Erin Ahrens (IG: @erin_sevensixninesix) has Long COVID and has been devastated by Long COVlD eyes. After her 1st exposure in 2022, Erin was reinfected in 2024. Shortly after getting over the initial illness, she started seeing white flashes in her peripheral vision. Photo credit: Mask Together America.

Greetings, public health PHANs! We hope you're having a healthy and safe April so far. This is our weekly newsletter for April 24, 2026, with news of our first podcast episode, an upcoming Zoom discussion about traveling while being clean-air-aware on May 5th, some community and creator spotlights, events related to COVID and clean air, and news and articles about COVID, other airborne pathogens, and clean air. 

 

You can manage your subscriptions from the “manage preferences” link at the bottom of this email. And you can support us by liking, sharing, and commenting on our social media posts on Bluesky, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. It really helps our visibility when you engage with our posts and follow our accounts.

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We're delighted to present our new podcast, Breathe This. We'll be talking about clean indoor air, airborne pathogens, how COVID and long COVID have affected individuals and our society, and how you can protect yourself from airborne pathogens, both individually and as a society.

 

You can watch or listen to our podcast on YouTube and Spotify. We invite you to check out our introduction for an explanation about why we're doing it and the kinds of topics we'll cover. Our first episode is with Mask Together America founder Julie Lam, who talks about her experience with COVID and long COVID, how she founded and developed Mask Together America, and what the future of public health messaging looks like.

 

We were thrilled to get to speak with Lam for this session, and we'll have another episode with author Jonathan Howard in two weeks. Let us know what you think about the podcast and if you have ideas for future shows. Please subscribe to help boost our visibility. Thanks for watching and listening!

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Our next community discussion will be on Tuesday, May 5, at noon ET, about traveling while being clean-air-aware. Summer travel season is coming up and we know you may have questions about how they can travel safely. Confirmed guest speakers include COVID advocate Keith Muise, mask advocate Daniel Kinder, and Mask Together America founder Julie Lam. Register in advance. You'll need a free Zoom account in order to register.

Recording of Our Zoom Community Discussion on April 2, 2026: 

COVID, Clean Air, and the Performing Arts

We held a terrific Zoom community discussion on April 2, co-hosted with Air Support Project, on “COVID, Clean Air, and the Performing Arts”. Our guests were artists phytocene and Nina Wildflower, who talked about their experiences with being clean-air-aware while they're on stage, and event creator Kyle Stevens, who spoke on his experience with providing clean-air events with his company, Clean Air Events in Seattle WA. The recording is now available for public viewing. If you have feedback or suggestions for future discussion topics, email us at info@phan.global.

Ongoing Meetings

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.

 

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.

 

Saturday meetings are at 11AM ET. Join Celebrate845 on Zoom for COVID Creative Coalition community meetings. No artistic experience required. Great for visual artists, writers, graphic designers, or folks interested in Street Team efforts. “Non-Hudson Valley folks are welcomed to attend, connect & get inspired, but we'll be centering building our efforts in the HV. We are down to host breakout rooms by locale!” More info at Celebrate845.com/COVIDCreativeCoalition. 

 

The folks at The Little Zoom Writers Room host a weekly co-writing space open to all COVID realists. Check their welcome page for more info.

 

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.

 

The COVID-Safe Art Collective holds an online gathering every Sunday at 4:30pm until 6pm CT for COVID-safe adults to create art or just chat and be with other aware folks. Zoom link.

 

April 25, 2026: The groups Love Despite the Apocalypse Cabaret, Bay Area Trans Centered Popup, and many others are coming together to host a mutual aid market, food pantry, and drag show featuring all trans vendors and talent. The event takes place from 2PM-7PM, at 436 E 12th St, Oakland. HIFI masks required as always. Proceeds going to multiple beloved Trans/2S community members in need of ongoing aid.

 

April 28, 2026: The Sick Times will host a webinar on “Following COVID-19 Data”. This webinar will help you find data on COVID-19 and other pathogens in your area, and interpret those data to inform safety measures for you and your community. Managing editor Betsy Ladyzhets will share how she writes The Sick Times’ weekly U.S. COVID-19 data updates. She’ll be joined by guests Caitlin Rivers, an infectious disease epidemiologist who directs the Center for Outbreak Response Innovation at Johns Hopkins and runs the outbreak newsletter Force of Infection; and Tea Burns, a nurse and first aid instructor with Action Readiness Collective of NYC (ARC-NYC). Register in advance.

 

May 5, 2026: PHAN and Air Support Project will host an online forum about traveling while being clean-air-aware. See the item above. 

 

May 5, 2026: Clean Air in Schools symposium hosted by the American Lung Association. This free online event takes place from noon to 3:30 pm ET. Register in advance.

 

May 6, 2026: Long COVID Justice invites supporters to celebrate the launch of their “Listening for the Long Haul” project, 4:30-6pm ET on Zoom. The project features 100+ hours of interviews with people living with Long COVID and associated conditions. Featured speakers will include project participants Chimére L. Sweeney, The Black Long COVID Experience; Jacquie Luciano, Breathing for Justice; Tracey Thompson, BIRCH (Black Indigenous Racialized Covid Health); and Una Osato, patient advocate & community artist; as well as project coordinators Dr. Jennifer Brier, University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC) professor; Kaimara Herron, UIC PhD student; and Gabriel San Emeterio, Long COVID Justice senior fellow. Visit their event page for speaker bios, access notes, and more info.

 

May 13, 2026: Join EPA's Healthy and Efficient School Environments Grantees to learn about programs, trainings, resources and funds available to K-12 public, charter, and tribal schools nationwide to improve indoor air quality and energy efficiency.  

