Category: News

As America, and even his own administration, woke up to the threat of Covid-19, President Donald Trump still didn’t seem to get it. Within weeks of suggesting that people social distance in mid-March, the president went on national TV to argue that the US could reopen by Easter Sunday in April. “You’ll have packed churches all over our country,” Trump said in March. “I think it’ll be a beautiful time.”

The US wasn’t able to fully and safely reopen in April. It isn’t able to fully and safely reopen in September.

The virus rages on, affecting every aspect of American life, from the economy to education to entertainment. More than 200,000 Americans are confirmed dead. Many schools are closing down again after botched attempts to reopen — with outbreaks in universities and K-12 settings. America now has one of the worst ongoing epidemics in the world, with the second most daily new Covid-19 deaths among developed nations, surpassed only by Spain.

America does not have the most Covid-19 deaths per capita of any rich country, but it’s doing worse than most. The US reports about seven times the Covid-19 deaths as the median developed country, ranking in the bottom 20 percent for coronavirus deaths among wealthy nations. Tens of thousands of lives have been needlessly lost as a result: If America had the same death rate as, for example, Canada, about 120,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.

The Easter episode, experts said, exemplified the magical thinking that has animated Trump’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic before and after the novel coronavirus reached the US. It’s a problem that’s continued through September — with Trump and those under him flat-out denying the existence of a resurgence in Covid-19, falsely claiming rising cases were a result of more tests. With every day, week, and month that the Trump administration has tried to spin a positive story, it’s also resisted stronger action, allowing the epidemic to drag on.

A pandemic was always likely to be a challenge for the US, given the country’s large size, fragmented federalist system, and libertarian streak. The public health system was already underfunded and underprepared for a major disease outbreak before Trump.

Yet many other developed countries dealt with these kinds of problems too. Public health systems are notoriously underfunded worldwide. Australia, Canada, and Germany, among others, also have federalist systems of government, individualistic societies, or both — and they’ve all fared much better.

Instead, experts said, it’s Trump’s leadership, or lack thereof, that really sets the US apart. Before Covid-19, Trump and his administration undermined preparedness — eliminating a White House office set up by the previous administration to combat pandemics, making cuts across other key parts of the federal government, and proposing further cuts.

Once the coronavirus arrived, Trump downplayed the threat, suggesting that it would soon disappear “like a miracle.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took weeks to fix botched tests, and the administration actively abdicated control of issues to local, state, and private actors.

“There was a failure to realize what an efficiently spreading respiratory virus for which we have no vaccine and no antiviral meant,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “From the very beginning, that minimization … set a tone that reverberated from the highest levels of government to what the average person believes about the virus.”

Several developed countries — including Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain — were caught off-guard by the pandemic and were hit hard early, suffering massive early outbreaks with enormous death tolls. But most developed countries took these crises seriously: adopting lengthy and strict lockdowns, widespread testing and contact tracing, masking mandates, and consistent public messaging about the virus. (Though parts of Europe are now seeing second waves, seemingly because they prematurely relaxed social distancing measures.)

America did not take the steps necessary, even after an outbreak spiraled out of control in New York. So the US suffered a wave of huge cases over the summer that other developed nations generally avoided, leading to new and continued surges in both cases and deaths. And while other developed countries have seen spikes in cases as fall neared, America also has seen cases start to rise once again.

“If George W. Bush had been president, if John McCain had been president, if Mitt Romney had been president, this would have looked very different,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me, emphasizing the failure to act after Covid-19 hit the US hard was a phenomenon driven by Trump.

Experts worry that things will again get worse: Colder weather is coming, forcing people back into risky indoor environments. So are holiday celebrations, when families and friends will gather from across the country. Another flu season looms. And Trump, experts lamented, is still not ready to do much, if anything, about it.

The White House disputes the criticisms. Spokesperson Sarah Matthews claimed Trump “has led an historic, whole-of-America coronavirus response” that followed experts’ advice, boosted testing rates, delivered equipment to health care workers, and remains focused on expediting a vaccine.

She added, “This strong leadership will continue.”

The US wasn’t prepared for a pandemic — and Trump made it worse

During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, President Barack Obama’s administration realized that the US wasn’t prepared for a pandemic. Jeremy Konyndyk, who served in the Obama administration’s Ebola response, said he “came away from that experience just completely horrified at how unready we would be for something more dangerous than Ebola,” which has a high fatality rate but did not spread easily in the US and other developed nations.

The Obama administration responded by setting up the White House National Security Council’s Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, which was meant to coordinate the many agencies, from the CDC to the Department of Health and Human Services to the Pentagon, involved in contagion response.

But when John Bolton became Trump’s national security adviser in 2018, he moved to disband the office. In April 2018, Bolton fired Tom Bossert, then the homeland security adviser, who, the Washington Post reported, “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks.” Then in May, Bolton let go the head of pandemic response, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, and dismantled his global health security team. Bolton claimed that the cuts were needed to streamline the National Security Council, and the team was never replaced.

In the months before the coronavirus arrived, the Trump administration also cut a public health position meant to detect outbreaks in China and another program, called Predict, that tracked emerging pathogens around the globe, including coronaviruses. And Trump has repeatedly called for further cuts to the CDC and National Institutes of Health, both on the front lines of the federal response to disease outbreaks; the administration stood by the proposed cuts after the pandemic began, though Congress has largely rejected the proposals.

The Trump administration pushed for the cuts despite multiple, clear warnings that the US was not prepared for a pandemic. A 2019 ranking of countries’ disaster preparedness from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and Nuclear Threat Initiative had the US at the top of the list, but still warned that “no country is fully prepared for epidemics or pandemics.”

A federal simulation prior to the Covid-19 pandemic also predicted problems the US eventually faced, from a collapse in coordination and communication to shortages in personal protective equipment for health care workers.

Bill Gates, who’s dedicated much of his Microsoft fortune to fighting infectious diseases, warned in 2017, “The impact of a huge epidemic, like a flu epidemic, would be phenomenal because all the supply chains would break down. There’d be a lot of panic. Many of our systems would be overloaded.”

Gates told the Washington Post in 2018 he had raised his concerns in meetings with Trump. But the president, it’s now clear, didn’t listen.

There are limitations to better preparedness, too. “If you take what assets the United States had and you use them poorly the way we did, it doesn’t matter what the report says,” Adalja said, referring to the 2019 ranking. “If you don’t have the leadership to execute, then it makes no difference.”

As Covid-19 spread, Trump downplayed the threat

On February 25, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters that Americans should prepare for community spread of the coronavirus, social distancing, and the possibility that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.”

Six months later, Messonnier’s comments seem prescient. But soon after the briefing, she was pushed out of the spotlight — though she’s still on the job, her press appearances have been limited — reportedly because her negative outlook angered Trump. (Messonnier didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The CDC as a whole has been pushed to the sidelines with her. The agency is supposed to play a leading role in America’s fight against pandemics, but it’s invisible in press briefings led by Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, advisers, and health officials like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx who are not part of the organization. CDC Director Robert Redfield acknowledged as much: “You may see [the CDC] as invisible on the nightly news, but it’s sure not invisible in terms of operationalizing this response.”

University of Michigan medical historian Howard Markel put it in blunter terms, telling me the US has “benched one of the greatest fighting forces against infectious diseases ever created.”

Meanwhile, the president downplayed the virus. The day after Messonnier’s warning, Trump said that “you have 15 people [with the coronavirus], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” This type of magical thinking appears to have driven Trump’s response to Covid-19 from the start, from his conviction that cases would disappear to his proclamation that the country would reopen by Easter.

This was deliberate. As Trump later acknowledged in recorded interviews with journalist Bob Woodward, he knew that the coronavirus was “deadly stuff,” airborne, more dangerous than the flu, and could afflict both the young and old. Yet he deliberately downplayed the threat: “I wanted to always play it down,” he told Woodward on March 19. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Trump has long said he believes in the power of positive thinking. “I’ve been given a lot of credit for positive thinking,” he told Axios reporter Jonathan Swan during a wide-ranging discussion about Covid-19 in July. “But I also think about downside, because only a fool doesn’t.” Pressed further, he added, “I think you have to have a positive outlook. Otherwise, you have nothing.”

The concern, experts said, is the signal this messaging sends. It tells the staffers under Trump that this issue isn’t a priority, and things are fine as they are. And it suggests to the public that the virus is under control, so they don’t have to make annoying, uncomfortable changes to their lives, from physical distancing to wearing masks.

It creates the perfect conditions for a slow and inadequate response.

The CDC botched the initial test kits it sent out, and it took weeks to fix the errors. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also took weeks to approve other tests from private labs. As supply problems came up with testing kits, swabs, reagents, machines, and more, the Trump administration resisted taking significant action — claiming it’s up to local, state, and private actors to solve the problems and that the federal government is merely a “supplier of last resort.”

South Korea, which has been widely praised for its response to coronavirus, tested more than 66,000 people within a week of the first community transmission within its borders. By comparison, the US took roughly three weeks to complete that many tests — in a country with more than six times the population.

Asked about testing problems in March, Trump responded, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” In June, Trump claimed that “testing is a double-edged sword,” adding that “when you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people — you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”

The testing shortfall was a problem few thought possible in the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth. “We all kind of knew if a biological event hit during this administration, it wasn’t going to be good,” Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist, told me. “But I don’t think anyone ever anticipated it could be this bad.”

Trump also consistently undermined the advice of experts, including those in his administration. When the CDC released reopening guidelines, Trump effectively told states to ignore the guidance and reopen prematurely — to “LIBERATE” their economies. When the CDC recommended masks for public use, Trump described masking as a personal choice, refused to wear one in public for months, and even suggested that people wear masks to spite him. While federal agencies and researchers work diligently to find effective treatments for Covid-19, Trump has promoted unproven and even dangerous approaches, at one point advocating for injecting bleach. Trump’s allies have even held up CDC studies that could contradict the president’s overly optimistic outlook.

The most aggressive steps Trump took to halt the virus — travel restrictions on China and Europe imposed in February and March, respectively — were likely too limited and too late. And to the extent these measures bought time, it wasn’t properly used.

The federal government is the only entity that can solve many of the problems the country is facing. If testing supply shortfalls in Maine are slowing down testing in Arizona or Florida, the federal government has the resources and the legal jurisdiction to quickly act. Local or state offices looking for advice on how to react to a national crisis will typically turn to the federal government for guidance.

But the inaction, contradictions, and counterproductive messaging created a vacuum in federal leadership.

