Notable development on the Long Covid front: consistent with previous studies, a randomized trial in ⁦The BMJ⁩ found that an exercise-based physical & mental health rehabilitation program improved outcomes for those with Long COVID. bmj.com/content/384/bm…

Hawking was wrong: Philosophy is not dead, and it has kept up with modern science | By ⁦Dan Williams⁩

Some recommendations for those interested in learning about the philosophy of science. conspicuouscognition.com/p/hawking-was-…

Two false dogmas of clinical infectious diseases:

'1⃣traditional durations of antimicrobial therapy and
2⃣the necessity of intravenous (IV) antibiotics

These dogmas based on uncontrolled case series from >50 years ago, amplified by the opinions of eminent experts'

😷🏥What is the effect of stopping hospital mask mandates?

'Using a robust quasi-experimental approach, we found no evidence that removal of a staff/visitor mask-wearing policy had a significant effect on the rate of hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2'

journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/S0195-…

Candida auris: a high risk fungal pathogen

This genomic study (pre-print) tracks introduction & spread of C. auris in & between UK hospitals

➡️# on arrows = between hospital transmissions
⏹️# in squares = in-hospital transmissions

biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Many people still think that children and schools are the major factor in the spread of Covid.
This is from Victoria Health, showing deaths (and the effect of Covid waves there).
What you can’t see is any obvious relationship to children returning to school after holiday breaks.

Has performance of COVID lateral flow tests changed over time, variants & vaccination roll-out? Short answer: they consistently pick up most infections, particularly those that transmit, but work best in people with symptoms & higher amounts of virus, see medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

Scientists took one of my favourite videos of all time, featuring Kurt Vonnegut explore 'the shapes of stories',

and turned it into a paper analysing the shape of >1000 stories

youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h…

Some immunosuppressed patients with COVID19 can shed infectious virus for weeks or months

Especially patients with:
🔴Haematologic malignancy or Transplant (S-HT)
🟢Autoimmunity or B cell deficiency

Often➡️difficult ethical questions re: isolation

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

A thread from The Lancet @CovidCommission on school closures:

--> 195 countries closed schools during the pandemic, affecting more than 1·5 billion children and young people and posing enormous long-term and unrecoverable costs to them, their parents, and the economy.

🧵1/n

'While HEPA filters can reduce viral load in the air, this does not lead to reduced COVID19 prevalence'

Are you an early career (postdoc) researcher & would you like to be a visiting scholar Ethox Centre?

📰Apply below

Broad topics of work can include:
- global health ethics
- clinical ethics
- public health ethics
- research ethics

Closes 21/April/24

ethox.ox.ac.uk/opportunities/…

Preventing RSV spread in hospitals (1980s):

'specially designed eye-nose goggles for staff reduced infection [but] the goggles were not well accepted by staff and eventually were abandoned.'

Discussion:
wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/7/…

Original study:
jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…

Photo from the classic 'all night poker game' studies of the transmission of the common cold

academic.oup.com/jid/article-ab…

'Most respiratory viruses produce reinfection after re-exposure.

Subsequent infections with the same or similar agents are generally more mild and last shorter periods'

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

UK winter peak prevalence of covid19

In mid-late December, up to ~5%, or 1 in 20 people were infected at any one time

Would be interesting to know how this correlates with sick leave / work absence data

We often assume that we know who infected us with a virus

But even in households, 1 in 40 presumed secondary cases (2.5%) came from other sources (see below)

People who say they know they caught a virus from a person outside their household are likely wrong (much) more often

Immediate global effort and investment are needed to improve patient care and develop an effective treatment for #Nipah virus.

A new proposal from Md. Zakiul Hassan Els Torreele @[email protected] Peter Horby Ashleigh Cheyne ISARIC icddr,b
& more in The Lancet Infectious Diseases

Full story 👇🏽
psi.ox.ac.uk/news/researche…

Work in hospital? Want to predict which patients will go home in the next 24h, or how many will leave hospital in total? We do this with only 3-5% error using data from 150k admissions: medrxiv.org/content/10.110… Could AI transform how your hospital runs? Big Data Institute ModMedMicro