It's amazing to watch various sick YouTubers try to explain away their second 'cold' of the year.. And it's only March
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#MaskUp
6 posts5 participants0 posts today
Continued thread
As far as I know, I've only had COVID once. It was a "mild" case. It didn't feel any worse than a cold and a bit of a sore throat for me. And even though I was fully vaccinated, took Paxlovid right away, and rested very very hard for three months (going to bed whenever I felt even the slightest bit tired), I still ended up with long COVID. I was strong and healthy before. I trained five days a week at the gym and yoga studio and hiked on weekends.
I'm scared shitless about getting COVID again. I'm one of the very few people I know who still masks regularly. #LongCovidAwarenessDay #LongCovid #Covid #MaskUp
You'd think people would want to know if there was a disease that killed more Americans than all our wars combined and is still killing, that causes long-term illness at yearly rates higher than all cancers combined, that all are at risk for, but that all could take actions to prevent. You'd think they want to protect themselves and their families. You'd think that this would be the #1 world priority. It is for me.
A case of measles has been confirmed at a Montreal Canadiens #hockey game on March 3.
Quebec measles outbreak: 31 cases, experts blame low vaccination
The following people may have been exposed:

spectator(s)s in the red sections 111 to 117;

Workers in these same sections;

Tim Hortons and Pizza Pizza workers at the #BellCentre.
#montreal #canada #cdnpoli #measels #publichealth #medmastodon #quebec #healthcare #maskup #elbowsup #hockey
https://www.quebec.ca/en/health/health-issues/a-z/measles/measles-outbreak
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@pixouls Thank you for sharing the photographs from the fungus class. Masked mushroom classes at the library will save the world. #mushrooms, #MaskUp, #COVIDisAirborne.
Re sharing this awesome piece because yes, these are my reasons too.
All of them. 
(maybe I'd add: because masks still help thwart surveillance systems)
#CovidIsNotOver #MaskUp
https://misfitmentalhealth.substack.com/p/why-are-people-wearing-masks-in-2025
Misfit Mental Health · Why Are People Wearing Masks in 2025?
Evidence suggests that measles immunity fades about 10-15 years after vaccination. If it's been more than 10 years since your MMR, or you can't find the latest record of vaccination, update your shot.
And WEAR A MASK. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases of all time. There is NO reason to expose yourself when a KN95/N95 mask offers so much protection.
PubMed Central (PMC)Long-term immunogenicity after measles vaccine vs. wild infection: an Italian retrospective cohort studyThe persistence of specific IgG after measles infection and after measles vaccination has not been sufficiently investigated. Current evidence suggests that immunity after the disease is life-long, whereas the response after two doses of ...
CDC Data Just In Shows A New Covid Variant Has Taken Over In The US
Continued thread
First round of voting starts March 1. Which respirators deserve to make it through to the next round? Which respirator could take it all? Post your predictions. Follow #MarchMaskness to keep up with the excitement.
GIF
To me a happy life isn't an ignorant life. It isn't a pretend life. It requires sense, reason, and compassion, not numbness. It requires both imagination AND manifestation. Action and reaction. It requires a journey and a destination. It needs focused paths with room for wondering. And above all else, a truly happy life.. requires walking in truth.
Ready to play #MarchMaskness? Download our bracket now and make your picks. Then follow along with us throughout March to see how your picks perform.
https://covidsafescouts.com/downloadables/covidsafescouts_marchmaskness.pdf
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As we approach the 5th anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic and widespread introduction of mask wearing, we hope to use this to raise awareness of respirator styles and encourage more folks to adopt the habit wearing them in the face of US mask bans.
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We wanna know everything about your fave go-to respirators! Is your respie MVP on our bracket? How will it stack up against the others?
Use #MarchMaskness to share stats and tell us why your mask is the G.O.A.T.
Voting starts in a few days on our Mastodon acct.
This guy was handling a puking kid 2 days ago, and now is refusing to cover his sneezes at all. Offered an N95; not well received. "It's just dusty in here." Ok but N95s filter dust too; also not well received.
I do not like parts of this timeline.
