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Apr 6 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Following attempts to 'move past' the pandemic, healthcare in the UK is compromised - again (even if with lower vaccination rates it could easily be so much worse)
theguardian.com/world/2022/apr…
you don't need to be a zerocovid hawk to think that stopping funding for the genuinely world beating #REACT study at the point when the highest prevalence has been recorded is shortsighted
To be clear it is looking like cases have peaked, so things will hopefully turn around soon. But because more older folks are infected in this - and they've not all gotten boosters yet - the severe consequences remain to be seen and could easily be more serious than for BA.1
And in case you think I'm not even handed, I will be giving a lecture tomorrow in which I will praise the UK's vaccine rollout, and the number of deaths it averted. But nobody should be under any illusion that covid has gone away.

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More from @BillHanage

Bill Hanage Profile picture
Mar 23
Before and after photos of the TB hospital in Chernihiv, Ukraine, shared by a colleague of @jenkinshelen recently evacuated from Kyiv. The war will impact the treatment of many infectious diseases, but TB is especially important 1/n
Ukraine and other parts of the former Soviet Union have very high rates of multi drug resistant TB. Failure to treat this adequately will lead to more infections, and if you don't want covid you *really* don't want MDRTB 2/n
While according to this (very good) thread from @veruka2 there were no casualties among patients or staff, the medical stockpiles were destroyed. This will set back the treatment of those already infected and mean more risk to public health in general
3/n
Read 7 tweets
Bill Hanage Profile picture
Mar 11
Here’s a question from a friend of a friend in the U.K. what follows is what I would personally do - it is in no way official advice 1/n
Simplest thing is isolate for ages. In reality you probably want to live your life. This is where mild interventions like masks and rapid antigen tests are your friend 2/n
If I were in this situation, I’d dial back my planned social calendar to the things I really wanted to do, take a rapid test shortly before and stay home if it was positive and… 3/n
Read 8 tweets
Bill Hanage Profile picture
Feb 26
Some people are interpreting this as praising the US response. It isn't. It is pointing out that as with many things there are successes and failures. And people who have made sacrifices for fellow human beings should know they have not been in vain 1/n
Some per-capita mortalities to date (all stats from worldometers.info/coronavirus/ and all per million). Note that this is very crude and a proper analysis should account for years of life lost, excess over expected accounting for age etc but this is what we have 2/n
Peru: 6,230 deaths per million.
Hungary: 4,548
Brazil: 3,301
USA: 2,901
UK: 2.353
France: 2,103
Sweden: 1,677
Germany: 1,459
Ireland: 1,287
Norway: 291
Australia: 196
New Zealand: 11

From 11 to 6,230. Big difference

3/n
Read 6 tweets
Bill Hanage Profile picture
Feb 26
It is fair to say that the pandemic has not been handled well. But can we get a sense of how much worse it could have been? Yes we can, at least roughly, by comparing per-capita mortality in different places to date. The results are quite striking 1/n
Take Peru. The JHU dashboard records 210,229 pandemic deaths so far. In a population of nearly 39 million. If that were repeated in the US, we would have been looking at more than 2 million pandemic deaths so far. Instead we have seen roughly half that 2/n coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Compare the epidemic curves. These are from Peru. See that grim double hump of deaths? Note that they happen before vaccine rollout (in green). The local variant(s) may also have contributed, but this is a powerful illustration of the need for global vaccine equity 3/n Image
Read 8 tweets
Bill Hanage Profile picture
Feb 21
“It took me a relatively short time in Haiti to discover that I could never serve as a dispassionate reporter or chronicler of misery. I am only on the side of the destitute sick and have never sought to represent myself as some sort of neutral party.” Dr Paul Farmer. 1959-2022
I saw rumours of the loss of Paul Farmer early this morning, and sadly they have been confirmed. I know so many who have been inspired by his example nytimes.com/2022/02/21/obi…
He also wrote beautifully about the ugly subject of inequities in healthcare. Read this on “Stupid deaths” (incidentally every time I am on Huron ave I think of this piece, for reasons that will be obvious) lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/…
Read 4 tweets
Bill Hanage Profile picture
Feb 16
Vaccines that protect against severe illness and death have been available for more than a year. In this we estimate conservatively that in the US ~135,000 lost their lives to covid over the Delta wave for lack of vaccination medrxiv.org/content/10.110… 1/n
Because vaccines were not immediately available to all we only look at 5/30/21 to 12/4/21, after which omicron rapidly took over and the situation changed (again). By the start of that time even I (youngish, not in a priority group) was vaccinated 2/n
All this makes use of data from covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tra… vaccine-status. Please read the preprint for full details, but a few major points follow 3/n
Read 13 tweets

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