1,1,2,5,14...?

Math Prof. @mariagillespie.bsky.social, founder of MaskTogetherColorado ( @wemaskcolorado.bsky.social), was interviewed by Óscar Contreras, @denver7.bsky.social for advocating for universal masking in Colorado hospitals to combat the unprecedented surge in flu cases. bit.ly/Denver7_on_MTC 🧵

Finally, a silicone stopper can be put over the tip of the straw and then pushed against the valve while drinking to minimize leakage. This one seems to be a pretty good size: a.co/d/bIq5Vc2

Enjoy, and stay safe!

Get a thin (5mm) metal straw, this one works for me: a.co/d/1Dsay7H

How do you drink safely while wearing a mask? Start with a SIP valve from sipmask.com, and then check out these tips I learned from the Fit Testing for Everyone community:

At an airport, Sinead and her husband were wearing BNX N95 respirators and their daughter was wearing a flomask.

“Happy to report that one week after traveling on an 11 hr flight to visit my elderly grandparents during a bad flu season, our masks kept us safe and helped us avoid spreading any airborne viruses to them, and we are able to enjoy Christmas together!”—Sinead O’Brien, @cleanairie.bsky.social

COVID & Health News, 10/5/25 According to JP Weiland, there are about 510,000 new COVID infections daily with about 1 in 66 people currently infected in the U.S.

COVID & Health News, 10/5/25
open.substack.com/pub/drruth/p...

When Will the Lion Concern Himself Joking memes make light of the uncomfortable reality: everyone's got a little of that post-COVID brain damage these days

Nobody has Long COVID, but everybody has brain fog, cognitive decline and memory loss. I talk about the overwhelming scientific evidence that COVID damages the brain, and the overwhelming social unwillingness to acknowledge it in my latest:

www.thegauntlet.news/p/when-will-...

As grievously bad as the ongoing pandemic of Covid-19 is now, the worst is yet to come. The complete lack of essential safety measures in public spaces means that current conditions will inevitably get much worse.

#COVID19

Do HEPA air purifiers really remove 99.95% of dangerous particles from the air? The 99.95% claim is technically true, but misleading. HEPA air purifiers are good! But not that good.

New Substack post about HEPA air purifiers. They're good, but not quite as good as the advertising might lead you to expect.
mecfs.substack.com/p/do-hepa-ai...

Many of us with complex chronic illness learn a ton over years of neglect in healthcare settings.

We learn by painful trial and error and become confident about when to speak up.

But someone who’s never been sick? Someone who doesn’t speak the language or is critically ill?

My friend
the optimist insists
that at core
most people
are basically
good.

My friend
the pessimist insists
that at core
most people
are basically
bad.

I worry,
my friends,
that at core
most people
are basically
unwilling to be inconvenienced.

Thanks so much @parentmishmash.bsky.social for showing me this hack and fit testing my kid!

This is how I make a seal cut at the nose on my kid's Zimi mask so that it fits better around her nose bridge, thus eliminating gaps around each side of her nose. The fit factor went way up on fit testing with this hack!

Here is the full combinatorics textbook, "Counting Rocks!", published as an "Open Educational Resources" project, that my coauthors and I wrote that the videos are a companion for. It's completely free to download and use! mathematicalgemstones.com/maria/OER.html

Virtual technology for learning is improving by the day, and it is both more accessible by allowing flexible formatting and asynchronous learning, and can reach a larger audience with the same effort.

If anyone is interested in remote teaching strategies, streaming tools, hybrid technology, video background design, cameras, lighting, or anything related, please reach out! I know I post about covid safety a lot here, but mathematics is my job, and virtual tools are my hobby.

Counting Rocks! An Introduction to Combinatorics - YouTube This playlist features the re-created videos for the Open Educational Resource "Counting Rocks! An Introduction to Combinatorics" created at Colorado State U...

Remote teaching in 2020 launched my interest in high quality virtual mathematics presentation. Just today I completed this playlist for undergraduate combinatorics, the result of years of learning and a semester of hard work:

www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

As I enter the copy room
my colleague tells me
she is feeling sick,
she is really feeling very sick,
and she is worried
she will need to leave early,
and though I want to note
that we’ve already been
in two meetings together,
instead I just say:
I’ll make my copies later.

I beg of you, please stop asking chronically ill people if we’re “better yet”.

We aren’t getting better. That’s the nature of chronic illness.

We may have good days & bad days… but we will always be sick. Its unrelenting. Always there. Ready to flare at any time.

New York Times: “30 Charts That Show How Everything Changed…in March 2020”

“The number of people reporting a disability soared. Many Americans struggled with long Covid and reported cognitive issues like “brain fog”

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

We’re Witnessing the Fall of Public Health… and Your Best Tool is a Mask Measles in Texas, bird flu in Louisiana, tuberculosis in Kansas and Covid everywhere. Public health has been dying a slow death for years, we can’t count on it anymore. What can we count on? A mask!

We’re still in a global pandemic. The threat of Covid has not passed.

We’re seeing an increase in bird flu, measles, TB & more.

Public health has been dying a slow & painful death for years. We are on our own.

The good news? Masks work for more than just Covid! My complete guide to respirators 👇🏼

Our 13-year-old crawled into our room 2 weeks after having a mild case of Covid & woke us in a panic because they felt like “their legs had been dipped in acid & set on fire.” It’s been 3 years & while the pain has decreased a bit, it’s still there every day + chronic fatigue and more. It’s brutal.

BREAKING: The USDA has confirmed five additional dairy herds in California have tested positive for the virus, raising the total to 732.

Currently, 74% of the state's dairy herds are infected with H5N1. www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-po...

"Most non disabled people are unable to face the fact that health is temporary. That all it takes is one virus, accident or stroke of bad luck to leave you permanently disabled. They don’t want to face it, so they blame us for our illnesses and tell themselves it can’t possibly happen to them."

Exactly 3 years on 👇

I've still not felt 'breathless', but as for 'some kind of impairment or difficulty in functioning'... Yes - that still sums it up 🙏

And as #COVIDisNotOver the number of people affected is growing!

#COVID19 #BloodClots #PulmonaryEmbolism #LongCovid

"The data demonstrates little or no improvement over 16 weeks, while the frequency of contact throughout the study demonstrates the episodic and relapsing nature of long COVID."
#LongCovid #PASC

More than 300 FAA employees have been dismissed.

Massive covidization and subsequent decovidization of the scientific literature involved 2 million authors - Journal of Clinical Epidemiology www.jclinepi.com/article/S089...

Why did we spend so much effort in 2020 mitigating against the wrong routes for COVID spread? Really interesting background on the history and culture of science and medicine for airborne diseases.

Flu breaking records, measles, tuna recall, and federal workers fired The Dose (February 17)

Meanwhile, back in the USA, 'flu is breaking records, other infectious diseases spreading, like measles and 2 severe human cases of H5N1', @kkjetelina.bsky.social.
And there are a lot of sick people in the UK too!
🤦By the way, measles is the most infectious virus known!
substack.com/home/post/p-...