Greetings, public health PHANs! Happy New Year! We hope you're having a good January so far. This is our weekly news update for January 9, 2025, with a selection of upcoming events and articles about COVID, other airborne pathogens, and clean air. We're busy with developing some great software tools, developing our website, creating a podcast, and making connections with people around the world. 

 

If you want to keep receiving this weekly news update, great! You don't need to do anything else. If you'd rather just receive the monthly newsletter, you can manage your PHAN email subscriptions from the “manage preferences” link at the bottom of this email.

 

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Would you like to help shape PHAN's work for 2026? If so, please join us for a special Zoom meeting on Tuesday, January 27, 2026 at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm GMT. We'll briefly review our work and progress in our first year of operations, present our proposed plans for 2026, and invite feedback and suggestions for what we could work on in 2026. We really want to know what you think! If you can't make it to the meeting but you have some feedback or suggestions for us, email us at info@publichealthactionnetwork.org.

 

The World Health Network (WHN) has sent a letter to the WHO that calls for respirator use as the standard in healthcare to protect patients and staff. Over 2300 researchers and advocates have endorsed the letter, and the campaign has been covered by The Guardian. WHN is asking everyone in the COVID-aware communities to share this letter with your networks. 

Another good friend of PHAN, Clean Air Allies, is sponsoring a creative video contest for young people to explain why indoor air quality in schools is important to them. U.S. students age 13 or older, in grades 9-12 during the 2025-2026 school year, are invited to create and submit a 1- to 3-minute video around the theme, “It’s Time to Care about School Indoor Air”. Clean Air Allies is accepting video submissions until January 12, 2026.

 

Clean Air Allies is a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring that all schoolchildren, school workers, and their broader communities have access to the benefits of clean air as an issue of educational, environmental, and health justice. We would love to see them get hundreds of entries. This contest will not only engage young folks in the cause for clean air and bring more awareness of the issue to their own schools, but it will also create terrific content for the entire clean-air community. 

ONGOING WEEKLY 

COVID COMMUNITY MEETINGS

Every Saturday evening: Pandemic Pals meetings on Zoom. Every Saturday at 5 pm PT/8 pm ET, the Pandemic Collaborative hosts a Zoom call with several breakout rooms based on age groups, life situations, and special interests. Check their Google Document the day of the call for that week's Zoom link.

 

Every Monday & Sunday: Rising Hope meetings on Zoom. Rising Hope is a community of COVID-conscious folks that meet Monday evenings, plus Sunday mornings for church services. Contact them via Reddit.

 

Daily: The World Health Network hosts COVID-aware community meetings every day. Community care starts with conversation! Their Welcome page explains how to connect with their meeting groups.

January 15, 2026: Mask Together America is hosting a Long COVID Defense Forum II with 4 esteemed speakers: 
—Sinéad O’Brien, (@sinebrien) co-founder of Clean Air Advocacy Ireland (CAAI) @cleanairie
—Akiko Iwasaki, Ph.D. (@akiko__iwasaki), Sterling Professor of Immunobiology at the Yale University School of Medicine @yaleschoolofmed @yalesph
—Betsy Ladyzhets and Miles W. Griffis @confettiwesterns, co-founders and editors of The Sick Times (@thesicktimes), a non-profit news site covering Long COVlD and the ongoing pandemic.

 

January 22, 2026: PHAN and Air Support Project meeting on COVID, airborne pathogens, and IAQ. The meeting is at 9 am PT / 12 noon ET / 5pm GMT and we'll have some guests from the COVID-aware and clean-air communities to talk about their work.

 

January 27, 2026: PHAN Plans for 2026. See our section above for more details.

 

January 29, 2026: WELL 2026 Summit New York. This summit hosted by the International WELL Building Institute invites you to participate in dynamic education sessions and engaging discussions on critical topics shaping the future of health, sustainability and well-being. 

 

January 31-February 4, 2026: ASHRAE Winter Conference 2026 Las Vegas. This conference invites you to immerse yourself in a world of HVAC&R with 100+ technical sessions at the ASHRAE Winter Conference 2026 Las Vegas, and 1700+ exhibitors at the AHR Expo. Registration for the ASHRAE Winter Conference 2026 Las Vegas includes registration for the AHR Expo, also in Las Vegas, February 2-4, 2026.

January 5, 2026: US Weekly COVID update from the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC). For additional data, visit the PMC Data website, and follow PMC Data author Mike Hoerger on Twitter.

 

🔹749,000 new daily infections based on wastewater-derived models

🔹1 in 65 people (1.5%) actively infectious

🔹Infections in the past week: 5,390,000

🔹Infections in 2026: 3,000,000

🔹Cumulative infections per person: 4.88
 

 

 

 

January 4, 2026: Canadian officials say US health institutions no longer dependable for accurate information

 

January 5, 2025: Flu-like illness activity now at highest rate on record, new CDC data shows - ABC News. Influenza activity is now at the highest rate ever recorded in the U.S. according to the CDC, with 8% of all outpatient visits in the past week being related to flu-like illness. This surpasses any levels seen since 1997, the earliest for which data is available.

 

January 5, 2025: An investigation published in JAMA focused on the burden of COVID-19 including illnesses, outpatient visits, hospitalizations, and deaths in the US from October 2022 to September 2023 and from October 2023 to September 2024. It found that from October 2022 to September 2023, there were an estimated 43.6 million COVID-19–associated illnesses, 10.0 million outpatient visits, 1.1 million hospitalizations, and 101,300 deaths. From October 2023 to September 2024, there were an estimated 33.0 million COVID-19–associated illnesses, 7.7 million outpatient visits, 879,100 hospitalizations, and 100,800 deaths. 

 

January 5, 2025: HHS today announced an unprecedented overhaul of the US childhood immunization schedule, paring the number of universally recommended immunizations from 17 to 11. Public health experts immediately decried the change. Experts said there’s no reason to change a system that has prevented 1.1 million deaths over the past 30 years. 

 

and now for your moment of zen

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