Many have worried these past few years about what effect lockdowns and other covid mitigation measures might have had on our children’s immune systems, especially babies and infants. So I dug into the science for New Scientist’s immune system special.

newscientist.com/article/mg2573… A common misconception is that it’s “good for kids to get sick” because there’s a critical window for training the immune system. This isn’t true – immune systems continue to learn throughout our lives, which is just as well as we don’t encounter every single illness in infancy.

Good morning. A blizzard of climate studies have been released this week, as the world readies for the COP27 climate summit. First off, greenhouse gases have hit yet another record high in our atmosphere: newscientist.com/article/234424… There's also news that 16 out of 35 key measures of planetary health are now "flashing red", including livestock numbers, human population, global consumption of natural gas, greenhouse gas concentrations and ocean temperatures: newscientist.com/article/234415…

As we go into the third year of the pandemic, the New Scientist team has been delving deep into what we can expect in 2022. I urge you: do not expect the pandemic to end next year. Let’s all go into the new year with realistic expectations. 2022 will be a better year than 2021 for many people, in the same incremental way that 2021 was a better year for many people than 2020. Vaccines and new covid-19 treatments should continue to make the coronavirus less lethal for people in the countries that can afford them.

Here’s what I wish everyone knew about #covid-19, especially young people who believe they are “low risk”. 1) “I’m not at risk” – everyone is at risk from the #coronavirus, and even young and healthy people can end up on a ventilator in an intensive care unit with this disease

Incredible story by @ClareWilsonMed

https://twitter.com/newscientist/status/1126792592073601025

@newscientist @ClareWilsonMed Deveza says she suggested the idea to many hospitals but got nowhere. “They didn’t know what I was talking about. They didn’t know which hospital department to transfer me to. One transferred me to the morgue.”