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9 Oct, 5 tweets, 2 min read
🚨I wrote about the rampant use of "strength" and "fighting" metaphors following Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis, the history of such language when talking about disease, and why it misleads, distracts, and makes things worse. 1/

theatlantic.com/health/archive…
I spoke to doctors, immunologists, linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists about what we're really talking about when we talk about "strength" in the context of "beating" disease, and whether there's any truth to that (very common) idea. 2/ theatlantic.com/health/archive…
On Trump specifically, what he & his supporters are calling "strength" is really 2 things:
- the performance of a specific toxic version of masculinity that prizes aggression, volume, stubbornness, overconfidence, & mockery
- *enormous* privilege
3/
theatlantic.com/health/archive…
"Trump is hardly the first American to mischaracterize his own privilege as fortitude, but from [him, it's] doubly pernicious. It distracts not only from the massive advantages that he enjoys, but also from his singular role in America’s pandemic year." 4/ theatlantic.com/health/archive…
This piece was also published today and pairs really well with the one I did:

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More from @edyong209

Ed Yong Profile picture
10 Sep
🥳A nice thing happened! Huge thanks to the NPCJI for this incredible honour. Ironically, I'm a little lost for words. The previous awardees are incredible; I never expected to be counted among reporters of their caliber, and it means so very much.
As always, any plaudits I get must be shared with my editors @slaskow @PaulBisceglio @andersen @thebanderson who’ve sharpened and polished my work, and our leaders @SwatiGauri @AdrienneLaF @JeffreyGoldberg who’ve created space and time for us to take our biggest swings.
As before, my intention is to donate the prize money from this. I only just found out about this yesterday and need a little time to work out a plan. More, as they say, tk.
Read 4 tweets
Ed Yong Profile picture
9 Sep
🚨I wrote a new piece about the 9 errors of intuition that people keep making during the pandemic, trapping us in a spiral of bad decisions & policies. This is a guide to thinking about the crisis & breaking free from that endless loop. 1/

theatlantic.com/health/archive…
Beating COVID-19 isn't just about more tests/masks. Many of the problems that have tripped us up are conceptual. Magical thinking. False dichotomies. Conflating imperfect with useless. Blaming individuals over fixing systems. I've listed 9. 2/

theatlantic.com/health/archive…
These errors of intuition cropped up in debates over masks, social-distancing, ventilation, colleges. They’ll appear again when we have a vaccine. Winter is coming. We must reset, and "adjust our thinking to match the problem before us.” 3/

theatlantic.com/health/archive…
Read 8 tweets
Ed Yong Profile picture
24 Aug
🥳As they say, some personal news: I won the 2020 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting!

I’m chuffed to bits. The prize honours writers for a 5-year body of work. By coincidence, I'm a week away from my 5-yr Atlanticiversary (1/7)
casw.org/casw/victor-co…
I'm very grateful to the CASW and the judges. This announcement release is hitting me squarely in the feels. 😭 I’m especially proud that it not only talks about the work, but The Work. (2/7)

casw.org/casw/announcem…
Huge thanks & credit must go to all my incredible Atlantic editors: @slaskow @andersen @PaulBisceglio @rachgutman @julieebeck @thebanderson and Don Peck. I’ve learned so much from them & my colleagues. @JeffreyGoldberg & @slaskow also wrote *the nicest* nominating letters. (3/7)
Read 7 tweets
Ed Yong Profile picture
24 Aug
In this immunology explainer, I noted that some anecdotal accounts of COVID-19 reinfections exist, but to confirm them, you'd need to sequence the genes of the virus from both infections and show they were subtly different.

theatlantic.com/health/archive…
A HK team has apparently done that. If true, this would be the first *confirmed* case of reinfection. (Note: there's a press release, and someone has posted screengrabs of parts of the paper, but the whole thing isn't online 😡)

BUT...

As I wrote, it's not surprising/worrying if reinfections *can happen*. More important Qs are:

- How common are they? (Not addressed in this study)
- Is the 2nd time more/less severe than the 1st? (2nd infection was asymptomatic here, but that's 1 case.)

theatlantic.com/health/archive…
Read 5 tweets
Ed Yong Profile picture
22 Aug
There's been a wave of good pieces on COVID-19 long-haulers in the last few weeks. Here's @tanyabasu in MIT Tech Review on the Body Politic group that organized to research themselves. 1/

technologyreview.com/2020/08/12/100…
At Buzzfeed, @bri_sacks wrote about the group's recent call with the WHO, as part of their continued efforts to get recognition. 2/

buzzfeednews.com/article/briann…
This one's mine, on how the long-haulers have changed their own landscape over the last couple of months.

I love that all these stories portray the group as protagonists of their own stories, and not victims without agency. 3/

theatlantic.com/health/archive…
Read 5 tweets
Ed Yong Profile picture
20 Aug
A few COVID-19 long-haulers told me they too disbelieved folks with ME/CFS and similar illnesses until they experienced something similar firsthand—and now deeply regret their previous skepticism. (Some folks w/ ME/CFS have said the same.) 1/

theatlantic.com/health/archive…
I asked David Putrino, who runs a Mt Sinai program, why he believes long-haulers when so many physicians do not. This is what he said. 2/

theatlantic.com/health/archive…
After my 1st long-hauler piece, I got an email asking if I have ME/CFS or similar—fwiw I don’t—on the assumption that ppl who don’t have these illnesses rarely write about them. That felt like a searing indictment. I think about it a lot. 3/

theatlantic.com/health/archive…
Read 5 tweets

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