In the months after Trump’s prediction that coronavirus cases would go down to zero, confirmed cases in the US grew to more than 160,000. As of September 22, they stand at more than 6.8 million.

Months into the pandemic, Trump has continued to flail

After the initial wave of coronavirus cases began to subside in April, the White House stopped its daily press briefings on the topic. By June, Trump’s tweets and public appearances focused on Black Lives Matter protests and the 2020 election — part of what Politico reporter Dan Diamond described, based on discussions with administration officials, as an “apparent eagerness to change the subject.”

Then another wave of coronavirus infections hit beginning in June, peaking with more than 70,000 daily new cases, a new high, and more than 1,000 daily deaths.

America’s response to the initial rise of infections was slow and inadequate. But other developed countries also struggled with the sudden arrival of a disease brand new to humans. The second surge, experts said, was when the scope of Trump’s failure became more apparent.

By pushing states to open prematurely, failing to set up national infrastructure for testing and tracing, and downplaying masks, Trump put many states under enormous pressure to reopen before the virus was under control nationwide. Many quickly did — and over time suffered the consequences.

Rather than create a new strategy, Trump and his administration returned to magical thinking. Pence, head of the White House’s coronavirus task force, wrote an op-ed titled “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave’” in mid-June, as cases started to increase again. Internally, some of Trump’s experts seemed to believe this; Birx, once a widely respected infectious disease expert, reportedly told the president and White House staff that the US was likely following the path of Italy: Cases hit a huge high but would steadily decline.

Trump trotted out optimistic, but misleading, claims and statistics. He told Axios reporter Jonathan Swan in July that the US was doing well because it had few deaths relative to the number of cases. When Swan, clearly baffled, clarified he was asking about deaths as a proportion of population — a standard metric for an epidemic’s deadliness — Trump said, “You can’t do that.” He gave no further explanation.

Seemingly believing its coronavirus mission accomplished, the Trump administration, the New York Times reported, moved to relinquish responsibility for the pandemic and leave the response to the states — in what the Times called “perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.”

“The biggest problem in the US response is there is not a US response,” Konyndyk, now a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told me. “There is a New York response. There’s a Florida response. There’s a Montana response. There’s a California response. There’s a Michigan response. There’s a Georgia response. But there is not a US response.”

When the coronavirus first hit the US, the country struggled with testing enough people, contact tracing, getting the public to follow recommendations such as physical distancing and masking, delivering enough equipment for health care workers, and hospital capacity. In the second wave, these problems have by and large repeated themselves.

Consider testing: It has significantly improved, but some parts of the country have reported weeks-long delays in getting test results, and the percentage of tests coming back positive has risen above the recommended 5 percent in most states — a sign of insufficient testing. The system once again appeared to collapse under the weight of too much demand, while the federal government failed to solve continuing problems with supply chains. Months after Congress approved billions of dollars in spending to deal with testing problems, the Trump administration has not spent much of it.

Some of Trump’s people seemed to listen to his calls to slow down testing: On August 24, the CDC updated its guidelines to suggest people exposed to others with Covid-19 don’t necessarily have to get tested — a move for effectively less testing that experts described as “dangerous” and “irresponsible.” Only after weeks of criticism did the CDC back down and, on September 18, once again call for testing people without symptoms.

Mask-wearing also remains polarized. While surveys show that the vast majority of Americans have worn masks in the past week, there’s a strong partisan divide. According to Gallup’s surveys, 99 percent of Democrats say they’ve gone out with a mask in the previous week, compared to 80 percent of Republicans. Leveraging surveys on mask use, the New York Times estimated that the percentage of people using masks in public can fall to as low as 20, 10, or the single digits — even in some communities that have been hit hard. Anti-mask protests have popped up around the country.

Testing and mask-wearing are two of the strongest weapons against Covid-19. Testing, paired with contact tracing, lets officials track the scale of an outbreak, isolate those who are sick, quarantine their contacts, and deploy community-wide efforts as necessary to contain the disease — as successfully demonstrated in Germany, New Zealand, and South Korea, among others. There’s also growing scientific evidence supporting widespread and even mandated mask use, with experts citing it as crucial to the success of nations like Japan and Slovakia in containing the virus.

It’s not that other developed nations did everything perfectly. New Zealand has contained Covid-19 without widespread masking, and Japan has done so without widespread testing. But both took at least one aggressive action the US hasn’t. “While there’s variation across many countries, the thing that distinguishes the countries doing well is they took something seriously,” Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an epidemiologist at the University of California San Francisco, told me.

One explanation for the shortfalls in the US response is Trump’s obsession with getting America, particularly the economy, back to normal in the short term, seemingly before Election Day this November. It’s why he’s called on governors to “LIBERATE” states. It’s why he’s repeatedly said that “the Cure can’t be worse than the problem itself.” It’s one reason, perhaps, he resisted embracing even very minor lifestyle changes such as wearing a mask.

The reality is that life will only get closer to normal once the virus is suppressed. That’s what’s working for other countries that are more earnestly reopening, from Taiwan to Germany. It’s what a preliminary study on the 1918 flu found, as US cities that emerged economically stronger back then took more aggressive action that hindered economies in the short term but better kept infections and deaths down overall.

“Dead people don’t shop,” Jade Pagkas-Bather, an infectious diseases expert and doctor at the University of Chicago, told me. “They can’t stimulate economies.”

The window to avert further catastrophe may be closing

As cases and deaths climbed over the summer, and as the November election neared, Trump at times appeared to spring back into action — bringing back coronavirus press conferences and briefly changing his tone on masks (before going back to mocking them).

But Trump still seems resistant to focusing too much on the issue. He’s tried to change the subject to former Vice President Joe Biden’s supposed plans to destroy the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” He’s continued to downplay the crisis, saying on July 28, as daily Covid-19 deaths once again topped 1,000, “It is what it is.” His Republican convention continued to diminish the risks of Covid-19 and exaggerate Trump’s successes in fighting the virus. At a campaign rally in Ohio on September 21, Trump claimed the virus “affects virtually nobody.”

So while combating Covid-19 aligns with Trump’s political incentives (it remains Americans’ top priority), he and his administration continue to flounder. And White House officials stand by their response so far, continually pushing blame to local and state governments.

“There’s no national plan to combat the worst pandemic that we’ve seen in a century,” Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me.

The summer surge of Covid-19 has calmed now, although cases across the US flattened out at a much higher level than they were in the spring, likely a result of cities, counties, states, and the public taking action as the federal government didn’t. Still, cases have started to pick back up again.

Experts now worry that the country could be setting itself up for another wave of Covid-19. Schools reopening across the country could create new vectors of transmission. The winter will force many Americans indoors to avoid the cold, while being outdoors in the open air can hinder the spread of the disease. Families and friends will come together from across the country to celebrate the holidays, creating new possibilities for superspreading events. And in the background, another flu season looms — which could limit health care capacity further just as Covid-19 cases spike.

“The virus spreads when a large number of people gather indoors,” Jha said. “That’s going to happen more in December than it did in July — and July was a pretty awful month.”

There are reasons to believe it might not get so bad. Since so many people in the US have gotten sick, that could offer some element of population immunity in some places as long as people continue social distancing and masking. After seeing two large waves of the coronavirus across the country, the public could act cautiously and slow the disease, even if local, state, and federal governments don’t. Social distancing due to Covid-19 could keep the spread of the flu down too (which seemed to happen in the Southern Hemisphere).

But the federal government could do much more to push the nation in the right direction. Experts have urged the federal government to provide clear, consistent guidance and deploy stronger policies, encouraging people to take Covid-19 as a serious threat — now, not later.

“I’m really concerned that the window might be closing,” Kates said.

Without that federal action, the US could remain stuck in a cycle of ups and downs with Covid-19, forcing the public to double down on social distancing and other measures with each new wave. As cases and deaths continue to climb, America will become even more of an outlier as much of the developed world inches back to normal. And the “beautiful time” Trump imagined for Easter will remain out of reach.

Click Here:

Tropical Storm Laura, which has been downgraded from a hurricane, made landfall early Thursday morning in Cameron, Louisiana — just 35 miles east of the Texas-Louisiana border — as a Category 4 storm with 150 mph winds.

Already, pictures and videos of the storm from Lake Charles, Louisiana, a town about 50 miles north of Cameron, show torn-off roofs, downed power lines, blown-out windows, and dozens of trees ripped from the ground.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said he’d received a report Thursday morning of the first American fatality from Laura, a 14-year-old girl from Vernon Parish who died when a tree fell on her home. Edwards later said a total of four people in his state have died — all as a result of fallen trees. Laura was also responsible for at least 23 deaths in Haiti and the Dominican Republic earlier this week.

There has been no official word of other injuries or deaths in the US since the storm made landfall. What we know is that about 20 million people reside in the path of the storm and 500,000 have been ordered to evacuate, a task complicated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

And so far, more than 740,000 homes and businesses are without power in Texas and Louisiana.

Louisiana and Texas residents were warned the storm surge could be “unsurvivable”

As a Category 4 hurricane, Laura reportedly became the strongest storm on record to make landfall along the western Louisiana and northern Texas coast. Although the storm has weakened since moving inland, prompting its downgrade from hurricane status, it is still sustaining winds of 52 mph.

Hurricane-force winds can cause normally dry areas near the coast to be flooded by rising waters. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) predicted that this phenomenon, referred to as “storm surge,” could result in up to 20 feet of flooding in places within 40 miles of shoreline where Laura made landfall, rendering some areas “unsurvivable” and resulting in “catastrophic damage.” However, it appears as if a slight change in wind direction may have spared the worst-hit areas from the feared 20-foot surge.

The NHC said Thursday the worst of the initial storm surge hit communities directly east of Cameron, which are experiencing surge of around 9 feet.

Some meteorologists, however, warn against jumping to premature conclusions about the extent of storm surge from Hurricane Laura, considering the limited number of data points currently available.

Heavy rain is also predicted to be widespread across the west-central Gulf Coast, with 5 to 10 inches falling over a broad area, and up to 18 inches locally. And this rain is expected to result in flash flooding throughout the region.

Click Here:

After making landfall Thursday morning, Laura tracked north across Louisiana throughout the day, and its center is expected to move into Arkansas overnight. The storm will then move through the Tennessee Valley and the mid-Atlantic from Friday into Saturday. As of now, the NHC predicts the storm will continue to give off heavy rain and sustain winds between 30 and 40 mph.

