Before Covid came along, England was doing pretty well with meningococcal disease.

Which is great because it's a disease that can *kill a healthy teenager within hours*...

... or leave them alive without limbs, hearing, or memory...

But... and it's a really big but...
🧵 ... but then, of course, covid infections came along.

I had heard of several more serious DKA episodes leading to hospitalisation, disability, and death since I last wrote about it in May, then this last week, I heard of two more.

Let me tell you about one of them. This is a very miserable thread, so stop reading now if you need to.

Look.
They know that covid infections are still causing death, damage, and disability, but they're still gambling on it *going away* once everyone's been infected enough times.

Can't you see how dangerous that gamble is if each infection is harmful to your long term health? And how especially dangerous it is if the gamble is pointless, because it's not going to work to make covid 'go away', and because the damage is actually cumulative.

I've been trying to write a thread on a huge huge huge problem, but like many of my threads, it has become messy and complicated.
But here goes anyway.

You've heard of the theory of evolution, and natural selection.
Right? And you've heard of selective breeding too?

Where you manipulate a species by selecting for a certain trait. Like crop yield, or size, or disease resistance, or aggression?

Imagine writing an official press release to say that there has been a sharp rise in the number of Shiga Toxin producing E Coli cases WITHOUT SAYING that these are more likely among people who are immune compromised in some way.

Deception piled on deception.
🧵 Let's talk about *just one* way in which Covid infection affects the immune system that would make E Coli infection more likely.

For decades things had been getting better for women aged 40-44 here, and among the things that were getting better was healthcare and health.
Women were getting healthier, and year on year, fewer were dying. Good news.

Until 2020. This is the rolling annual mortality rate for that age group, with the trend highlighted:

Ok.

This is a shit thread, and very depressing, so, yes, please, flick past it, or just block me. I'm in my fourth decade of working with young kids. I've done it in different roles in different places, but I've done it steadily throughout that time.

This one still concerns me.

There could be lots of possible explanations for it, but no one's providing them.

If you know what John Cunningham Virus does... then it would concern you too. It could be down to:
Increased testing and monitoring in at-risk groups.
Increased usage of MS drugs like natalizumab and ocrelizumab.

Young doctors in England are getting sicker - and fast.

For decades the levels of sickness absence of NHS Staff were stable, until Covid infections arrived.

Now, in all three of these groups, sickness absence rates have *more than doubled*.

And they're STILL CLIMBING. I have no idea why young doctors are assenting to this.

Here's another one to look out for.

Someone this morning said, "it's another one with leg problems, there are so many with leg problems".

And there are. There really are. There's a wave of people here with lower leg problems that all feel kind of similar.

Ten things people mean when they say "no one could have predicted this". 1
Actual people did predict this, but we ignored them.

There's a six month old in our community just been admitted to hospital because they've been affected badly by a covid infection.

I am concerned about the effect of Covid on this age group. Covid infection does two things:
It causes short term health problems.
It causes long term health problems.

🚨
Look, I've gone round on this a few times, and I hope I'm wrong, but there seems to be a *really nasty increase* in mortality rates for under 1s here in the last 24 months.

People were already on top of this for the 2022 and 2023 data, but I think the trend has worsened. Look. The deaths in that age range have trended up slightly...

Ten misconceptions about WWIII 1
That it's only WWIII if it goes nuclear.

Think about nucleotide entropy this way.
There's a remote island and a flock of one species of finch get blown there.
There are dozens of different species of seed-producing plants on the island. The finches are initially adapted to only one type of seed, but gradually their ancestors change through selection so that the ones with bigger beaks are able to eat the bigger seeds, and ones with long thin beaks are able to eat the smaller ones.

Covid nucleotide entropy had *never* been higher than it was in mid-May... The first nucleotide entropy peak was June 2021.

You know that one, right?

One of the brilliant things about the Ukrainian drone strikes on the Russian airbases by way of drones shipped close to the targets in shipping containers is that the only logical Russian response is to increase security checks on all shipping inside Russia. Which means... ... that Russia may have to start treating every shipping container like a potential bomb.

It's quite staggering when you look at the doubling of days of sickness absence for doctors in the NHS in five short years.

We're not "back to normal".

We're going *out of control*. Zoom in to "Gastrointestinal Problems" and "Cold Cough Flu-Influenza".

Look at that genuinely astonishing rise from *2019* to now.

I have just had the craziest morning.
I meet up twice a year with five colleagues to coordinate an annual event.

When I arrived the first two were already there... One was talking about how her husband (early 50s) has not returned to work after a stroke six months ago, and about how she (early 50s) was dealing with unending fatigue.

I haven't worn ffp2+ masks for the entire pandemic.

I bought a load in mid January 2020, and started wearing them in February 2020.

But then I fell for some weird disinformation... The weird disinformation was that there wasn't enough manufacturing capacity to make enough ffp2+ masks for healthcare workers.

How do I put this.

The people who say that endless repeat covid infection is not a concern... They say it, despite the fact that studies like this one are only coming out now after *five years of work*. It was based on cases in 2020.

There *is* enough evidence in to say that endless repeat Covid infections are going to be detrimental to long term health on an individual and population level, but there will be even more evidence to come. There will be problems caused by cases caught *today* that will not be out for years.