tern Profile picture
Mar 6 27 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Why don't people grasp how serious this is?

Across an entire population, losing more than three years of your healthy life expectancy...

That is just staggering.

Especially because of this:
The big problem is that it *isn't even distributed evenly*.
I mean you might think that losing 3.3 years is bad.

But actually, that's 3.3 years spread across all the people.
So if the population were 5 people, it would be 16.5 healthy years lost.
But because it is not distributed evenly, different people lose different amounts of healthy years.
So Person A might lose 1 year of healthy life.
Person B might lose none.
Person C might lose 2 years.
Person C might lose 0.5 years.
And then the rest of the full weight of the loss of healthy years comes down heavy on Person D.

They lose THIRTEEN YEARS of healthy life.
And actually it's bad enough if it's distributed evenly.

That's three and a third years of lost salary, lost contribution to society, lost family time, lost pensions contributions, lost joy.

But also the weight of all of that loss having to be carried by society.
The economic loss caused by that?
Huge.
The societal loss from all of that?
Huge.
The individual loss from all of that?
Huge.
But when it's distributed unevenly, you get some lives that win the lottery and some that don't.
And that's where the current injustice hits hardest.

Some people's lives have been absolutely ravaged by long covid.

Their healthy years have been snatched away from them, and it's there being charted in brutal black and white: Image
And blue and light blue.
But actually a load of people haven't even noticed yet that their own health has been stolen by covid infections.
I'm supporting a woman who's retiring early after developing a string of health problems after her covid infections.

She's struggling financially because she's supporting her own daughter who has a string of health problems after her covid infections.
And what's even more hideous is that the full effect of covid infections is not even fully evident in the healthy life expectancy charts.

These charts are built on actual health situations now.
They don't factor in what it means to kids born today to catch covid every year for the rest of their lives.
So the full scale of the problem isn't even close to appearing in these charts yet.
And, as someone who was predicting this decline in the charts long before it was even visible, believe me that it is going to get worse.
And worse.
And worse.
You should have believed me the first time.
You should have believed the science.
Covid infections, every covid infection you have throughout your life, will shave time off your healthy life expectancy.
Stop catching Covid, stop spreading it.
Unless you like growing old early, growing sick early, and dying early.

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More from @1goodtern

May 19
If covid infections make you *more vulnerable* to almost every other pathogenic infection by multiple mechanisms, then you'd expect increases in almost every other pathogenic infection.

And that's what we see.

Ten completely unsurprising news stories:
1
Dengue virus
"Cases of the mosquito-borne viral illness have touched a record high in the Americas this year."
reuters.com/world/us/us-cd…
2
Measles virus
"Measles cases in the European region doubled in 2024."
reuters.com/business/healt…
Read 70 tweets
May 18
I was absolutely appalled to hear Bonnie Henry say "Personal Protective Equipment, the word we all dread".

You may have had an instant visceral reaction to that yourself, but here are the eleven things wrong with what she said:
It's like the head of NASA talking about the dread everyone has of space suits.
The space suit is something you *need* in space to be able to do the thing you want to do, and then to be able to do it again.

To hear the head honcho saying they dread it turns every single concept on its head.
Read 43 tweets
May 14
I don't think I have ever been so appalled about public health policy, information, and communication than by what I'm hearing about hanta at the moment.

It's like people's brains are just switched off.
Like they can't think straight.
It's unbelievable.
I genuinely think we should *not* be at high risk of a universal spread of hantavirus, but we don't need universal spread for it to have been an absolute failure.
If there are a couple more generations of spread, then it risks becoming a nightmare.

Is that going to happen? I don't know.
Neither do you.
The WHO doesn't know.
No one does.
Read 27 tweets
May 9
Since we've decided to do this all again:
🔟
Ten things that can reduce the risk of catching an airborne pathogen:
1 An ffp2+/n95+ mask (respirator) worn properly
2 Ventilation
Read 31 tweets
May 9
People are just not going to be able to get their heads round the slow incubation period of hantavirus.

On reflection, thousands of people have probably already been exposed, and those thousands could expose tens, even hundreds, of thousands more.
The sheer time scale is almost impossible to grasp when placed in the context of people engaged in the kind of fast international travel involved with a cruise ship.
You might think that's ridiculous because a cruise ship is slow and contained, but it's not the cruise ship so much as the interwoven pattern of flights people take to *get to and from* the cruise ship.
Read 23 tweets
May 8
I'm just going to say it again once, as simply as I can, for everyone who is slow to understand this:

Covid infection damages the vascular endothelium, the delicate lining inside your blood vessels.

Hantavirus *targets* the vascular endothelium.
If you've had the first one, you're more likely to be susceptible to, and damaged by, the second.
I don't know how to explain it more simply.
Read 9 tweets

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