One of the most powerful storms in US history

Meteorologists categorize hurricanes based on the intensity of storms’ maximum sustained winds:

• Category 1: 74-95 mph (a storm with winds below 74 mph is classified as a “tropical storm,” and below 38 mph is a “tropical depression”)
• Category 2: 96-110 mph
• Category 3: 111-129 mph
• Category 4: 130-156 mph
• Category 5: 157 mph or higher

Laura’s 150 mph winds at landfall made it a Category 4 hurricane and one of the most powerful in US history — as powerful as Hurricane Charley in 2004 and slightly less powerful than Hurricane Michael in 2018, but far more powerful than Hurricane Katrina (which clocked in at 125 mph at landfall) in 2005.

These categorizations are important in terms of assessing potential damage to life and property. From 1900 to 2005, US hurricanes that clocked in at category 3, 4, and 5 at landfall have been responsible for 85 percent of total hurricane damage, despite making up around a quarter of total hurricanes. That’s because relatively small changes in wind speeds can lead to exponentially more damage. For instance, hurricanes like Laura that make landfall at around 150 mph cause, on average, 256 times more damage than hurricanes less than half their speed, at 75 mph, would.

But wind speed alone doesn’t determine how deadly a hurricane will be. As my colleagues Brian Resnick and Eliza Barclay explain, storm surge, the coastal flooding that occurs when a storm’s winds push water onshore several feet above the normal tide, is particularly dangerous. Severe storm surge — like that expected with Laura — can trap people in their homes, wash away houses, and make rescue missions harrowing and slow.

So far, we don’t know what the damage from Tropical Storm Laura will be, but we do have reference points. Hurricane Rita, which hit the same area as Laura in 2005, produced up to 15 feet of storm surge, had Category 3 winds of 115 mph, and resulted in 97 to 125 deaths and $18.5 billion in damage. By comparison, Laura made landfall with Category 4 winds of 150 mph and is predicted to produce up to 20 feet of storm surge.

A record season for hurricanes

Laura is the 12th of as many as 25 named storms that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has predicted would form this hurricane season (which lasts from June 1 to November 30); seven to 11 of those storms, including Laura, were expected to become hurricanes. If NOAA’s predictions are correct, this will be a record-breaking season for hurricanes.

“This is one of the most active seasonal forecasts that NOAA has produced in its 22-year history of hurricane outlooks. NOAA will continue to provide the best possible science and service to communities across the Nation for the remainder of hurricane season to ensure public readiness and safety,” said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the agency. “We encourage all Americans to do their part by getting prepared, remaining vigilant, and being ready to take action when necessary.”

There are a few explanations for this record-breaking season, but chief among them are the above-average sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea, particularly in the region between West Africa and the Leeward Islands, which tends to be a prime development region for hurricanes.

These warmer-than-average waters are, in part, the result of climate change. A new study published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a group of NOAA and University of Wisconsin Madison researchers found that from 1979 to 2017, the odds that a given tropical cyclone would become a Category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane increased about 8 percent per decade as the planet has warmed.

This finding builds on lots of previous research — like multiple academic studies demonstrating that Hurricane Harvey’s record-blasting rains were likely amplified by climate change.

“We’ve just increased our confidence of our understanding of the link between hurricane intensity and climate change,” James Kossin, the lead author of the new study, told the Washington Post. “We have high confidence that there is a human fingerprint on these changes.”

In other words, Laura might be the most recent of the major hurricanes to reach US shores, but it certainly won’t be the last.

How to follow Tropical Storm Laura:

• The National Hurricane Center provides updates every few hours, with projections and important warnings. Take a look here.
• The National Hurricane Center’s Twitter account has similar updates, as well as the latest on forecast changes and public safety concerns.
• Meteorologist and journalist Eric Holthaus has compiled a Twitter list of weather experts that’s a valuable repository of forecasts, data, and useful information on hurricanes in general.

Correction, August 26: An earlier version of this story misstated the relative strength of Hurricanes Michael and Charley.

---

New goal: 25,000

In the spring, we launched a program asking readers for financial contributions to help keep Vox free for everyone, and last week, we set a goal of reaching 20,000 contributors. Well, you helped us blow past that. Today, we are extending that goal to 25,000. Millions turn to Vox each month to understand an increasingly chaotic world — from what is happening with the USPS to the coronavirus crisis to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work — and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world. Contribute today from as little as $3.

President Donald Trump’s speech on Thursday — and the events surrounding the Republican National Convention in general — at times came off as a celebration: a series of rhetorical monuments to a president who, based on what he and his supporters said, had triumphantly carried America through one of its best periods.

It’s an image that’s been hard to reconcile with Trump’s actual record. Under Trump, the economy is tanking. The country is in the throes of widespread unrest, as Black Lives Matter protests and related riots continue. The murder rate in large cities has spiked, and the opioid epidemic continues.

And more than 180,000 Americans have so far died from Covid-19.

The contradiction was perfectly captured by this photo posted on Twitter by USA Today reporter Matt Brown, in which protesters pointing out America’s massive Covid-19 death toll stood in front of the Republican convention’s fireworks show:

It’s a moment that encapsulates what amounted to a week of gaslighting on Covid-19 by Trump and the Republican convention — an attempt to make America think that a president who had so clearly failed had in fact won a victory for the US.

Experts, and the data, tell a very different story than what Trump tried to suggest.

For one, Trump’s performance on Covid-19 really has been a disaster. When the coronavirus first reached America, Trump was slow to react, instead suggesting that the virus would suddenly disappear “like a miracle.” Once states began locking down, Trump pushed them to reopen too early and too quickly — to “LIBERATE” themselves from economic calamity. His administration was slow to expand the US’s testing capacity, instead punting the issue to local, state, and private actors. As his administration suggested people wear masks in public, Trump said it was a personal choice, refused to wear a mask himself, and claimed people wear masks to spite him. Instead of offering calm, collected messaging during a crisis, Trump was erratic — at one point musing about people injecting bleach to treat Covid-19.

The result: America stands out as the one developed country, with the possible exception of Spain, that not only failed to prevent a massive coronavirus outbreak when it first arrived in the spring, but has continued to struggle deep into the summer. So while many other developed nations, from Germany to South Korea, see their lives inch back to normal, America continues to see high numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths.

It’s a uniquely bad position, as this chart of Covid-19 deaths in developed nations shows:

That failure on Covid-19 “begins in many ways, and you could argue it ends in many ways, with the Trump administration,” Ashish Jha, faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told me. “If George W. Bush had been president, if John McCain had been president, if Mitt Romney had been president, this would have looked very different.”

But in a reelection campaign, Trump wants to do everything he can to mask his failure. So we get a strangely celebratory convention when there isn’t much to celebrate in America.

For more on Trump’s failure on Covid-19, read Vox’s full explainer.

---

New goal: 25,000

In the spring, we launched a program asking readers for financial contributions to help keep Vox free for everyone, and last week, we set a goal of reaching 20,000 contributors. Well, you helped us blow past that. Today, we are extending that goal to 25,000. Millions turn to Vox each month to understand an increasingly chaotic world — from what is happening with the USPS to the coronavirus crisis to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work — and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world. Contribute today from as little as $3.

Click Here:

Earth is now in the middle of a mass extinction, the sixth one in the planet’s history, according to scientists.

And now a new study reports that species are going extinct hundreds or thousands of times faster than the expected rate.

The researchers also found that one extinction can cause ripple effects throughout an ecosystem, leaving other species vulnerable to the same fate. “Extinction breeds extinctions,” they write in their June 1 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

With the accelerating pace of destruction, scientists are racing to understand these fragile bits of life before they’re gone. “This means that the opportunity we have to study and save them will be far greater over the next few decades than ever again,” said Peter Raven, a coauthor of the study and a professor emeritus of botany at Washington University in St. Louis, in an email.

The findings also highlight how life can interact in unexpected ways and how difficult it can be to slow ecological destruction once it starts. “It’s similar to climate change; once it gets rolling, it gets harder and harder to unwind,” said Noah Greenwald, the endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity, who was not involved in the study. “We don’t know what the tipping points are, and that’s scary.”

It’s worth pausing to reflect on what “extinction” means: a species completely and forever lost. Each one is an irreparable event, so the idea that they are not only happening more often but also might be sparking additional, related extinctions is startling. And these extinctions have consequences for humanity, from the losses of critical pollinators that fertilize crops to absent predators that would otherwise keep disease-spreading animals in check.

So researchers are now looking closely at which animals are teetering on the edge of existence to see just how dire the situation has become, and to figure out what might be the best way to bring them back.

Hundreds of animals are on the brink of extinction over the next two decades

There is tremendous biodiversity on earth right now. The number of species — birds, trees, ferns, fungi, fish, insects, mammals — is greater than it ever has been in the 4.5 billion-year existence of this planet. But that also means there is a lot to lose.

The new study examined 29,400 species of vertebrates that live on land — mice, hawks, hippos, snakes, and the like. These species from all over the world were cataloged by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Out of those examined, 515 species — 1.7 percent of those studied — were found to be on the brink of extinction, meaning fewer than 1,000 individuals were left alive. These species include the vaquita, the Clarion island wren, and the Sumatran rhino. And half of these 515 species have fewer than 250 individuals left. If nothing is done to protect them, most of them will go extinct over the next 20 years.

But these species on the precipice of the abyss are not spread evenly across the world; they’re concentrated in biodiversity hotspots like tropical rainforests. That makes sense because tropical forests have the most variety of species to begin with and they have the highest rate of habitat destruction. “About two-thirds of all species are estimated to occur in the tropics, and we know less about them than those in other parts of the world,” said Raven. “[Y]et more than one-quarter of all tropical forests have been cut in the 27 years since the ratification of the Convention on Biological Diversity.”

Losing one endangered species can endanger many others

The species teetering on the edge of eternal loss often live alongside other endangered species, even if they are present in greater numbers. The species on the brink then serve as loud sirens of the possible bigger threat to other life in their environs. As species within a pond, forest stand, or watershed die off, others soon follow.

In many cases, species interact with others in complicated and often unforeseen ways that aren’t recognized until they are gone. For example, if a plant-eating insect dies off, the plants it eats could run rampant and choke off other vegetation. Meanwhile, the birds that feed on the insect could be without an important food source. Each of these subsequent changes could have myriad other impacts on distant species, and so on and so on. The disruption can continue until the ecosystem is hardly recognizable.

Scientists have observed these kinds of rippling disruptions in ecosystems for decades in places like the Amazon rainforest, watching what happened when species went extinct in a given area or when a habitat fractured into pieces.