 

May 18-22, 2026: The 12th International Conference on Indoor Air Quality, Ventilation, & Energy Conservation in Buildings takes place at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Register in advance.

 

May 19, 2026: The Geneva Health Forum, in collaboration with Air Club, the Ministère de la Santé (France), the Pandemic Center at Brown University, and the University of Melbourne, are pleased to announce a high-level symposium: World Health Assembly High-Level Dialogue on Healthy Indoor Air, at the Campus Biotech, Geneva, Switzerland, on Tuesday, May 19, 2026, at 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM CET. Organized as a side event of the World Health Assembly, this high-level dialogue will bring together global leaders, Ministers of Health, UN agencies, and technical experts to elevate a critical yet under-recognized issue: indoor air quality.

 

May 25-31, 2026: World Mask Week, where everyone is encouraged to commit to mask in public for just one week. From the celebrate845 website: “At its simplest, Mask Week asks folks to commit to masking up for collective health for 1 week. Bigger picture, Mask Week is so many things—an invitation to co-ideate with folks inside or outside your region, a tangible solidarity action, a vessel to meet like-minded folks, a way to truly embody intersectional values, and so much more.” 

 

June 9, 2026: The Air We Share: Shaping healthier indoor air quality in Europe and beyond. The IDEAL Cluster Summit in Brussels is bringing together seven Horizon Europe research and innovation projects, over 120 organisations, and more than 50 million in investment, and will convene policymakers, researchers, industry leaders and public authorities to present.
 

June 25, 2026: phytocene, a clean-air-aware singer, songwriter, and producer living in Paris will host a mask-required album release party in Paris for her new album. RSVP for tickets.

April 20, 2026:  The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative reports that in the U.S., only three states/territories have moderate or higher transmission: Mississippi (moderate, limited data), Guam, and West Virginia (very high, only one site reporting). Based on our current estimates, only 1 day since the summer of 2021 has had lower transmission – the lull point of the summer 2023 wave on July 15, 2023. As a caveat, like peaks, these lull point estimates are volatile in real-time.

 

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March 26, 2026: A new paper from Georgia Lagoudas of the Pandemic Center at Brown University's School of Public Health and three other scientists advises that the European Union should adopt a health-based framework for indoor air quality. Europe, for the first time ever, has embedded health and indoor air quality requirements into energy building policy. This is a global first, at this scale. We spend 90% of our time indoors, and yet we do not have health-based standards for the air we breathe inside. Europe is about to undergo a major change in this historical divide between energy building policy and public health.  

 

April 13, 2026: Citing a nationwide rise in several infectious diseases, two health tech companies plan to test a new airborne-pathogen-detection and air-purification system at a San Francisco school later this year. Primary.Health and Poppy Health Inc. — headquartered in San Francisco and Winter Park, Fla., respectively — said they’ve created a product that analyzes genetic information that can determine what pathogens are in the air in buildings. When certain pathogens are detected, the buildings’ HVAC systems are triggered to filter them out.

 

April 14, 2026: In a recent study published in the journal Communications Medicine, researchers in Australia and Norway examined how inflammatory and neurological protein levels differ between long coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and recovery, and how they respond to vaccination and reinfection. The study revealed protein patterns that may help distinguish long COVID from both recovered and healthy individuals.
 

April 17, 2026: From The Sick Times: A doctor got Long COVID from practicing medicine in Pakistan and found that the healthcare system has almost no way to accommodate doctors who develop chronic illnesses. 

 

April 19, 2026: From the Orange County Register: "For the third straight year, environmental activists and California lawmakers are locked in a tug-of-war over a pool of state funds created to upgrade heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems in schools to curb disruptions and closures attributed to extreme weather. At a time when one environmental group estimates 60,000 K-12 students in the state — nearly a third of them in San Bernardino County — have lost classroom time this school year due to weather-related events, roughly $194 million sits in limbo in the CalSHAPE program."

 

April 20, 2026: A recent study published in the journal Academic Pediatrics highlights the broader impact of long coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19, long COVID, LC) in children, extending beyond physical symptoms to academic and social functioning. Researchers found that children with LC were significantly more likely to experience declining grades, attention difficulties, and reduced peer engagement, raising concerns about longer-term educational and developmental consequences.
 

April 21, 2026: U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the US military will no longer require the flu vaccine for troops, The move alarmed some public health experts, who warned that it would weaken the military’s readiness. The U.S. military first mandated the flu vaccine in 1945, at the end of World War II — in part to hedge against the threat of biological warfare and because the great influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1920 had crippled American troop readiness during World War I, killing more than 26,000 American soldiers.
 

April 21, 2026: The Hong Kong Centre for Health Protection (CHP) reported three more H9N2 avian flu cases on mainland China, all in children under the age of 6 years. Last week, CHP recorded two cases.

 

April 23, 2026: Long COVID is thought to affect over six million children in the U.S. The Boston Globe focused on one young woman who contracted COVID in early 2022 and developed long COVID symptoms about six weeks later, including deep exhaustion, intense body pain, and extreme memory loss.

 

April 24, 2026: A man from Perth, Australia who was studying in Vienna, Austria on university exchange is believed to have died of an aggressive strain of meningococcal B. He began developing symptoms including a headache and a rash while on a flight from Portugal earlier this month, and the 21-year-old was dead within just a few hours. Meningococcal B can be transmitted through the air or through close contact with nose and throat secretions.

 

April 24, 2026: After six years, Maria Van Kerkhove, COVID-19 Emergency Manager and Technical Lead at the WHO, has quietly deleted her tweet from March 3, 2020 that stated that COVID-19 is not airborne.  

 

on the lighter side…

Credit: The Vertlartnic

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