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Prof. Michael S Fuhrer Profile picture
Prof. Michael S Fuhrer
@MichaelSFuhrer
Quantum materials/Science comms. Personal acct. If X algorithm drove you here for a free argument, I’m not available. Try a different approach, or get blocked.
☀️ Leon-Gerard Vandenberg 🇳🇱🇨🇦🇦🇺 Math+e/acc Profile picture Myrne Stol (she/they) Profile picture eric821092 Profile picture 4 subscribed
Sep 18 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Oh good lord, this is absolutely hilarious and devastating news for the copromancers.

Here's how CDC aggregates its wastewater data.

TL;dr, it's a Z-score of variation around a baseline of last 12 months' data from each site.

1/
 cdc.gov/nwss/about-dat…
Image In simple terms, "high" or "low" means high/low compared to the average of the last 12 months!

***By design*** it is impossible to use the data to compare the size of waves that are >12 months apart, or to calculate absolute numbers of infections.

2/
Sep 12 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
I thought I’d provide my thinking on this set of polls.

To start, I’ll say I was heartened by the polite and constructive engagement!

The thread got more than a dozen replies and >300 votes. (I re-posted on the blue site: 2 likes and 0 comments ☹.)

1/
My personal calculus:

I think annual boosters are probably quite effective against onward transmission, probably 50% (a combination of VE|infection and VE|symptomatic which affects onward transmission).
2/
Jul 26 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
Really good article about the body of work from @zalaly using electronic health records to study post-acute symptoms of covid in the US Veterans Health Administration.

Mirrors many of the criticisms I've made of these studies over the years.

1/undark.org/2024/07/25/lon… "At best, the studies are detecting health problems...when people with poor baseline health experience a severe infection of any kind, said @anders_hviid. At worst, the findings simply reflect bias...picking up on symptoms that are not caused by Covid-19 at all."

2/
Jun 14 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
"Conservative estimates suggest that over 200 million SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals worldwide will develop persistent symptoms of COVID-19" (C. Yang and S.J. Tebutt)

Tracking down the origin of that number led me to an absolute gem of a figure...

thelancet.com/journals/lanep…
Image C. Yang and S.J. Tebutt cite Ref 1 as the source.

Ref 1 is another paper by the same authors and isn't the actual source of the 200 million figure. Sloppy referencing!

(But well done slipping in a self-reference 👍)

frontiersin.org/journals/immun…

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May 16 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Top-level result here is that covid is 1.35 times [95% CI, 1.10-1.66] more deadly than influenza in this cohort (VA patients hospitalized due to covid or influenza).

To me that means covid ~ influenza.

Moreover...

1/ Around 44% of those hospitalized for influenza had been vaccinated this season. While that's lower than the average vaccination for this age cohort (most >65) of around 54% (quite possibly because the vaccine works!)

But...

2/
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Mar 21 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
A new study out on neurologic sequelae following covid-19 or influenza hospitalization using a large electronic health record database.

Interesting to compare this study to the recent study using VA database - a thread.

1/
neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WN… I wrote a lot about the VA study here.


Here's the rate of new neurological diagnoses after covid-19 (red) or influenza (blue) hospitalization in the VA study:

2/
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Feb 24 • 45 tweets • 10 min read
Does covid infection cause psychiatric and neurologic disorders?

A tale of two studies, and an interesting story about how science works!

Time for a long weekend thread.

1/
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Image First, this study published last year in Nature Medicine.



The study examined electronic health records of the US Department of Veterans Health Care System (VHA).

2/nature.com/articles/s4159…
Jan 25 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
Immunity gap update.

Flu and RSV hospitalizations have peaked in the US. How does this season compare to previous?

Thread.

1/ RSV first. Overall, RSV hospitalizations are down a little this year compared to last but still higher than pre-pandemic.

2/
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Jan 19 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
In testimony before the US Senate yesterday, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly (@zalaly) is quoted as saying “The burden of disease and disability in Long Covid is on par with heart disease and cancer”.

I think this statement is provably false.

Thread.

1/🧵
The basis of the statement appears to be a study on which Dr. Al-Aly is the lead author, “Postacute sequelae of COVID-19 at 2 years”.

The abstract is below.

2/
nature.com/articles/s4159…
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Jan 14 • 40 tweets • 11 min read
I’d like to revisit this study by @zalaly’s group.

I want to tackle one issue in particular:

Does the study provide evidence that those hospitalized for COVID-19 had worse *long-term* health outcomes compared to those hospitalized for influenza?

