HANTAVIRUS OUTBREAK

A WHO representative was interviewed on GMB this morning.

She said that if someone self-isolating at home starts to feel sick, they should immediately remove themselves from company & start wearing a mask…

…but that’s NOT what the WHO guidance says… 🧵

https://twitter.com/gmb/status/2054826489229545544

The guidance is clear that those self-isolating at home should NOT wait for symptoms before taking precautions.

For the ENTIRE 42-day quarantine, they should:
▪️Avoid contact with other household members
▪️Remain in a separate room
▪️If contact is unavoidable, wear a respirator

HANTAVIRUS OUTBREAK:

I’ve just listened to the health update from the US Nebraska Health Officials 🇺🇸

A few points of interest:

1/ in addition to the US passenger who tested positive & the one showing symptoms, it seems there is ANOTHER passenger who may have tested positive. 2/ Passengers currently in the Nebraska quarantine unit will spend a few days there being assessed.

If they remain symptom free & have support available at home to isolate safely, they’ll have the choice to complete the 42-day isolation either at home or in the quarantine unit.

HANTAVIRUS OUTBREAK

Following my thread yesterday which criticised aspects of the WHO’s strategy, I’m pleased to see they’ve done a 180° turn in the updated guidance published today:

who.int/docs/default-s…

EVERYONE from the ship will now be treated as HIGH-RISK contacts…

🧵 x.com/_catinthehat/s… …and ALL high-risk contacts will now be required to ISOLATE in a designated facility or at home (depending on each country’s capabilities) for 42 days from last known exposure…

…and for the MV Hondius passengers & crew, the last day of exposure is the date of disembarkation.

HANTAVIRUS OUTBREAK 🧵

Following the WHO press briefing, I wanted to compile a thread with the key points.

1/ ISOLATION OF PASSENGERS

Concerningly, it seems the WHO are NOT recommending to isolate cruise ship passengers (even high-risk contacts) UNLESS they develop symptoms. Just to quickly recap, it has been confirmed that the passengers & crew (including the 30 who disembarked on 24 April in St Helena) come from a total of 28 different countries.

The full breakdown of countries for both passengers 🟥 & crew 🟦 is detailed below ⬇️

HANTAVIRUS OUTBREAK ON CRUISE

“Human-to-human transmission suspected on board hantavirus cruise ship, WHO says”

▪️7 cases identified so far.

▪️3 people (2 Dutch, 1 German) have tragically died.

▪️1 Briton is in intensive care in South Africa.

edition.cnn.com/2026/05/05/afr… x.com/cnn/status/205… The exact Hantavirus has not yet been identified, but given the ship departed from Argentina, it’s a distinct possibility it’s the Andes Virus.

This strain is known to be transmissible between humans & previously caused superspreader events in Argentina.

nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.105…

MENINGITIS B TRANSMISSION

There’s been a lot of discussion online and in the media about how exactly Meningitis B spreads.

A lot of it is conflicting & confusing.

So let’s put opinions & hearsay aside and take a proper look at what the latest science actually tells us…

🧵 The UK National Institute for Health & Care Excellence (NICE) states that bacterial meningitis and meningococcal disease is transmitted by the following 3 modes:

▪️ aerosol
▪️droplets
▪️direct contact

cks.nice.org.uk/topics/meningi…

COVID INQUIRY: MODULE 3 REPORT

“Fundamental flaws in the UK’s approach to IPC [infection prevention & control] guidance, for example in relation to the use of PPE, put patients and healthcare workers at risk.”

— Baroness Hallett, Chair of the Covid Inquiry

Read more here… ⬇️

https://twitter.com/_catinthehat/status/1860781843244634365

These are the words we were all hoping to hear:

“Initial guidance on preventing the spread of infection was flawed. It assumed the virus was spread by contact transmission, failing properly to consider the extent to which it was also spread by AIRBORNE transmission.”

Last week, CATA released two explosive reports which revealed a scandal of monumental proportions.

Flawed decisions were made at the start of the Covid pandemic - and then covered up for years to come.

In this series of videos, @SafeDavid3 talks us through the key findings… The CATA Executive team have worked tirelessly in their pursuit of the truth, forensically analysing over 17,000 Covid Inquiry documents & submitting countless FOI requests.

Concerningly, they discovered around 100 key emails which have not been disclosed to the Covid Inquiry…

In honour of #LongCOVIDAwarenessDay, I’d like to present some important data from the latest GP-Patient survey.

This is a HUGE survey with a sample size of ~700K people in England (5x bigger than ONS’s Covid survey).

In this thread, I’ll walk you through some key findings…

/1 According to the GP-Patient survey:

🚨4.2% of people say they DO have Long Covid. That equates to around 2.3M people in England.

🚨A further 9.5% (~5.3M) say they ‘don’t know’.

So potentially as many as 7.6M people in England either have Long Covid or suspect they might.

/2

CATA's reports are a truly remarkable piece of forensic investigation & took literally YEARS to put together.

The fact it’s taken so long is a fundamental part of the story.

For example: it took a whopping 27 MONTHS to extricate one document from the DHSC via an Fol request...

https://twitter.com/_catinthehat/status/2032439344250900981

And it took 17 MONTHS to elicit a set of draft minutes from IPC Cell meetings which took place in Dec 2020 - and only following a direct order by the ICO.

