As of mid-June, a summer COVID-19 wave appears to be slowly starting in parts of the Southern U.S. Disease levels are still low across most of the country, though, and it may be a few weeks before we see recent increases grow into a broader surge. thesicktimes.org/2026/06/30/n...

It’s Wastewater Wednesday! How are COVID levels? We’re using two sources to help us keep track of the country and our state of Oregon. Thank you to @michael-hoerger.bsky.social for the map and graph, and OHA for continuing to track data coming from our wastewater treatment centers!

You'll Be Surprised How Much Science There Is Behind Sneezing Into Your Elbow

🚨🧵by @barryhunt008.bsky.social on XTwitter about science vs cough/sneeze etiquette ("hygiene") " "Cough into your elbow" has no peer-reviewed origin Researchers traced it to a 2006 hospital video And a 1994 quote from a pediatrician..." 🎯19-tweet🧵 threadreaderapp.com/thread/20481...

A lull in transmission is often a time to seek delayed medical & dental care, not a time to rush to Applebee's. 🍎 Levels are at 1/5th the peak of the winter wave. Statistically, you'd be better off wearing a KN95 with mediocre fit during the peak than going maskless today.

🧠 Daily Feed of Brain Damage 🧠 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I want to find new ways to say this because people look baffled when I try to explain it—but I really can’t put it any better. Covid is not over. Covid isn’t in the past tense. Right now is relatively good in very recent terms, but actually worse than what people retrospectively call “during covid.”

In the unlikely event anyone who has been protecting themselves from infection with respirator masks and is considering unmasking because “the risk is low now” I’m going to offer up a long thread on a kind of risk management I was trained in as it may help for decision making 🧵

SARS2 has the following proven characteristics: it is persistent in the body (multi-systemic) after the acute phase of infection. “Recovery” therefore signals latency. That means the virus is still there but successfully suppressed by the immune system. For now. 9.

There are no drug cocktails to lower viral load when latency fails. Most don’t experience any latency and develop a myriad chronic conditions requiring medical intervention and prescriptions to try to prop up the progressively more damaged living system. 10.

If you’ve had Covid and “recovered” there’s even more urgency attached to not getting another strain. Seeding the body with more SARS2 will hasten deterioration and likely cut short the latency period you were experiencing. 11.

If you’ve never had a chronic illness or witnessed someone you love with one, you also have the mistaken assumption that medical intervention will be a) available to you, and b) will allow you to maintain your ability and independence. 12

Being disabled by the impacts of SARS2-generated chronic illness is a cascade of bad at a time when the medical industrial complex is failing and drug supplies are collapsing as well. 13.

No one listens to the hordes of LC patients but they are the canaries in the coal mine. I have lost count of the number of posts saying “you do not want this.” The almost never event is utterly irrevocable. 14.

It’s not that the chance of getting a SARS2 infection is an almost never event in some circumstances, it has to be you shoot for zero because the cost of it happening is too high. End.

Germany's covid RNA in wastewater continues to drop. Current level is about 10X lower than previous omicron-era lows. Also Netherlands and Denmark recorded omicron-era record-low wastewater covid RNA concentrations this week. 1/

It would appear Boston / Boston's North Shore has hit the lowest COVID-19 wastewater levels since July 2021 (the brief time between adults being fully vaccinated and the delta wave, then omicron)

"Long COVID potentially affects nearly 6 million children in the US." 10–20% of children who contract COVID develop long COVID, which manifests differently than in adults. While vaccines lower risk, no single cure exists. Care is tailored to symptoms like fatigue, headaches, and brain fog.

Did you know that using an in-home HEPA purifier for one month spurs a small but significant improvement in brain function in adults age 40 and older? 🎉

Sick, well, old, young, healthy, unhealthy—-all people deserve our respect and our protections, perhaps even more so for those who aren't able to help themselves. Or at least that’s true in a civilized, humane society.

They found a way to make themselves believe that, if COVID-19 killed a person, that meant that person was sick. Then that structure justifies not even trying to mitigate the pandemic. Sociopathic nihilism as public health policy.

I’m an ambivert who continues to take precautions. Do I miss socializing more casually, dining with friends, and so on? Yes. Will I keep on as I am? Also yes.

Masks reduce that exposure, and when both people mask, protection compounds. So no, it’s not that “masks don’t work.” It’s that not all masks, or how they’re used, work the same. For more information, visit our “Yes, We Continue Wearing Masks” page: whn.global/yes-we-conti... #CleanAir #Masking

Wastewater data report the lowest national averages of SARS-CoV-2 in sewage in a couple of years, and low levels across regions. Recent levels are still higher than the true lows we saw with widespread precautions earlier in the pandemic, but they are getting surprisingly close. bit.ly/48byxo8

The CAN 99 headstrap version is equivalent and the closest to the fit of a 3M Aura that I’ve found www.protectly.co/products/vit...

