The Covid wave in England is growing very fast, & the overall Covid risk level has been raised to High. As of 4 October, 1 in every 175 people were infected, up 34% on the previous week. We recommend that Covid-Cautious people take full precautions anywhere indoors. A thread 🧵

There’s No Need To Worry About Hospitals Closed By This Covid Wave Because Everyone Is Immune To Covid Now

Given there is no community testing, nursing home testing, or universal hospital admission testing, & only a select few of those who are in hospital who might get treated who are ever tested, these official numbers are undoubtedly an underestimate of reality & are a sad reminder

Now that the summer has come to an end, it's possible to have a view on the heat mortality in England and Wales in 2026 I come to 5,800 deaths triggered by heat, an amount which is far higher than say in 2020, 2021 or 2022 (which also saw significant heat-triggered deaths)

🚨A shameless, grotesque abuse of power from @Sagal_AW ​Frontline homeless outreach is commissioned with public taxpayer cash. Using it for a closed-door VIP campaign visit on the eve of an election completely tramples pre-election neutrality guidelines. 👇 cc @ElectoralCommUk

My wife works in a pharmacy. She's also reporting an uptick in covid test sales. She made the point to me that it's bizarre to have the most vulnerable members of society going to a pharmacy & mixing with customers buying tests, & staff who are mostly unmasked.

Wondering if the reason the government has delayed publication of the #Milburn report is just to give Alan a bit more time to calm down after his foul-mouthed outburst at #Labour conference, when he was challenged over his silence on safeguarding: disabilitynewsservice.com/la…

Basic stuff breaking tiny minds.

Covid in England SARS-CoV-2 Laboratory-Identified Cases notified to UKHSA under the NOIDS Health Protection Regulations - W40 Weekly data, often published prior to the UKHSA Covid Cases signal, gives an early indication of the trend in prevalence. (UKHSA data, @gwladwr chart)

Maybe plant a (native) tree instead.

So, just a little reminder from time to time: balloons won't reach Grandma in heaven. But they will fall back to Earth and suffocate the wildlife.

Apparently, most people think Covid is over. Good luck getting an in date lateral flow test in the UK right now. Unavailable in most large pharmacy chains, no new stock ordered. Some retailers flogging expired tests at discount rates e.g. @FaceMaskStore

Any sort of nicknaming is minimizing and does a huge disservice to public health. Even if it’s not “misleading”, they all inherently subconsciously make the variant seem less threatening to the public. We can look to meteorology to see the damage that can come with giving seemingly neutral and innocent nicknames - hurricanes with female names are deadlier than hurricanes with male names because people take them less seriously: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.14… “Nimbus”, “stratus”, “fluffy cloud”, etc sounds extremely silly to any non-scientist and is always going to seem less threatening to the public than pango designation

Time for PJ.2.1 nickname to aid public discussion? Otherwise we end up with UK newspapers coining their own misleading ones e.g. last week XFG was dubbed "(New) American Variant" by our tabloids - neither true nor helpful 🙄 Unclear who briefed them all on that terminology...

Covid Deaths in the UK (in memory of @tigresseleanor) Week 39 = 35 Registered UK Covid Deaths w/e 25th September 2026 England 28 Wales 0 Scotland 6 N Ireland 1 UK 35 ( +11 ) 1/

How would you recognise an immunocompromised person anyway? One of the many impossible issues.

I think a lot of the misunderstanding in the UK stems from Vallance & Whitty's incorrect focus on "herd immunity". The Public was led to believe that vaccination/infection would prevent Covid entirely and hence break transmission. 1/

Why does Nimbus Disability believe disabled people need yet another assessment to access venues, when many venues previously accepted existing evidence of disability? Accessibility should be about removing barriers, not creating new ones. Disabled people are already over-assessed and over-scrutinised. #DisabilityRights #Accessibility

Today, @OpenAI warned it may suspend my account for "Prohibited Biological Use" (The bioinformatics work i do on pandemic prepardness). Unfurtunately, for now ill have to lower down my work for🦠Alert. Can anyone tag or connect me with someone at OpenAI who can help?

UK: Covid cases double in a month and hospital admissions rise five-fold "Monthly infections stand at 4,589 – their highest since October last year, with cases rising at an unusually accelerated pace" Daily Mail Online dailymail.com/health/article…