#covid19 — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #covid19, aggregated by home.social.
-
#COVID cases and emergency room visits in #NYC continue to rise, but cases are still lower than the March peak, and that was lower than last summer's low! And we're three and a half months without a #COVID19 death!
#Flu and #RSV cases are starting to rise as well, currently about 38 flu and 22 RSV cases citywide.
Hopefully the cool weather will bring people out of the air conditioning and stop the summer wave. #COVIDIsNotOver so I #WearAMask in pharmacies, doctors' offices and crowded trains!
-
A guy who gauges #COVID19 prevalence posted that 0.7% of Americans are infectious. IMO, that's inflated.
The median offers a more accurate picture than the mean. At present, the mean, including Anchorage, which is a HUGE outlier, is 106 PMMoV. The median is 65—more than 1/3 lower.
By my estimate (and it's only an estimate), around 1 in 316 is infectious, or .3%. (I've always felt his estimates are roughly 2x inflated, so this fits.)
We need more knowledge and less fear. Be smart, not afraid.
-
Two indigenous groups had low rates of death to acute COVID-19, with less virus reaching their lungs - and presumably less reaching other organs.
Did the researchers look at life patterns, since the number of virus particles in an exposure ("inoculum") correlates with severity?
No. Of course not.
These folks have well ventilated homes and spend a lot of time outdoors. The relationship between inoculum and severity alone should be examined when considering why their antibody levels were higher than urban dwellers:
Indigenous groups living in peri-urban or urban areas do not seem to be protected in the same way
is pretty suggestive!
Blood tests showed that levels of COVID-specific antibodies were more than double those measured in a French cohort during the same COVID wave
Noteworthy that a high rate of parasites reduces the likelihood of a severe cytokine storm but reduced cytokine activity, to my understanding, would be the difference between moderate SARS2 and severe, life-risking SARS2 once SARS2 spreads within the body - and wouldn't prevent SARS2 from reaching the lungs and other organs:
The Tsimane and Moseten have about a 70% prevalence of infection with helminths (Blackwell et al., 2016), and a previous study among the Tsimane found reduced cytokine response to viral antigen stimulation in patients with parasites
Anyways, one thing they DID do was to check for antibodies to "common cold coronaviruses" (CCC):
Serological testing of a pre-pandemic subset (N = 43) revealed high apparent prevalence for all Common Cold Coronaviruses (83.7% for NL63, 100% for OC43, 88.4% for HKU1, and 44.2% for 229E). No humoral cross-reactivity with SARS-CoV-2 antigens was detected across the four assays employed, suggesting that prior exposure to endemic coronaviruses did not generate detectable cross-reactive antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in pre-pandemic samples
Article: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/researchers-probe-why-2-indigenous-groups-bolivia-had-lowest-covid-death-rates-world
Paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953626005691 -
Is it too much to ask that major news media actually be informed and report accurately about #COVID19? Yes, COVID is rising now in most of the US. No, this has NOTHING to do with respiratory virus season. COVID has surged EVERY SINGLE SUMMER since 2020, and then it surges again when other viruses rise in winter. (COVID has never settled into the "endemic" routine of surging once a year in winter.)
-
DATE: August 20, 2026 at 07:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Negative social media posts correlated with changes in the brain’s fear network during the COVID-19 lockdown
The collective emotional stress of the COVID-19 pandemic may be reflected in how the human brain regulates fear and anxiety. A recent study published in Frontiers in Nuclear Medicine indicates that on days when public social media posts expressed higher levels of negative emotions, brain scans of patients taken on those same days showed reduced activity in areas responsible for emotional regulation. This provides evidence that societal stress can have measurable, wide-reaching neurological effects on vulnerable populations.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about widespread isolation, uncertainty, and fear. Public health lockdowns, intended to limit the spread of the virus, placed intense psychological burdens on communities worldwide. These environmental and societal factors can interact with human biology, a dynamic that population neuroscience aims to understand. By studying this interaction, scientists hope to learn how collective experiences shape large-scale brain function.
An earlier study by the same research group explored the physical impacts of the lockdown. The scientists found that social isolation and reduced physical activity were associated with lower brain metabolism in the sensorimotor network, the areas that process movement and sensory information. In separate work, they also observed that long COVID was associated with metabolic changes in olfactory regions, the temporal lobe, and the brainstem.
“The idea grew directly out of our previous study,” said study author Eric Guedj, a professor at Aix-Marseille University in France. “In that work, we investigated the more physical side of lockdown — reduced activity and deconditioning — and found measurable effects on brain metabolism.”
“We then wanted to explore another question: how does our individual brain absorb the emotional shocks experienced collectively by society?” Guedj explained. “The first COVID-19 lockdown provided a unique natural setting to examine this.”
