jo abbess

@Nature If 80% of Americans Wore Masks, COVID-19 Infections Would Plummet, New Study Says vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/m…

What would have happened if everyone in the United Kingdom had worn high-grade masks during the COVID-19 pandemic? nature.com/articles/d4158…

We are still in a pandemic. What would happen if everyone wore a high grade mask now?

You can tell an event is unprecedented when you have to start making up new words to describe it Tridemic Quad-demic But it gets ridiculous real fast Pentademic Hexademic Heptademic Octademic Nonademic Decademic And what would you call this? ⬇️⬇️ (H/t @1goodtern)

Stupid question: is the flu more difficult to catch than Covid? Or is airborne transmission the same for both?

~80 studies on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 were published just today. They span topics like the occupational risk to healthcare workers, chronic lung damage, raised inflammatory markers in children and adults, amyloidosis, ongoing mortality waves… ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/coron…

Her: "Don't worry about catching anything from us. We had Covid six weeks ago, then tonsillitis, then pneumonia, but we don't have anything now." Me: 🙄

TGIF Masking #MaskUp #CovidIsNotOver #H5N1 #BirdFlu

“When people see me in a mask, they’re reminded of the acute phase of the pandemic. My presence confronts them with an uncomfortable truth: their refusal to mask contributes to the deaths & disabling of others. It reveals they may not be as caring as they like to think.”🎯 🧵/1

A day in the life of C-informed PH worker: Was in a mtg just now where v exper research scientists said: “just the other day 26 yr old had a stroke, the age of strokes is getting younger and younger… we don’t know what it is but we’ve got to work on it…”

Riddle me this… Across England, there are nearly 1,100 FLU patients in hospital right now & suddenly flu is all over the news… …but the number of COVID patients in hospital has not dipped below 1,100 ON A SINGLE DAY IN THE PAST YEAR! Yet COVID barely ever gets mentioned. 🤔

But instead of starting with known biological mechanisms and viral pathologies and connecting the dots, researchers run around like blind men trying to describe an elephant - each in their own little segment, never reading others' findings. And patients are dying. 🧵

Which, again, gives us a clue to the pathology of long covid - especially since we know that both viruses are able to infect immune cells, bone marrow, and even brain cells. Because we know how infections of these compartments affects these things. 🧵

But - once again - I have some really bad news for you. Once again, those are all outcomes, of the virus. As seen in HIV, in which all of these outcomes are also commonly seen. 🧵

Everyone likes commonalities until it comes to viral persistence & immune dysfunction, for some reason. Its simpler to blame everything on clotting abnormalities, inflammation, allergies, or autoimmunity. 🧵

Eerily, the fact that all of the same outcomes have once again been mistakenly pointed to as causes, actually provides a major clue to the pathology of long covid. But no one wants to talk about that, so they avoid the area of research all together. And patients are dying. 🧵

The cause is known. What isn't yet well understood is the pathology by which SARS-CoV-2 induced Long Covid - and thats the part that must be studied in order to develop treatments. Everything else is a grifty waste of precious resources, while patients are dying🧵

Unlike the early eighties, when HIV was not yet known to be the cause of AIDS - with Long Covid, we know right out the gate that the virus responsible is SARS-CoV-2. And because of that, we also know these other things are OUTCOMES. As they were with AIDS. 🧵

Notably, HHV6 was initially isolated and identified in lymphocytes of AIDS patients in the course of looking for the cause of the illness. It turned out to be an incidental finding, as it will with long covid. Because in both cases, another virus was & is the actual cause 🧵

I have some more really fucking bad news for you. All of those things I mentioned in the previous tweet? Are also common findings in people living with HIV (particularly in advanced stages, or those whose initiation of antivirals was delayed) 🧵