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tern Profile picture
tern
@1goodtern
Empathy, science, determination, hope.
Apr 2 • 17 tweets • 2 min read
When you have a chronic health condition, it can be hard to explain to people without a chronic health condition what it means. You say, "I have muscle pain", and they say, "oh yes, I did the London marathon and all my muscles hurt for two days".
Mar 31 • 50 tweets • 10 min read
Another quick dive into the NHS staff sickness absence data.

This gets nuts pretty fast... The NHS shares sickness absence data for different groups of staff.

Most of these staff groups include people of every age. Image
Mar 28 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
You may have thought that the chatter out of schools about kids having developmental problems was bad so far…

But this autumn, Reception will welcome kids born in late 2021… whose mothers caught Covid while pregnant… kids who have themselves caught Covid in every wave since. I work with three nurseries, and, let me tell you, schools and society are in for an even worse jolt than the ones they've had so far.
Mar 26 • 36 tweets • 9 min read
And did I post this one already for Core Training...

Covid infections cause a reduction in sets of your immune cells that fight infections... and when you keep catching covid that effect keeps getting worse, so you're increasingly prone to being off sick with cold cough flu. Image There are over 750 of these charts for the different categories... so I'm just going to pull out a very few of the serious ones for the different groups.
Mar 26 • 61 tweets • 16 min read
I'm in a lull on twitter without much visibility, so probably hardly anyone will see this, but here's an important thread on "why everyone's sick all the time".

No, you are not imagining it.
Sickness is increasing.
Sickness absence rates are increasing. Image Let's start with this graph.
The monthly sickness absence rates of staff at the NHS.

They have over a million employees, so this is a massive slice of the population of the country. Image
Mar 25 • 38 tweets • 3 min read
One of the subtle but serious problems in science and health communication at the moment is that people are treating Long Covid like a yes/no thing.

Do you have Long Covid? Yes
Do you have Long Covid? No It's just not that simple.
Mar 22 • 16 tweets • 2 min read
Five things about this study.

First, even mild Covid infection screws your immune system so you're 60% more likely to be hospitalised by EBV/mono/glandular fever for and the effect lasts ages.

Covid infection can screw up your immune system. Second, we're talking about *hospitalisation* by EBV after the covid infection, so it's not just getting extra 'mild' bugs afterwards.
Mar 21 • 59 tweets • 6 min read
I've seen this gotcha quite a few times now:
"If the Kent meningitis outbreak was caused by Covid, why is it just in Kent?"
Which completely misses the point of what people mean when they say that outbreaks like this are made more likely by the damage caused by covid infections. Wildfires aren't a perfect analogy for infection outbreaks - but they can help us understand certain aspects.

Think of a whole country made more prone to wildfires by a drought.
Mar 20 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Enormously massively huge studies have shown that each wave of Covid infections causes damage to people's immune systems. The science is incontrovertible.

And yet you will not find a single media article about the current meningitis outbreak that mentions that. It's really simple.
It's been established science for decades that "a low CD4 count... has been shown to be associated with an increased risk of Invasive Meningococcal Disease"
Governments base policies on this established science.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10…Image
Mar 20 • 24 tweets • 3 min read
Don't you get it?

If lots of people in your population have lower ability to fight infection, it doesn't just mean those people are more likely to *catch* infections.

It means they are more likely to *spread* them too.

Let me explain.
This is important. Jack has a metal lunchbox.
No ants can get into his lunchbox, so when he leaves the park, no ants fall out of his lunchbox.

Annie has a lunch bag made of wool.
Ants can climb into it, and they can also fall out easily too.
And that's what they do.
Mar 19 • 56 tweets • 2 min read
Ten things they'll be telling us about meningitis before the end of the week: 1
It's mild
Mar 19 • 21 tweets • 3 min read
I'm sitting at my computer with 46 tabs open with media stories about the meningitis outbreak from the last 3 days.

Following mainstream coverage, govt statements and UKHSA briefings on the meningitis outbreak has been surprisingly tiring.

Here are a few of the inconsistencies: "Outbreak has been contained." Then within 16 hours: "It is too soon to say the outbreak is contained."
Mar 13 • 22 tweets • 3 min read
All day I've been whacking my head against this vital tweet and the press release attached to it.

It's probably one of the most important things I've read about the early progression of the pandemic, but it's very hard to express concisely the huge scandal they've exposed here. The central difficulty with getting your head round it is that there are *two* scandals detailed here:

👉The first is that key advice by experts was ignored in 2020.

👉The second is that a huge amount of money seems to have been spent covering that up.
Mar 8 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Them: But if Covid infections lower your lymphocytes wouldn't more people be dying from infections??

Me: Yes, that's right, that's exactly what's happening. 👇 Image Also them: But those people are probably just weak and old. Surely we'd also see some kind of increase in sickness among healthy young people, specifically from infections?

Me: Yes, that too 👇 Image
Mar 6 • 27 tweets • 3 min read
Why don't people grasp how serious this is?

Across an entire population, losing more than three years of your healthy life expectancy...

That is just staggering.

Especially because of this: The big problem is that it *isn't even distributed evenly*.
Mar 3 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
This one should be labelled 'Public Health Failure'. Yep, I've taken funerals for two of these. Image
Mar 3 • 90 tweets • 22 min read
What are people dying from?
How do those causes of death change from year to year? We have a big database here in England that helps catalogue causes of death. The most recent version is for the year 2024.
Feb 7 • 46 tweets • 4 min read
People don't understand that there are several real models of cumulative harm that apply to covid infections.

People don't like complex ideas, so they avoid them.

This is going to be a long thread, with several simple ideas that combine to make a big complex one. First off, we *know* beyond all doubt that covid infections cause short term harm.
Feb 5 • 32 tweets • 5 min read
Do midwives know that they're now twice as likely to be off sick with a pregnancy related disorder than before the Covid pandemic started? Image Do nurses?
And health visitors? Image
Jan 22 • 9 tweets • 1 min read
I think one of the most important conclusions people are missing from the data in the recent big studies is that covid infections cause radically diverse long term effects in different age groups. So much so that it could appear as if they've been infected with different viruses.
Jan 20 • 51 tweets • 6 min read
Okay folks, I'm calling it, and it's bad news:

The word mucinous is going to become much more common.

Yes, bookmark this tweet, it looks bland, but it's important. oh, okay. I won't leave you hanging.

I've written a lot recently about how we're missing the big picture of how covid infection is doing cumulative damage to interfaces in the body - linings, membranes, barriers, walls, filters.