⚠️Dangerously negligent! “With the surging number of COVID-19 variants, (BC 🇨🇦 health chief) Dr Henry said BC would cease tracking individual variants, & proceed on assumption that variants are now dominant in community transmission.” This is so wrong🧵
globalnews.ca/news/7746859/b…
2) “Our strategy moving forward, given this high rate of (variants of concern) that we’re seeing in British Columbia, will be to no longer routinely sequence for confirmation. We just assume those screened positives will be the variants,” she said.
3) Why is this so damn wrong? Because we need to know which variants there are to know the properties of their transmission speed, track severity, possible Reinfection breakthroughs, and if mitigation working for what types.
4) Why? Mitigation measures could only be partially working — and only slowing the old common strain(s) but not able to contain the newer variants—and if so, which ones?
5) BC is doing the exact opposite of NYC, which is tracking every variant of concern and even many variants of interest...

NYC is led by an actually experienced public health doctor.
6) Tracking variants was how we first learned of a dangerous surge in #P1 that was surging in BC Canada 🇨🇦 in the first place!!!
7) Don’t forget, Bonnie Henry had long dismissed variants—

Head scratching — I don’t know why BC health chief keeps insisting the variants (B117 P1 and B1351) are not different than older strains. That is patently false and been well known for months.
8) Oh hey.... anyone remember when this BC school outbreak was happening back in February? So many people ignored. BC leaders ignored. (HT to @realreporter for covering this early)
9) Was BC alone in such school outbreaks? Were there others BC could have learned from? Countless others.
10) Got more school outbreaks in Canada 🇨🇦 of #B117 that BC could have learned from? Oh heck yeah.
11) Well, gosh, how could we have known? Is it schools or is it community? What happened when schools closed for winter holiday? What about about back to school?

Show me the data! And it must be Canadian to count!

...okay, here it is:
12) BC 🇨🇦 health leaders also famously weakened school safety standards, and insisted school kids don’t need to mask.

Meanwhile here is data from Quebec of pediatric cases immediately after schools reopened. See anything wrong?

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More from @DrEricDing

12 Apr
Sweden 🇸🇪 has the highest #COVID19 per capita in Europe for the past week! Its Scandinavian neighbors that didn’t negligently go for natural infection herd... all among the lowest.

Swedish pandemic leadership is an utter failure and likely responsible for pandemicide. 🧵 Image
2) Proof is also in the Swedish excess deaths.... Sweden is the only country in Scandinavia with any.
3) How bad is Swedish excess mortality? 100+ year record bad!
Read 6 tweets
12 Apr
Ummm, HOLY SHIT!

“pretty fucked up that eukaryotic and prokaryotic DNA polymerases arent homologous” ~@halvorz

Trying to now ponder—if humans & archaea share DNA polymerase, but not bacteria, then where the hell did bacteria learn their DNA 🧬 copying system?! Like, WTF.
2) More translation— “completely independently” is an eye popping 😳 phrase.
3) I’m trying to digest this... “super fucked up” is how an evolutionary biologist is describing this.
Read 7 tweets
12 Apr
US Pentagon has funded a blood filter for a dialysis machine that removes the #SARSCoV2 coronavirus from the blood - FDA has approved it for emergency use. It has been used to treat nearly 300 patients. #COVID19
2) Dr. Matt Hepburn: This is a filter that you can put on a dialysis machine.
"Patient 16", a military spouse, was in the ICU, near death with organ failure and septic shock when she was entered into a Defense Department COVID-19 study (video above)

cbsn.ws/3237WqI
3) Dr. Gaeta: She's liberated from veso-active medications and her septic shock resolved. We also see improvements in her markers of inflammation. Those are all positive prognostic signs.

Bill Whitaker: You pass someone's blood through this--
Read 11 tweets
12 Apr
The most important vaccine in Latin America—SinoVac’s CoronaVac reports new trial results from Brazil 🇧🇷—

Efficacy against symptomatic #COVID19–50.7%. Moderate & severe: 83.7% / 100%. Delayed 2nd dose no issue. Neut. titres lower in age>=60 against #P1.🧵
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… Image
2) Results 12,396 people randomized in Brazil. It seems 2nd dose efficacy wasn’t much diff than 14 days after 1st dose. And delaying 2nd dose didn’t seem to hurt. And a second dose >21 days actually showed no drop in efficacy. ImageImage
3) As for lab antibody neutralization titres, vaccinated people had no real difference for seroconverting (having antibodies) against different variants. That said, among those who seroconverted, neutralization titres was lower among those age 60 and above against #P1 🇧🇷 variant. Image
Read 18 tweets
11 Apr
What’s worse than losing school days during pandemic? Losing a parent.

Nearly ~40,000 children have lost a parent to #COVID19, black children even more.
"The number of children experiencing a parent dying of Covid-19 is staggering.”

cnn.com/2021/04/05/hea…
2) "Black children are disproportionately affected, comprising only 14% of children in the US but 20% of those losing a parent to Covid-19."
3) “The model suggests that each Covid-19 death leaves 0.078 children aged between 0 and 17 parentally bereaved, representing a 17.5% to 20.2% increase in parental bereavement absent of Covid-19”
Read 12 tweets
11 Apr
My god India 🇮🇳... and it’s not just more testing, because positivity had quintupled (5x) in recent month. India could be the next Brazil 🇧🇷 in terms of #COVID19 crisis scale. Image
2) India crisis is also due to mixed messages and complacency, writes @AmyKazmin.

“Mixed messages from the prime minister and health authorities left the public playing down the risk of the virus”
3) I hope people realizes how important India is... it’s also the world’s largest maker of vaccines for COVID. But it recent halted all exports due to this surge. Hence Canada 🇨🇦 is now delayed in its vaccine deliveries due to the crisis there in India. amp.ft.com/content/6f6705… Image
Read 7 tweets

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