15 MINUTE RULE IS WRONG! When you watch the SuperBowl, remember it was saved because the NFL knew the 15 minutes + 6 ft rule was wrong. The #COVID19 gospel of ‘within six feet for more than 15 minutes’ wasn’t enough—and the NFL had the data to prove it.🧵 wsj.com/articles/super…
2) It was early October, and NFL had a problem. It wasn’t just that players and staff for Tennessee Titans were continuing to test positive in an outbreak that shook NFL’s season. It wasn’t even that the NFL was learning that virus was able to rush through holes in its protocols.
3) The NFL was slowly discovering something far deeper: a core tenet of Covid-19 transmission wisdom—how to define when individuals are in “close contact”—was just wrong.
4) The safety of interactions during this global pandemic had been for months measured by a stopwatch and a tape measure. The guidance was that someone had been exposed to the virus if they had been within six feet of an infected person for more than 15 minutes.
5) “It was drilled into everyone for so long it became coronavirus gospel.
But that wasn’t proving true. People were testing positive even though they had spent far <15 minutes or weren’t within 6 feet of an infectious person—and NFL had contact-tracing technology to prove it.
6) Meanwhile... Ontario 🇨🇦 is waking up to #B117 transmission and how quickly it can spread... and realizing what the NFL realized too...
📍CDC this weekend: not really safe to have a #SuperBowl party with people outside your home.
📍Also CDC: it’s safe for teachers to teach kids/teens, in person, indoors, 5 days/week.
🤔...and let loud kids eat at lunch indoors unmasked? #COVID19
2) To be clear — I am a firm believer kids need to go back to school. and as an epidemiologist, a staunch CDC advocation. But we need to call a spade a spade on this issue. Kids definitely do transmit. Here is the best collection of evidence in 🧵why it does from Dr @dgurdasani1.
3) This makes the clear case that school transmission of #COVID19 does occur, and increases when cases levels rise—which then further drives school transmission. It’s an analytical thread but it’s the Bottomline: Schools are not impervious to transmission. Can’t lie to ourselves.
What’s worse than simple mutation? RECOMBINATION! Recombination is the large scale “copy and pasting” mixing of whole sections of genome 🧬 swapping from one virus to another.
2) But it is not just these small genetic changes that are raising concerns. The novel coronavirus has a propensity to mix large chunks of its genome when it makes copies of itself.
3) “Unlike small mutations, which are like typos in the sequence, a phenomenon called recombination resembles a major copy-and-paste error in which the second half of a sentence is completely overwritten with a slightly different version.
Israel 🇮🇱 is seeing a sharp rise in the number of children and teens getting #COVID19.
>50,000 children & teens have been diagnosed with coronavirus since the start of the month, many more than Israel saw in any month during the first or second waves. 🧵 jpost.com/health-science…
2) “We got a letter from the Israeli Association of Pediatrics that says they are very worried about the rate of disease in younger students,” Health Minister Yuli Edelstein told The Jerusalem Post. “This is something we did not witness in previous waves of corona.”
2) Although the exact strain in these Israel 🇮🇱 pediatric cases are unclear, there is another similar pediatric outbreak in a village in Italy 🇮🇹. 10% of the town is infected and mostly children.
Holy cow: 10% of the village of Corzano 🇮🇹 has the #B117 variant—10% of all residents! 60% of cases are kids from kindergarten and primary school, other 40% are their parents, says the mayor. Schools in the village now closed. ansa.it/amp/lombardia/…
2) Israel is seeing a sharp rise in the number of children and teens getting infected with coronavirus, according to 🇮🇱 Health Ministry.
“This is something we did not witness in previous waves of coronavirus,” Health Minister Yuli Edelstein said.#COVID19 m.jpost.com/health-science…
3) forgot to mention, the mayor of the village in Italy 🇮🇹 is also #COVID19 positive.
⚠️TWO DIFFERENT #COVID19 PANDEMICS—Many think with cases dropping that pandemic is nearly over. But truth is, there are now 2 different #SARSCoV2 pandemics diverging—old strain is waning, while the more contagious #B117 strain is dominating. We will be soon slammed very hard. 🧵
2) Here is what is really going to happen... most countries are having a gentle case decline with R(e) currently around 0.9. But this is deceiving. The #B117 is still relatively rare so far, so the R is being influenced mostly by the old common variant. But not for long...
3) Here is what is going to happen... currently R is ~0.9 in many places, but with the more infectious #B117, the R will jump 50% approximately. And it is inevitable (all CDC and Danish models say this) that B117 will take over as the reigning dominant variant soon...
2) If anyone knows me personally, I’m actually not a loud or dramatic person. I’m quite low key in person. And I never cared to really use Twitter in the decade that I’ve had an account. I’ve only begun using during the pandemic because of the lack of urgency for public health.
3) when I shouted aloud in Jan 2020, i only had 2000 or so followers collected over 10 years. It didn’t define my life or career. But I see the power in which we can mobilize action if we join together to warn others. And that is my only goal. nymag.com/intelligencer/…