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Dr. Deepti Gurdasani

@dgurdasani1

Dec 8

I know lots of people have been asking why I haven't been on social media much. I've been meaning to explain for a while, but wanted a few weeks to myself, before sharing this to brace against the inevitable attacks & harassment that will likely follow from this thread.🧵

Here goes - I recently moved to Western Australia with my family- we had been considering this for a while, as some of you may know. COVID policy was one reason. But there were many many others.

Watching the UK sink to where it is right now has been incredibly painful, including what's happening with UK academia, and scientific leadership. I'd been unhappy living in the UK for a really really long time, and the grief of day to day life had become hard to bear.

Read 25 tweets

Dr. Deepti Gurdasani

@dgurdasani1

Dec 8

Yup, we really messed things up by reducing hosp from multiple viral illnesses by between 50-90%, including flu, measles, sepsis, meningitis - take away: Although mitigations could prevent these, it's much better to expose children to these deadly diseases regularly. \s

Should've done the same with typhoid, and cholera. Instead of regulating clean water, we should've just kept exposing children and adults to pathogens in water, just as we should continue doing this via the air.

Of course, you do understand that simple things like ventilation would massively reduce all disease burden in children- but you can't be bothered to do that, so you make protecting children to reduce disease burden look like a mistake.

Read 14 tweets

Dr. Deepti Gurdasani

@dgurdasani1

Dec 1

New preprint, from Oxford, ONS, Wellcome Trust- John Bell, Jeremy Farrar & many others - if you want to know what the current GBD looks like- and who backs it -this is it:

boosting with infection good, although there may be risks to *some* people'
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

Completely ignoring the evidence of multi-system impact post-COVID, and long COVID even with mild infection in young 'healthy' people, as well as continuing excess deaths in all age groups. But sure, boosting with infection is the answer.

Forget that even young people and children post-COVID have increased risks of clotting, pulmonary thrombo-embolism, renal disease, diabetes, and respiratory illness.

Read 16 tweets

Dr. Deepti Gurdasani

@dgurdasani1

Dec 1

Have done a little toy example to explain why mass exposure in the community in the HCW N95 study would produce a heavily diluted effect compared to in a study where transmission was much lower. Toy example below with calculations - I will run through them step by step below.

So imagine a trial of N95s in HCWs- where those in the test group wear N95s but only in hospital, and in the control group surgical masks - also only in hospital. Below I show the two groups in two settings -
-left - high community prevalence
-right - low community prevalence

Exposure in hospital is always 100% in both scenarios because these are HCWs who have direct contact with COVID patients. However, in the first scenario (left), the exposure in community is ~80%, and in the second (right), it's 10% in the community

Read 12 tweets

Dr. Deepti Gurdasani

@dgurdasani1

Dec 1

Many still missing the point on the HCW N95 study. The primary issue is that *50%* of participants reported *known exposure* in their household/community in Egypt. Very high. Actual exposure likely even higher. Results were driven by this- which would bias results to the null.🧵

If 50% of participants had direct known exposure in the community, one would expect that given incomplete testing and contact tracing, actual exposure would've been even higher in the community 70%? 80%? With such ubiquitous exposure outside hospital, any effect would disappear.

This makes this non-generalisable, and incredibly underpowered. if you look at the data, this wasn't the case in other contexts, where there was a non-significant effect, but power was very limited, because much fewer cases occurred.

Read 9 tweets

Dr. Deepti Gurdasani

@dgurdasani1

Dec 1

If you believe nurses/ambulance workers shouldn't strike under terrible working conditions, because patients may suffer, what're your suggestions for what to do when they're having to feed their children through food banks while working punishing understaffed shifts at low pay?

And don't give me - 'ask politely and it will happen'. It won't. In no other work would employees be expected to put up with this, but apparently if you work in essential services (transport, education, healthcare), you lose your right to protest poor working conditions?

So how do you protest poor working conditions then? Or do you just accept it and work in systems that are being devastated by govt, harming patients, children, employees, and let your families starve?

Read 6 tweets

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