As these ecosystems degrade or collapse, humans stand to lose a lot of functions from nature they take for granted, like forests that generate rainfall for aquifers or mangroves that shield coasts from erosion. Many land vertebrates, for instance, are critical for spreading the seeds of trees. Without them, the makeup of a forest could transform.

Even if a less diverse prairie, forest, or desert were to remain, it would be more vulnerable to shocks like fires and severe weather. Diverse ecosystems act as buffers against environmental extremes, and without them, humans will face more risks of phenomena such as heat waves without vegetation to cool the air, or they may suffer more coastal inundation without mangroves to absorb waves.

And as humans build closer to areas that were once wild, they face higher risks of exposure to threats such as animal-borne disease and wildfire. So the economic and health costs of runaway extinctions could be immense.

Humans are the problem, and humans are the solution

The new study is part of a steady stream of grim news for endangered species. In 2019, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released a massive 1,500-page report on global biodiversity. The report concluded that up to 1 million species are at risk of extinction, including 40 percent of all amphibian species, 33 percent of corals, and about 10 percent of insects.

And a unifying theme among the various studies of extinctions is that humans are to blame.

Through destroying habitats, spreading disease, raising livestock, dumping waste, overharvesting, overfishing, and climate change, the 7.5 billion humans on this planet have become their own force, unlike any that exists in nature.

“We are in no sense simply a part of the global ecosystem anymore, living in a broad, wide world,” said Raven. “[W]e are one species, totally dominant, among the millions of others that exist.”

It’s true that species do go extinct naturally, but the rate of extinction now is thousands of times higher than the expected background rate. It can be difficult to tease out whether an organism disappeared as a direct consequence of human activity or because a species it depended on was wiped out by people, but both types of losses stem from humanity. “We can’t easily reverse the trend but can learn as much as we can in the time we have left,” Raven said.

However, the fact that human activity is driving the vast majority of these extinctions means that changing human activity can help pull back vulnerable species from annihilation.

Conservation policies have already proven effective at thwarting some permanent losses, like the Endangered Species Act in the United States. It’s even spurring the recovery of several species, like the bald eagle. And there is still time to rescue other species that are on the brink. But saving what’s left will require concerted action, and time to act is running out.

“You do not want to get into a deep depression. You want to get involved and do the very easy things we can do to prevent us from destroying the planet,” said Stuart Pimm, a professor of conservation at Duke University and president of Saving Nature, an environmental conservation nonprofit. “The important story is there is a lot we can do about it.”

Since humans are causing most of the destruction that is driving extinctions, humans can change their behaviors in ways to protect life. One of the most effective steps people can use to protect endangered species is to protect the environments where they live, shielding them from mining, drilling, development, and pollution.

“We can definitely make a difference. We can slow the pace of extinction,” Greenwald said. “We know how to do that. We can set aside more area for nature.”

Another tactic is building corridors for connecting fragmented ecosystems, creating larger contiguous areas. That can allow the synergy between species to grow and build a more resilient ecosystem that could better withstand the disappearance of a species and restore those in decline.

However, the threats to so many species have been building for years and they can’t be reversed overnight. It will take a sustained global conservation effort to protect the precious few and restore them to the multitudes that once swam, flew, and walked the earth.

Click Here:

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday announced changes to its guidelines on who should wear a mask during the Covid-19 pandemic and where they should wear it.

The new guidance recommends that the general public wear cloth masks made from at least three layers of fabric “on public transport, in shops, or in other confined or crowded environments.” It also says people over 60 or with preexisting conditions should wear medical masks in areas where there’s community transmission of the coronavirus and physical distancing is impossible, and that all workers in clinical settings should wear medical masks in areas with widespread transmission.

It’s a major update to the agency’s April 6 recommendations, which said members of the general public “only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with Covid-19” or “if you are coughing or sneezing.” And it’s important advice for countries around the world battling the virus, especially those in South America, the Middle East, and Africa, where the rate of Covid-19 transmission appears to be accelerating.

At a WHO press conference on June 3, Michael Ryan, an infectious disease epidemiologist and the executive director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, said WHO still believes that masks should primarily be used “for purposes of source control — in other words, for people who may be infectious, reducing the chances that they will infect someone else.”

And on Friday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus offered a few words of warning as part of the announcement: “Masks can also create a false sense of security, leading people to neglect measures, such as hand hygiene and physical distancing. I cannot say this clearly enough: Masks alone will not protect you from Covid-19.”

But the changes finally bring the WHO in line with many countries around the world that have made masks mandatory in crowded public spaces, including Cuba, France, Cameroon, Vietnam, Slovakia, and Honduras. While it has not made masks a requirement, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has since April 3 suggested “wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.”

Many health experts have wondered why it’s taken this long for the WHO to update its mask guidelines, given the accumulation of evidence that they may be helpful and have few downsides.

Eric Topol, a research methods expert and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, calls WHO’s delay “preposterous.” He adds, “I have great respect for the World Health Organization — but they got the mask story all wrong, and we have lost people because of it.” Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, agrees, saying, “Everyone should be wearing a mask.”

Here’s what the research suggests and why experts think WHO has now revised its guidelines.

Why wear a mask?

The WHO didn’t cite any particular research for its dramatic change, noting only that it “developed this guidance through a careful review of all available evidence and extensive consultation with international experts and civil society groups.”

But there have been a number of recent studies that experts point to as the best evidence for mask use in the general public to reduce Covid-19 transmission. And a growing number of doctors, scientists, and public health experts have been calling for universal masking in indoor public spaces and crowded outdoor spaces.

One meta-review published in Lancet waded through 172 studies on Covid-19, SARS, and MERS, from 16 countries and six continents. Its authors determined that masks — as well as physical distancing and eye protection — helped protect against Covid-19.

The studies reviewed evidence both in health care and non-health care settings and then adjusted the data so they could be directly compared. The researchers found that your risk of infection when wearing a mask was 14 percent less than if you weren’t wearing a mask, although N95 masks “might be associated with a larger reduction in risk” than surgical or cloth masks.

Other literature reviews have not been as favorable. Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, coauthored one such preprint review in early April. “In evidence-based medicine, randomized-controlled trials are supposed to trump observational studies,” he says, “And randomized-controlled trials have all been pretty much negative on face masks in the community.” The Lancet piece, he notes, gives more consideration to observational studies with surgical masks.

A few recent observational studies on mask use by the public in this pandemic, however, support general mask usage to prevent the spread of Covid-19. One from Hong Kong concluded, “mass masking in the community is one of the key measures that controls transmission during the outbreak in Hong Kong and China.” Another concluded that if 80 percent of a population were to wear masks, the number of Covid-19 infections would drop by one-twelfth, or about 8.3 percent, based on observations from several Asian countries where mask-wearing is common.

There’s been some debate over the efficacy of homemade cloth masks and surgical masks (especially compared to N95 masks, which have more evidence behind them) for the general public. But one recent article, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that even cloth masks block some viral particles from escaping.

The general consensus is that masks are better at keeping your viral particles from spreading to others than keeping someone else’s from spreading to you. Catherine Clase, the lead author of the Annals of Internal Medicine piece and an associate professor of medicine at McMaster University, says one study she reviewed found even a single layer of cotton tea towel tested against a virus aerosol reduced transmission of the virus by 72 percent. “One thing to remember,” she says, “is that a mask doesn’t need to be perfect” to bring down the average number of people being infected by one sick person. “It just has to reduce the probability of transmission to some degree.”

William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, notes that previous data on masks and viruses came out of the SARS and MERS epidemics, which involved viruses that weren’t as transmissible. “Masks were thought of then as more personal protection as opposed to community protection,” he said, helping explain why masks weren’t widely regarded as particularly effective.

But with Covid-19, the rate of asymptomatic patients may be as high as 40 percent, requiring a shift in thinking about masks from protecting the wearer to protecting the community. Clase concludes that while cloth masks may not protect you from inhaling someone else’s germs, “the evidence that they reduce contamination [from sick people] of air and surfaces is convincing, and should suffice to inform policy decisions on their use in this pandemic.”

Clase adds, “The pandemic is not going particularly well. So this is probably worth employing now and doing the additional research later.”

Why the WHO may have had trouble reaching consensus on universal masking

The WHO generally does rigorous reviews of evidence, as the whole world’s health rides on their recommendations. This may explain their delay in recommending the general public wear masks.

The agency used to largely base its decisions around expert advice, says Hunter. “They would get together a group, and they would use these experts to drive WHO guidelines.” But in 2007, a Lancet paper criticized the agency for not following evidence-based medicine, which prioritizes randomized controlled trials.

As a result, Hunter says, “WHO went through a major upheaval in its guideline development practices. Now, it has to base its recommendations on systematic reviews,” and its guideline development committees now have methodologists.

“I think [the delay] reflects a general principle often followed by scientists, which is not to change practice until the evidence is strong and definitive,” Trish Greenhalgh, a professor of primary care sciences at the University of Oxford, wrote in an email interview. “Whilst many people (including me) believe that is already the case, some scientists on WHO committees have been waiting for additional evidence to strengthen the case.”

Greenhalgh argued in early April that it was time to apply the precautionary principle to pandemic response and that the public should wear masks “on the grounds that we have little to lose and potentially something to gain.”

But David Heymann, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a member of WHO’s Strategic and Technical Advisory Group for Infectious Hazards (STAG-IH) advisory board, says the agency “is very cautious to only use evidence when we have it. We don’t make any precautionary measures if we don’t have any contributing evidence.”

STAG-IH was asked to look into the evidence for and against mask use in early May and compiled a report for the WHO that was made public on May 25. The finding “supports mask use by the general public in the community to decrease the risk of infection,” the WHO said in a statement to Vox, noting that in updating their guidance, they took the STAG-IH advice into consideration.

Cliff Lane, the clinical director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health and another member of STAG-IH, says the WHO is ”very good at trying to get a diverse set of opinions before making recommendations.” But he admits he doesn’t know why the WHO has timed its recommendations for masks the way it has.

He is one of many experts Vox interviewed who said it’s difficult to conduct a randomized, double-blind controlled study of mask use in the general public. Because of ethics and practicality, “much of the epidemiologic data on the impact is inferred,” he says. This magnifies a general problem he sees: “Any guideline you make does an assessment of risk and benefit, and you want to get as much information as you can.” For example, if wearing a mask provides a sense of false security and encourages people to stop social distancing, then consequences may not be worth it. “It’s not a trivial decision,” he says.

Heymann says the WHO’s delay in recommendation comes in part from needing to consider evidence from around the world. “WHO takes longer because there’s a need to obtain consensus from global experts and inform six regional offices.”