Anyways here's hoping 
the HEPA and elasto suffice. I'd rather have more layers of 
swiss cheese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model now - and every time, but kinda feeling it now!
hope ocular protection 
isn't needed for whatever this is
at least he's not sneezing directly on me but I've seen the infrared videos of aerosol dispersal 
en.wikipedia.orgSwiss cheese model - Wikipedia
Last week a colleague who had been ill returned to work, wearing a mask. She said "I am following your example".
This is one of the reasons I mask - even though I totally suck at doing it properly and also forget.
To hold the space.
There is now a mask bloc of 4000 cool black FFP2 masks in #Utrecht to be distributed further, feel free to contact me if you want any for personal use, your space or events. More are available in other cities including Rotterdam and Amsterdam. #MaskBloc #CovidIsNotOver #MaskUp #MutualAid
Ooh this is interesting https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.04.25320937v1.full-text
They "consistently observed a significant enrichment of signatures (77% - 83%, p < 0.01) that are positively associated with long COVID [...] across all three sets of disease signatures "
Notably,. the high rate of undiagnosed Long COVID is a serious source of possible error:
"published estimates of long COVID prevalence in the United States range between 6.9% to 14%, yet fewer than 0.2% of individuals in AoU have ICD-10 codes associated with long COVID.
This suggests that many long COVID patients have not been assigned the appropriate ICD-10 code. As a result, more than 10% of the controls in our AoU study cohort potentially could represent misclassified cases with unreported long COVID"
Still in preprint.
medRxiv · Reproducibility of Genetic Risk Factors Identified for Long COVID using Combinatorial Analysis Across US and UK Patient Cohorts with Diverse AncestriesBackground Long COVID is a major public health burden causing a diverse array of debilitating symptoms in tens of millions of patients globally. In spite of this overwhelming disease prevalence and staggering cost, its severe impact on patients’ lives and intense global research efforts, study of the disease has proved challenging due to its complexity. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified only four loci potentially associated with the disease, although these results did not statistically replicate between studies. A previous combinatorial analysis study identified a total of 73 genes that were highly associated with two long COVID cohorts in the predominantly (>91%) white European ancestry Sano GOLD population, and we sought to reproduce these findings in the independent and ancestrally more diverse All of Us (AoU) population.
Methods We assessed the reproducibility of the 5,343 long COVID disease signatures from the original study in the AoU population. Because the very small population sizes provide very limited power to replicate findings, we initially tested whether we observed a statistically significant enrichment of the Sano GOLD disease signatures that are also positively correlated with long COVID in the AoU cohort after controlling for population substructure.
Results For the Sano GOLD disease signatures that have a case frequency greater than 5% in AoU, we consistently observed a significant enrichment (77% - 83%, p < 0.01) of signatures that are also positively associated with long COVID in the AoU cohort. These encompassed 92% of the genes identified in the original study. At least five of the disease signatures found in Sano GOLD were also shown to be individually significantly associated with increased long COVID prevalence in the AoU population. Rates of signature reproducibility are strongest among self-identified white patients, but we also observe significant enrichment of reproducing disease associations in self-identified black/African-American and Hispanic/Latino cohorts. Signatures associated with 11 out of the 13 drug repurposing candidates identified in the original Sano GOLD study were reproduced in this study.
Conclusion These results demonstrate the reproducibility of long COVID disease signal found by combinatorial analysis, broadly validating the results of the original analysis. They provide compelling evidence for a much broader array of genetic associations with long COVID than previously identified through traditional GWAS studies. This strongly supports the hypothesis that genetic factors play a critical role in determining an individual’s susceptibility to long COVID following recovery from acute SARS-CoV-2 infection. It also lends weight to the drug repurposing candidates identified in the original analysis. Together these results may help to stimulate much needed new precision medicine approaches to more effectively diagnose and treat the disease.
This is also the first reproduction of long COVID genetic associations across multiple populations with substantially different ancestry distributions. Given the high reproducibility rate across diverse populations, these findings may have broader clinical application and promote better health equity. We hope that this will provide confidence to explore some of these mechanisms and drug targets and help advance research into novel ways to diagnose the disease and accelerate the discovery and selection of better therapeutic options, both in the form of newly discovered drugs and/or the immediate prioritization of coordinated investigations into the efficacy of repurposed drug candidates.