1/🧵
thelancet.com/journals/lanin…
Image I discussed the same study previously here:

2/🧵
Jan 10 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
Just for fun, I took @JWeiland’s wastewater-to-infections calibration and asked:

How often on average are people infected with covid in the US?

Is the rate increasing or decreasing?

A thread.

1/🧵
There are big uncertainties in this. Wastewater monitoring isn’t meant to be an absolute measure of prevalence. There's uncertainty around the conversion of wastewater into # of infections. (I’ve used @JWeiland’s number at face value, but I do some sanity checks at end.)

2/🧵
Jan 9 • 24 tweets • 7 min read
This is one of the most persistent and most important misconceptions of the pandemic.

A new variant does NOT cancel all, or even most, prior immunity!

Thread.

1/🧵


Image
Image This aspect of variant evolution has confused even the experts.

(P.S. I don’t know that @JWeiland has it wrong; I suspect he does understand that JN.1 has cancelled ~10% of immunity, see below. Maybe he can clarify the parameters in his model.)

2/🧵 Image
Dec 18, 2023 • 27 tweets • 7 min read
I'd like to take a deeper dive into this new study on long-term outcomes after covid/flu hospitalization, which I discussed on Saturday.



1/ thelancet.com/journals/lanin…
The study looked at electronic health records of patients of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). They examined outcomes for 540 days after covid-19 hospitalization in 2020-22, and after influenza hospitalization in 2015-19.

2/
thelancet.com/journals/lanin…
Dec 15, 2023 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
A thread about this recent paper.
1/ This new study is from the same research group, studying the same electronic health records (US Veterans Health Administration) that I've discussed before, such as in this study:

2/
Oct 12, 2023 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
Perhaps the most important lesson of the pandemic:

For epidemic disease, small reductions in transmission have an *exponentially magnified* effect on infections.

For endemic disease, small reductions in transmission are *reduced* to an even smaller effect on infections.

1/ Image This central result of epidemiology is unfortunately not well known; such that even @CrabbBrendan, Director of @BurnetInstitute gets it wrong.

(Understandable, as it is counterintuitive, but I hope he will correct it.)

2/ Image
Oct 2, 2023 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
It looks like @TRyan_Gregory found the study I tweeted about yesterday. Now we get a rare glimpse into how the covid-misinformation sausage gets made in real time.

1/

Image Here are the results of the case-control study in table form. (I encourage you to read the whole study – it is open access.)

2/
thelancet.com/journals/lanch…
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Sep 25, 2023 • 23 tweets • 6 min read
This is a very good question regarding the Danish study I tweeted about yesterday. This study using EHR appears to come to a very different conclusion.

I think the answer is important so I will QT. This is NOT a call for a pile-on. The issues are subtle and worth exploring.

1/ My tweet from yesterday about the Danish study, which uses electronic health records (EHR) and finds no association in ages 50+ between covid infection and later hospitalization for may common infectious diseases.

2/
Sep 10, 2023 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
@drseanmullen The issue at hand, I think, is whether the effects of covid are getting better or worse. That’s a different question than whether the effect are “large” or “small”, or what we should do about them. I’m happy to tackle those too, but let’s start with the getting better/worse.

2/ @drseanmullen I’ll mostly (some exceptions) limit my data to Australia as that’s the area where I’m most familiar with the data. I think many of the conclusions apply broadly, though Australia fared relatively well in the pandemic through strong suppression of covid until very high vax.

3/
Aug 29, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Here's a nice preprint that simultaneously estimates excess deaths correlated with influenza prevalence and covid prevalence, in France - a rare apples-to-apples comparison of influenza and covid mortality.

1/
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
Image In 2014-2019, influenza was responsible for around 15,600 excess deaths each year in France on average, or about 23 per 100k population (equivalent to about 5,900 deaths/year in Australia).

(This is likely a high estimate as includes the high 2017 & 2019 seasons).

2/
Aug 10, 2023 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
LK-99 lessons:

The ArXiv worked as intended. The scientific community was alerted to the possibility of a room-temperature superconductor, investigated the report, and produced further evidence...

1/ ...and that evidence, taken on the whole, shows that there’s little reason at present to think LK-99 is a room-temperature superconductor. All in under 3 weeks.

2/
Aug 7, 2023 • 31 tweets • 6 min read
There's been quite a lot of interest in recent reports of room-temperature superconductivity in the material dubbed LK-99.

Setting those aside for the moment, how likely is it that room temperature superconductivity, superfluidity, or zero resistance might be achieved?

1/ Superconductivity refers specifically to superfluidity of electron pairs in a solid. Superfluids can flow without friction or dissipation (heat generation), and charged superfluids (such as fluids made of electron pairs) can carry currents (flow of charge) with resistance.

2/