This is a really good like State of the Covid letter, of where we're at right now. It ain't great, obviously. This guy is an epidemiologist with a background in hospital infection control and emergency management.

i am in the core committee talking to a dude in the committee which is a palestine advocacy group, we were about covid 19 and i suggested we should implement mandatory masking policies for indoor events, after half our leadership was down with an illness. we are also in a summer surge

he has some kind of medical degree, and worked in long term care as a medical officer of some sort. I'm kind out of depth with this rhetoric tbh,

his comments

It is normal to get sick once a year and, in fact, healthy because it helps train your immune system. Some years you won't get sick, other will be twice.

Covid doesn't cause an impact on your immue system either. Sometimes you can be In a bit of a state of inflammation which happens in many viral infections. And long covid is a topic in itself. It has never been quantified by any and all testing except subjective

maybe he would be more receptive with super libbed up sources or something, i dunno what he would respect

In the cohort who were exposed to COVID-19 before vaccines were available, the incidence of type 2 diabetes was four times higher during the first 4 weeks after a diagnosis of COVID-19 than before or in the absence of COVID-19. Type 2 diabetes incidence remained elevated by 64% overall during the second year after diagnosis, was twice as high in people who were hospitalised with COVID-19, and was 11% higher in those not hospitalised with COVID-19. The majority of incident type 2 diabetes after COVID-19 was persistent. The increase in incidence of type 2 diabetes after COVID-19 was markedly attenuated in vaccinated compared with unvaccinated people (1.6 times higher vs 8. 8 times higher during weeks 1–4 after COVID-19 diagnosis). The incidence of type 1 diabetes was elevated only during the first year after COVID-19 diagnosis....

Around 60% of cases of incident type 2 diabetes persisted—defined as being on glucose-lowering medication or having an HbA1c concentration consistent with type 2 diabetes at 4 months after diagnosis—with a similar proportion of persistent type 2 diabetes diagnoses observed in people after COVID-19 (57%) and before or in the absence of COVID-19 (62%). Using a similar definition of persistence, 56% of all cases of newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes persisted up to 1 year post-COVID-19 in a previous study.21 Additionally, 35% of newly diagnosed cases of prediabetes after COVID-19 persisted at 6 months.21 These previous studies were in patients who were hospitalised; we found slightly higher levels of persistence in people who were hospitalised (837 [61%] of 1382) than in those who were not hospitalised (2649 [56%] of 4731).

On July 18, Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19. Despite having symptoms, he’d spent the morning shaking hands with voters and workers before bothering to test during yet another massive surge of the virus; we won’t be getting breathless health updates about the peasants he exposed, nor will those infected be receiving any of the free medical treatment the President received from the comfort of his isolation bed, in his vacation home. The New York Times reported that he looked ill and unsteady as he walked to Air Force One (maskless) and was helped into his limousine, then carted back to his beach house in Rehoboth.

On July 19, Biden tweeted that he was “stuck at home with COVID”; most Americans, of course, have to return to work while ill these days, even when experiencing symptoms. His administration has thoroughly minimized the illness, with his former COVID response coordinator calling masking “fringe", and his CDC encouraging people to end isolation when they’ve been without a fever for one day, a standard that has absolutely no scientific relationship to infectiousness. (Amidst the wall-to-wall minimizing and ever-changing guidance, most employers interpret this most recent update to mean “no isolation”).

. . .

It was a poetically appropriate end for Biden, who, as hundreds of thousands died on his watch, alternated between ignoring COVID, joking about it, mocking masks, and appearing ignorant of the strict COVID protocols that his staff used to protect him for years while his administration unwound protections for everybody else.

In fact, in order to meet with or be in the room with Joe Biden at all, you had to submit to PCR testing for COVID-19 right up until this past March; it only took four months of life in the "new normal” he’d thrust the rest of us into years ago for Biden to get a taste of his own medicine.

WastewaterSCAN is the dashboard a lot of us have switched over to after biobot sunsetted their dashboard. They've only dropped 49 sites, but that's still less data in a dwindling realm. Idk if it's related or not but I've lost yet another major county's data in Florida.

https://data.wastewaterscan.org/

Also, tbh, I prefer biobot's dashboard, but I guess in the land of a million freaking toothpaste brands having reliable analytics for an ongoing pandemic is too much to ask.

im also dumb and they're expired

Random twitter thread that popped up for me. That first link, to the reddit post about some random dude in Oregon who thinks he has bird flu - giving me real late 2019 flashbacks. I remember back then when we all still thought it was contained in China (or maybe it had been confirmed in Washington state at that point - can't remember) some reddit post from a guy in NYC who was absolutely sure he had Covid but there were no tests available and his doctor was telling him to just stay home and not leave the house. Don't remember exactly when that was but I feel like late 2019...a harbinger of things to come.

I was talking to some guy on here whose friend's dad died of COVID winter 2023. The interesting part is that it was his first time getting COVID

Anyway, I want to talk to him again and find out more deets but I can't find him.

Linktr.ee/covidisntover

I'm not affiliated with these folks in any way, nor have I gotten around to joining them. Yet. One of these days.

The final update of the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines was on February 29, 2024. PDFs of the Guidelines can be downloaded until August 16, 2024, when the website will be shut down.

Not that the site was very good. Their Prevention of SARS-CoV-2 Infection page mentions masks once on the whole page and does not mention nasal sprays:

The risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission can be reduced by covering coughs and sneezes, wearing a well-fitted mask around others, and isolating when experiencing symptoms. Frequent handwashing also effectively reduces the risk of infection.

