Alan Garner

Doing exclusively trauma care these days but from an emergency medicine and prehospital background. COVID concerned. The evidence is mounting for a tsunami of chronic illness.

Scott Boland Told To Stop Taking Wickets, Making Runs if He Wants To Be Picked for Australian Test Team

Serbia’s students turned disaster into defiance, grief into solidarity, and less than two years of resistance into victory. They built something new. They broke a grip on power that seemed unbreakable. Let this travel far beyond Serbia: Power is not permanent. Hope is not foolish.

Stop giving Pauline Hanson, Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan, Peta Credlin and the rest of the hatemongers a platform, ABC. Give it to the crossbench, who are doing good work. Put positive pressure on Labor, instead of stoking division

clocking in as RFK jrs worst nightmare (kn95 wearing angeleno alone in car stuffed to the gills with n95s free distribution) #DoMaskBlocShit

If this death toll was the result of a terrorist attack, the world would be up in arms And remember, this is not the new normal From the perspective of 2100, or even 2050, the summer of 2026 will be one of the coolest www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Ambulance or corridor? The association between site-level use of ambulance ‘ramping’ as Emergency Department escalation areas and 28-day mortality in admitted patients: a secondary analysis of the UNCORKED study link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Hospitals love to say that they can't comply with staffing mandates because there's a nursing shortage. But there is no nursing shortage; there's a shortage of nurses willing to work under impossible conditions. www.wsj.com/health/healt...

I've said it before and I'll say it again, we can't magically create more HCW and more beds. The only way to immediately ease pressures on our medical system is to reduce the number of patients seeking care. Clean air, respirators, and no more catering to libertarian antivaxer nonsense.

Science keeps learning more about COVID, and policy is always catching up. Researchers say it’s worth refreshing guidance as new evidence emerges, including how the virus spreads through the air and how we protect healthcare staff. 🎥 Watch: shh-uk.org/covid-19-...

This is a problem in Canada. The cost-benefit model used to assess the value of COVID vaccines *forgot* to include the fact that you can get #longCOVID without seeking medical care for acute COVID, so they set annual total COVID incidence to 7.5%.

"It's not just the amount of nurses that we're employing, it's the experience we need them to have..." It takes an additional 2 years to train up an ICU nurse. Same in many other areas. Expertise matters Retention matters Workforce planning matters #nzpol www.rnz.co.nz/news/health/...

Burden of chronic disease and not just risk of death should be considerations in vaccination schedules. Not currently taken into account for COVID in Australia and many other countries.

But Australia commits to stay in AUKUS…

This is the disease for which I research and advocate: #MECFS. Even mild presentation is life-changing, and this is what severe looks like. People are surprised so many of us were athletes. They want to believe this can only happen to people who were already unwell. www.bbc.com/sport/athlet...

This young Olympian had very mild infection but is now severely disabled. I have been asked why I still mask when death is now rare from COVID in Australia. It is not dying I am worried about.

Hospital access block, not excessive ED visits or inefficient ED docs, is the primary cause of ED overcrowding. ED overcrowding is fundamentally a hospital-wide and healthcare-system capacity problem that requires solutions primarily outside the ED.

Meanwhile, current WHO guidance for both Ebola and pneumonic plague is still based on droplet dogma and medical masks.

We have written to the JCVI before about the evidence that vaccination reduces the risk of developing Long Covid. We’ve now written AGAIN following their advice for autumn 2027 2 million #pwlc in the UK. Yet #LongCovid isn’t mentioned in the latest advice. www.longcovidsos.org/post/respons...

Oh wow. This is proper fucked. That list of folks eligible for a free vaccine is *narrow*. So anyway, we gave BHP $600m in diesel rebates this past year. You know they really needed them because in the same year the company booked a $14b profit.

New paper: Long COVID exposes a huge blind spot in how governments define “security.” We respond quickly to sudden, visible crises, but seem to accept mass disability as normal, even while it puts growing pressure on healthcare, the workforce, the economy and society. Published: 28 September 2026

Oopsie for the 6th year in a row. Because why do serious prevention when you can overwhelm health care each year. "The figures show there were 950 hospital admissions for Covid in August and the total jumped to 4,939 in September, up by around 420 per cent." www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

Healthcare should not a place where you pick up another infection. Strong infection prevention measures, including clean air, masking, and other layered protections, help keep patients, visitors, and healthcare workers safer. Prevention belongs in every setting, healthcare included.

Why A&E is broken Not enough hospital beds

Here's today's column on the astonishing, ongoing mistreatment of people with #ME/CFS. Please spread it far and wide: the only thing which can break the media's wall of indifference is seeing an article about the issue go viral. Thank you. 1/2 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Articles like these are emblematic of the institutional amnesia surrounding Covid-19. A pathogen that emerged less than seven years ago, which can cause fatigue during the acute infection and as a common long-term effect, not even mentioned. Conspicuously absent. www.nbcnews.com/health/menta...

www.sbs.com.au/news/article... Not only does Australia not get updated vaccines in good time, the government has now limited free access. Based on the notion that we all have strong immunity due to infections and previous vax. So it’s basically relying on infections to protect people 😣 - huh?

Scientists and experts warned COVID could spread through airborne aerosols, but infection-control leaders relied on outdated views of aerosol transmission. The assumption that COVID couldn’t be airborne was a mistake, based on thinking already described as illogical in a 2006 SARS Commission report.

"The study found that most aerosol-generating procedures considered high risk produced fewer emissions than coughing or talking...This has effectively ended the use of the term "aerosol-generating procedure" in risk assessments, leading to a major change in how PPE is deployed in health care."

The rostering stars aligned today and all the medical staff on the ward round this morning were male, including the student. Am pleased to report that it felt distinctly odd.

👇This is corruption. The transport minister accepts a gift from Qantas of free platinum status rewards membership for her lifetime. This is the company she's supposed to be regulating. www.afr.com/rear-window/... #auspol

Good grief. Apparently infection prevention is possible. We just have to teach people how to do it, and then do it. I need to lie down.

Um… 😶

Many children of a certain age band (too young to be vaccinated before 2023) will now go through their entire adult life unvaccinated. Plenty of scientific evidence pointing to that being a truly dumb approach, likely costing more in poor health than the federal department’s “savings” ffs …

For airborne infections, fit and filtration matter. A well-fitting N95 or better respirator is designed to filter airborne particles and provide stronger protection for the person wearing it. Better respiratory protection should be the standard. #COVID #COVID19 #PublicHealth #Masking #MaskUp

Just remember, the Reserve Bank is worried that wages might grow too fast and cause inflation

Among the range of symptoms experienced by those with long covid, cognitive and mental health concerns are especially common. This review provides an assessment of the nature, severity, and trajectory of neuropsychiatric long covid sequelae www.bmj.com/content/390/...

Can’t stop thinking about Lily Hooper. Her poor family.