To capture the psychological climate, the researchers used a sentiment analysis of public social media posts. “We used social media as a real-time window into the collective emotional climate and compared daily negative-emotion levels, derived from approximately 2.6 million French tweets, with FDG-PET brain scans performed on the same days in 95 patients with neurological conditions,” Guedj said.
These posts were created on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, during the 55-day national lockdown in France from March to May 2020. The authors calculated a daily negative-emotion score by evaluating the intensity of words related to fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise. They then compared this daily national mood score to brain imaging data collected in clinical settings during the same period.
The sample included 95 adult patients, with an average age of 54, who underwent brain positron emission tomography scans. A positron emission tomography scan, commonly known as a PET scan, uses a small amount of radioactive material to measure cellular metabolism, showing how different parts of the brain utilize energy. The patients in the study were already receiving these scans for pre-existing neurological conditions, such as cognitive impairment, brain tumors, or focal epilepsy.
When running their statistical models, the authors controlled for several potential confounding variables. They adjusted for the patients’ age, sex, and the presence of specific focal brain lesions. They also accounted for the duration of the lockdown, noting how many days had passed since the lockdown began at the time of each scan.
The data suggests an inverse relationship between collective negative emotions and the metabolism of specific brain regions. On days when the national negative-emotion score was higher, the patients’ PET scans tended to show lower metabolic activity in the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex.
These two regions are core components of the brain’s fear network. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex helps regulate emotional responses and decision-making, while the anterior cingulate cortex is involved in processing emotions and assessing threats.
“The broader message is that our brains do not function in isolation from the social world,” Guedj told PsyPost. “On days when negative emotions expressed collectively on social media were more intense, we observed lower brain metabolism in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex, two regions that play important roles in regulating fear, stress and emotions.”
The correlation between the daily negative-emotion score and brain metabolism was moderate, with a correlation coefficient of -0.40. A correlation coefficient measures the strength of a relationship on a scale from -1 to 1, meaning this represents a moderate negative relationship at the group level. When the authors looked at specific emotions, they found that sadness, fear, and surprise drove this effect. In contrast, emotions like anger and disgust were not statistically significant in their primary brain imaging analysis.
Social media served as an indicator of the environment rather than the direct cause of the brain changes. “This does not mean that social media itself was changing the brain,” Guedj clarified. “Rather, social media provided us with a kind of real-time mirror of the emotional climate experienced by society, and that collective emotional climate was associated with measurable differences in brain function.”
The authors also analyzed how these specific brain regions interacted with others. They found that the prefrontal and cingulate cortices were connected to a broader network located primarily in the right hemisphere of the brain. This network included the amygdala, which detects threats, as well as the hippocampus, which is involved in memory processing.
“What struck us most was the anatomical coherence of the finding,” Guedj said. “The association was not scattered randomly across the brain: it involved regions at the core of emotional regulation, connected to a broader limbic network including the amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus and basal ganglia.”
The reduced metabolism in these regulatory areas points to a potential impairment in how the brain processes collective stress. Notably, this pattern of reduced metabolism in the fear network was entirely separate from the sensorimotor changes the researchers previously linked to physical deconditioning. It also only had a ten percent overlap with the pattern seen in long COVID patients, suggesting that collective emotional stress affects the brain through its own distinct pathways.
“It was also interesting that this pattern was distinct from the brain changes we had previously associated with physical deconditioning during lockdown, and also distinct from the brain changes associated with long COVID,” Guedj added. “This suggests that the physical and emotional dimensions of a collective crisis may affect the brain through partly different mechanisms.”
The study relies on observational data, meaning it indicates a correlation but cannot establish that the national mood directly caused the brain changes. Additionally, the proxy measure for societal stress is limited to users of a single social media platform. Social media users do not perfectly represent the demographics, socioeconomic status, or emotional state of an entire country.
“The most important point is that this is an observational study showing an association, not proof of causality,” Guedj warned. “We cannot say that collective negative emotions directly caused the metabolic changes we observed. The Twitter-derived score was also a measure of the broader emotional environment, not of what each individual patient personally felt or saw online.”
The sample consisted exclusively of individuals with neurological conditions, who may possess a heightened vulnerability to societal stressors. Conditions like brain tumors or cognitive impairments can disrupt neural connectivity, potentially making these patients more susceptible to the effects of collective negative emotions.
“Finally, our participants had neurological conditions and may represent a particularly vulnerable population, so the findings cannot yet be directly generalized to healthy people,” Guedj said.
