Foodborne illness increase? Common cold, Covid-19 summer wave, and more.

Katelyn Jetelina · 25 Aug 2026

Read the piece on yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com ↗

Katelyn Jetelina did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Vaccine distribution schedules that miss the optimal protection window represent a policy failure.

Their wordsOur systems not matching up with the optimal protection window seems like a big policy failure.
Our reading
Defunding public health surveillance systems allows foodborne disease outbreaks to go undetected.
Mental modelEverything decays without maintenance

Their wordsWhen the public health systems meant to catch and stop this stuff are cut (less funding, less staff, less historical knowledge, and less leadership), outbreaks can, and will, emerge between the cracks.
Our reading
The raw count of food recalls is a poor measure of foodborne illness trends because unknown contamination goes uncounted.
Mental modelThe map is not the territory

Their wordsThe problem is that "number of recalls" is a terrible metric because we don't know what we don't know.

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