Mike Famulare
@famulare_mike
Like polio, Twitter lingers on. Learning to be a father, husband, and person. Systems epidemiologist, see Google Scholar. All tweets mine alone.
Goodbye Dad
After a lovely yesterday of festivities with three generations of chosen family, my wife’s gift to me is time to do whatever I want. Adrift after a sweet morning of tv and cuddles, and waiting to get the courage for a bracing swim, I find myself needing to write about my dad 🧵
My dad has never asked to come visit his granddaughter. Since my first trip to Seattle nearly 20 years ago, where he came to help me move, he’s never asked to come visit me. He hasn’t texted today, and it’s late enough to know he won’t. And yet, I still miss him.
Prevalence of Chronic SARS2: Insights and Frustrations
Great to see estimates of the prevalence of chronic SARS2 from scientists working with the remarkable UK @ONS Covid infection Survey. Chronic prevalence (>60 days) was at least 0.1-0.5% in people infected before July 2022 (thru BA.1/2).
Gonna use this moment to grind an axe...🧵
twitter.com/Mahan_Ghafari/status/1760338169864618124
The interesting and frustrating thing is it was possible to guess this 2 years ago. How?
1) take patient self-reported symptoms seriously @ahandvanish ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8280690/
2) take the ONS long-covid symptom survey seriously (the best survey in the world for this).
My Frustration with COVID Forecasting
I started looking at COVID forecasting papers and got angry. To move on with my life, posting a few things.
tl;dr: a huge amount of effort was wasted on COVID forecasting, and the allure of forecasting without exponentially better data is continuing to waste a lot of effort.
Evaluation of ... forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the US pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2113561119
Evaluation of the US COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub... nature.com/articles/s41467-023-42680-x
Predictive performance of multi-model ensemble forecasts of COVID-19 across Europe... elifesciences.org/articles/81916#content
Very amateur notes on the UV Can Lily personal far UV-C device
As an interested amateur looking to learn about personal far UV-C as an infection prevention tool, I did some playing with the 222nm irradiance data from the UV Can Lily from @joeyfox85. For those interested in learning along with me, here are notes: twitter.com/joeyfox85/status/1575882717107224576
Caveat #1. Did I mention I'm an amateur? While I have earned my place to claim a fair amount infectious disease transmission expertise, when it comes to UV sterilization, I'm currently at the "white guy with a physics degree" stage of personal development. HERE BE DRAGONS.
Polio shows us the way for COVID
MFW all the hot takes on SARS2, polio, transmission blocking, mucosal immunity, and community-level risk differences collide🤯
The story of polio epi today is the story of how mucosal vaccines and clean indoor air will together be transformative against respiratory infections.🧵
Here's the shortest version I can muster... (42 tweets is not short.)
Nothing about birth or death is simple
I also want to share how the ambiguities of biological life are of great comfort to me. There is no single moment when life starts, just as there is no moment when life ends. In that ambiguity is so much space for empathy and healing. 🧵
twitter.com/famulare_mike/status/1541604260030214144
Molecules become cells become organs become people. At death, through that journey our matter returns.
A new approach to situational awareness modeling in infectious disease epidemiology
Measurements, interpreted with models, are how we make sense of the world. I'm excited to share @niket_h_thakkar's new approach for building surprisingly rich situational awareness models with surprisingly weak assumptions from disease surveillance data! arxiv.org/abs/2205.02150