Anna Stevenson

Airborne transmission: a new paradigm with major implications for infection control and public health | OPEN ACCESS Great to be able to collaborate across professional disciplines to write this article. journal.nzma.org.nz/journal-articl…

I was disappointed to see this in a hospital this evening. Clean hands are a good thing but #covidisairborne

@AmandaKvalsvig Loved ‘Hail Mary’ but not the air quality in a half empty huge ENT X @hoyts movie theatre. Grateful for a N95 and hoping clean air infrastructure not too many years away!

1st prize is to get Covid-19 as few times as you can. Hybrid immunity will do you no good if it comes with a side of Long COVID. Vaccines help, but risk increases with infection count. Clean indoor air is key infrastructure: until then, def wear a mask on the bus this winter. 3/

The NZ Government appears to have no strategy for preventing or managing long COVID - which may turn out to be a very expensive oversight. The 2024/5 NZ Health Survey shows that LC remains common in the Omicron era. What to do? 1/ theconversation.com/almost-200-000… via @ConversationEDU

This documentary film looks well worth supporting. It’s an Israeli-Palestinian collaboration about friendship of 2 women from the 2 communities, set against the background of the tragic & unresolved conflict. Both women have lived & worked in NZ. Appeal: thearts.co.nz/boosted/projec…

For anyone wanting a deep-dive into the regulation of indoor air quality in Australia, the recent NSW Parliament enquiry into Clean Indoor Air offers a treasure-trove of great information about the present sorry situation and possible ways forward. A recurrent theme of the inquiry has been that there is little we can do about poorly ventilated public buildings because there are no standards to enforce. It’s true that the absence of specific standards for indoor air quality has long been used as an excuse for the indifference to effective ventilation. But I believe that new regulatory frameworks and codes of practice make it clear that even without unambiguous standards, safe indoor air is a non-negotiable legal obligation and the consequences for non-compliance reach all the way to individual principals, executives, and clinicians. Full details here: #dirty-air" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">petervogel.legal/rubyprincess/#…

9/ The path to 80% attendance doesn't run through the STAR framework. It runs through the ventilation system. Indoor air quality. Proper vaccine funding. Health guidance that prioritises not making other children sick over turning the attendance dashboard green.

@AndrewDickson13 @ClintVSmith @G_Davidson_NZ Thanks for putting the time into writing this up @AndrewDickson13 great analysis

@ClintVSmith @G_Davidson_NZ I wrote something that might be useful about this whole affair: open.substack.com/pub/andrewdick…

the NZ data suggests that the 2nd jab for teens resulted in around 12 extra cases of myocarditis - none severe in return, we avoided many severe COVID cases and possibly deaths- *including less myocarditis* because having COVID causes more myocarditis than the vaccine does.

Very helpful article on the reasoning behind the NZ C19 vaccine schedule. diplomaticimmunity.blog/covid-booster-…

I was curious here so here some facts: a) the 7yo report was a "hoax" (I call it "lie" but that's me) b) the 9yo has not been confirmed as vax induced (said to be a hoax but I could not find evidence) c) a child died of cardiac arrest every week in Victoria alone in 2019-2020

@Jetstar_NZ got your flight cancellation notice but the advertised portal to rebook isn’t working-please fix

With the rise of new tools in molecular biology, it’s becoming clear that viruses and other pathogens can remain in the body or otherwise affect its workings for a surprisingly long time time.com/article/2026/0…

@jamesclear “During that period of time I read Atomic Habits - I owe that book my life. “It taught me the systems and the strategies I needed to take to change my life. And that was just being 1% better every single day.” stuff.co.nz/te-ao-maori/36…

I’ve been thinking about these two terms ‘load-bearing belief’ and ‘cascading failure’ since I read this. So helpful to have a name for what is unfurling in front of us all. Thanks (yet again!) @NukitToBeSure

Well, I got some bad news for you😅 when we lost droplet theory, we largely lost coughing into our hands/elbows as “polite” infection control. It’s still polite, it’s just not doing all that much. Particularly not as it’s often used, “If you are sick, at least cover your mouth when you cough!” when really the only covering that will matter is a good mask. Effectiveness of cough etiquette maneuvers in disrupting the chain of transmission of infectious respiratory diseases pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC38… Simulating the Environmental Spread of SARS-CoV-2 via Cough and the Effect of Personal Mitigations mdpi.com/2076-2607/10/1… Coughing into our elbow/hand “feels” right because we have an entire 60-year-old risk-management heuristic based on bad data that we’ve all been using our whole lives. "Suzy at the office is sick- so I’ll be careful to wash my hands." or "I’m sick- but I’ll cover my mouth when I cough". In China, when we quarantined individual apartments, but all the apartments that shared the same sewer line or kitchen vent pipe got sick because it was aerosols, not droplets. This is one of the problems with losing the droplet model- it’s a load-bearing belief. You lose it, you lose a lot of things built on it- literally. Nearly all modern buildings are built on droplet theory, not aerosol transmission. Scientists and policymakers with a macro view of things reflexively oppose it because, if droplet theory is wrong, it's a cascade failure (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading…) on a vast scale. So many things have to be reexamined and are likely to be very bad if it was aerosols all along. As outrageous as the ongoing institutional denial is, aerosol transmission as a dominant infection model breaks a lot of things- everywhere, and the people in charge, got there, and stay there by maintaining the status quo, not by being disruptive and advocating for costly adaptation to change.

‘Rarely do we live through an opportunity to build out an entirely new field so consequential for health and well-being. Let us be the generation that discovers how to make sure we all breathe safe air.’ ssir.org/articles/entry…

When someone lives with chronic pain, a clinician’s words can help…or harm. Three communication shifts that can help patients feel heard ⬇️

@NukitToBeSure Is this with the far lights off?

This is the reality of modeling aerosols all day🤢 It's just a lot nicer not to think about that, or be like..."nah all the bioaerosols kind of just die on their own in the few seconds between when they are exhaled by someone else and I inhale them..." Because otherwise?🤮

I think that in some cases, the better someones grasp of science, the stronger their need to reject aerosol transmission. Because if they accept that it's a dominant mode of transmission and really understand what that means, the implications are far-reaching and incredibly frightening. For the layperson, it's just "Oh, so like coughs but further yeah? Well I'll take extra vitamins LOL" and they get on with their life of episodic illness, possibly debilitating, but with (to them) unclear vectors. For someone with a good grasp of science, if they really understand what almost every respiratory infection having airborne potential means, than they understand that if true, almost all of the modern indoor spaces we have would be unsafe without massive IAQ upgrades- and in many cases those upgrades might not even be physically possible. If airborne transmission is dominant = Nearly all of our indoor physical infrastructure is dangerous and obsolete without costly upgrades. That is a massive, massive social, political, and financial upheaval to contemplate- and people able to see the big picture implications, rejecting it at a visceral level, when a comfortable, nostalgic paradigm of handwashing and coughing into their elbow is right there for them to cling to, is somewhat understandable. It will take a long time, and a great deal more work before many come around- and many never will. Semmelweis's findings were not accepted during his lifetime- and those were a comparatively minor upheaval.

Superb public health messaging from the Durham County Department of Public Health. Take note @UKHSA

@Cioccolata234 @Evointegrity @MattNippert Try this. archive.ph/2026.03.13-214…