Hunter added that nation-states can make decisions based in part on politics or educated guesses. “But WHO cannot take political decisions like that. It has to try to get consensus opinion among scientists, because people look to WHO to make decisions on hard evidence wherever possible.”

As Heymann sees it, “WHO is just the gold standard. Countries many times are ahead of WHO — there’s no need for them to wait for WHO to make recommendations.”

Topol, on the other hand, says the best reason he can think of for the WHO not recommending everyone wear masks is because of the worry over a global shortage of masks, particularly in the US. Perhaps, he says, “They didn’t want to have masks maldistributed, because of the dire need for, and lack of, PPE for health care personnel.”

But, he adds, “That’s not the reason to say you don’t need masks — that’s the reason to say we desperately need to make masks.”

“The world needs the WHO — and it needs it now more than ever”

The WHO has been under a lot of scrutiny since the beginning of the pandemic. And it recently got worse: At the end of May, President Trump announced that the US would pull out of the WHO altogether, potentially withdrawing a significant portion of the agency’s funding.

But the WHO isn’t alone in being slow to suggest mask use. Countries like Venezuela made masks mandatory on March 14, and the Czech Republic made the move on March 18. But the US CDC also originally recommended against masks for the public, only changing its guidance to universal masking on April 3.

Richard Besser, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and former acting director of the CDC, explains that during an emergency, experts have to look at new information and evaluating decisions. He led the emergency planning and response at the CDC for four years, and says, “When guidance went up, it was always interim. Early on, what you don’t know always exceeds what you do know, and as you learn more, you make changes.”

Sometimes those changes are minor, and sometimes, as in the case of the CDC’s mask guidance, they are significant. “In order for that to make sense to the public, you need to have something that we’re lacking right now: direct communication,” Besser says. “That’s valuable because it engenders trust in settings of crisis, where there are things people should do to protect their health. They’re much more likely to do them if they trust the messenger.”

Unlike the CDC, which has been roundly criticized for its lack of press briefings, the WHO is still holding daily conference calls during the pandemic.

“The WHO, like the CDC, is far from perfect, and is flawed in many ways,” says Gostin, the Georgetown public health law expert. “Having worked with WHO for 30 years, I can say they can be maddeningly bureaucratic and unresponsive. But the world needs the WHO — and it needs it now more than ever.”

Lois Parshley is a freelance investigative journalist and the 2019-2020 Snedden Chair of Journalism at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Follow her Covid-19 reporting on Twitter @loisparshley.

Click Here:

Decades of research paint a clear picture: The No. 1 environmental health risk in the US is soot. Also known as particulate pollution, it is made up of extremely small particles spewed into the air by power generation, industrial processes, and cars and trucks.

There are “coarse particles,” between 2.5 and 10 micrometers in diameter, and “fine particles,” at 2.5 micrometers and smaller. By way of comparison, the average human hair has a diameter of about 70 micrometers.

Research has consistently found that inhaling these particles is incredibly harmful to human physiology, at high concentrations over short periods or low concentrations over extended periods. Particulate pollution is linked to increased asthma, especially among children, along with lung irritation and inflammation, blood clots, heart attacks, weakened immune systems, and, according to a wave of recent research, long-term cognitive impacts (reduced productivity, inability to concentrate, and dementia).

Research is equally consistent on another point: the harms of particulate pollution are not equitably distributed. They fall most heavily on vulnerable populations like children, the elderly, people with preexisting health conditions, low-income people, and, above all, people of color.

A groundbreaking 2019 study from researchers at the Universities of Minnesota and Washington attempted to quantify both sides of particulate pollution, who produces it and who suffers from it. They found that the consumption producing the pollution was concentrated in majority white communities, while exposure to the pollution was concentrated in minority communities.

“On average, non-Hispanic whites experience a ‘pollution advantage’: They experience ∼17% less air pollution exposure than is caused by their consumption,” the study concluded. “Blacks and Hispanics on average bear a ‘pollution burden’ of 56% and 63% excess exposure, respectively, relative to the exposure caused by their consumption.”

To put it more bluntly: People of color are choking on white people’s pollution.

The current regulatory limits on particulate pollution under the Clean Air Act were set in 2012, based on scientific review concluded in 2010. As subsequent science has revealed, they are inadequate to protect public health. That was the strong and unanimous conclusion of the panel of 19 scientists assembled in 2015 to assess the evidence.

Nonetheless, EPA claims the science is not settled and is refusing to tighten the standards, which will mean, on an ongoing basis, well over 10,000 unnecessary deaths in the US every year.

The purported rationale, of this and all the administration’s deregulatory efforts, is to reduce costs to industry. But the costs of pollution don’t disappear when they are removed from industry’s books. They are simply shifted onto the public ledger, in the form of health care costs and lost work days. Lax pollution standards represent an ongoing transfer of costs from industry to the public.

In the case of particulate pollution, the costs are disproportionately borne by black people — who, in part because of the air pollution in their communities, also suffer disproportionately from Covid-19.

Lax particulate pollution standards are, in short, yet another way of devaluing black bodies and black lives, yet another expression of the structural racism that Trump has so effectively flushed to the surface.

How EPA stacked the deck to ignore the science

Particulate pollution is regulated under the Clean Air Act’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) program. The Act mandates that scientists periodically review the latest evidence on air pollution and recommend updates to NAAQS standards as necessary, so that the program stays abreast of the latest science.

The EPA’s seven-member Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) reviews the standards, but because it does not have depth of expertise in all the various subject matters, it typically consults with a panel of outside scientists.

Click Here:

When the latest review of particulate standards began in 2015, such a panel was assembled: the 19-member Particulate Matter Review Panel, made up of experts in epidemiology, physiology, and other relevant disciplines. The review was delayed in getting underway, and Trump’s EPA initially talked about moving the deadline for completion to 2022. But in early 2018, then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt abruptly announced that the agency would rush to be done by December 2020, the tail end of Trump’s first term.

Later in 2018, to “streamline” the review process, newly appointed EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler unceremoniously disbanded the PM Review Panel and left the review in the hands of CASAC — which had, over the previous year, been entirely reconstituted with Trump appointees. It was chaired by an industry consultant; just one of the seven members was a scientist.

The disbanded scientific panel later reconvened and rebranded as the Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel. It went on to issue the same assessments and recommendations it would have offered CASAC.

For fine particles (PM2.5), it recommended reducing the annual average concentration limit from 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air to between 10 and 8, though it noted that “even at the lower end of the range, risk is not reduced to zero.” It recommended reducing the daily exposure limit from 35 to between 30 and 25.

Now, the Independent PM Review Panel has penned an extraordinary piece in The New England Journal of Medicine, excoriating the EPA.

“We unequivocally and unanimously concluded that the current PM2.5 standards do not adequately protect public health,” they write. Ignoring that clear conclusion required serial abuses of the review process, as outlined in this somewhat mind-boggling paragraph:

The dismissal of our review panel is just one of numerous recent ad hoc changes to scientific review of the NAAQS since 2017 that undermine the quality, credibility, and integrity of the review process and its outcome. Other changes include imposing nonscientific criteria for appointing the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee members related to geographic diversity and affiliation with governments, replacing the entire membership of the chartered committee over a period of 1 year, banning nongovernmental recipients of EPA scientific research grants from committee membership while allowing membership for persons affiliated with regulated industries, ignoring statutory requirements for the need for a thorough and accurate scientific review of the NAAQS in setting a review schedule, disregarding key elements of the committee-approved Integrated Review Plan, reducing the number of drafts of a document for committee review irrespective of whether substantial revision of scientific content is needed, commingling science and policy issues, and creating an ad hoc “pool” of consultants that fails to address the deficiencies caused by dismissing the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee PM Review Panel.

That is … a lot. “It’s not surprising [CASAC] would retain the standards,” Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Washington Post, “because they broke the process.”

The chair of CASAC, Tony Cox — who has worked as a consultant for energy and chemical industry trade groups — contends that the particulate science doesn’t hold up. In the end, CASAC ignored the panel’s work and recommended that the standards be kept where they are.

The 60-day comment period on the new rule ends on June 29; there is no sign that the vast number of critical comments and submissions to EPA will change Wheeler’s mind.

Once the rule is put into effect, it will immediately face lawsuits. Given how shoddy the process has been and how clearly the results fly in the face of consensus science, it is unlikely to hold up in court. Like many of the Trump administration’s hastily executed regulatory rollbacks, it will likely end up quietly rejected — in the end, less an enduring victory than a flashy nationalist pageant that merely delays inevitable changes.

If it is rejected, it will go back to EPA for another rulemaking process that will take years. In the meantime, tens of thousands of people, disproportionately people of color, will needlessly get sick and die.

Black people are most likely to suffer the effects of soot

It is well known that the harms of pollution are inequitably distributed. Like so many social harms, they fall hardest on the most vulnerable.

That means people with weak or compromised immune systems, like children, the elderly, or people with preexisting respiratory or circulatory problems. And it also means people who happen to live close to the industrial facilities and highways that produce the pollution, typically low-income communities and communities of color. Black people fall disproportionately into both those categories, with high rates of preexisting conditions and high likelihood of living proximate to pollution sources.

A 2018 study by EPA scientists, published in the American Journal of Public Health, attempted to quantify the disparities in pollution exposure down to the county level. It found that, for PM2.5 pollution, “those in poverty had 1.35 times higher burden than did the overall population, and non-Whites had 1.28 times higher burden. Blacks, specifically, had 1.54 times higher burden than did the overall population.” These results held steady across the country.

This illustrates that the impact of pollution on the black population can not be reduced to geography or economic status. It “should be considered in conjunction with existing health disparities,” the study says. “Access to health care has well-documented disparities by race/ethnicity, and the prevalence of certain diseases is notably higher in non-White populations.” In other words, the pollution burden should be considered in the context of systemic racism.

Another recent study, focused on Texas, found that “the percentage of Black population and median household income are positively associated with excess emissions; percentage of college graduate, population density, median housing value, and percentage of owner-occupied housing unit are negatively associated with excess emissions.”

These studies are consonant with a long history of research — see here, here, here, and here — showing that air pollution reflects and reproduces wider income and racial disparities. The poor suffer; minorities suffer; black people suffer most of all.

Trump’s environmental policies reinforce structural racism

Inequitable distribution of pollution is as old as industrial society. The Clean Air Act was meant, in part, to address that injustice, to secure healthy air for every American. And despite its flaws and failings, it has been, among other things, one of the most effective environmental justice policies in US history. Just as pollution hurts people of color most, reducing it helps them most.

