The tail scientists over here grab the tail and say 'yes! Long Covid is primarily a tail disorder!'.
And the ear scientists flap the ears and say 'it's primarily a flappy ear disorder!'.
And they each do that. Cardio. Neurology, endocrinology, each one after the other saying "yep, long covid is mainly this", when yep, it's primarily all of them.
And if you're a neurologist then of course you're seeing the people with neuro problems.
And if you're in immunology, of course you see immune problems, because,
A) those are the problems you are trained to spot
B) the people with those problems have been sent to you
C) the people with neuro and ortho and cardio got sent to see someone else.
When the truth is that covid is doing this stuff to all these different systems.
And it has been doing that all the time.
This is not new.
We have been round and round this issue for four years now.
Covid can damage ANY SYSTEM IN THE BODY.
Covid is primarily a virus that harms the body.
And Long Covid is primarily all of the repercussions.
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Well, two weeks ago I told you I thought the dip was temporary and there'd be at least one more peak this summer.
And I was right.
And I hate being right, because it means that more people will get hospitalised and die and get disabled.
I didn't want to be right.
I guess that's the difference.
They predict that the wave has peaked and want to be right.
I predict that it's going to go higher and want to be wrong.
A short while ago a few people mentioned that judging by my posts I seemed really angry, and asked how I was doing.
It was after an incident where I had to walk out of an event that I was leading in a venue that didn't have airborne transmission mitigations.
The event had a number of vulnerable people attending, and a grandfather brought his grandson along to it because he was too unwell to attend school.
I pointed out to the event organiser that I thought this was wrong, calmly and quietly, and the event organiser said that no one there was bothered about it, and that the lad could sit off to one side.
Back in January, it was pretty easy to plot the timing of the next wave based on the shape of the wave at the time.
It's all about the dominance of the variant.
But right now it's quite hard to know what's about to happen next here.
A quick thread that has an interesting bit on about tweet five...🧵
When the wave started to build it turned out it wasn't going to be V70/H69-, we still have that joy in store for us (hooray!), but it also became clear that it would be one of those nasty *competing waves* where a string of variants jostle for dominance.
Two months in, KP.2 never really made it above a third of all sequences, and is now back at about 20%.
JN.1 remained strong, and is still clinging on at about 15%.
The main KP.3s (except 3.1.1) look like they're approaching their peak at about 50%...
Remember all those 'scientists' who ranted and raved and swore blind that Covid infections didn't affect the immune system?
Now, obviously we knew they were wrong, but this study shows that they were a whole new level of wrong.
Like being so spectacularly wrong that it can be seen from space.
Picture a person with Long Covid going for a specific medical check-up with a nurse.
The Long Covid person is masked with a high quality respirator.
The nurse is first of all difficult and then actually laughs at the Long Covid sufferer.
🧵
And the Long Covid sufferer who only has a limited amount of energy summons all their patience and calm, and explains their situation.
I don't think explaining this graph again will help.
Because the people who don't want to understand it don't want to understand it.
And the people who are willing to try to understand it probably do already.
But I'm going to explain its significance again anyway.
This graph is the product of two sets of data from the UK government:
1: The number of people who have tested positive on an official covid test whose positive test has been recorded and reported in the official data.