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Dr. Deepti Gurdasani Profile picture
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Mar 14 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
It's a tragedy when govts, rather than using vaccines & therapies to improve outcomes (by using a vaccines plus approach), use them to promote policies that cause a much higher level of infection, long COVID & unacceptable levels of 'acceptable deaths'.
theguardian.com/world/2022/mar…
Shouldn't we expect better given we've had 2 yrs to do better? Vaccines, therapies, and evidence on so many airborne precautions that reduce spread? Or should we just tolerate higher infections? 27,000 deaths involving COVID-19 as per ONS in the UK since 'freedom day'.
>9,000 just this year in the 'mild' omicron wave. 1.5 million people with long COVID - with 685,000 having had symptoms for *more than a year*. 21,000 of these with symptoms more than a yr are children. Impacts of omicron not even fully felt yet on long COVID figures.
And we've decided mass infection is an okay policy, Millions remain unvaccinated or unboosted. Millions of children haven't even been offered the vaccination yet, despite being MHRA and JCVI approved and recommended.
Not only have they promoted mass infection with these policies, they've also made us blind to what's going on by the loss of contact tracing, and massively disincentivizing testing. Hospitalisations going up once again & declines in deaths have stopped at 700/wk.
The only plan seems to be to denial and distraction.

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More from @dgurdasani1

Dr. Deepti Gurdasani Profile picture
Mar 11
UKHSA tech report out - TL;DR:
-BA.2 now represents >80% of omicron in England
-Growth rate 80% greater relative to BA.1 per wk
- regional growth seems to correlate with BA.2 frequency
-?lab reports indicating that BA.1 infection may lead to lower neutralisation against BA.2
🧵
BA.2 does not produce the spike gene failure (SGTF) on TaqPath PCR tests that BA.1 did, so it can be detected on some routine PCR tests. Looking at this 'SGTP' signature, it looks like 83% of cases are BA.2. This won't be fully representative of England but in the ballpark.
There are regional differences - which may at least partly explain the differences in prevalence and rises of cases in different regions. Highest in London, and the SE and EoE south, and lowest in the North.
Read 21 tweets
Dr. Deepti Gurdasani Profile picture
Mar 9
Really worth looking at what's happening in the 8-11 yr group- infections have continued to occur at a high rate (as per ONS data) in this age group- yet antibodies appear to be plateauing, and early declines being seen. This is well-described in the literature.🧵
Children *do not* develop sustained antibody responses- and the rate of seroreversion (going from antibody positivity to negativity) and antibody declines are faster than adults. Remember antibodies don't mean immunity in the first place (given the level of escape with omicron)
It is unlikely children develop lasting immunity to infection. The UKHSA data also shows this clearly, with re-infections being highest among children, with a significant proportion of BA.2 re-infections having occurred within just 3 months.
Read 5 tweets
Dr. Deepti Gurdasani Profile picture
Mar 8
A brief discussion on the impact of omicron we're seeing in some countries currently - e.g. HK - which may seem surprising given the impact observed in South Africa and even perhaps the UK - which while v. significant, seems lower on the face of it.🧵
Some of this will no doubt stem from different vaccination rates by age in different regions - but there is possibly another important factor that may not be immediately apparent.
I want to revisit the discussions on the severity of omicron relative to delta here. As many of us discussed earlier - there are two aspects to severity:
1. intrinsic severity - what is the severity if omicron compared to delta if they infected the same people
Read 22 tweets
Dr. Deepti Gurdasani Profile picture
Mar 8
As hospitalisations increase, it's worth again noting that testing has massively reduced as positivity has risen to 20% in England (similar to the Dec omicron wave). So cases are *massively* underestimated - and looking at dashboard numbers will underestimate risk.🧵
I worry that this is providing false re-assurance about where things are at. ONS data suggests infection rates remain high. And hospitalisations with COVID-19 are clearly rising across all age groups. BA.2, a more transmissible sub-variant of omicron has also gained dominance.
Vaccines will provide protection, but we know this protection wanes, and isn't absolute. So other additional layers are important to protect yourself
& others. While the govt no longer mandates any measures, it's important to continue to be cautious.
Read 8 tweets
Dr. Deepti Gurdasani Profile picture
Mar 8
I think it's undeniable that massacres, wars & famines in many parts of the world have been largely ignored by the west & western media- but the fact that this (keeping in mind the role of Putin in some of these) is being used by the Kremlin to distract from Ukraine is disturbing
It's clear that there's racism & inequality in reporting & responding to crises in different parts of the world. Some lives clearly have been assigned less value than others. While this is completely true, the Kremlin weaponising this to distract from their killing is wrong.
The fact that they're sharing a picture of killing that they themselves were involved in- the slaughter of civilians with chemical weapons in Syria makes them using the suffering that they themselves created all the more sickening.
Read 5 tweets
Dr. Deepti Gurdasani Profile picture
Mar 6
A key thread. As we face the shock of the Ukraine war, it's vital we also face up to the rot at the heart of UK government and erosion of democracy in the UK that continues to prop up the kleptocracy in Russia - which in turn delivered Brexit & Tory wins in our last election.
Democracies are only as good as the independence of institutions in them - vitally independent media, independent judiciary and law.. all these systems are being eroded in the UK. The information we see on the media is massively skewed - in line with vested interests.
We saw it during the Brexit referendum, during the election. During COVID-19. It's an information war, and the consequences are dire. As we're seeing in Russia at the moment, as the public gets more and more isolated by govt propaganda.
Read 7 tweets

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