Emission of the six big pollutants — particles, ozone, lead, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide — declined an average of 73 percent between 1970 and 2017. Fine particle concentrations fell by 43 percent between 2000 and 2019.

The Clean Air Act has accomplished this much because it is not a static law but a living, evolving set of policy tools. It has scientific reviews built in every few years, so that the level of public protection keeps up with the latest evidence. Scholars call this “green drift,” as the landmark environmental laws of the 1970s continue updating, even in the face of some hostile administrations.

Trump’s is the most hostile yet, working overtime to gum up the Clean Air Act and blunt its effectiveness. It goes beyond weakened standards for particulates, mercury, methane, and fuel economy.

There’s the “Transparency in Regulatory Science” (or “secret science”) rule, which would prohibit EPA from considering a broad swathe of the epidemiological research that supports particulate rules. There’s the effort to alter EPA cost-benefit analysis to exclude consideration of “cobenefits.” Many rules reducing other pollutants — mercury and CO2, for example — are justified in part by the fact that they also reduce particulates, which substantially adds to their health benefits. Excluding cobenefits is a way to justify weakening a whole range of other air-quality standards.

EPA is doing as much as it can to dismantle, weaken, or delay Clean Air Act protections before the end of Trump’s first term. The typical framing of these moves is that Trump is doing them on behalf of industry and that they are hurting “the environment,” or, worse, “the planet” (ugh).

There’s another way to frame them: They are expressions of structural racism, America’s long history of exploiting people of color for their labor while rewarding them with deprivation, marginalization, and ill health. Just as black people are often denied police protection while subjected to police violence, they are often denied the wealth and consumption that produce pollution while subjected to the health ravages of inhaling it.

Science-based air quality standards are one way to ease the burdens imposed on black bodies. The Trump administration’s staunch opposition to those standards, its attempts to undermine the bureaucratic machinery that produces them, is just one more expression of its disregard for black lives.

Several states are now seeing a surge in new Covid-19 coronavirus infections and hospitalizations. And the states with more alarming outbreaks — Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, and Tennessee — generally saw few cases early in the pandemic.

Many of these states have started to relax the restrictions on movement, businesses, and public gatherings that were meant to control the spread of Covid-19. But with infections rising, there will be more illnesses, deaths, and financial hardships for people who have already suffered immensely from this pandemic.

If cases continue to rise and threaten to overwhelm the health system, officials may be faced with a daunting prospect: another round of shutdowns, requiring businesses that have reopened to close, public gatherings to be banned again, and stay-at-home orders to go back in effect.

Some local officials are already talking about this possibility. The city of Houston, Texas, for instance, is weighing another stay-in-place order. (It may ultimately be prohibited from having stricter rules than the state government.)

Thanks to several studies, including two recent scientific papers in the journal Nature, there’s now more certainty these measures dramatically lower the case count and save lives. However, the shutdowns also drove a massive spike in unemployment and caused huge social strains as people were forced to stay apart.

Asked about the prospect of further lockdowns, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Science Friday last week it depends on how well other public health strategies are deployed.

“Whether those infections turn into a real resurgence of infections and a rebound will depend on how effectively we’re able to identify, isolate, and contact trace,” Fauci said.

Other public health experts are debating the viability of additional lockdowns, noting it may be harder for leaders to muster the political will for them now, and that citizens may be less likely to comply with them.

What’s clear is that it will be difficult to get quick, satisfying results from shutdowns at this stage of the pandemic. And while there are other ways to protect public health that don’t require such sacrifices from the public, they require investment, coherent public messaging, and political will. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear every state has these elements in place.

The US is in a much different place than it was at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic

The United States is now the epicenter of Covid-19, with 2.16 million confirmed cases and 118,000 deaths as of June 16.

This growth is evident in states like Arizona, now a hot spot for the virus with daily cases climbing rapidly in the last two weeks. Will Humble, former director of the Arizona Department of Health Services, said the shutdowns worked when they were implemented on March 31. Arizonans largely complied with stay-at-home orders. Businesses closed. People maintained social distance.

But there was little transmission at that point. “The first stay-at-home order was done when we just had a couple hundred cases a day,” Humble said. Then on May 15, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey allowed the order to expire, replacing it with an executive order that suggested guidelines for how people should behave, but no enforcement. It’s likely that this relaxation contributed to the rise in cases.

“We’re blowing the doors off now with 1,500. … We’d be going into a stay-at-home order under very different circumstance than back in April,” Humble said.

A reimposition of shutdown measures at this point, if they were obeyed, would still reduce the number of new infections. But that reduction would be in proportion to a higher baseline. New cases would drop, but it would take much longer to reach the levels seen after the first round of shutdowns.

When starting from a higher number of cases, there is more transmission baked in. For instance, there will likely be more cases of household spread among family members under a stay-at-home order. And when there are a higher number of overall infections, there are likely to be even more undetected infections that may continue to worsen the pandemic.

And as states saw during their first brush with shutdowns, it can take a while for pandemic control policies to show up in the data. “We can expect those lags and timings would operate in a similar way,” said Joshua Salomon, a professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine who studies disease models and public health interventions. “It takes a few weeks after you change people’s interactions and contacts for that to translate into a reduction in the number of cases.”

Perhaps the biggest unknown for a second shutdown is how well people will adhere to the orders. Already, people in some parts of the country are gathering en masse, flocking to reopened businesses, and flouting guidance to wear masks in public places.

“We are starting to notice a lot of people across South Carolina are not doing the social distancing or not avoiding group gatherings and wearing masks in public the way, especially, that they were earlier on,” Brannon Traxler, the physician consultant for the South Carolina state health department, told ABC News. Public officials are also facing intense political pressure to ease restrictions.

Hannah Druckenmiller, a doctoral student at the University of California Berkeley, co-authored a recent paper looking at the effectiveness of shutdown measures. She and her team found that across the US, such tactics averted 4.8 million more confirmed cases of Covid-19 and up to 60 million infections in total.

But the results also showed that these policies had different effects in different parts of the world because some governments took the policies more seriously than others.

“This is likely a result of the fact that populations have different cultures and governments enforced the policies to varying degrees,” said Druckenmiller, in an email. “One interpretation of this result is that if a second round of lockdowns was less strictly enforced and had lower levels of compliance, these containment measures may not be as effective as they were in March and April.”

With states taking so many different approaches to the pandemic, however, the US is likely to experience a patchwork of different outcomes from further school closures, public gathering bans, and shelter-in-place orders.

There are alternatives to shutdowns, but the US hasn’t invested in them enough

Economic and social shutdowns are effective, but they’re expensive. They weren’t meant to stay in place indefinitely, but were aimed at slowing the spread of the virus to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed with patients.

The more targeted strategy for containing Covid-19 is testing, tracing, and isolation. With a robust system of testing, health officials can identify people who are infected and spreading the disease, even before they feel sick. Then they can trace the contacts of the infected to test other people who may have been exposed. And the people who test positive can be directed to isolate themselves. All the while, the general public should maintain social distance and minimize exposure as they take calculated risks in going about their lives.

Such an approach would break the chain of transmission of the virus. It would also only require a handful of people to stay home rather than large swaths of the population. But it demands a lot of infrastructure to deploy tests and trace contacts, and it takes time to set up.

“Shutdowns really had two goals. One was to stop the uncontrolled spread, which they did,” said Salomon. “The other was to try to buy us time to set up the public health infrastructure to do testing and tracing and isolation at scale. And we really failed to make use of that time.”

Another round of closures and stay-at-home orders could still be availed to build up the testing and tracing capacity. The more testing and tracing is available, the less strict shutdowns need to be. And building a system for testing millions of people would still be cheaper than an indefinite pause of the economy.

At this point in the pandemic, public health officials also have a better understanding of the spectrum of risk for the virus. Rather than issuing blanket orders to stay home, more nuanced guidance about what kinds of public spaces are safe and what precautions are necessary could ease the acceptance of pandemic control measures. But that requires careful and nuanced public messaging, and given the mixed messages the public has received on tactics like wearing masks, health officials would have to rebuild trust.

“What we really want to do is get as much benefit as we can from lockdowns in a way that’s more targeted and doesn’t demand as much sacrifice,” Salomon said. He added that policies like paid sick leave and building up work-from-home capabilities would also be important steps to helping people avoid unnecessary exposure to Covid-19.

As for when states can relax, that remains a fraught question. Some of the guidelines from the federal government for reopening have been confusing, and some states have gone ahead and established their own.

More recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out a list of best practices to reduce Covid-19 risk as shutdowns relax. Measures include wearing masks and maintaining distance from other people.

However, with cases spiking in several states, it may still be too soon to think about relaxing, and efforts may still be needed for containment. But with the most blunt yet effective public health tool losing strength, it’s more urgent than ever to fight the pandemic without such drastic measures.

Click Here:

When states had strict stay-at-home orders and lockdowns in place, many decisions about the risk of getting the coronavirus were simple. People didn’t have to think about whether dining in a restaurant is safe if the restaurant was closed.

Now, that states are opening up — with varying degrees of precautions and adherence in place — individuals will need to weigh some risks on their own.

It isn’t easy; information about what’s safe, and what’s not, can be contradictory and confusing. A state may allow restaurants to reopen and concerts to resume, but should you really go? Is it safer if people are only allowed to dine outside?

The hunger for guidance is clear: On May 6, infectious disease expert Erin Bromage posted a blog post summarizing the evidence of coronavirus transmission risks, and 17 million people have since read it, he says. The CDC didn’t post its own updated guidance for individuals and events venturing out into a post-lockdown world until June 12. Perhaps a bit too late, as new cases and hospitalizations are currently rising in several states.

As Bromage conveys, the scientific understanding of how the virus transmits in public is improving. Contact tracing studies around the world have taken a magnifying glass to the “superspreading” events, where one person ends up infecting dozens of others. These studies shine a light on the key risk factors that create dangerous situations.

From these studies, one thing is clear: The main way people are getting sick with SARS-CoV-2 is from respiratory droplets spreading between people in close quarters. The risk of catching the coronavirus, simply put, “is breathing in everybody’s breath,” says Charles Haas, an environmental engineer at Drexel University. Droplets fly from people’s mouths and noses when they breathe, talk, or sneeze. Other people can breathe them in. That’s the main risk, and that’s why face masks are an essential precaution (they help stop the droplets from spewing far from a person’s mouth or nose).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) emphasizes the risk of close contact over other modes of transmission. “The virus does not spread easily in other ways,” the CDC writes. It’s still possible that a person can catch it from touching a contaminated surface (more on that below.). But it’s “not thought to be the main way the virus spreads,” the CDC states.