The findings suggest a new way to conceptualize emotional well-being during wide-scale events. “One concept I find particularly important is that mental health is not exclusively an individual matter,” Guedj explained. “We are relational beings, continuously influenced by our social and emotional environment.”
“Social media is often viewed mainly as a potential source of psychological harm, but from a research perspective it can also provide an extraordinary real-time measure of collective emotional states,” he continued. “Combining these large-scale societal data with objective biological markers such as brain imaging may help us better understand how events experienced by society become associated with what happens in individual brains.”
Future research could track individuals over longer periods to see if these metabolic patterns persist after a crisis resolves. Expanding data collection beyond social media to include personal diaries or longitudinal surveys could provide a more accurate picture of collective stress.
The researchers hope to expand this framework to other contexts. “We would like to develop this approach within what could be called population or societal neuroscience: studying how large-scale social and environmental events interact with individual brain function and vulnerability,” Guedj noted. “The COVID-19 pandemic offered an exceptional natural experiment, but the broader questions go far beyond COVID. How does the brain respond to periods of collective fear, major social crises, terrorist attacks, wars or climate-related disasters?”
Investigating the potential benefits of shared positive experiences is another goal for the team. “And conversely, could positive collective experiences — major celebrations, sporting events or periods of social cohesion — produce measurable protective effects? These are questions we would now like to explore,” Guedj said.
Understanding how vulnerable populations react to environmental shifts may eventually guide public health interventions. “In that sense, the most vulnerable individuals may also act as particularly sensitive indicators of the effects of collective stress,” Guedj said. “Understanding this interaction between society and the brain could become increasingly important for public health.”
“Ultimately, this type of research could help identify both individual vulnerability and population-level warning signals, and perhaps contribute to better mental-health strategies during future collective crises,” he concluded.
The study, “Emotional stress during the COVID-19 lockdown: how negative X/Twitter posts correlated with changes in the brain’s fear network,” was authored by Eric Guedj, Jacques-Yves Campion, Tatiana Horowitz, Fanny Barthélémy, Stéphanie Khalfa, and Wissam El-Hage.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #COVID19 #MentalHealth #BrainImaging #NegativeEmotions #SocialMediaImpact #FearNetwork #PrefrontalCortex #AnteriorCingulate #PublicHealth #PopulationNeuroscience
-
Hi, these are the weekly #washingtonstate #kingcounty (that is, #seattle and environs) #COVID #COVID19 #wastewater toots.
A quick reminder that this King County respiratory disease data comes from Washington State, not the federal government.
The West Point (WSPT) sewage treatment plant's 7 day running average is higher. Looks like a (for now, modest) summer wave is upon us :( The last 7DRA calculation was on 8/11.
WSPT is one of three King County(-ish) sewersheds in this dataset. You can find overviews, individual sewershed results, and a breakdown of variants for the state wastewater surveillance program, along with other metrics like case counts and hospitalizations for Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses, at https://doh.wa.gov/data-and-statistical-reports/diseases-and-chronic-conditions/communicable-disease-surveillance-data/respiratory-illness-data-dashboard#WasteWater. If you go to the page and click "learn more" in the statewide view tab, you can find out lots of details about how these data are calculated and how to interpret them. The dashboard gets updated every Wednesday (generally). The Department of Health is here on the fediweb, at @WADeptHealth
-
People are free to disagree with me, but X is full of COVID accounts screaming about a #COVID19 surge.
We are absolutely in a surge, and if I were in certain hotspots (Alaska, Hawaii, Bay Area, and the South), I would be taking a great deal of care. But nationally, the risks are simply not very high compared to the surges (or the lulls, of that matter) of the past 3 years, as this chart demonstrates.
I always advise caution, but I also believe in transparency and accuracy. 1/3
-
Herman Cain resigned from chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City OTD in 1992; he died of #COVID19 in 2020, contracting it at a #Trump rally while insisting that SARS-CoV-2 was of no concern https://toilet-guru.com/blog/52.html?s=mb #PublicHealth #DarwinAward
-
Herman Cain resigned from chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City OTD in 1992; he died of #COVID19 in 2020, contracting it at a #Trump rally while insisting that SARS-CoV-2 was of no concern https://toilet-guru.com/blog/49.html?s=mb #PublicHealth #DarwinAward
-
Outbreak: #COVID-19
Facility: Hillsdale Estates
Facility Type: LTC Home
Unit/Floor/Area: Blueberry Hill
Location: #Oshawa #Ontario
Facility Tracking Hash: #DRHD0011Date: 2026-08-19
Public Health Unit: Durham Region Health Department
PHU Tracking Hash: #OnObDRHDClick or follow tracking hashtags to see current and historical data for individual facilities or a specific public health unit.
