One of the best reads of the year from @MattMcGorry
“The science is really clear getting Covid over & over again is not good for anyone. It feels like where the climate movement was 10 years ago, where scientists were saying things & people were not really listening.” #LongCovid
If we can get @GeeksForHarris to 15K followers, I will make Andy "Brak" Merrill sing a heartwarming song on our call. Rib-crushingly sincere. Can you help? @amerrill2
Unmitigated transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
Low situational awareness of H5N1 in the US.
Growing outbreak of clade 1 mpox in DRC, cases detected in Uganda and Kenya.
Multidrug resistant bacteria circulating in Ukraine and Gaza.
We are sleepwalking into dangerous new territory.
CDC is reducing covid isolation to 1 day because so many people are getting sick so often that it’s keeping them from work - NOT because covid is magically less dangerous & 1 day is safe. It’s absolutely about treating people like cogs in a machine, not health or science.
Your next COVID-19 infection could be your worst, so don't gamble with your health. Vaccination reduces risks and severity and keeps you protected.
Stay up to date with COVID-19 vaccines: https://t.co/009bOerScg #COVID19
As we've (hopefully) passed the peak of the U.S. late-summer 2023 C0VID wave, is it still a good time to advocate for further precautions?
YES! It's the perfect time. (A psychologist's non-calculus version).
In contrast to our usual graph, which shows daily cases (see QT), this graph shows cumulative cases, estimated based on #wastewater data, starting from the approximate onset of the current wave, Jun 21, 2023. We're at an estimated >50 million infections so far this wave!
Even though we are past the peak, we are still piling on cumulative cases at a very high rate, and we will keep doing so the next few weeks. (The "calculus" part is that we're just piling on at a marginally lower rate each day, almost imperceptibly slighter.) Bear in mind, most people you know are not tracking wastewater and have been told the pandemic is "over." BUT they are seeing more and more anecdotal examples in their own lives. Their implicit C0VID tracker has been ticking up, much like our graph, and it's going to keep ticking up.
As a psychologist who was doing community-based N95 distribution during the Omicron BA.1 wave ("Project Bandura"), I would speculate that people are most concerned about a wave 2-4 weeks after it's peaked, when their implicit cumulative case count is very high. For example, in that project, there was limited interest in free N95s just 2 weeks before the peak! 3 weeks after the BA.1 peak, we were able to pass out 1 N95 mask every 4.6 seconds and backed up traffic on Canal St by 5 blocks!
As a psychologist, the second point I would raise is that behavior change takes time. Every therapist has had the experience of suggesting something repeatedly to a client (patient), only to get shot down or ignored repeatedly, and then have the client adopt the pattern of thinking or doing several months later, highly internalized, with perhaps limited awareness it was suggested by the therapist. That's 100% a win. So, you may not win today getting a vulnerable loved one to mask or fit test, or getting a school to accept a HEPA, but right now, people may be more receptive than usual. It's a teachable moment. And if you don't win now, you might win when the bigger winter wave comes, or next February amid the grief of much gratuitous morbidity, or next August when cases tick up again via poorly-ventilated schools and they have internalized that what you said was right.
Stay strong. #MaskUp #VaxUp Keep fighting. 💪
@hubermanlab It would be fantastic to get @edyong209 as a guest on your podcast -- not only to discuss An Immense World, but I'd love to hear you talk about the neurological aspects of #LongCovid and #MECFS. Ed has been a true champion in writing about this.
“COVID-19 is not a cold. It is not influenza. It is a systemic, vascular-damaging disease that only spreads via the respiratory route, via aerosols.
COVID-19 is neither over, nor is it a harmless infection without consequences.”
@hubermanlab@edyong209@hubermanlab It would be fantastic to get @edyong209 as a guest on your podcast -- not only to discuss An Immense World, but I'd love to hear you talk about the neurological aspects of #LongCovid and #MECFS. Ed has been a true champion in writing about this.
Reading account after account of the vulnerable being discarded by the system, it's clear to me that at a cultural level we are refusing to look honestly at what is happening with covid because of what it would reveal about our society and even about ourselves