1/7 Very important thread from an Indiana pulmonary/critical care doctor. Your choice to gather in large groups to celebrate New Year's Eve could mean someone else's death. If that sounds like hyperbole, read & share this thread. Indiana hospitals are operating on a knife's edge.
2/7 We are all potential links in the Omicron transmission chain—even those who've been infected and/or triple-vaccinated. Omicron spreads unlike anything we've seen. Even the triple-vaccinated are potential superspreaders.
3/7 Testing beforehand is better than nothing, but it is no guarantee that there will not be rampant transmission at your gathering, even if every single person tests negative.
4/7 Several recent studies have shown rapid tests are less sensitive to Omicron and frequently miss highly infectious cases.
5/7 You may be triple-vaccinated and have essentially zero risk of severe Covid. But if you or a loved one need urgent medical care for any other reason—a car crash, heart attack, stroke, aneurysm, broken bone—you could be an Omicron victim too.
6/7 Another essential thread from the same ICU doctor that explains the situation at hospitals in Indiana.
7/7 And finally, an excellent thread by the master data analyst & #dataviz guru @MicahPollak, outlining why every bit we can do to slow transmission is crucial. Lives are at stake. Please, do your part to save our hospitals.

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More from @LongDesertTrain

1 Jan
NYC Mayor Eric Adams, just before he pushed into a crowd of out-of-towners raucously celebrating the New Year: “It’s just great when New York shows the entire country how we come back." (1/5) Image
"Mayor-elect Eric Adams promised that New York City would soon lead the nation by example." (2/5) Image
Kindergarten teacher Jennifer Gaitan, while celebrating in Times Square: “In 2020 & 2021 we all had these high expectations, now we have to let come what may... It was my moral imperative to be here."

"Moral imperative"

Meanwhile... (3/5)
Read 5 tweets
28 Dec 21
1/4 For about the 5th time, leading politicians & powerful medical authorities (e.g. @CDCgov) have decided that mass infection is preferable to inconveniencing "the economy," which is code for the interests of our wealthy overlords.
2/4 How have our previous attempts to achieve herd immunity through mass infection worked out? One could look to many countries, but Italy provides a good example.
3/4 Is there any limit to the number of times a strategy can fail, with devastating consequences, before politicians and public health leaders will acknowledge its utter failure?
Read 4 tweets
24 Dec 21
1/6 At a private gathering of 33 Pfizer-triple-vaccinated health care workers in the Faroe Islands, 21 were infected with Omicron—a superspreading event among 3-dose-vaccinated people. All received dose #3 within 2.5 months of the event. Very discouraging.
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
2/6 All participants tested negative within 36 hours of the event: five with rapid tests and the other 28 with PCR tests. Median age was 45. Only four of the 21 infected had any comorbidities.
3/6 And very similar to the Oslo Christmas superspreader event (where 79 of 80 infected were symptomatic, with 74 having >3 symptoms), all 21 experienced symptoms. There is virtually no asymptomatic infection with Omicron it seems.
Read 6 tweets
24 Dec 21
1/11 Shocking and terrible news, possibly for the entire world. Molnupiravir works by inducing mutations in the virus. The potential danger is obvious, and Merck has not provided any reassuring data on this.
2/11 Perhaps most shocking is that MOV was approved when it's not at all clear that it will have any benefit at all for the people taking it. MOV only showed any efficacy at all in the pre-Delta era. nature.com/articles/d4158…
3/11 The @Nature article above actually understates the matter. In the second part of the trial, from Aug-Oct, there was actually a 32% higher rate of hospitalization in the MOV group than in the placebo group (6.2% vs 4.7%).
Read 16 tweets
23 Dec 21
1/4 Must-read 🧵. Molnupiravir could be a catastrophe, breeding a nightmarish panoply of variants. Approval would be insane.

"MOV approval is most momentous decision the FDA will make in this epidemic, maybe in FDA history, maybe even in the entire history of pharmaceuticals."
2/4 Molnupiravir works by causing SARS-CoV-2 to undergo so many mutations that it ceases to function. Except it doesn't always work. And when it doesn't, virus with potentially beneficial mutations could survive, be passed on, and haunt the world.
3/4 It's not even clear if molnupiravir works at all—in the Delta era phase of its trial, it proved almost totally useless. Perhaps it doesn't work against rapidly replicating variants like Delta & Omicron. nature.com/articles/d4158…
Read 5 tweets
17 Dec 21
1/ Can't put it better than @micah_arsham does here. The CDC treats the public like 1st-graders. Their job is to inform & advise the public, warning of any imminent dangers, & they've utterly failed. People will be blind-sided, with grim consequences.
2/ As long as the CDC crafts their messaging for political purposes, with a greater concern for shaping public attitudes and manipulating public behavior than telling the unvarnished truth, they will not regain public trust. @michaelmina_lab said it well:
3/ John Barry, author of The Great Influenza, on the *fundamental lesson* of the 1918 pandemic:
"Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one"
rochester.edu/newscenter/his…
Read 12 tweets

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