viewarticle/...

The importance of the immune system for healthy aging. A large multi-cohort study identifies a mechanism of immune resilience with substantial impact for outcomes onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

“swill milk” killed babies. Get rid of food inspections and get ready for dead babies. bigthink.com/the-past/swi...

60 Minutes just ran a good (& alarming) piece on bird flu. Highlights: 🔹️Kay Russo, DVM, a dairy & poultry expert, says: "At present, we're given a stick and they put a blindfold on us and send us into a gunfight, and we're losing. We're losing." 🔹️Kamran Khan, 🧵1/4 www.cbsnews.com/video/bird-f...

“We found that having COVID-19 during the 3-year study period significantly increased the progress of aging,” particularly among females. Associations of epigenetic aging and COVID-19: A 3-year longitudinal study link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Because some people clearly haven't got the memo

Many Medicaid recipients do not know they receive it because Medicaid is called different things in different states. The public narrative of Medicaid focuses on a distant other, but 40% of US children and 60% of nursing home residents receive Medicaid. Just SOME of the names by state are below:

"After the war they tried to persuade public health officials to take the threat of airborne infection seriously. But infectious disease experts, fighting against outbreaks and preparing for emergence of new diseases mostly ignored them, even when it meant accepting basic mistakes about physics."

This is a very unusual pattern for COVID. I'm really curious as to what is driving it.

A new wave driven by the LP.8.1.* variants. Genomic sequencing data (routinely lags) predicts a recent crossover vs XEC.* for the US. bsky.app/profile/mike...

Dog carry #H5N1 at lower levels than cats but can infect others: "Our results suggest that the intensive monitoring of dogs is necessary to prevent human infection by H5N1 influenza virus, [they] may not show clear clinical signs...” NH Kim (2015) paper here: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25416494/

The code… RNA or DNA when it’s in the body *is the virus. Whether it’s latent or not is another question.

Still more deadly than flu or RSV jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

I went through and calculated the 2024 averages based on the numbers provided here. On a yearly basis, SARS2 is still over four times the threat of any of the influenzas & over three times the threat of RSV. So don't listen to anybody when they tell you that is not a problem anymore.

And this:

Not good news: @WHO just announced a new Marburg outbreak in Tanzania. “As of 11 January 2025, nine suspected cases were reported including eight deaths across two districts – Biharamulo and Muleba. …Results are pending official confirmation.” www.who.int/emergencies/... 🧪 #IDsky

Can we please put this on street video boards all over and air it as a commercial on every channel?? #AIRBORNE #COVID

I still remember the first time I saw #SARSCoV2 in the brain in the microscope, back in 2021. I was supposed to be looking at brains with Alzheimer, the neuroinflammation is similar. I knew #NeuroCovid was going to be pretty bad. We are just starting to see how much. #LongCovid