-
Herman Cain resigned from chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City OTD in 1992; he died of #COVID19 in 2020, contracting it at a #Trump rally while insisting that SARS-CoV-2 was of no concern https://toilet-guru.com/blog/47.html?s=mb #PublicHealth #DarwinAward
-
Herman Cain resigned from chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City OTD in 1992; he died of #COVID19 in 2020, contracting it at a #Trump rally while insisting that SARS-CoV-2 was of no concern https://toilet-guru.com/blog/45.html?s=mb #PublicHealth #DarwinAward
-
Messenger RNA, or #mRNA, is a single-stranded molecule that delivers genetic information to direct the formation of proteins. Before it was used in #vaccines against #Covid19, mRNA was stirring excitement among #cancer researchers.
However, the technology has faced backlash in the wake of the pandemic, with some [ #ConspiracyTheories ] questioning the safety of mRNA.
#Melanoma #vaccine #PublicHealth #health #science #medicine #MedicalBreakthrough
-
The results are “as big a day for humanity as Nov. 16, 2020,” when #Moderna released late-stage clinical trial results showing its #Covid19 #vaccine worked, the company’s chief executive, Stephane Bancel, told CNN Wednesday. “This is a new chapter in #cancer care.”
Moderna said the company & partner #Merck aim to file for approval from regulators within months, though they declined to provide a more specific timeline.
#PublicHealth #health #science #medicine #MedicalBreakthrough
-
The WastewaterSCAN #COVID19 dashboard has taken an alarming turn with a vertical rise from 118 to 336 PMMoV in one day (1st chart). What's going on?
Nothing new, as it turns out. This is simply the astronomically high levels in one sewershed, Anchorage, pulling up the national average (2nd chart).
If we eliminate Anchorage, we can see a more modest upward trend with only a dozen or so sewersheds above 200 PMMoV (3rd chart).
1/2
-
🎭 COVID-safe Bay Area Art, Performance, Livestreams, and Protests 🌉
🗓️ Week of August 16th - 22nd 🗓️
by #CovidConscious SF journalist Charles S. Lewis III #CSL3
✨Please help support this community service and the independent journalist who compiles it each week -- even $1/month would be a huge help. And please boost!✨
https://www.patreon.com/CSL3/posts/covid-safe-bay-166785761
#Covid19 #CovidIsNotOver #CovidSafeArts #CovidSafeEvents #CovidSafeFun #BayArea #SanFrancisco #PerformingArts #Activism #CSBAA
-
Staying at home gives time to plan gardens, think spring https://www.allforgardening.com/1932812/staying-at-home-gives-time-to-plan-gardens-think-spring/ #ChronicleMedia #ChronicleillinoisCom #coronavirus #Covid19 #DupagechronicleCom #GardeningIllinois #Illinois #KaneCounty #KendallCounty #KendallchronicleCom #MortonArboretum #PlantingSeeds #Prtizker #SpringFlowers #SpringYardwork #StayAtHomeOrder #UniversityOfIllinoisExtension
-
I am very pleased to have gotten my Covid Vaccine a little ahead of time today - Pfizer LP81.
Given the drop off in antibodies after 3 months we should be having it at least 6 monthly, but I'll take what I'm permitted to get.
-
"Don’t be surprised if you start hearing some more coughing in the next few weeks. #COVID19 is once again on the rise in nearly every corner of the U.S." https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/6036387-covid-is-growing-in-nearly-every-state-cdc-reports-heres-where-levels-are-highest/
-
There is some *early* evidence that our summer surge of #COVID19 in the US may be nearing a peak. It is much too preliminary at this point, but it appears the rate of rise in the positive rate of testing is slowing. If additional data validates this, we may be within three or four weeks from a downturn into fall. (Obviously, risk levels vary considerably around the nation, and different spots will hit their peak at different times.)
-
I've shared that Anchorage, AK, has seen skyrocketing #COVID19 in wastewater. A sudden explosion in a localized wastewater site does not necessarily mean a massive community outbreak is occurring. Instead, it often reflects heavy, concentrated viral shedding from a single individual with a persistent, localized chronic infection. We've seen this before, such as last September in Coeur d'Alene, ID. Anchorage is now at 10450 PMMoV, and Coeur d'Alene was briefly as high as 16970 PMMoV. 1/2
-
Has this all worked? To my knowledge, I've had #COVID19 once, after a trip to do a public speaking event where I opted not to mask. That was a bad decision, but I had a moment of weakness because I like public speaking and no one else was masked. Even I succumb to social pressures.
But I haven't shut myself off from the world. I dine out. I see friends. I travel. And I wish I didn't have that one infection, but I also believe it's important to balance health risks with living and enjoying life.