For the last month I've been asking headteachers and staff at seven schools a simple question:

"Are repeated covid infections affecting pupil health?" I've been asking the question in person, face to face, while chatting to them about other issues, including staffing problems and attendance.

Three quick things about this year's flu wave. Has it actually 'kicked off' yet?

Look at 2019 and 2024.
They have one kicking off point.

Interestingly it was the same week in both years - the week kids go back to school after half term break.

From there it skyrockets.

I've been sent the text below, which is an extract from a proposed article that didn't make it to publication.
The writer asked me to share it.

For American readers: categories like Motor Neuron Disease include things like Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis/ALS/Lou Gehrig's disease. "There is growing concern among clinicians and researchers that COVID-19 infection may be contributing to a striking rise in rare but serious neuromuscular conditions such as motor neuron disease (MND) and spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) among younger adults.

I've been watching soccer players here get ACL injuries with painful regularity over the last five years.

I've had two ACL injuries myself, and some times of year I develop a painful ache just below and to the side of my knee that feels like a small ball of pure pain.
🧵 So whenever I hear about someone going through this, I feel a strong personal empathy.

You might think that public health bodies and institutions and their leaders know what they're talking about, but, sadly, they often just regurgitate garbage fake science that has no actual basis in fact, but sometimes it's more sinister than that. Here's an example, shared a couple of weeks ago by the American Society of Microbiology.

It includes a claim (a lie, actually, but we'll come to that) that you might have seen repeated a lot during the last few years.

I'm slowly working my way through the thousands of conditions covered by the uk hospital episodes data.

Quite a few people have been asking me about POTS and Dysautonomia.

Well... Where shall we start.

Autonomic nervous systems in teenagers?

I think it's worth taking a look at the trends in hospital episodes for breast cancer.
🧵

https://twitter.com/fillthewhole/status/1987442929766449169

A few graphs to follow.
They show the number of 'hospital episodes' for different aspects of breast cancer.

Hospital episodes are *not the same* as case numbers, or people suffering from breast cancer.

If Covid infections caused harm to the immune system like weakening immune surveillance and dysregulation of T cell balance, making it harder to keep old viruses in check, then you'd expect to see some things.

Things.
🧵 You'd expect dormant infections to flare up again.

Why are people fighting about what Long Covid is?

This is really important. Long Covid is the casual term for the long term health problems caused by Covid infection.

It's probably time to talk about bird flu again.
🧵 You may have noticed UKHSA going into intense *we're not panicking mode* about flu here.

So... teeth eh.

I went to visit a 45 year old man in hospital today.
He's recovering from complications of his recovery from surgery after an infection... and he said that while he was ill, three of his teeth fell out.

So I thought I'd look up statistics on teeth... Brace yourself.

Shall we work down the list?

https://twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1877819129316389124

Look out for sharp increases in the last couple of years.

The five things you need to know if you're just realising that it's bad for you to keep catching Covid: 1
You can't properly reduce your risk of catching Covid and still look normal.

I have had another horrible realisation. It suddenly made sense of *loads* of things about the effects of covid infection itself, but it also made massive sense of why public health is missing what's going on.
🧵🙏 This is hard to articulate coherently, but I'm going to try.

I just want to do a quick thread about the doubling and more of sickness absence of young doctors.

Some graphs with real genuine NHS data on them. There is no equivalent dataset to this here in this country as far as I know.

The NHS is the largest employer in this country, about the sixth largest employer in the world.

So this database is *huge*.

I occasionally talk about how hideously incompetent the ukhsa is.

And, yes, it's hard to tell if it's hideous incompetence or plain malice sometimes.

Here's an example.

🧵 This discussion of the autumn booster contains this piece of staggering inaccuracy:

Young adults.
Let's see how they're doing. Or something that affects your skin in a dozen ways...

I'm going to start this thread with a boring tweet so no one reads it. But what if using the term AIDS is a problem because people don't understand that *immune deficiency* is the *boss level* of untreated HIV infection, not the introductory open world gameplay.

How's that lymph system doing. Blastic NK-cell lymphoma, England.

Can we all agree that it's weird and not good that there has been a 25% rise in hospital episodes of acute myocardial infarction (heart attacks) in young working age adults?

And can we all look at that graph and maybe just consider for a moment that it might be due to damage caused by covid infections? And, no, of course we're not catching up on the pandemic backlog of heart attacks you flipping dingdong.

There's no treatment delay.
Or reporting delay.
These are recorded on the day they happen.
🤬

🚨If Covid infections could interfere with the way your body handles fats, you'd expect a massive jump in the number of episodes of hospital treatment for that problem.
🧵📈 What do you think the graph is going to look live?