Public health has changed a lot since covid. Here’s a really concrete example of that. In 2019, PH in Montreal published a really detailed list of places people were exposed to measles: bus routes, malls, walmart, etc. In 2024? The list is just healthcare, schools + the airport.

Why the sudden change in what information is made public? I highly doubt that *none* of these measles cases exposed people anywhere else. Did any of them go to a pharmacy or grocery store or coffee shop or hockey rink? And if so, why aren’t any of these locations being published?

@Penelope19920 @jvipondmd As soon as the IPAC email goes out letting everyone know they need to wear masks, everyone wears masks. If IPAC decides everyone has to wear respirators, then everyone wears respirators. This actually isn’t hard at all. Why leadership would make it seem like it is, is baffling. @Penelope19920 @jvipondmd They lean on hand wave-y concepts like mask fatigue when I have never once received a survey asking me how I felt about masking. None of this is evidence based. Since 2022, they seem to be making decisions based on “feels”.

StatCan just dropped a bombshell report on LC. This is the most important figure. It highlights that the risk of long term symptoms is cumulative, it increases with increasing number of infections. By 3+ infections, 38% report long term symptoms — that’s 1 in every 2.6 people. 🤯 Right now 1 in every 9 Canadians has long covid. 80% have symptoms for longer than 6 months and 50% just never recovered.

Full report here:
www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-…

We’re in our *3rd* post-lockdown viral respiratory season and admissions for viral resp illness+pneumonia are 6 standard deviations above the historical average. I do not understand how so many reasonable people haven’t figured out that the “immunity debt” scapegoat is disinfo.🧵

https://twitter.com/dgbassani/status/1730640262169297324

It’s not the lockdowns, it’s the covid. Covid damages immune systems. Catching covid makes people more susceptible to catching other infections. Immunity theft, not immunity debt. A thread of evidence:

“We report a consistent increase in the risk of persistent symptoms after reinfection compared to first infection. All post-acute symptoms mentioned in the WHO clinical case definition appeared more common after reinfection than after a 1st infection”

‘RoBuSt HyBriD iMmuNiTy’ 🤪 Yet another study showing that more infections = more morbidity. Can we like warn people maybe? Feels like something people might want to know.
nature.com/articles/s4146…

I’m very optimistic that vaccine/treatment breakthroughs + better air hygiene standards will change the game at some point. But I’d also like to point out that preserving one’s short and long term health is an endgame in and of itself. It’s the endgame for so many things we do… The endgame of exercise? Health.
The endgame of limiting alcohol? Health.
The endgame of treated tap water? Health.
The endgame of tossing spoiled food? Health.
The endgame of cooking meat to temp? Health.
The endgame of washing your hands? Health.

If I said you had a 1 in 10 chance of winning the lottery each time you play, do you like those odds? How many times would you play?

If I said you have a 10% chance of winning chronic health issues each time you catch covid, do you like those odds? How many times would you play? Covid isn’t a one a done disease. Every time you catch the virus, you’re risking your health again. The spectrum of post acute sequelae is wide and includes heart problems, strokes, autoimmune diseases, immune system dysfunction, viral brain injury, POTS… the list is long.

Covid infections can cause strokes, heart attacks and pulmonary embolisms in the post-acute phase. Even if the acute infection is mild. Even if you’re vaccinated/boosted. Even if you’re healthy. Even if you’re young. Even if you already caught it before and have “hybrid immunity”

https://twitter.com/em_resus/status/1682893442517544966

“Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, heart attacks were the leading cause of death worldwide but were steadily on the decline. However, the new study shows that heart attack death rates took a sharp turn and increased for all age groups during the pandemic.”

cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/covid…

So how does this whole “you only need to wear a mask with immunocompromised patients” guideline work in practice? You walk into the room masked and after taking the patient’s medical history if they aren’t IC, you take it off? The absurdity somehow continues to reach new heights. Or is it the even more absurd inverse scenario where you walk in unmasked and if after taking the patient’s medical history, they turn out to be immunocompromised, you put your mask on? It would be too little too late at that point. You’ve already exposed them to your aerosols.

If your institution is hosting an event on equity, diversity and inclusion without having given a single thought to covid safety, effectively rendering your EDI event inaccessible to the disabled and medically vulnerable, I have some bad news for you… How the absurdity of this scenario doesn’t seem to dawn on people spontaneously is astounding. Truly.