### Competing Interest Statement
AR is an employee of Metrodora Foundation, SG and RG are co-chairs of Metrodora Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board. JS, SD, KT, KC, MP and SG are employees of PrecisionLife Ltd. S.G. is a shareholder of PrecisionLife, Ltd.
### Funding Statement
The project was funded entirely by Metrodora Foundation and PrecisionLife Ltd.
### Author Declarations
I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained.
Yes
The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below:
The Sano GOLD study has approval from the Wales Research Ethics Committee (REC) (IRAS 291221). Consent to participate has been received from all participants. Institutional Reviewing Board (IRB) approval was obtained prior to enrollment of patients in the All of Us Research Program. Informed consent for all participants is conducted in person or through an eConsent platform that includes primary consent, HIPAA Authorization for Research use of EHRs and other external health data, and Consent for Return of Genomic Results. The protocol was reviewed by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the All of Us Research Program (IRB Approval Date: Dec 03, 2021). The All of Us IRB follows the regulations and guidance of the NIH Office for Human Research Protections for all studies, ensuring that the rights and welfare of research participants are overseen and protected uniformly. The All of Us Research Program is supported by the National Institutes of Health, Office of the Director: Regional Medical Centers (OT2 OD026549; OT2 OD026554; OT2 OD026557; OT2 OD026556; OT2 OD026550; OT2 OD 026552; OT2 OD026553; OT2 OD026548; OT2 OD026551; OT2 OD026555); Inter agency agreement AOD 16037; Federally Qualified Health Centers HHSN 263201600085U; Data and Research Center: U2C OD023196; Genome Centers (OT2 OD002748; OT2 OD002750; OT2 OD002751); Biobank: U24 OD023121; The Participant Center: U24 OD023176; Participant Technology Systems Center: U24 OD023163; Communications and Engagement: OT2 OD023205; OT2 OD023206; and Community Partners (OT2 OD025277; OT2 OD025315; OT2 OD025337; OT2 OD025276). Results reported are in compliance with the All of Us Data and Statistics Dissemination Policy disallowing disclosure of group counts under 20 to protect participant privacy.
I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals.
Yes
I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance).
Yes
I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable.
Yes
Only data from existing All of Us and Sano GOLD study cohorts were analyzed and no new source data were collected for this study. Aggregate-level data for the All of Us cohort is publicly available at <https://databrowser.researchallofus.org/> (Public Tier dataset). Individual-level data for the All of Us cohort, available in the Controlled Tier dataset, can be analyzed by approved researchers on the Researcher Workbench.
<https://databrowser.researchallofus.org/>
The H5N1 portion of @ducky 's roundup is going to make a lot of Cassandras tense up grimly:
"the US CDC looked at the blood of 150 cow veterinarians in 46 states and found that 
3 of them (2%) had H5N1 antibodies in their blood. None of them had known they had been infected. Only one of them had contact with a known infected herd. One of them only worked in two states that have had no known infected herds.
To spell it out: there were H5N1 infections that nobody knew about.
The vets reported using gloves and clothing covers, but not masks or goggles"
In Nevada, "in a second dairy herd located close to the confirmed D1.1-infected one, they found a partial sequence consistent with D1.1; both the farm with confirm D1.1 and the one with the partial match reported large bird die-offs nearby; they saw a genetic mutation – a change of PB2 D701N, commonly associated with mammalian adaptation and which they have never seen in birds — in four separate dairy cows they looked at."
In my opinion: it could peter out. But has it? Or have counts of infections of herds and humans gone up? If this is early in an exponential upramp, can the coefficient even be guessed at, when what amounts to initiating events (mutations facilitating mammalian and human spread) are stochastic?
citations and more papers sumarized at https://covidbc.webfoot.com/2025/02/15/2025-02-15-general/
covidbc.webfoot.com2025-02-15 General – Pandemics in British Columbia