This doc is one of the most damning pieces of evidence in the report as it reveals how minutes were fundamentally altered.

https://twitter.com/_catinthehat/status/2032763845190599009

In 2023, the British Council for Offices (BCO) updated the ventilation guidance for offices:

💨 The *minimum* recommended ventilation rate was increased from 12 to 14 litres of outdoor air per sec per person.

Now guess what the ventilation rate is in a typical UK classroom…❓ Since 2022, the Schools Air quality Monitoring for Health & Education (SAMHE) project has monitored indoor air quality in hundreds of schools across the UK.

Shockingly, their data revealed that the ventilation rate in a typical UK classroom is just 5.3 litres per sec per person.

FROM THE OLYMPICS TO NASA, WEARING MASKS IS BACK - EXCEPT IN HEALTHCARE

Brilliant article on how masking is increasingly popular with Olympic athletes, actors & astronauts wanting to avoid illness…

…but sadly, in hospitals, masking is rare & those who do are often gaslit.

🧵 Here’s a link to the online version of this article by the brilliant Tess Finch Lees:
independent.ie/opinion/commen…

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Something unusual & concerning in Scotland’s Covid data in the last few weeks.

There’s been a sharp rise in the proportion of hospitalised Covid cases which are children.

Currently over half of all Covid hospitalisations in Scotland are kids aged 0-14 years.

(h/t @gwladwr) The data also shows that, since January, Covid incidence rates for these younger age groups have been going into the ‘high’ (dark blue) and ‘very high’ (purple) classifications, particularly the 1-4 years age group.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿PUPIL ABSENCE - AUTUMN 2025

The DfE have now published pupil absence data for the Autumn term:

🔎 Pupil illness absence across the autumn term averaged out at 3.44% (compared to pre-pandemic average of 2.5%).

🔎 By the end of Nov, illness absence had soared to 4.7%.

🧵 DfE commentary:

“The increases seen in the latter weeks of term were mainly driven by illness-related absence”

“This increase in absence is equivalent to approximately 500,000 less days in school compared to the previous autumn term.”

…e-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistic…

COVID & CHILD DEVELOPMENT

New US study showing impact on child brain development when their mothers are infected with COVID during pregnancy.

Results show:
🔎 Structural differences in regions of the brain
🔎Lower cognition & social-emotional scores

sciencedirect.com/science/articl… x.com/harryspoelstra… And here’s another study, this time from Brazil (published Jun 2025), which also shows the impact of maternal COVID infection on child development.

At 24 months:
🔎 36% of infants exhibited cognitive delays
🔎 64% communication delays
🔎 57% motor delays

nature.com/articles/s4139…

“When it comes to flu, the focus is often on droplet transmission, but there’s also evidence of aerosol transmission. That means that ventilation & air filtration are HUGELY important.

“Are the Govt looking to improve that to help deal with all the respiratory infections?”

/1

https://twitter.com/natalieben/status/2001231003075924344

It’s absolutely brilliant to hear Baroness Bennett raising this crucial question in the House of Lords this week.

Thank you, @natalieben 🙏🏻

You can read a transcript of the full question and response received below ⬇️



/2 hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2025-12-…

This feels like an important breakthrough moment…

On the BBC News this evening, Medical Editor @BBCFergusWalsh clearly stated:

“As for facemasks, simple surgical masks are *not* good at stopping viruses. You really need a properly fitted tight respirator mask for that”…

/1 …which begs the question, why does the NHS infection control guidance STILL only recommend surgical masks for treating patients with airborne viruses like flu & Covid… and not proper FFP3 masks?

Even Baroness Hallett was rather perplexed by this during the Covid Inquiry.

/2

CEO, NHS Providers, @danielelkeles:

“It’s a v nasty variant of flu that we have this year.”

“We need to get back into the habit that, if you’re coughing & sneezing […] then you must wear a mask when you’re in public spaces.”

I’m so pleased to hear Daniel promoting masks BUT…

https://twitter.com/timesradio/status/1998325697090080775

…I have 3 questions for @danielelkeles:

1️⃣ He only mentions that people who are sick “must wear a mask in public spaces”…

…but why did he not also suggest that people who are *not* sick should wear a mask to prevent themselves getting sick in the first place?!

Like this ⬇️

UK ‘SUPERFLU’ OUTBREAK

Schools in England & Wales have been forced to close amid escalating flu outbreaks with hundreds of pupils off sick at a time.

Simon Kidwell, headteacher of Hartford Manor Primary told BBC Breakfast: “The winter bugs spread really easily in schools”…

/1 Headteacher Simon Kidwell is not wrong.

Children are crammed into poorly ventilated classrooms, shoulder-to-shoulder with up to 29 other kids, for around 6 hours a day, 5 days a week.

It’s the perfect environment for airborne diseases to spread…

/2

NHS England: “It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.”

This has got to be one of the most 🤯 things I’ve ever seen written down in an official document.

https://twitter.com/_catinthehat/status/1996204893108080657

And this is an important point from @mdc_martinus ⬇️

The NHS constitution states that they’re meant to PREVENT health problems…

…so how can their pandemic response strategy say it’d be a WASTE of public health resources to attempt to halt the spread of a new pandemic virus?!

https://twitter.com/mdc_martinus/status/1996577368891088942

Two countries.

Two charts.

A very similar (and concerning) trend.

…………..

Can you think of anything that happened in 2020 which is still affecting huge swathes of people on an ongoing basis and which may help explain this worrying trend?

/1 If you haven’t figured it out yet, here’s a little clue… 🔎

/2