“We’re facing a multidemic of respiratory viruses, there’s three or four of them causing trouble … influenza, RSV, para-influenza, adenovirus, HMPV, there are a lot,” Mr Booy said.
“Winter naturally leads to perspiration, indoor crowding and lack of adequate ventilation.
“Because were locked down for two years, the level of natural immunity dropped off against flu and Covid, so we happen to have a lot of cases and deaths due to Omicron and the opening of a society with less natural immunity.
RSV
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A concerning number of ‘pandemic babies’ with no immunity to respiratory viruses are ending up seriously ill in ICU.
Doctors have revealed children born during the Covid-19 pandemic are requiring intensive care ‘from encountering viruses they haven’t come across before’, such as influenza, RSV and Covid.
The children had been born and raised when there were virtually no other viruses circulating in Australia, other than Covid-19.
The Children’s Hospital at Westmead infectious diseases paediatrician Dr Philip Britton said an analysis of ICU admissions across shows babies are testing positive for influenza and Covid at the same time.
‘Over the last month or so, we have seen four times the admissions to hospital for flu in children as for Covid,’ Dr Britton told The Daily Telegraph.
Dr Britton said five per cent of the children presenting with co-infections were being admitted to ICU, a statistic he described as ‘very concerning’.
One of the checks and balances on rampant bad scientific research is to continuously assess how new ideas fit into the framework of the bigger picture. A new piece of information may seem perfectly reasonable and well-documented, but the domino effect of its implications gives you another way to test its validity. When multiple lines of seemingly rock-solid evidence contradict one another, that’s a good sign that something is wrong, even if you don’t yet know why. Whenever a thread seems out of place, it’s time to pull on that thread until you can figure out what exactly is going on.
…”Trusting the science” is not (and never has been) about trusting results or trusting experts. Trusting the scientists is what got us into this mess. For science to function properly, we must NOT trust the scientists. Instead, we must trust in the messy self-correcting process that allows truth to boil to the surface even if every participant in that process is flawed.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of the Experts”
— Richard P. FeynmanScience is the relentless competition between measurable pieces of evidence, the ruthless gauntlet of debate, the willingness to question even the most “obvious” of assumptions, and the humbleness to test and retest any and all assumptions against hard evidence, most especially when those assumptions are our own.
https://www.juliusruechel.com/2022/01/who-do-you-trust-if-you-cant-trust.html
An investigation has been launched into a spike in deaths among newborn babies in Scotland.
Official figures reveal that 21 infants died during September within 28 days of birth, causing the neonatal mortality rate to breach an upper warning threshold known as the ‘control limit’ for the first time in at least four years.
Control and warning limits are designed to flag up to public health teams when neonatal, stillbirth or other infant deaths are occurring at unexpectedly high or low levels which may not be due to chance.
Concerns have previously been raised about the potential impact of Covid on maternity services and maternal wellbeing, but it is the first time since the pandemic began that neonatal deaths have been so abnormally above average.
Although the rate fluctuates month to month, the figure for September – at 4.9 per 1000 live births – is on a par with levels that were last typically seen in the late 1980s.
Epidemiologist and public health professor Michael Baker used the metaphor of forest brushfires: if a year or two have passed without fire, there is more fuel on the ground to feed the flames. When a fire finally comes, it burns much more fiercely. “What we’re seeing now is we’ve accumulated a whole lot of susceptible children that have missed out on exposure – so now they’re seeing it for the first time,” Baker said.
…“The lack of immune stimulation… induced an “immunity debt” which could have negative consequences when the pandemic is under control and [public health intervientions] are lifted,” the doctors wrote. “The longer these periods of ‘viral or bacterial low-exposure’ are, the greater the likelihood of future epidemics.”