Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
Sep 29, 2020 4 tweets 3 min read Read on X
One million people dead from #covid19.
Imagine losing a mother, a father, a sister, a brother. Multiply that loss, that pain by a thousand then multiply that again by a thousand. That’s what we are looking at.
What a sad day.
And as I have written before we are on track for 1,500,000 deaths by the end of the year.
Last week more than 2 million cases and more than 36,000 deaths were reported to @WHO, similar to the week before. #covid19 is continuing to cause disease and death at a staggering rate. Image
@WHO "The Eastern Mediterranean Region showed the greatest increase (9%) in cases in the past week, while the European Region reported a substantial rise in deaths, with a 9% increase compared to the previous week.” Image
@WHO Europe: "France, the Russian Federation, Spain and the United Kingdom continue to report the highest numbers of new cases. Turkey reported the third highest deaths in last seven days after the Russian Federation and Spain.”
(Full sitrep here: who.int/docs/default-s…) Image

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More from @kakape

Nov 1
So what have I learnt about #misinformation research? I tried to condense it into a list of the 5 biggest challenges the field faces.
Second story in my package of stories about misinformation research is up here (and thread to come):

science.org/content/articl…
Let me start with the first:
What even is misinformation?
When I started reporting on the field, eager to delve into things I was really frustrated that I kept coming back to this basic question. I told friends it felt like trying to take a deep dive in a puddle, always forced back to the surface.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that this was going to be a thorny problem that I would have to spend a lot of time on. The definition you use really defines the shape of the problem and it also kinda helps to be sure you're talking about the same thing as your interview partner...
Read 18 tweets
Oct 30
I’ve reported on infectious diseases for 15 years, but during the covid-19 pandemic and even more during the global outbreak of mpox clade IIb, I was shocked by the amount of misinformation I was seeing. Misinfo had always been part of any outbreak, but this felt different.
I ended up spending almost a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow (@KSJatMIT) to try and understand misinformation/disinformation better, to - I hope - be a better infectious disease journalist.
It’s been an interesting experience in turns fascinating and frustrating and when I went back to full-time science writing earlier this year I decided to try and put at least some of what I’ve learnt into words.
Read 10 tweets
Aug 15
I'm seeing a lot of confusion already out there about #mpox and the differences between clades and lineages. I will get into this in more detail later, but for now:
We really don't know for sure whether there is any material difference between clade Ia, Ib, IIa and IIb.
The differences we see might have very little to do with the virus and everything to do with it affecting different populations in different places and spreading different ways once it gets into certain contact networks. Real world data is not comparing apples and apples here...
We will learn a lot in the coming weeks and months and things will become much clearer. But for now there is a lot of uncertainty. My advice as always: Don’t trust anyone who pretends that things are clear and obvious.
Read 4 tweets
Aug 10
In May I wrote about researchers' plans to infect cows in high-security labs with avian influenza #H5N1 to better understand the infections and how easily the virus is transmitted. The results from two of these experiments are now out here in a preprint:
biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
WHAT DID THEY DO?
In one experiment (at Kansas State University) 6 calves were infected with an #H5N1 isolate from the current outbreak oronasally and then housed together with three uninfected animals ("sentinels") two days later.
In the other experiment (at Friedrich Loeffler Institut) 3 lactating cows were infected through the udder with an #H5N1 isolate from the US outbreak and 3 other lactating cows the same way with a different #H5N1 isolate from a wild bird in Europe.
Read 13 tweets
Jun 20
One question at the heart of the #h5n1 outbreak in US cows has been: Is there something special about this virus? Or is H5N1 generally able to do this and this particular version was just "in the right place at the right time"?
Quick thread, because it seems we have an answer
Researchers in Germany have done an experiment in a high-security lab infecting cows directly with the strain of #H5N1 circulating in cows in the US (B3.13) and infecting others with an #h5n1 strain from a wild bird in Germany.
(I wrote about the plans here: )science.org/content/articl…
In both cases they infected the udders directly through the teats and in both cases the animals got sick. They "showed clear signs of disease such as a sharp drop in milk production, changes in milk consistency and fever." That suggests there is nothing special about B3.13.
Read 8 tweets
Jun 13
The thing that I find most frustrating about the entire mpox/gain-of-function debate is how the uncertainties that lie at the base of it all just become cemented as certainties that are then carried forward.
(If you know anything about me you know I love me some uncertainty...)
Most importantly: The interim report on the investigation into these experiments released on Tuesday numerous times calls clade II "more transmissible" or even "much more transmissible".
But that is a claim that has very little evidence at all.
In fact you can find plenty of literature that argue the exact opposite, that in fact clade I is more transmissible.
Just, as an example, here is Texas HHS:
"Clade I MPXV, which may be more transmissible and cause more severe infection than Clade II..."
dshs.texas.gov/news-alerts/he…
Read 7 tweets

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