Ok.
Look at this chart.
It's from the ONS Winter Covid Survey analysis.
Is it designed to be confusing?
Yes.
I think so.
It's a chart of when people doing the survey who said they were experiencing symptoms of Long Covid said that their Long Covid symptoms started.
So it's a chart of *how many weeks ago* their Long Covid started.
Recent is at the top.
Long ago is at the bottom.
So up top here you have a section of people who say they have been affected by symptoms of Long Covid for "4 to 11 weeks" and "12 to 25 weeks" (preceding March 7th)
That's short term Long Covid, as Long Covid goes.
Early days.
Lingering symptoms, initial new repercussions of the acute illness, new problems, dysfunctions.
That's not the part of this that I want to concentrate on.
Everyone knows there are short term repercussions of Covid, but the narrative pushed by the government is that:
a) they mostly clear up.
b) fewer people are developing Long Covid now.
This is important to understand.
They want you to believe that most of the people who developed Long Covid developed it a long time ago.
The clue, I guess, is in the title of the chart:
"Figure 1: The majority of people self-reporting long COVID experienced symptoms over two years previously"
This is what they want you to believe.
Do you understand that?
So this section here is *designed* to reinforce that understanding.
Look.
I'll erase the first two sections for you, so that it's really easy to see:
It looks like most of the people reporting symptoms lasting longer than 6 months developed them a long time ago... and then fewer and fewer have developed them since... right?
Except look CLOSELY at those numbers down the left.
What do you see?
They're all DIFFERENT lengths of time.
So the graph looks like you're comparing even time periods, but you're not.
How do you feel about this chart now that you know that?
Would you like to see the chart so that the percentages of people in those time periods are distributed evenly?
Now, I don't have the underlying data, so I can't break it down for you neatly, but here's *when* each of those time periods starts.
This group of Long Covid cases (orange) (that developed over 156 weeks prior) developed over this time period (green) of 58 weeks.
So that's 31% over a span of 58 weeks.
And then 5% of cases developed over the timespan of 39-51 weeks prior to the survey... that's over a timespan of 13 weeks.
So you want a graph that spreads out those columns of data over the number of weeks that they represent.
Are you braced for it?
Here it is.
Just look at that.
The moments at which people developed Long Covid are distributed evenly right the way across the time period from February 2020 to April 2023.
And then there was the first real lull since the start last summer, and then the Pirola wave.
And if you display *all* the data in the ONS graph this way...
Now, I don't actually think that's how many people are going to permanently have Long Covid.
But the whole "most people who developed Long Covid developed it over two years ago"?
And "fewer people are developing Long Covid now"?
That's just bullshit, isn't it?
PS... any guesses for what happens here...
PS2...
Just going back to this graph, of when everyone who has Long Covid that lasted longer than 12 weeks up to march 2023...
If you take those two points, and add them together to distribute their data evenly across six months rather than two sets of 12 weeks...
I've got some more data to add to this.
And it's a bad situation.
🚨🚨
I based the thread below on 'Lab Confirmed' Cases of Whooping Cough in England.
This evening I had the chance to look at the 'Statutory Notifications'.
It's rising much faster.
This will be a 5 tweet thread.
So this is Lab Confirmed cases of Whooping Cough in England over the last ten years.
On this chart, our current month has three times as many confirmations of cases as the previous highest point in the last ten years.
That's already bad because we haven't reached the height of the wave - that's not due for another four months. (see the thread below)
⚠️I would like to share a very very serious concern about whooping cough.
⚠️Professor Paul Hunter of the University of East has said that there was a surge "expected based on usual seasonal patterns" this year.
🧵About those usual seasonal patterns:
Look at the point at the right. That's the last week of January this year. That's when things went from normal to crazy in whooping cough world in England.
The last week of January is pretty much the start of the whooping cough season in most years up to now, in terms of lab confirmations.
You may have seen stories recently about 'the rise of drug resistant superbugs'.
There was even one expert yesterday saying that they could make the covid pandemic look minor.
Well.
Here's a little thread about the timings of these superbug waves in England.
There's quite a wide range of potential drug resistant superbugs - microbes that include bacteria, fungi, protozoans, and viruses.
Let's leave the others aside for a minute, and concentrate on the bacteria.
Primarily because the UK government have been publishing some data on the number of cases of drug-resistant bacteria for the last three years.
The UKHSA added three more weeks of data today.
Guess what new diagnoses of Cryptosporidium Parvum did in the most recent week's data.
Yep. They dropped.
Parvum waves follow Covid waves *precisely*.
Maybe it's that Covid damages the immune system making people vulnerable to Cryptosporidiosis the way that another famous virus does.
Maybe it's that english hospitals are disgusting and dirty and when more people are admitted to hospital for covid they then develop a C Parvum infection.
Difficult conversation with a middle aged woman yesterday who probably has long covid, but won't consider that as a possibility.
Healthy, active until Nov 23.
First had Covid in late '21.
No obvious repercussions then, been 'ill' a couple of times in between...
#AnecdoteAlert
Then she had 'a nasty stomach bug' in November 2023, and quickly developed high blood pressure, breathlessness, fatigue, dizziness, hearing problems that have all persisted since then.
She's a bit of a wreck.
But she's stuck in the "that's life", "I'm just getting old", "it's the stress" way of thinking.
You've probably been waiting for an update on this for the last ten months.
I mean it was quite a bold claim to make, that cases of Klebsiella would continue to rise sharply if we allow Covid to keep damaging immune systems...
Guess what has happened to them...
🧵
Yep.
They continued to rise to the point where four times as many people are being diagnosed a month as just two years ago.
You're probably looking at that graph and thinking, hang on a moment, do those spikes coincide with anything?