Couchella 2026 🎶 🛋️ All the best music, none of the SARS-CoV2, at a ticket price that's affordable to all!

From the US School Difficulties and Long COVID in Children and Adolescents www.academicpedsjnl.net/article/S187... Screenshot from latest Science for ME weekly update #LongCovid #LongCovidKids

You are born with all the brain cells you'll ever have. As you learn, these cells are knitted into neural pathways. Covid eats these cells. Loss of smell? That's brain damage, bringing dementia and parkinson's closer. Yours multiple times a year, unless wearing a respirator. #CovidIsNotOver

How To Prevent Heatstroke

You think too much anyway.

So HEPA filters in all schools and remote class until then??

"It's just a flu." "COVID doesn't affect kids." We're into year 7 of this mess and there are still those who refuse to believe. Rolling the dice with kids' health is unconscionable. #longCOVID #pediatrics #childhealth #disability #maskup

Okay, but if we roast the tomatoes would that cancel out the vaccine? or only enhance it?

I like my tomatoes with a polio vaccine! It limbers me up. Also, tastes great!

"The anti-vaccination movement is a particularly bitter issue for me because it doesn’t just dehumanize me as an autistic person; it also sets off two of my biggest triggers. Like many people on the spectrum, I don’t handle it well when people are 1) wrong, and 2) unfair."

"I’ve always struggled to be patient with people who are clearly and obstinately wrong. Most of my elementary school report cards contained some variation of 'Sarah does not suffer fools gladly' and I can’t honestly say that I’ve made significant improvements in that arena since then."

"And people who refuse to vaccinate their children because they believe that vaccines cause autism are wrong. Andrew Wakefield’s infamous study that linked autism to the MMR vaccine, which first sparked anti-vax panic in 1998, was called into question in 2004 and fully retracted in 2010."

"Wakefield, who misrepresented or altered the subjects’ medical histories over the course of his research, lost his license that same year. No scientist has been able to reproduce his results. [...] This should be more than enough to persuade a rational person that vaccines are safe—or at least...

"...at least as safe as any other simple medical procedure—but there is nothing even remotely rational about the anti-vaccination movement. It’s a dangerous and infuriating melange: poorly articulated fears of 'toxins,' a failure to understand the difference between correlation and causation..."

"...misleading articles on truther websites, and conspiracy theories [...] I can’t even begin to wrap my head around anti-vaxxers’ reasoning. How can you find fault with every single bit of evidence that we have, from every single source, about the safety of vaccines?"

"How can you continuously misread every single fact about their contents? How can you disregard the efficacy of vaccines in the fight against deadly and debilitating illnesses across the globe? If you can’t disregard it, how can you not care?"

"If there really is a connection between autism and vaccines—which there’s not—and Big Pharma and/or The Man really are causing autism through vaccinations, what on earth do you think the end game of this conspiracy is?"

"What upsets me more than the wrongness, though, is the dangerously unfair behavior that results from it. When someone believes asinine things about vaccines, it hurts humanity on an intellectual level."

"When they put those beliefs into action and refuse to vaccinate their children, it puts all of us at risk of serious illness and death. The 2025 measles outbreak, which as of publication has reached 17 states and Washington DC, is a glaring example of what can happen when people..."

"put their (ignorant) personal whims against the well-being of their community. Through no fault of their own, unvaccinated children, immunocompromised people, babies too young to receive the vaccination and the occasional vaccinated person (no vaccine is 100 percent because science is not magic)...

"are suffering from an infection that was essentially eliminated from the U.S. in 2000. All because [...] privileged parents have decided reviving a group of life-threatening diseases & potentially inflicting them on their loved ones & neighbors is infinitely preferable to having an autistic child."

"I’ve been told by some anti-vaxxers that they don’t mean my brand of autism; they mean non-verbal autism, or as they are so fond of calling it, 'profound autism.'"

"I’m not about to take any solace in the idea that they’re willing to make exceptions for autistic people who can perform as neurotypical, or at least pose as little annoyance to neurotypicals as possible."

"That just means that I will cease to be of any value to these people if I am no longer able to pass as one of them, and that they see no value and no humanity in anyone who communicates or behaves differently from them. Tell me again who has the empathy problem?"

"We work together to bridge our differences in communication, sensitivities, attributes, and detriments to go about our lives in a way that expands far beyond the moment-to-moment. We’re no more or less imperfect or tragic than the average family. We don’t even have measles."