Vaccination is the most effective way to prevent COVID-19.

Older versions of their PDF mention N95s. The only mention of N95s, other than recommending them for healthcare workers, is to claim that surgical masks are just as good:

There is evidence from studies of viral diseases, including SARS, that both surgical masks and N95 respirators reduce the risk of transmission.6 Moreover, surgical masks are probably not inferior to N95 respirators for preventing the transmission of respiratory viral infections; a recent systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials that compared the protective effects of medical masks and N95 respirators demonstrated that the use of medical masks did not increase the incidence of laboratory- confirmed viral respiratory infections (including coronavirus infections) or clinical respiratory illness.

(That is incorrect.) The latest version does not mention the existence of N95s or KN95s, it just says "a well-fitted mask". And N95s and KN95s are not mentioned on the site itself, outside of these PDFs.

https://deadline.com/2024/07/whoopi-covid-joe-biden-covid-1236014218/amp/

“I’m just getting over Covid – again – and I can barely remember anybody’s name,” she said before jokingly motioning to her cohosts and saying, “I don’t know who they are….there are times when I go for a word and it’s not there, and I’m just not going to go and decide that’s the problem. If he falls low in this next debate, I’ll consider changing my outlook. And if it

Like I get how covid conscious and dating/meet-up sites are a bit of a contradiction, but my partner and I are both immunocompromised with asthma and have followed proper covid protocol since the beginning (masking, not really going out ever, because it could kill us easily, and even if it didn't, I don't want to harm others!). It's... difficult, though. We're very social, poly people that have been effectively stuck in the best prison with the best prison mate.

Like, other people like us have to exist right, even in this hyper-individualistic hellhole? I tried grindr and tindr but, well, people lie, and it's very literally life and death. I tried googling this and came up with basically nothing.

I have a group of friends who have gone back to normal for the most part. Restaurants, concerts, clubs, bars, etc... One of them tested positive today and that sparked the standard slew of get well messages from the rest of them. All well and good, I'm not gonna sit here and act like we should point and laugh at the sick. However the conversation that followed didn't sit well with me.

I asked the group if they normally quarantine from the rest of their household when only one gets sick, or if they just wing it. Someone said they stop kissing and sharing food, but stay unmasked and still sleep in the same bed. They were adamant about not sleeping on their couch. (must be a huge inconvenience to sacrifice a little comfort for their health). Anyway, same person proceeds to say that it wouldn't matter that much due to incubation time. I responded anecdotally that in the past quarantining from my household while sick has worked for for us and kept the healthy people healthy. No response after that.

The conversation continues with someone else who was saying they did the same thing I did, quarantined in their office and slept on the sleeper sofa to keep their partner healthy, AND IT WORKED?!?! This person then proceeds to question how they got it in the first place because they are fully remote for work... They would understand if their partner got it because of their on-site job, but couldn't reason with how they themselves the remote worker would get it. Mind you, all these people indulge in dining indoors at restaurants and bars, going to concerts without masks, running errands without masks... So, I said just that. "Probably restaurants? Honestly anywhere public.". The conversation ended right there, no one responded to me after that.

The bright side of the whole convo was that someone did eventually chime in and say that "It's best to assume COVID when you are feeling sick, because even a cold isn't worth spreading." Only to be countered by the sick person saying, "if I would have tested positive sooner I would have been wearing a mask or cancelling appointments" Felt sick and didn't care until the 2 lines showed up on the test.

So yeah, at the end of the day vibes and treats rule the world. No one wants to be told that their incessant need for good vibes and tasty treats is what may have gotten them sick with a highly communicable disease.

It's really exhausting...

Good read overall, I recommend checking out the post, but here's the big highlights imo.

I know a lot of us have been watching Disability Numbers in the workforce and Long term sick in the UK. Here's some more fuel for the fire.

“New data from the official Spanish health survey. The share of the population that has a chronic illness now stands 9.8 standard deviations above its prepandemic average. Hospitalizations, 5.9 standard deviations above its average. All age groups doing badly.” Full thread here

Tuberculosis is on the rise. They mention that during the early years of HIV, it's rise served as an indicator of AIDS/Immune damage.

[cw:dead rat image] They wanna stress that covid is a vascular illness, not a respiratory illness.

Recent study found:

The pooled analysis found no significant increase in the risk of myocarditis among vaccinated pilots compared to unvaccinated pilots

Let's be real tho, they're not trying to avoid Long Covid either.

Watch Australian Swim Team MaskGang | Streamable

Tour de France Reinstates COVID-19 Measures as More Cases Emerge in the Peloton

#MaskGang #N95Gang

#n95gang

On average, there have been over 500 additional deaths a week involving CVD since the pandemic began.

While deaths from Covid-19 have fallen year-on-year since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of deaths involving CVD have remained high above expected levels.

Excess deaths involving CVD outnumber those involving all other individual disease areas since the beginning of the pandemic in England.

No doubt, the reasons for continuingly high numbers of excess deaths related to CVD in England are complicated. However, along with deaths caused by Covid-19 among people with heart and circulatory diseases, we think the following factors have played a role:

The longer-term impact of Covid-19 infection on the heart and circulatory system.

Extreme and continued disruption to GP and heart care services.

This fucking sucks.

https://subium.com/profile/maxberger.bsky.social/post/3kwxrllk72c2q

Occured to me we've a problem of being pretty US centric around here so I've been trying to find more resources for the rest of our comrades.