And did I post this one already for Core Training...
Covid infections cause a reduction in sets of your immune cells that fight infections... and when you keep catching covid that effect keeps getting worse, so you're increasingly prone to being off sick with cold cough flu.
There are over 750 of these charts for the different categories... so I'm just going to pull out a very few of the serious ones for the different groups.
There are pregnancy problems in loads of groups, as well as the ones I've already posted.
Imagine being a midwife and *knowing* this is happening to you and your colleagues.
Again, remember that we have every reason to assume this was not rising before covid.
I'm in a lull on twitter without much visibility, so probably hardly anyone will see this, but here's an important thread on "why everyone's sick all the time".
No, you are not imagining it.
Sickness is increasing.
Sickness absence rates are increasing.
Let's start with this graph.
The monthly sickness absence rates of staff at the NHS.
They have over a million employees, so this is a massive slice of the population of the country.
The graph is *rate*, so it's the proportion of staff who are off sick each month.
So it's not rising "because there are more people working for the NHS".
First, even mild Covid infection screws your immune system so you're 60% more likely to be hospitalised by EBV/mono/glandular fever for and the effect lasts ages.
I've seen this gotcha quite a few times now:
"If the Kent meningitis outbreak was caused by Covid, why is it just in Kent?"
Which completely misses the point of what people mean when they say that outbreaks like this are made more likely by the damage caused by covid infections.
Wildfires aren't a perfect analogy for infection outbreaks - but they can help us understand certain aspects.
Think of a whole country made more prone to wildfires by a drought.
The whole country doesn't suddenly burst into flames.
In a drought ridden country, what happens it that you get wildfires happening locally sporadically.
Enormously massively huge studies have shown that each wave of Covid infections causes damage to people's immune systems. The science is incontrovertible.
And yet you will not find a single media article about the current meningitis outbreak that mentions that.
It's really simple.
It's been established science for decades that "a low CD4 count... has been shown to be associated with an increased risk of Invasive Meningococcal Disease"
Governments base policies on this established science. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10…
And Covid infection... Covid infection hammers your lymphocytes including CD4 T cells... and the rest.