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

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…

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 Peter Horby @peterhorby.bsky.social Ashleigh Cheyne ISARIC icddr,b & more in The Lancet Infectious Diseases Full story 👇🏽 psi.ox.ac.uk/news/researche…

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

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

“Lack of research on how Paxlovid affects outcomes beyond severe Covid — such as duration of illness, how the drug affects transmission, and whether it prevents long Covid”

"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…

Photo from the classic "all night poker game" studies of the transmission of the common cold academic.oup.com/jid/article-ab…

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/…

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/…

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

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…

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…

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.

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…

😷🏥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-…

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"

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…

Infectious Disease Ethics and I on herd immunity to endemic diseases like covid-19: "..a large number of infectious diseases continue to circulate[.] It would be a mistake, however, to confuse the lack of elimination for the idea that herd immunity does not occur[.]" doi.org/10.1111/jep.13…