Great study showing how the UK COVID app provided real-time insights into contact patterns and transmission during 2021-23, including the Euros:

New in Science Magazine: app-based contact tracing for covid 🤒🤳📲 as well as reducing transmission, generated data for epidemic monitoring & analysis in real-time with unprecedented resolution. Example below: sharp spikes in transmission in England during last Euros, 2021 🇪🇺⚽

The only app where you'll see 3 prominent authors debating algebra & f-words 😂

Risk of long COVID has ebbed during pandemic, mostly thanks to vaccines, new data reveal The highest risk of developing long COVID was seen among patients infected with the original strain of the virus, when no vaccines were available. cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/risk-…

The British public are far more pro-maths than we tend to think. Two thirds of people fall into one of our pro-maths segments, and about half say they enjoy doing maths.

Death rates so far in 2024 are as low as they've ever been! So why is this still not great news? Well, another way of saying the same thing is "death rates are no better than 5 years ago". The last time that happened in England & Wales before the pandemic was 1976!

You'll only drive it underground

I'll post more about this soon ... deepmind.google/discover/blog/…

Google DeepMind have produced a program that in a certain sense has achieved a silver-medal peformance at this year's International Mathematical Olympiad. 🧵 deepmind.google/discover/blog/…

Deaths data has been released for week ending 19 Jul. 10,182 deaths were registered in England and Wales this week. Year-to-date there have been 325,255 deaths registered. 1,344 deaths involved flu or pneumonia. 234 involved Covid-19 - the highest seen since February.

Never even liked tennis anyway.

Important 🧵on our new peer-reviewed paper: The pandemic is as bad as it ever was for babies - in year to Aug 2023, 6,300 babies under 1 were admitted to hospital wholly or partly BECAUSE of Covid. They are ONLY age group where admissions have NOT gone down over time 1/17

The thing about "the UK’s tax burden is now at a record high", is that this is also true for almost all countries 📈

Inspired by this viral meme about DOGE: Research the US government has supported that can be made to sound silly, but that has contributed to human progress. Valuable work can often be framed as absurd out of context. That doesn’t make funding research any less important.🧵

"No one had RSV when I was young..." - a 🧵 about why you are hearing a lot more about RSV since COVID & this year in particular. My baby is just getting over RSV, so I've thought about this a lot this week.

happy new year to you all! 2025 (= 45^2) will be the first square year since 1936, and that was such a wonderful year with events such as the start of the Spanish Civil War, the Abdication Crisis, and the occupation of the Rhineland, so I’m sure 2025 can’t fail to be a belter 😉

Life expectancy has continued to rise in the longest-lived countries 🧵

I hadn't realized this but Romania's next president was 1st in the world in the International Maths Olympiad 2 years in a row with maximum score