As Bromage put it in his piece, “We know most people get infected in their own home,” from housemates or family members who caught the virus in the community.

So how can we assess the risk of going places outside the home?

The story is a little more complicated than the simple “stay 6 feet away” guidelines. Coronavirus risk is simply not one-dimensional. We need to think about risk in four dimensions: distance to other people, environment, activity, and time spent together.

Let’s walk through them.

A simple suggestion: Imagine people are smoking, or farting really bad, and try to avoid breathing it in

It’s easy to get into the weeds talking about the risk of catching and spreading the coronavirus as people reenter communal spaces in society. We can talk about the number of viral-laden droplets expelled by a single breath (a lot, perhaps 100 or more), by a person talking (10 times more than breathing), about how far a sneeze can propel those droplets (much farther than 6 feet), how long those viral droplets linger in the air (around eight to 14 minutes, at least in a controlled indoor lab setting).

But really, what all this means is that the greatest Covid-19 risk is being around breathing, laughing, coughing, sneezing, talking, people.

It’s still hard to visualize the risk, though, as the respiratory droplets are invisible to our eyes.

Perhaps helpful: Imagine everyone is smoking, as Ed Yong reported in the Atlantic, and you’d like to avoid inhaling as much smoke as possible. In a cramped indoor space, that smoke is going to get dense and heavy fast. If the windows are open, some of that smoke will blow away. If fewer people are in the space, less smoke will accumulate, and it might not waft over to you if you’re standing far enough away. But spend a lot of time in an enclosed space with those people, and the smoke grows denser.

The denser the smoke, the more likely it is to affect you. It’s the same with this virus: The more of it you inhale, the more likely you are to get sick.

An alternative image to thinking about this risk: “With my kids, I just sort of joke around that if you can smell their farts, you need to move farther apart,” Bromage says. So if not smoking, imagine everyone is farting. Keep this in mind and surely you’ll realize outdoor activities are better than indoor ones. “This tells you the gradient of risk,” Bromage says. “The closer you are, the more it’s gonna smell, the more dangerous it is.“

At a barbecue, you can still imagine being close enough to people to smell their farts. So even in outdoor spaces, we need to limit our contacts.

A crowded indoor place, then, with poor ventilation, filled with people talking, shouting, or singing for hours on end will be the riskiest scenario. A sparsely populated indoor space with open windows is less risky (but not completely safe). Running quickly past another jogger outside is on the other end of the spectrum; minimal risk.

There are many scenarios in between. “In general, outdoors is lower risk,” Muge Cevik, a physician and virology expert at the University of St. Andrews, says. But “if you have a gathering or a barbecue outside, and you spent all day together with your friends, your risk is still higher.”

What recent contact tracing studies can teach us about risk

Scientists pointed out a few recent contact tracing studies that nicely illustrate the dimensions of Covid-19 risk.

In China, 8,437 shoppers and employees of a supermarket were tracked in late January after one of the employees was confirmed positive with Covid-19 while working in the store.

The risk for infection was much higher for the workers than for the shoppers. Around 9 percent of the supermarket employees (11 out of 120 employees) got sick as a result. But just 0.02 percent of the shoppers (2 out of 8,224 shoppers) got sick.

What does this show?

The employees are at a much larger risk due to the time they spent working in the store. Both the employees and shoppers were in the same physical space, but their risk was not the same. (The study did not note whether the shoppers and customers were wearing masks in the store.) The employees may have interacted more with their colleagues, but they also had a greater chance of breathing in the virus.

What we should learn from this: If we have to spend time with people indoors, try to make it quick.

Another recent study out of China investigated an outbreak that started at a Buddhist temple event.

Two buses brought people to the function. On one of the buses, there was a person who later tested positive for the coronavirus who had not yet started to feel symptoms. The other bus was free of infected people.

Both buses brought people to the same temple, where they mixed and mingled outdoors*. But who was most at risk of getting sick? Those who rode the bus with the infected person. Twenty-four out of 67 people on that bus got sick. No one on the other bus did. The event was attended by another 172 people who arrived by other transportation. Only seven of these people got sick.

The lesson? The confines of a bus are a much riskier environment for viral spread than a larger outdoor space, like at the temple. The risk at the temple was not zero. But it was much reduced compared to the confines of the bus. And it appears those who were exposed at the temple were in close contact with the infected person.

“When you look at public transport, work spaces, restaurants — places where we’re just trying to fit many people in a small confined space — respiratory viruses like those spaces,” Cevik says. It’s “just common sense.”

There’s no set time that’s safe to be in these places. “Generally, for droplet transmission, we say 15 minutes,” Cevik says. “So if you spend 15 minutes face to face with somebody, you’re close contact [and at high risk], but that doesn’t mean if you spend 14 minutes your risk is zero.” And if you have to choose between a big open indoor space and a smaller one, choose the larger one, where people can spread out.

It’s not just the location or the time spent together: The activity people are engaged in matters, too.

In Washington state, a person with the virus attended a choir practice, and more than half of the other singers subsequently got sick. This was labeled a “superspreading” event, as one infection led to 32 others. Why was this so risky?

“The superspreading event is about the behavior of the person involved,” Cevik says. There are many reasons why a person could become a “superspreader”: Some people shed more of the virus than others, and it appears people shed most of it when they are just starting to feel symptoms.

But what made this event so risky was the convergence of many risk factors: the singing activity (during which the infected person released viral particles into the air), the time spent together (the practice was 2.5 hours), and the interaction between the choir members in an enclosed space (not only did they all practice together, they also split up into smaller groups and shared cookies and tea).

In a new paper published by CDC, researchers in Japan identified 61 clusters (five or more cases stemming from a common event) of Covid-19 cases. The researchers found most commonly the clusters originated in health care facilities. But outside of that they note “many Covid-19 clusters were associated with heavy breathing in close proximity, such as singing at karaoke parties, cheering at clubs, having conversations in bars, and exercising in gymnasiums,” the scientists wrote.

Notably, too, were the ages of the people who instigated spread outside of the health care settings. “Half … were 20–39 years of age,” the report finds. Which is a reminder: younger people can catch the virus, survive, but at the same time spread it to others who may die from it.

What about touching something with infected droplets? Is that still a risk?

According to the CDC, the coronavirus does not often spread from people touching surfaces. That is, if someone with Covid-19 touches a hand railing, does that make that hand railing dangerous for other people to touch? The CDC is now saying that such events are not a huge risk for Covid-19 transmission.

But, there’s a catch: It is still the case that surface transmission is possible. Scientists believe the virus can remain viable on a hard, non-porous surface like plastic or steel for around three days, and a rough surface like cardboard for about a day. You could, conceivably, touch a contaminated surface, and then touch your face, and get sick. (The good news is that even though some virus can remain on a surface for a day or more, the amount of virus on a given surface drops by half after several hours, and then continues dropping.)

Bromage cautions it’s just really hard to study surface transmission. In contact tracing studies, it’s much easier to ask people who they’ve been in contact with than to have them remember every surface they’ve touched.

“I agree with this [CDC] statement,” Cevik says, agreeing that surfaces aren’t the most significant mode of transmission. “But this does not mean it does not happen.” Cevik points me to a contact tracing study that suggests (with a good deal of uncertainty) that some people caught the infection in a mall via the restroom. “Bottom line,” she says, “it’s still important to maintain personal hygiene and wash hands.”

Also consider how scientists recently found live Covid-19 virus in feces. So good bathroom hygiene is still as important as ever.

There are no magic numbers to eliminate risk

It would be great if there were very specific numbers and guidelines we could follow to minimize coronavirus risk to zero.

But there aren’t. While 6 feet away from another person, it’s not like the virus will immediately decide to drop dead. That’s why we need to think of risk in terms of many dimensions: so we can each think critically and not fall back on rules that are too simplified.

“When I first said restaurants were risks, people interpreted that as ‘every restaurant is a risk,’” Bromage says. “Each restaurant has its own unique environment, its own unique challenges that need to be worked out. If you’ve got a large open-seating area, and you can open up the windows and doors … the risk there is much lower than a boutique restaurant with five tables that creates that really intimate atmosphere.”

When we venture out into the world, we need to remember we can reduce risk, but never eliminate it.

“Wearing a mask is not going to completely reduce your risk, hand-washing is not going to completely reduce your risk, and staying a distance away from people in an enclosed space is not going to completely reduce your risk,” Haas, the Drexel professor, says. “But the concurrent use of all those strategies will hopefully reduce your risk down to a lower level. We can never get to zero. There’s no such thing as zero risk.”

And we still need more data, and follow-up on potential exposures. A hair salon in Missouri made headlines when a couple of their hair stylists were reportedly back at work after testing positive for Covid-19. Both hairdressers wore masks, and so did their clients, and a follow-up investigation by their county health department revealed no new infections among the 140 clients they saw.

This data point is a bit anecdotal. “I think they got lucky,” Bromage says. “But it does highlight the importance of masks.” Perhaps more data will reveal that getting a haircut while everyone is wearing a mask is a low-risk activity.

Contact tracing studies have taught us a lot so far. But as of now, most of this work has been done in Asian countries, which may have different expectations around mask-wearing, among other differences.

“Contact tracing, testing, isolating — these are the building blocks to understand where the transmission is occurring,” Cevik says. And the more we learn, the more power we have to stop the spread of this pandemic.

*This piece was updated to clarify the temple event occured outdoors.

Click Here:

The search for life in our solar system got a lot more exciting this week. On Monday, a team of scientists announced its members had detected phosphine gas in the caustic, hot atmosphere of Venus. So what? The gas — which you’d recognize by its fishy odor — is thought to be a byproduct of life.

“We did exhaustively search through all known chemistry … and we didn’t find anything that could produce more than the tiniest amount of phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere,” says MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager, who was one of the co-authors on the discovery published in Nature Astronomy, says. That leaves us two possibilities: The gas was created by life or by some chemical interaction scientists don’t yet know about.

Seager is one of the leading dreamers and thinkers in astronomy, looking for life beyond our planet. She studies planets orbiting stars many light-years away and thinks about how to detect life on them and others closer to home, like Venus.

She’s also thinking creatively about the microscopic life forms that could potentially survive there. This summer, before the phosphine announcement, she and her co-authors published a speculative, hypothetical sketch of what life on Venus could look like. The vision is beautiful: a living rain of microbes floating, cyclically, in the clouds, blooming and desiccating continually for millions of years.