Yes the smoke smells like plastic. And the reason is horrifying:

“The VOC’s from the wildfire smoke interact with UV radiation to create benzene and formaldehyde compounds in the atmosphere. These are toxic air pollutants – and they happen to smell like burning plastic.”

https://twitter.com/weathernetwork/status/1674086978395033607

But don’t worry, the deciders decided that the general public doesn’t need to wear N95s to protect us from the cancer air on particularly bad cancer-air days. Phewwww. I feel so much safer now, don’t you? /s

Any official or institution that talks up research on LC prevention while they also discourage covid testing and work to make access to PCR/ RATs increasingly difficult (or altogether impossible) is blowing smoke. You can’t prevent LC without a way of knowing you have covid.
1/2 You can’t claim to care about LC and LC research while destroying testing infrastructure and access. Those two positions are fundamentally incompatible. Thanks for coming to my talk.
2/2

There's some serious goalpost shifting going on. The people that told you long covid was rare in general, and exceptionally rare in kids and for reinfections, have been unequivocally proven wrong by several studies. So now the talking point is "your lifetime risk of LC isn't 99%" LOL wait is that the bar now? Despite being common in general, on reinfection and in kids... most people need not worry about LC bc 'there's no evidence that 99% of us will end up with post covid health conditions in our lifetime'. How could there be when the virus is only 3yo?

Yesterday someone confronted me about my social media content, saying that while I’m not wrong, I’m too radical? They asked me “ok what happens once everyone agrees [that covid infections are problematic], then what?”

Then we clean the air. HEPA filters are not radical. I don’t know what they expected as an answer. We regulate water safety and food safety in an effort to decrease population rates of waterborne and foodborne illnesses. Having clean air standards to lower the rates of respiratory illnesses isn’t radical.

I feel like we don’t talk enough about how closely linked health supremacy and white supremacy are. It’s like everyone just conveniently forgot what flags and symbols were being carried by the freedom convoy during their anti-public-health-measures protest last year.

@1goodtern He deleted that tweet as soon as people replied with articles on covid increasing kids’ risk of developing diabetes. I’d bet good money that going forward he’ll just deny that he’s seeing a rise in diabetes diagnoses. @1goodtern It’s alarming how colleagues shut down very quickly if I produce scientific articles on post covid data that supports their anecdata. I can see the off button on their scientific curiosity get flipped when covid enters the conversation. Denial + gaslighting then follow.

This saga is wild. A team pulled their C+ athlete from Giro bc the cardiovascular risk of competing with SARS was too high. But the media apparently couldn’t cope with a team opting out of the “C is just a cold” mass denialism, so they accused them of fleeing/hiding. Wild times.

https://twitter.com/elisaperego78/status/1659676753239982080

That was Italian media. British media also did their part to try to erase the huge impact of the covid outbreak at Giro d’Italia by blaming the unprecedented wave of illness on… rain. These are wild, wild times. Journalists and the media seriously need to get their act together.

https://twitter.com/1goodtern/status/1660157560828076034

The Heart Foundation is advocating for everyone to have access to heart health checks after a SARS2 infection. The medical field won’t be able to keep our heads in the sand on C heart damage in “healthy and young people” forever. Elite athletes are already getting these checks.

https://twitter.com/raffyflynnart/status/1660236640663609344

Also this from the Heart & Stroke Foundation in Canada:

“Physicians and patients should be talking about recent infections. Since CVD can be silent, it’s important to get your blood pressure checked and do further screening for cardiovascular disease if there are concerns.”

A mask ban in care homes. JFC.
Next up on the crazy train: outdoor sunscreen bans, bicycle helmet bans and hard hat bans on construction sites.

So much for “mUh fReEdOm”.

https://twitter.com/BlakeMMurdoch/status/1657404904808521729

For the record, we did NOT have mask bans in 2019. You could wear a mask all day if you wanted to even if not officially recommended by IPAC. No one policed voluntary mask wearing in 2019. So this isn’t “back to normal”. This is a new dystopian era.

Ok guys, it’s time for me to tell you about something very enlightening that I read in a book recently:

75% of people would rather being knowingly wrong and blend in, than be right and stand out. And there’s a well known psychology experiment that proved it. 🧵 The book is ‘Atomic Habits’ and has nothing to do with masks or avoiding neurotropic viruses, but there was a section explaining that if we want to change our habits, we should hang out with people that have the habits we wish to adopt. Bc humans are wired to do as the pack does.

Lately it feels like some HCWs are struggling with the competing mindsets of “covid is over” when not at work and “covid is an important risk factor for disease and an ongoing danger to my patients” at work. It seems hard to hold both these thoughts in one’s mind simultaneously. Healthcare workers are going to have to figure this one out quickly because the “covid is over” mindset at work is not okay. Covid denialism or minimization has no place in healthcare. It’s incompatible with our jobs and imo a violation our code of ethics.