I wanted to hear more about this vision of life in a world so very different from our own, so I called her up.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Evidence for life on the planet next door
Brian Resnick

To start off: What’s the gist of the discovery that you and the team announced this week?

Sara Seager

We aren’t claiming we found signs of life. We are claiming we have a robust detection of the gas phosphine in the atmosphere.

[After searching] all the known chemistry — volcanoes, photochemistry, lightning — we didn’t find anything that could produce more than the tiniest amount of phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere. So we’re left with two possibilities. One is that there is some kind of unknown chemistry, which seems unlikely. And the other possibility is that there’s some kind of life, which seems even more unlikely. So that’s where we’re at. It took a long time to accept it.

Brian Resnick

Okay, so it’s very unlikely. Has Venus historically been thought of as a place life might exist in the solar system?

Sara Seager

It’s been fringe pretty much the whole time that it’s been a topic. Carl Sagan first proposed there could be life in [Venus’s] clouds. There is a small group [of scientists] that writes about this topic. A lot of people love it. It’s like a closeted love because a lot of people are enthusiastic about it, but they either didn’t want to say so or they never had a reason to say so.

Brian Resnick

What do they love about it?

Sara Seager

I think it’s just the intrigue that there could be life so close to home.

[Venus is closer to Earth than Mars. It’s also the second-brightest object in our night sky, other than the moon.]

Why life would have to exist in Venus’s clouds, not on the surface

Brian Resnick

As I understand it, if life exists on Venus, it wouldn’t be on the surface of the planet, but in its sulfuric acid clouds?

Sara Seager

It’s always been the theory because the surface is too hot for complex molecules.

Brian Resnick

What is too hot? What happens there?

Sara Seager

Molecules break apart. If you took a protein or an amino acid, or anything, and put it in high temperature, it would come apart into smaller fragments and atoms.

Brian Resnick

Why, then, is the atmosphere a better place to look for life?

Sara Seager

It has the things that astrobiologists think life needs. It needs a liquid of some kind. And there is liquid in the atmosphere, although it is liquid sulfuric acid.

Life needs an energy source. So there’s definitely the sun, at least as an energy source. Life needs the right temperature. In the atmosphere, there is the right temperature. And life needs a changing environment to promote Darwinian evolution. So if you want to break it down like that, that’s why. To simplify, it’s mostly the temperature argument. Temperature and liquid.

Brian Resnick

Do we know of any life form on Earth that can exist in liquid sulfuric acid?

Sara Seager

No, we don’t.

Brian Resnick

What makes it seem possible for life to exist in sulfuric acid?

Sara Seager

We simply don’t know. I think your questions are the next decades of research, basically.

Brian Resnick

How do you even begin to imagine life in such a different world — life that has to live in conditions that would be deadly for any life on Earth?

Sara Seager

It has to be made up of different building blocks than our life is made up of. Our building blocks — like proteins, and amino acids, and DNA — wouldn’t survive in sulfuric acid. Or life has to have found a way to have a protective shell, made of materials that are resistant to sulfuric acid.

The dance of (potential) life on Venus

Brian Resnick

Over the summer, you and your colleagues published a paper speculating on what life on Venus could look like. You describe that it could basically dance in the atmosphere, alternating between an active phase up high and a dormant phase down low. I found it to be kind of beautiful. Can you describe how you came up with this?

Click Here:
Sara Seager

I had to help plug a hole in the concept of life in the atmosphere. That’s where it came from. Life has to live inside the liquid droplets, to be protected from the outside.

But in these droplets — where life is living, reproducing, metabolizing — the droplets would collide and grow.

Over time, like four months or a year or so, the droplets get big enough, so they start settling out of the atmosphere, like rain, but really slowly.

And so my colleagues told me I had to figure out how life could survive. If it all just rains out, it couldn’t stay in the atmosphere for billions of years, or hundreds of millions of years.

Brian Resnick

How did you solve this?

Sara Seager

So I came up with this life cycle idea: as the droplets fall, they evaporate, and we’re left with a dried, spore-like life form. Now that’s not very massive; it stops falling and becomes suspended in a haze layer [lower down in the atmosphere]. And this haze layer is known to exist beneath the clouds of Venus. It’s very stable and long-lived. So the concept is that this haze layer is populated by dried-out spores, which can stay there for days, weeks, months years — and eventually they get updrafted back up to the region that has the right temperature for life, where it can attract liquid, hydrate it, and start their life cycle again.

Brian Resnick

It’s like a living rain, of sorts.

Sara Seager

Right.

Brian Resnick

Why wouldn’t the spore die suspended in that lower layer?

Sara Seager

It’s pretty warm there, so some might die. And this is all just a hypothesis, so it’s not a proven theory or anything, but for this to work, some of them have to live. We have examples on Earth of dried-out spore living a long time.

What it would mean to discover life on Venus
Brian Resnick

Why is it important to do this type of exercise, to be so speculative, and imagine life in a world so seemingly hostile to life?

Sara Seager

If we think about it and couldn’t find any possible way for life to be in the atmosphere indefinitely, that would be bad news for the enthusiasts for life on Venus. Does that make sense?

Brian Resnick

Yeah, if you can’t think of any hypothetical that allows life to survive, it’s hard to make a case to go look for it. Does the life you imagined fit in with in the new discovery of the phosphine gas?

Sara Seager

Yes. Well, it was motivated by the phosphine work.

Brian Resnick

What would it mean to find life on Venus?

Sara Seager

I think it would mean that if there’s life there, it has to be so different from Earth, and that we could show that it had a unique origin. It would just give us confidence that life can originate almost anywhere. And that would mean that our galaxy would be teeming with life. All the planets around other stars. It just sort of ups our thinking that there could be life everywhere.

Brian Resnick

Are you talking about a second genesis of life happening separately on Venus? Or would we have to figure out if there’s a common origin of life in our solar system? That something seeded life on both Earth and Venus?

Sara Seager

We’d have to figure it out.

How to find life on Venus, once and for all
Brian Resnick

What are the next steps, ideally?

Sara Seager

Our ideal next step would be to send a spacecraft or spacecrafts, plural, to Venus, that could involve a probe going into the atmosphere and measuring gases confirming phosphine, looking for other gases, looking for complex molecules that might indicate life, and maybe even searching for life itself.

Brian Resnick

Anyone working on that?

Sara Seager

Rocket Lab had mentioned about a month ago that they were planning to send a rocket to Venus. There are two NASA discovery class missions under a phase A competition [meaning they’re just mission proposals and need to be greenlit]. if they get selected for launch, they will get to go. Russia and India are planning to send something there. And I’ve started to lead a privately funded study. It’s not a mission. It’s just a study of what it would really take.

Brian Resnick

Can we answer this question — is there life on Venus — in our lifetimes?

Sara Seager

I think it is answerable in a human lifetime.

Brian Resnick

Is too much time and money spent on finding life on Mars? Venus seems to be neglected in terms of big NASA missions.

Sara Seager

Well, we don’t have infinite resources, unfortunately, but it sure would be nice to see more spent on Venus. We haven’t explored Venus for a very long time. You’d have to look up when the last time the US went to Venus. [It was the Magellan mission that launched in 1989.]

Brian Resnick

What would you love the public to think about and dwell on with this topic?

Sara Seager

Our solar system, our galaxy, our universe is full of mysteries. We’d like to solve them, but some end up being unsolvable and they just leave us in limbo. So hopefully that’s not going to be the case here.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Friday reversed changes to its Covid-19 testing guidelines, once again recommending that people without symptoms get tested for the coronavirus if they have come into close contact with someone known to be infected.

The CDC’s new guidelines now state, “If you have been in close contact, such as within 6 feet of a person with documented SARS-CoV-2 infection for at least 15 minutes and do not have symptoms. You need a test. … Because of the potential for asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, it is important that contacts of individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection be quickly identified and tested.” It also calls for such people to self-isolate for 14 days, even if the test comes back negative.

Recent guidelines suggested that people without symptoms who have come into close contact with others known to be infected “do not necessarily need a test.” The new guidance, in effect, returns the CDC to a recommendation for more testing.

Public health experts and officials criticized the previous revisions. They noted that people without symptoms can still spread the coronavirus, and, in fact, people may be at greatest risk of spreading the virus before they develop symptoms. For those without symptoms, the test may be the only way to confirm an infection — and, as a result, get people to isolate to stop further spread of the disease.

The previous changes to not recommend testing, however, appeared to be politically motivated. President Donald Trump, arguing that more tests make the US look bad by exposing more Covid-19 cases, previously said that he told his people to “slow the testing down, please.” Media reports confirmed the White House and Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services forced and oversaw the previous changes to recommend less testing — even as CDC officials objected. That fell into broader efforts by the Trump administration to muzzle and warp the CDC to downplay Covid-19 and Trump’s botched response.

The latest revisions to the guidelines amount to the CDC rebuking Trump and his officials’ politically motivated efforts.

Since the start of September, the number of people getting tested for Covid-19 in the US has stalled out and even fallen. Some experts said that the previous revisions to the CDC guidelines were partly to blame.

Testing is crucial to stopping Covid-19 outbreaks. When paired with contact tracing, tests allow officials to isolate the sick, track down close contacts and get them to isolate as well, and deploy other public health measures as necessary. Aggressive testing and tracing were key to controlling Covid-19 outbreaks in other countries, such as Germany and South Korea.

The US, however, has struggled to build up its testing capacity. In the spring, the country was slow to do so due to a mix of federal screw-ups and bureaucratic hurdles, resulting in a “lost month” for confronting Covid-19. In the months after, testing did increase. But then, when cases started to spike nationwide in the summer, there were more testing shortages as some labs reported delays for results as long as weeks. Starting this month, testing appeared to decline again.

The testing failures are one reason the US, which is now nearing 200,000 confirmed Covid-19 deaths, has struggled so much to contain the virus. While the US hasn’t seen the most coronavirus deaths of wealthy nations, it’s in the bottom 20 percent for deaths since the pandemic began, and reports seven times the deaths as the median developed country. If the US had the same death rate as, say, Canada, 115,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.

The recent drop in testing is particularly concerning now: The fall and winter threaten another wave of rising Covid-19 cases — as people return to school, the holidays bring families and friends close together, the cold pushes people into indoor spaces where the virus is more likely to spread, and a flu season looms.

At least with its new guidance, the CDC is pushing for the kind of testing that could help America get control over future outbreaks and, hopefully, prevent them from becoming dire.

Click Here: