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You can get reinfected with Covid-19 but may still have immunity. Let’s explain.

Researchers at the University of Nevada have reported that a 25-year-old man was reinfected in June with SARS-CoV-2, the virus the causes Covid-19. He joins a handful of other confirmed cases of reinfection in people without immune disorders — in Belgium, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Ecuador — where researchers have demonstrated that the genetic signature of the second infection did not match that of the first.

According to a new study on the Nevada case, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, the patient first tested positive in April, and then tested negative for the virus twice. In June, 48 days later, “the patient was hospitalized and tested positive for a second time,” according to the authors, and he experienced severe symptoms. There were major genetic differences between the two infections, suggesting that the patient got the virus twice. (Since then, the patient has recovered.)

The report is in line with what immunity experts have been telling us is possible with this virus: that reinfection is possible and, to some extent, expected, with a coronavirus. But it also shows us how much we still have to learn: about how much protection a single infection can confer, about what exactly a robust long-duration immune response looks like, and about what determines the severity of disease in a second infection.

“Does immunity protect an individual from disease on reinfection?” writes Yale immunobiology researcher Akiko Iwasaki in an accompanying editorial in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. “The answer is not necessarily, because patients from Nevada and Ecuador had worse disease outcomes at reinfection than at first infection.”

The Nevada case is an important finding, since in the two other confirmed cases of reinfection, the patients had mild disease or were asymptomatic. Scientists still don’t know how common reinfection is (it may well be very rare), nor can they determine an individual’s chances of getting infected again.

They do know there are many, many components of our immune system that work together to fight the coronavirus, and immunity doesn’t mean one single thing. And while we’re waiting for scientists to figure it all out, everyone, including those who’ve already had the virus, should still try to avoid getting infected at all.

The new study “strongly suggests that individuals who have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 should continue to take serious precautions when it comes to the virus, including social distancing, wearing face masks, and handwashing,” said Mark Pandori, of the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory at the University of Nevada Reno School of Medicine and lead author of the study, in a statement.

Let’s walk through the basics of immunity, and what we’re learning about reinfection.

There are no simple stories about immunity and Covid-19

The immune system is profoundly complicated, and “immunity” can mean many different things. A lot of this nuance gets lost in headlines about immunity.

For instance: Previous research has shown that neutralizing antibodies — immune system proteins that latch onto pathogens and prevent them from infecting cells — can wane in the months after a Covid-19 infection, particularly when the initial infection was mild. Some wondered if that meant the end of herd immunity hopes.

In the Nevada case, we know that “the patient had positive antibodies after the reinfection, but whether he had pre-existing antibody after the first infection is unknown,” writes Iwasaki.

But what’s often misunderstood is that antibodies are only one component of the immune system, and losing them does not leave a person completely vulnerable to the virus.

In fact, there are several parts of the immune system that may contribute to lasting protection against SARS-CoV-2.

One is killer T-cells. “Their names give you a good hint what they do,” Alessandro Sette, an immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, told me in July. “They see and destroy and kill infected cells.”

Antibodies, he explained, can clear virus from bodily fluids. “But if the virus gets inside the cell, then it becomes invisible to the antibody.” That’s where killer T-cells come in: They find and destroy these hidden viruses.

While antibodies can prevent an infection, killer T-cells deal with an infection that’s already underway. So they play a huge role in long-term immunity, stopping infections before they have time to get a person very sick.

And it’s not just killer T-cells and antibodies. There are also helper T-cells, which facilitate a robust antibody cell response. “They are required for the antibody response to mature,” Sette says.

Some proportion of the population (perhaps 25 to 50 percent of people) seems to have some preexisting T-cells (of both varieties, but the helper kind have been more commonly observed) that respond to SARS-CoV-2, despite these people never having been exposed to SARS-CoV-2. The hypothesis is that these people may have acquired these T-cells from being infected with other strains in the coronavirus family of viruses. Researchers still don’t really understand what role these preexisting T-cells play in preventing or attenuating infection (if any).

But wait, there’s more! There’s another group of cells called memory B-cells. B-cells are the immune system cells that create antibodies. Certain types of B-cells become memory B-cells. These save the instructions for producing a particular antibody, but they aren’t active. Instead, they hide out — in your spleen, in your lymph nodes, perhaps at the original site of your infection — waiting for a signal to start producing antibodies again.

All the things “immunity” can mean

All these different components of the immune system mean “immunity” isn’t just one thing.

Immunity could mean a strong antibody response, which prevents the virus from establishing itself in cells. But it could also mean a good killer T-cell response, which could potentially stop an infection very quickly: before you feel sick and before you start spreading the virus to others.

“In many infections, the virus does reproduce a little bit, but then the immune response stops this infection in its tracks,” Sette explains. Also possible: “You do get infected, you do get sick, but your immune system does enough of a job curbing the infection, so you don’t get as sick.”

Immunity might also result from an awakening of memory B-cells. If an individual has memory B-cells and is exposed to the virus again, “that infection will stimulate a much faster antibody response to the virus, which would, theoretically lead to faster clearance of the virus and potentially less severe infection,” Elitza Theel, the director of the infectious diseases serology laboratory at the Mayo Clinic, said in a July interview.

In general, scientists believe, the stronger the infection (and immune response) that occurs during an initial infection, the longer immunity will last.

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So reinfection may still be possible, but it may not mean severe illness. When a virus invades a body, generally, the body remembers.

Could asymptomatic infections spread the virus? Unclear.

It’s still not known what the latest reinfection study means for how long the pandemic will last. If reinfections happen regularly (and we have no idea how common they might be), then it might take longer to achieve herd immunity without a vaccination (which is an un-ideal, and cynical, goal to begin with). How long immunity lasts, on average, and how common reinfection is are key unknown variables in figuring out how long the pandemic may last in the absence of an effective vaccine or treatment.

“Reinfection cases tell us that we cannot rely on immunity acquired by natural infection to confer herd immunity; not only is this strategy lethal for many but also it is not effective,” Iwasaki wrote in the editorial. “Herd immunity requires safe and effective vaccines and robust vaccination implementation.”

We also have much more to learn about how often reinfections lead to more clusters of cases. Recently, I asked Shane Crotty, an immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, about this very scenario.

“Could there be an ‘immunity’ scenario,” I asked, “where, after having recovered from Covid, a person could get infected again but not feel sick at all, and also be able to spread it?”

“It is a good question, and the answer is that no one knows,” Crotty replied. “There are cases with other diseases where asymptomatic immune people can be infectious. There is definitely a lot to learn still about immunity to SARS-CoV-2.”

Science has been in a “replication crisis” for a decade. Have we learned anything?

Much ink has been spilled over the “replication crisis” in the last decade and a half, including here at Vox. Researchers have discovered, over and over, that lots of findings in fields like psychology, sociology, medicine, and economics don’t hold up when other researchers try to replicate them.

This conversation was fueled in part by John Ioannidis’s 2005 article “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” and by the controversy around a 2011 paper that used then-standard statistical methods to find that people have precognition. But since then, many researchers have explored the replication crisis from different angles. Why are research findings so often unreliable? Is the problem just that we test for “statistical significance” — the likelihood that similarly strong results could have occurred by chance — in a nuance-free way? Is it that null results (that is, when a study finds no detectable effects) are ignored while positive ones make it into journals?

A recent write-up by Alvaro de Menard, a participant in the Defense Advanced Research Project’s Agency’s (DARPA) replication markets project (more on this below), makes the case for a more depressing view: The processes that lead to unreliable research findings are routine, well understood, predictable, and in principle pretty easy to avoid. And yet, he argues, we’re still not improving the quality and rigor of social science research.

While other researchers I spoke with pushed back on parts of Menard’s pessimistic take, they do agree on something: a decade of talking about the replication crisis hasn’t translated into a scientific process that’s much less vulnerable to it. Bad science is still frequently published, including in top journals — and that needs to change.

Most papers fail to replicate for totally predictable reasons

Let’s take a step back and explain what people mean when they refer to the “replication crisis” in scientific research.

When research papers are published, they describe their methodology, so other researchers can copy it (or vary it) and build on the original research. When another research team tries to conduct a study based on the original to see if they find the same result, that’s an attempted replication. (Often the focus is not just on doing the exact same thing, but approaching the same question with a larger sample and preregistered design.) If they find the same result, that’s a successful replication, and evidence that the original researchers were on to something. But when the attempted replication finds different or no results, that often suggests that the original research finding was spurious.

In an attempt to test just how rigorous scientific research is, some researchers have undertaken the task of replicating research that’s been published in a whole range of fields. And as more and more of those attempted replications have come back, the results have been striking — it is not uncommon to find that many, many published studies cannot be replicated.

One 2015 attempt to reproduce 100 psychology studies was able to replicate only 39 of them. A big international effort in 2018 to reproduce prominent studies found that 14 of the 28 replicated, and an attempt to replicate studies from top journals Nature and Science found that 13 of the 21 results looked at could be reproduced.

The replication crisis has led a few researchers to ask: Is there a way to guess if a paper will replicate? A growing body of research has found that guessing which papers will hold up and which won’t is often just a matter of looking at the same simple, straightforward factors.

A 2019 paper by Adam Altmejd, Anna Dreber, and others identifies some simple factors that are highly predictive: Did the study have a reasonable sample size? Did the researchers squeeze out a result barely below the significance threshold of p = 0.05? (A paper can often claim a “significant” result if this “p” threshold is met, and many use various statistical tricks to push their paper across that line.) Did the study find an effect across the whole study population, or an “interaction effect” (such as an effect only in a smaller segment of the population) that is much less likely to replicate?

Menard argues that the problem is not so complicated. “Predicting replication is easy,” he said. “There’s no need for a deep dive into the statistical methodology or a rigorous examination of the data, no need to scrutinize esoteric theories for subtle errors — these papers have obvious, surface-level problems.”

A 2018 study published in Nature had scientists place bets on which of a pool of social science studies would replicate. They found that the predictions by scientists in this betting market were highly accurate at estimating which papers would replicate.

“These results suggest something systematic about papers that fail to replicate,” study co-author Anna Dreber argued after the study was released.

Additional research has established that you don’t even need to poll experts in a field to guess which of its studies will hold up to scrutiny. A study published in August had participants read psychology papers and predict whether they would replicate. “Laypeople without a professional background in the social sciences are able to predict the replicability of social-science studies with above-chance accuracy,” the study concluded, “on the basis of nothing more than simple verbal study descriptions.”

The laypeople were not as accurate in their predictions as the scientists in the Nature study, but the fact they were still able to predict many failed replications suggests that many of them have flaws that even a layperson can notice.

Bad science can still be published in prestigious journals and be widely cited

Publication of a peer-reviewed paper is not the final step of the scientific process. After a paper is published, other research might cite it — spreading any misconceptions or errors in the original paper. But research has established that scientists have good instincts for whether a paper will replicate or not. So, do scientists avoid citing papers that are unlikely to replicate?

This striking chart from a 2020 study by Yang Yang, Wu Youyou, and Brian Uzzi at Northwestern University illustrates their finding that actually, there is no correlation at all between whether a study will replicate and how often it is cited. “Failed papers circulate through the literature as quickly as replicating papers,” they argue.

Looking at a sample of studies from 2009 to 2017 that have since been subject to attempted replications, the researchers find that studies have about the same number of citations regardless of whether they replicated.

If scientists are pretty good at predicting whether a paper replicates, how can it be the case that they are as likely to cite a bad paper as a good one? Menard theorizes that many scientists don’t thoroughly check — or even read — papers once published, expecting that if they’re peer-reviewed, they’re fine. Bad papers are published by a peer-review process that is not adequate to catch them — and once they’re published, they are not penalized for being bad papers.

The debate over whether we’re making any progress

Here at Vox, we’ve written about how the replication crisis can guide us to do better science. And yet blatantly shoddy work is still being published in peer-reviewed journals despite errors that a layperson can see.

In many cases, journals effectively aren’t held accountable for bad papers — many, like The Lancet, have retained their prestige even after a long string of embarrassing public incidents where they published research that turned out fraudulent or nonsensical. (The Lancet said recently that, after a study on Covid-19 and hydroxychloroquine this spring was retracted after questions were raised about the data source, the journal would change its data-sharing practices.)

Even outright frauds often take a very long time to be repudiated, with some universities and journals dragging their feet and declining to investigate widespread misconduct.

That’s discouraging and infuriating. It suggests that the replication crisis isn’t one specific methodological reevaluation, but a symptom of a scientific system that needs rethinking on many levels. We can’t just teach scientists how to write better papers. We also need to change the fact that those better papers aren’t cited more often than bad papers; that bad papers are almost never retracted even when their errors are visible to lay readers; and that there are no consequences for bad research.

In some ways, the culture of academia actively selects for bad research. Pressure to publish lots of papers favors those who can put them together quickly — and one way to be quick is to be willing to cut corners. “Over time, the most successful people will be those who can best exploit the system,” Paul Smaldino, a cognitive science professor at the University of California Merced, told my colleague Brian Resnick.

So we have a system whose incentives keep pushing bad research even as we understand more about what makes for good research.

Researchers working on the replication crisis are more divided, though, on the question of whether the last decade of work on the replication crisis has left us better equipped to fight these problems — or left us in the same place where we started.

“The future is bright,” concludes Altmejd and Dreber’s 2019 paper about how to predict replications. “There will be rapid accumulation of more replication data, more outlets for publishing replications, new statistical techniques, and—most importantly—enthusiasm for improving replicability among funding agencies, scientists, and journals. An exciting replicability ‘upgrade’ in science, while perhaps overdue, is taking place.”

Menard, by contrast, argues that this optimism has not been borne out — none of our improved understanding of the replication crisis leads to more papers being published that actually replicate. The project that he’s a part of — an effort to design a better model to predict which papers replicate run by DARPA in the Defense Department — has not seen papers grow any more likely to replicate over time.

“I frequently encounter the notion that after the replication crisis hit there was some sort of great improvement in the social sciences, that people wouldn’t even dream of publishing studies based on 23 undergraduates any more … In reality there has been no discernible improvement,” he writes.

Researchers who are more optimistic point to other metrics of progress. It’s true that papers that fail replication are still extremely common, and that the peer-review process hasn’t improved in a way that catches these errors. But other elements of the error-correction process are getting better.

“Journals now retract about 1,500 articles annually — a nearly 40-fold increase over 2000, and a dramatic change even if you account for the roughly doubling or tripling of papers published per year,” Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch argues. “Journals have improved,” reporting more details on retracted papers and improving their process for retractions.

Other changes in common scientific practices seem to be helping too. For example, preregistrations — announcing how you’ll conduct your analysis before you do the study — lead to more null results being published.

“I don’t think the influence [of public conversations about the replication crisis on scientific practice] has been zero,” statistician Andrew Gelman at Columbia University told me. “This crisis has influenced my own research practices, and I assume it’s influenced many others as well. And it’s my general impression that journals such as Psychological Science and PNAS don’t publish as much junk as they used to.”

There’s some reassurance in that. But until those improvements translate to a higher percentage of papers replicating and a difference in citations for good papers versus bad papers, it’s a small victory. And it’s a small victory that has been hard-won. After tons of resources spent demonstrating the scope of the problem, fighting for more retractions, teaching better statistical methods, and trying to drag fraud into the open, papers still don’t replicate as much as researchers would hope, and bad papers are still widely cited — suggesting a big part of the problem still hasn’t been touched.

We need a more sophisticated understanding of the replication crisis, not as a moment of realization after which we were able to move forward with higher standards, but as an ongoing rot in the scientific process that a decade of work hasn’t quite fixed.

Our scientific institutions are valuable, as are the tools they’ve built to help us understand the world. There’s no cause for hopelessness here, even if some frustration is thoroughly justified. Science needs saving, sure — but science is very much worth saving.

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The 4 simple reasons Germany is managing Covid-19 better than its neighbors

Germany gets a lot of favorable Covid-19 press — and for good reason. Its daily new cases per million people have been persistently lower than any of its Western European neighbors, and its death rate, from the beginning of the outbreak, has been among the lowest in Western Europe: currently 0.15 deaths per million people, compared to France’s 1.15 and Spain’s 2.19.

Even as coronavirus cases surge across the continent — the week prior to October 11 saw the largest increase since the beginning of the pandemic — Germany’s latest wave is still small relative to other countries in the region.

So what exactly is Germany getting right?

What’s often cited is an effective deployment of technology, such as a contact tracing app, to fight the pandemic. There’s the frequently praised mass testing program, which rivals South Korea’s, and the oversupply of ICU beds — controversial before the coronavirus, now lauded. It also helps that Angela Merkel has a doctorate in quantum chemistry and heads a country that treats scientists, like the Berlin-based virologist and podcaster Christian Drosten, like superstars.

Yet this is far from the whole story of Germany’s relative success.

Over the past few weeks, I talked to doctors, health officials, and researchers in Germany— including some of the country’s first Covid-19 responders — and elsewhere to get a deeper perspective on why Germany has had better-than-average pandemic performance in Europe.

I heard, again and again, four explanations for the country’s coronavirus success. They had nothing to do with tech, Merkel, or hospital beds. And they’ve been largely overlooked.

Let’s call them the L’s: luck, learning, local responses, and listening. While the pandemic certainly isn’t over, and Germany is facing a pivotal moment with a record number of new infections, these factors may be the reason Germany bends the curve quickly once again.

The power of luck

Günter Fröschl, a tropical medicine doctor at Munich University, has been leading Germany’s longest-running Covid-19 testing unit. He’s been at it so long, he swabbed four of the first five coronavirus patients in late January. At that time, his fiancée — another infectious disease specialist — happened to be working in Brescia, Italy, ground zero of Europe’s deadliest Covid-19 outbreak. The two were on the phone every day comparing notes, and Fröschl concluded the only reason the paths of the two countries diverged so widely early on in the pandemic was something both countries had no control over.

“We had a lot of luck in Germany,” Fröschl says.

The first known Covid-19 cases in Germany originated in a Munich-area auto parts firm called Webasto. There, an employee from China — who tested positive for the virus after returning home — infected several others during a visit to Munich. When she notified her German counterparts of her positive test result, the company informed its staff, including one employee who, despite not having serious symptoms, sought out a test.

“The patient came to us and said, ‘I had a common cold for a few days. I’m feeling fine — but we did have a Chinese colleague coming to visit us who tested positive,’” Fröschl recalls. The fact that this patient came forward meant public health officials were able to identify, trace, and isolate other cases, and instead of a large and silent outbreak early on in the pandemic, health authorities stopped the virus from spreading further at that point.

There was another element of luck involved: The Bundeswehr Institute of Microbiology in Munich is home to a biosafety level 3 lab — the kind that deals with highly infectious and deadly agents that can spread through inhalation, like SARS-CoV-2. When China released the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus in January, Fröschl’s colleagues at the institute got ready with coronavirus PCR tests. That meant the test was available in Munich when the first patients showed up there, and Fröschl was able to use it to quickly diagnose the first cases. “The index patient was meeting this unique situation in Europe,” Fröschl says. “That is luck. It’s not that we were so smart.”

It wasn’t just Munich that had tests ready. In Berlin, scientists created the test kit the World Health Organization and many countries ended up using even before China released the sequence of the virus. But Fröschl points out that if that first patient had shown up in a less prepared part of the country, the outcome may have been different — perhaps something more like what happened in Italy, where cases went undetected for weeks and then overwhelmed the health system. “I’m always emphasizing,” Fröschl says, “we were just lucky.”

The power of learning

Of course, the key to Germany’s coronavirus management isn’t only about luck. It’s also about learning and acting quickly on new knowledge. After the Webasto cluster came under control, Fröschl and his colleagues got to work applying what they learned from the experience — establishing protocols for diagnosing, isolating, and treating Covid-19 patients safely.

This meant that by the end of February, when travelers started returning from Austria, Italy, and other countries with outbreaks, they were ready. The Webasto outbreak gave doctors and public health officials “extremely valuable” experience dealing with the virus. “Everything was in place,” Fröschl says. “We had experience of how to treat people and remain calm.”

There was also learning from other countries. “We tried to take the strategy of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan — all good examples of how a quick and fast response can reduce the number of positive cases,” said Nicolai Savaskan, the chief medical officer of a local health department in Berlin. One part of that fast response: Germany’s mass testing program. While Germany was quick to lock down, it also scaled up testing from the start of the pandemic, and then repeatedly adapted the program to respond to changes in the epidemic dynamics.

In anticipation of a rise in cases following summer travel, for example, labs across the country scaled up their supply. You can see the result of this in the country’s test positive — or cases divided by tests — rate. This metric tells you whether a country’s testing capacity is rising in step with the demand for testing and growth in real cases. Since the beginning of May, relatively early in the pandemic, Germany’s test positive rate has held steady even though cases have increased, while the rate started to rise in July and August in other European countries currently experiencing the worst outbreaks, including France, Spain, and the UK.

“There have been ups and downs in Germany’s [outbreak], but the difference is they managed to scale up testing,” said Edouard Mathieu, the Paris-based data manager of Oxford University’s Our World in Data project. From May to the present, Germany went from around 60,000 tests per day to a staggering 160,000. And even now, Germany is again adapting its testing approach: adding a new rapid, antigen-testing strategy that will launch this week, the Wall Street Journal reported, to increase capacity as cases rise going into winter.

This also helps explain why outbreaks in the country — or even screw-ups like failing to notify positive cases quickly — haven’t spun out of control yet, as we’ve seen in other countries. “They are testing more people every time they find a case, which means they haven’t lost touch with the epidemic,” Mathieu said. It also means they didn’t waste their early lockdown: They used it to build robust systems that will likely help them control the current uptick, too.

The power of local responses

Germany, a federal country made up of 16 states with some 400 municipal health departments, ran a localized coronavirus response.

Though this has sometimes led to a confusing array of policies, it’s also meant municipal governments could act quickly and tailor pandemic policies to the needs and challenges facing local populations across 16 federal states with 400-plus counties.

And this may be another reason for Germany’s success compared to neighbors with more centralized systems such as France, Spain, and the UK.

“The decentralized [approach to] managing the pandemic was maybe a good way to deal with a quickly changing situation,” said Berlin’s Savaskan. He explained that while local health authorities have to report cases to Germany’s national public health agency, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), they could each tailor their pandemic responses to meet local needs in their region and react quickly whenever problems arose.

So, for example, while the RKI recommended a 14-day quarantine after contact with an infected person, in Berlin, health authorities decided that was too long to be acceptable for the population and that a seven-day quarantine with a coronavirus test at that point would do. “We could adapt what was recommended by RKI and then implement … [to] locally fit the needs of the people,” Savaskan said.

Similarly, early on in the pandemic, in March, Berlin decided to shut down bars, dance halls, and nightclubs ahead of other regions, since they were local sources of contagion. When they reopened in June, municipal health authorities were in constant contact with the industry to encourage them to cooperate in contact tracing.

“We have a rate of contact tracing higher than 90 percent,” Savaskan said, meaning nearly all the contacts of infected people are being identified and followed up with.

When we talked at the end of September, Savaskan was heading to meet the health minister in Berlin. Outbreaks in bars and nightclub settings were on the rise again, and politicians wanted to engage local health departments on how to get the situation under control. By October 10, a midnight curfew for bars and clubs went into effect.

“The narrative so far in Germany concerning the public health departments is that people trust in them — they believe that when they give very detailed information about their life, this is taken very seriously. And I think this is the major impact of the success of the German response,” Savaskan said. It’s also allowed authorities to identify and stop chains of infection at an early stage.

The power of listening to scientists

There’s one other L that sets Germany apart. It’s the most straightforward of them all — but it’s certainly not being done in many countries, particularly the US. From the moment the coronavirus arrived in Germany, German authorities have been good about listening to scientists, says Clemens-Martin Wendtner, a Munich-based internal medicine doctor. Wendtner would know: He was also part of Germany’s coronavirus front line, overseeing the treatment of the country’s first patients in Munich.

He, too, didn’t mention Angela Merkel when I asked him how he explains how Germany managed to control the coronavirus. Instead, he said local politicians did something that now seems like a foreign concept in America: They listened to scientists.

Since February, Wendtner has been texting new findings and insights to the health minister in Bavaria — the German state that’s home to Munich — every week. And during the first weeks of the pandemic, before heading to the hospital, he’d join a 9 am briefing in the office of the health ministry to share his data there, too.

“Every [piece of] information we had from the hospital, they also had from the political decision side,” he said.

So that’s why Germany instituted a mandatory mask policy in public spaces in the spring and shut down schools. That’s why Jens Spahn, the federal minister of health, retracted the idea of Covid-19 immunity passports after listening to scientists. “He used the direct approach, just calling me here in my office,” Wendtner said.

As the science evolved and leaders listened to scientists, the policies keep changing. Recently, the Bavarian government decided to invest 50 million euros in hepafilters that deactivate infectious aerosols for use in classrooms across the state. “It’s not reasonable to open the window in Bavaria every 20 minutes” in winter, Wendtner said. So as temperatures drop, filters might help keep schools open at a time when we know the coronavirus can spread through aerosols, especially in poorly ventilated rooms.

Of course, science hasn’t been free of politics in Germany. And in the race to find a successor for Merkel, state politicians have certainly used the pandemic to increase their profile. But the big picture, Wendtner says, is that the public trusted German politicians “because they didn’t lie in the beginning and [they] built up trust,” following science, not denying it.

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The absurd controversy over Joe Biden’s “transition away from the oil industry”

At the second and final 2020 presidential debate on Thursday, when asked by President Donald Trump if he would “close down the oil industry,” former Vice President Joe Biden said that he intends to “transition away from the oil industry, yes.” Republicans are working furiously to make this supposed admission into a scandal, hoping it will get Biden in hot water with oil-state Dems and swing voters and sow division in the party. The right sees energy as a key wedge issue as the election approaches.

Trump himself put it in the most dramatic terms:

After the last debate, Republicans hoped Biden’s refusal to ban fracking would get him in trouble with the climate left. That didn’t go anywhere, and my guess is that this gambit won’t either. So far, a few oil-state Dems have distanced themselves, oil companies have expressed “concern, not alarm,” and most everyone else seems distracted by a virus that is setting new case records and infecting White House staff.

However the politics play out in this instance, it’s important to consider the underlying dynamic of these recent energy disputes. It’s an extremely familiar dynamic that finally seems, in fits and starts, to be working in Democrats’ favor.

Let’s begin with a little armchair political science.

Americans want reform as long as it doesn’t negatively affect them

Social science suggests that most people, even most politically active people, don’t have particularly well-considered or coherent views on public policy issues. They vote based on identities and social affinities. Their opinions on issues are easily swayed by elite cues or the phrasing of poll questions.

In my experience, the one rule that reliably governs public issue polling is that the public likes things that sound good and doesn’t like things that sound bad.

If you poll a health care system that covers everything, with no copays and free choice of doctors, it does well. If you poll tax increases to pay for other people’s health care, it does poorly.

If you poll cleaner energy or less pollution, it does well. If you poll gasoline prices rising and fossil fuel workers losing jobs, it does poorly.

When polled on individual progressive policy goals, Americans tend to respond positively. Universal health care and clean energy sound good. When polled on ideological abstractions like “taxes” and “big government,” they tend to respond negatively. Giving up money to some distant bureaucracy sounds bad.

This is why there’s an unending argument over whether America is or isn’t a “center-right nation” — it depends on how you ask America. More or less everyone wants to improve the collective welfare, but not at their own expense. Depending on how they are phrased, these kinds of questions don’t so much uncover preexisting opinions as they guide and shape opinion formation. Trigger thoughts of things getting better, you’ll get good poll results; trigger thoughts of sacrifice, privation, or unfair burdens, you’ll get bad poll results.

Democratic politics isn’t much different. Reformers pushing for change guide attention to the collective good that will come of it. Reactionaries pushing against change guide attention to the risks and dangers.

These are not, unfortunately, parallel endeavors. Asking people to imagine an alternative future calls upon their thinking and imagination — their frontal cortex. Asking people to fear change calls upon something much deeper and older, their brainstem sense that it’s a dangerous world, they’re lucky to have what they have, and any disruption threatens it. The latter, when invoked, tends to drown out the former. That’s why progressive change is so difficult to muster and so easy to reverse.

But that’s the game in a democracy: changes that can improve collective circumstances versus the fear of personal loss.

Making the clean energy transition seem scary

This brings us back to Biden and energy. The core Republican approach, which they understand at a gut level even if there is no particular strategic intelligence at work in the Trump era, is to make change seem scary. They need to make Biden’s climate plan seem abrupt, alien, and threatening. That’s why they have resolutely ignored all the actual policies involved in the Green New Deal and instead made it a boogeyman, a repository for every conservative fear. They’re going to take your hamburgers and your SUV!

That’s why Republicans are so delighted to make a fracking ban — a policy that no president can pass and no Congress would pass — the center of discussion. And that’s why they are delighted when Biden says he will transition away from oil. These changes sound sudden and disruptive; they draw attention to what will be lost, not to what will take its place. They define a playing field favorable to Republicans.

There’s an element of play-acting to all this. For all the hue and cry about his gaffes, Biden’s climate policies are articulated quite clearly on his website. (No manned outpost on the moon, sadly.) He plans to ramp up clean energy and electrification while ensuring that affected communities, including fossil fuel communities, are taken care of through investments in infrastructure, clean energy projects, education, job transition, and other kinds of assistance.

Over time, clean energy will come to dominate the electricity sector (where Biden has targeted 100 percent net-zero by 2035) and from there it will expand to the rest of the economy (where Biden has targeted 100 percent net-zero by 2050). By 2035, coal will disappear, and by 2050, the US oil and gas sector will radically shrink. It’s just carbon math.

Some fossil fuels may survive at the margins to fill in the gaps in large electricity systems, attached to carbon capture and storage systems, or for some industrial applications or plastics. And it may be that some oil and gas companies are successful at pivoting away from their core products to clean energy (ahem, geothermal).

But the oil and gas industry as Americans know it, as a major source of jobs and profits, is going away in coming decades. It has to — it produces lots of carbon and carbon is frying the planet. Many oil and gas companies, especially in Europe, have acknowledged this inescapable reality and begun to transform themselves.

So when Biden says his plan will have the US “transition away from the oil industry,” he’s not saying something radical, unexpected, or mysterious. Any serious climate plan must do the same. It wouldn’t be a climate plan if it didn’t (no matter how many trees it planted).

But Biden was also being entirely accurate when he said to reporters later, “we’re not getting rid of fossil fuels for a long time.” And he was being entirely accurate when he said that he will not ban fracking.

These are not contradictory comments. The latter are not “walking back” the former, despite what reporters (goosed on by Republicans) project onto them. It’s not that hard to understand: Biden’s plan will gradually transition the US economy to clean energy, and while it’s happening, ensure that those who are negatively impacted receive assistance and new employment opportunities. Justice — for fossil fuel workers and other vulnerable communities — is at the heart of the new Democratic consensus on climate policy.

Biden needs room to maneuver

When speaking to the left, Biden emphasizes the transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy, and the environmental benefits; when speaking to audiences that contain persuadable voters in swing states (some of whom work in, or have family members who work in, fossil fuels), he emphasizes the gradual, carefully staged nature of the transition, and the economic/jobs benefits.

But in all cases, he’s referring to the same plan — which is, again, right there on his website.

As usual, the media is playing along with Republican efforts to sow confusion about this, playing on Biden’s penchant for garbling his messaging, as with this CNN “fact-check” that pretends Biden’s written plan carries no more weight than one infelicitous phrase in a debate.

Republicans will lie about Biden’s plan and the mainstream media will search for something they can ding Biden for, to “balance” all the negative coverage Trump attracts — but Democrats would be goofy to play along.

Instead of distancing themselves, oil-state Democrats could take the opportunity to defend the massive infrastructure and job investments contained in the plan, targeted at rural, poor, and fossil fuel communities. They could tell their constituents the truth about the long-term viability of fossil fuels, unlike Republicans in Appalachia and Wyoming, who have lied to their constituents about it until their economies have run headlong into disaster.

As for the left, as usual, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is taking the smart line:

She is positioning herself to the left of Biden on fracking, a signal to moderates that Biden has not been “captured by the left,” but she’s also emphasizing the need to get him elected, a signal to the left that it’s important to get on board.

AOC understands what are, to my mind, the two lessons progressive climate reformers can draw from this episode.

The broad lesson is that making change is often less about convincing people that good goals are good — Americans are already convinced that fighting climate change and expanding clean energy are good — than it is about convincing them that change won’t leave them behind, that they have a place and a stake in it.

In practical terms, that might mean less talk about the Earth and children and more about industrial policy and what it can do to foster specific industries that will employ specific people in specific regions of the country. It means talking about how a transition to clean energy will create well-paying jobs in every US zip code and save every US homeowner between $1,000 and $2,000 a year. It means less talk about things that will be banned or taken away and more about things that will be created or improved. The Green New Deal was conceived, in part, to push just such a shift in emphasis, to envision climate policy as a generative, not merely oppositional, project.

Climate reformers have the wind at their back. There’s never been a broader consensus that climate change is dangerous and action is needed. What remains is painting a richer picture of the world that action can help create.

In the meantime, the more specific lesson for climate advocates is that, in the home stretch of this election, Biden needs room to maneuver. His election depends on the whims of a few marginal voters in a few swing states, some of them living in places where fossil fuel production has unusually high salience. He needs votes from union households that do some of the very work he’s talking about phasing out.

He needs to reassure them that the clean energy transition will not be abrupt and destructive; nothing will be banned or shut down overnight. It will unfold gradually, and as it does, new investments will reach their communities and new industries will rise to make use of their skills.

The transition will not come at their expense or leave them behind. They have a place in it.

This inclusiveness is a foundational part of Biden’s plan and, more broadly, core to the spirit of the Green New Deal and the recent Democratic alignment on climate policy. It would immeasurably aid public understanding if more people explained that vision of a managed, inclusive transition and fewer nitpicked Biden’s latest attempt to articulate it.

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States need billions to prepare for Covid-19 vaccines. The federal government isn’t helping.

Early results from the two leading US Covid-19 vaccine trials are expected in November, in what will likely be a major milestone in the race to end the pandemic.

The final leg of the race, however, will be actually getting people vaccinated.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has offered guidance on jurisdictions’ plans, and has given them a deadline of November 1 to be ready to roll out a potential vaccine (a timeline administration officials assert is unrelated to the November 3 election).

Will health departments be ready to distribute a vaccine by then?

“Probably not, if you mean completely ready,” says William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who also serves as a consultant to the Tennessee Department of Health. “Are they working hard? Absolutely.”

No matter when it commences, a nationwide vaccine administration effort will require a massive workforce of health professionals (who are already in short supply and are often already working on other Covid-19 responses). It also may require costly medical-grade freezers to keep vaccine doses at supercold temperatures — or lots and lots of dry ice. And it needs a robust new data management system to track who gets which vaccine when and where, particularly if vaccines require multiple doses to be effective, and if there ends up being more than one approved vaccine.

The trouble is, states and local health departments have not received funding from Congress to make any of this happen. This “makes it nearly impossible to do what you need to be doing at this stage of the game if your go date is November 1,” says Adriane Casalotti, head of government affairs for the National Association of City and County Health Officials (NACCHO).

Like many things in the pandemic, it didn’t have to be this way, she says. “This is one of the few areas of Covid-19 where we can plan in advance, where we don’t have to build the plane while flying it.” She adds that although their group has been asking the federal government for support for distribution since early vaccine research began, “now it’s late.”

To be sure, there will not be enough vaccine to immunize 328 million people right away, which simplifies logistics somewhat. And many experts are expecting it will be the end of this year or the beginning of 2021 before the first doses are available. (Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar recently said there might be enough doses to vaccinate health care workers, first responders, and seniors by the end of January, with some doses arriving sooner.)

But even with a relatively modest beginning (and we’re still talking about tens of millions of people), public health workers want to make sure they have plans and systems in place, rather than rushing to meet a deadline, Schaffner points out. “The government is antsy about getting things started, but most health departments are saying, ‘Whether I start vaccination this week or next week doesn’t matter so much because this is going to be going on for eight months,’” he says.

Let’s take a closer look at the challenges facing the vaccine rollout and how the government could help things get on track sooner rather than later.

Health experts say they need billions of dollars to be ready; the federal government hasn’t promised any money

State health departments were asked in late September to submit their proposed vaccine rollout plans to the CDC by October 16. For this task, the federal government distributed $200 million, which was split among the states, major metropolitan areas, and US territories.

Not only did this mean relatively little funds for each of the 64 jurisdictions (states, territories, and major cities), Casalotti notes, but it also did not guarantee any funding would reach the thousands of smaller local health departments around the country, which is where much of the on-the-ground work of preparing to get people vaccinated will take place.

More importantly, the government has yet to promise any money to support actually building out these plans and helping the health organizations be ready when the vaccines are.

A well-coordinated, well-supported effort by health departments to vaccinate the US population will likely cost at least $8.4 billion, according to an October 1 letter NACCHO sent to Congress requesting that much be appropriated for the effort. And other public health groups, including the Association of State and Territorial Health Offices (ASTHO), agree.

CDC Director Robert Redfield put the number slightly lower, but still in the billions. In a congressional subcommittee meeting in mid-September, Redfield said the CDC would need $6 billion to help states and localities adequately prepare to distribute a potential vaccine.

But the federal government still has not said if it will fund the effort, or how much it will allocate to vaccine distribution and administration.

“That needs to change soon, or that’s going to be a limiting step,” says Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for ASTHO. “It’s great that we have an opportunity to plan for some element of the Covid-19 response, because so far we’ve just been reacting.”

Health officials are hoping a new, broad Covid-19 relief package, approved by Congress, will include funds earmarked specifically for vaccine distribution readiness. And soon. “That would mean we could finally be really prepared, and we could finally get a step ahead of things,” Plescia says.

If the federal government doesn’t step up, would states and localities be able to? Experts we spoke with agree that the funds need to come from the top. The first reason for this is logistical. With local and state budgets tapped out from pandemic response and lost revenue — and unable to run deficits — the federal government remains the only level of government that could bankroll this effort.

The second reason has to do with equity. “We’ve seen throughout the pandemic response when we’re not working as a nation, it’s really hard for us to make any ground,” Casalotti says. For a vaccine rollout to be most effective, it needs to be supported at a national level, she notes. “People travel, and what happens across state borders can directly impact your community. The virus doesn’t care about jurisdictional boundaries.”

If states and localities are left to somehow support vaccine deployment, the results are going to be uneven, and likely accentuate disparities the pandemic has already laid bare, she says.

“It really has to come from federal sources,” concludes Plescia.

Major unknowns remain, making preparations even more difficult

Planning a national vaccine rollout is a sizable ask, but it is also happening in the midst of major continued uncertainties — and not just about funding. This has left state and local health departments scrambling to prepare as best they can. “They’re not only planning, but they have to plan for several different contingencies,” Schaffner says.

One big unknown is which vaccine or vaccines will be approved and distributed first. This matters in part because many have different requirements, such as extreme cold chains. If health departments need to keep vaccine doses in storage way below zero, as some front-running candidates require, that will necessitate medical-grade freezers.

“You’re not going to find those freezers in pharmacies and doctors’ offices,” Schaffner says. Nor are they “something you can just run down to the hardware store and buy,” Casalotti adds.

So if thousands of vaccine locations around the country are ordering these freezers at the same time — on an expedited timeline — it is possible there could be a shortage.

Or if there is not a shortage, they could follow the path many other pandemic specialty supplies have: With such a sudden increase in demand, there could also be a drastic price increase. This would throw another wrench in even the best-laid plans. It’s quite possible, Casalotti says, for example, that health departments could already have established how many freezers they will need, and where they will procure them, but then encounter a new price, many times higher due to the surge in demand.

The federal government has the ability to step in and prevent this sort of price gouging. Although “we haven’t seen those tools deployed” in previous instances of this during the pandemic, Casalotti says.

Pfizer’s vaccine candidate, which is among those leading the race to approval, requires temperatures of about -94 degrees Fahrenheit (and even then is only stable there for about 10 days). To address this challenge in distribution, it has devised a freezer alternative, in which the vaccine vials can be stored in specially designed boxes filled with dry ice. Although these boxes will need to have their dry ice replenished during storage, which means that “all of our states have been spending a lot of time sorting out their dry ice supplies,” Plescia says.

Even this workaround might not prove to be a solution for everyone. Dry ice isn’t readily available everywhere, such as in some US territories, notes Plescia. And a shortage in the carbon dioxide supply has made it hard for some dry ice makers to keep up with demand. So Plescia hopes that even if a vaccine requiring drastic cold storage is approved first, a less temperamental one will not be far behind.

Another big unknown is precisely who will get the vaccine first and when. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Schaffner also helps advise, is working on finalizing this rubric for who will get the vaccine first. But they might not be able to complete their work until it’s known what vaccine or vaccines will be approved.

Many expect that health care workers and first responders will be first to receive an approved vaccine, which aligns with an assessment put out by the National Academy of Medicine in September and the CDC’s interim playbook for states. (President Trump, at an October 16 stop in Florida, claimed inaccurately that “seniors will be the first in line for the vaccine.” The CDC has listed those 65 and older — along with others at higher risk for severe Covid-19, and essential workers — in the second half of the first phase for vaccination, although this could change based on the results of the ongoing vaccine trials.)

Vaccinating health workers first would also give those working on vaccine distribution a slightly gentler start. As Plescia notes, this population would generally be easy to reach and follow up with through their employers, and tend to be in favor of vaccinations in general.

If this prioritization group does come first, he is optimistic about the possibility of health departments being equipped to provide these early doses when they become available. “I think being ready for that is not overly ambitious, and as we roll that out, we start to learn more and gives us a little more time to be ready to do it in community settings — those are the things that are going to require more capacity and more planning, and just more people,” he says.

What distribution might look like after that is fuzzier, making it hard for health departments to plan logistics, but also communication.

Local health departments are eager for the federal government to take on the job of clear messaging once these priority groups get established.

If local health departments are in charge of telling their communities who gets priority for the vaccine, “that’s just putting local health departments in a really hard position as people are looking at who is at the front of the line and who is at the back of the line,” Casalotti says. And animosity toward health departments has already been building, resulting in reluctance to participate in contact tracing efforts and even, in some cases, threats of violence, she notes.

So she asks for “clear messages from the top that we’re all in this together, and not everyone is in prioritization group 1 — and that’s okay because we, as a nation, are all going to get through this.”

Health departments will need time to get staff and systems up and running

One clear challenge in being ready to vaccinate millions of people as quickly as possible is having enough well-trained workers to give those shots. Hiring people to give shots in a public health setting is challenging even in the best of times, Casalotti says. The pay tends to not be that great and the hours can be hard. Not only that, but much of this available workforce has already been hired out to other much-needed positions, like those in hospitals, she notes.

There are also procedural considerations. “In most governmental structures, you can’t get a million dollars on Monday and hire people on Friday,” Schaffner says. “You have to go through a laborious administrative process to post openings, make sure they are available to everybody, interview applicants — and this all takes time.” And after they get hired, they still need to be trained before they can get to work.

Public health departments and other locations will also likely need to acquire additional ancillary supplies, such as PPE and other items that are already in high demand in the midst of the pandemic and flu season.

“We can be all ready to go and have planned perfectly and have our people in place and our capacity built, and then we run out of PPE,” Plescia says. He worries about that, he says, because “that supply still doesn’t seem to be secure.” And shortages, as we saw earlier in the pandemic, lead to unequal distribution, in which larger and wealthier states can procure more supplies.

There is also the little-discussed — but critical — issue of data infrastructure. As a country, we have a patchwork method for tracking vaccinations. For most adult vaccines, only the patient and office or clinic receive records about a given dose. (As Schaffner jokes, “When my father-in-law lived in New Hampshire, and spent time in Tennessee, then spent winters in Florida, I was his vaccine registry, I told his doctors. It worked fine for my father-in-law, but I can’t do that for everybody.”) Even pediatric vaccinations are usually logged just on a state-level basis. (And still the CDC encourages parents and caretakers to be in charge of tracking their child’s vaccines themselves.)

So the idea of states and localities tying into a robust national vaccine tracking program — and on short order — is daunting, but crucial. Especially with many leading candidate vaccines requiring multiple doses, and different time spans between doses.

And this information will have to flow easily among vaccine administration sites across the country in close to real-time. “We have to have a good ability to track people and know who got the initial dose, and we need to be able to do that across state lines,” Plescia says. “If someone got the first dose in Florida and moves to South Carolina, we need to see what they got.” Even beyond that sort of rapid record look-up, health workers will also need a way to get in touch with people to remind them to get their second dose in the right time frame, he says. One candidate vaccine has a 21-day space between doses; another is 28 days.

“It would be good to go ahead and have the funding so we can start building those systems,” Plescia says.

And not only that, Casalotti says, “we need time to make sure those systems are interoperable, and to train the users in how to employ them. And, frankly, we don’t have the time.”

“The marathon continues”

For many health departments, support from the federal government can’t come soon enough. Despite asking the federal government for vaccine distribution guidance and funding since this spring, Casalotti says they have still wound up behind the eight-ball. “We have ended up in a position where we no longer have the luxury of time. Now we’re behind.”

Additionally, many local health departments still hadn’t recovered from the budget cuts of the 2008 recession, and now a number of them have faced further budget reductions and have had to furlough staff. “That is certainly not what you want to be doing when you know you’re going to be in the middle of a pandemic,” she says.

In the meantime, the CDC has been directed to transfer $300 million from its budget to the public affairs office at its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, Redfield said in a September 16 Senate subcommittee hearing. At least $250 million of that has been allotted for a massive public relations campaign “to defeat despair and inspire hope,” with the bulk of the funds to be used before January.

Some of this could be used toward general vaccine safety education and information, but experts are dubious that will be the case. “I haven’t seen that this program would be addressing this issue,” Casalotti says.

She asks for support from the federal government in reminding people that even after the first round of vaccine doses is distributed, the pandemic lifestyle will be here to stay for most people for quite a while. “The marathon continues, and we’re all running it whether we want to or not.”

Other public health experts are also looking to the federal government for a unified message and response. “This is a pandemic; it’s a national issue,” Schaffner says. “We have not had a coherent, sustained response to Covid-19 from the beginning. Every public health person I know of thinks we need it. This has to be largely directed and funded from a federal level. This is akin to disaster assistance. Sure, the locals go to work, but you really have to deal with this from a federal level. This is a hurricane that’s hit all 50 states.”

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance science journalist and author of Cultured and Octopus! Find her on Twitter at @KHCourage.

Why the record low Arctic sea ice this October is so alarming

For the past five months, Melinda Webster has lived on an icebreaker ship frozen in an ice floe near the North Pole.

For Webster, a sea ice geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, it was an ideal observatory. She and a team of 14 other scientists set out, as part of the largest polar expedition ever, to study rapidly disappearing sea ice, which is often shrouded from the view of satellites by thick fog.

Protected from polar bears by armed guards, the researchers spent their days measuring every aspect of the sea ice including the snow and ice thickness, the depth of melt ponds on the surface, and the ice’s reflectivity. They wore red “survival suits” to insulate them during the occasional plunge through cracking ice into the Arctic Ocean.

“People did fall in, myself included,” Webster recounted with a laugh. “But that’s just part of it, you know.”

Braving the elements like this is part of essential research: Sea ice is a bellwether of the climate change in the Arctic. Due to our ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions, the Arctic surface air temperatures have been warming rapidly — at twice the rate of the global average.

Historically, during the winter, sea ice has covered a vast swath of the Arctic Ocean, which fills much of the Arctic Circle. But as temperatures rise, it has been shrinking 12 percent every decade since measurements began in 1979.

Sea ice coverage fluctuates seasonally, hitting a low in September before forming again as temperatures drop in the fall — and expanding again by two to three times by the end of the winter in March. Webster and her team surveyed the summer conditions and the beginning of the “re-freeze.” But this year, that regrowth has been slower than ever. As October comes to a close, sea ice is at its lowest level for the month in recorded history.

Aboard the German icebreaker ship Polarstern, the changing ice conditions were palpable. Webster noticed in particular “just how easy it was to go across the Arctic, across the North Pole, like the ice is very thin,” she said. “It was easy to break through the ice pack, and the ship was only running on three engines rather than the full four.”

The shrinking and thinning out of Arctic sea ice is bad news for polar bears and indigenous people, who rely on the sea ice to hunt. The disappearance of the sea ice also further accelerates warming. When the white surface is replaced by a dark open ocean, more heat is absorbed and less light is reflected. According to a new study in Nature Communications, this feedback loop could add 0.19 degrees Celsius to the global temperature by mid-century, nearly wiping out the temperature effect of China going carbon neutral.

To understand what’s driving the dramatic transformation underway in the Arctic Ocean, let’s look at three compelling charts created by Colorado State University atmospheric scientist Zachary Labe.

Sea ice has hit a record low for October

The overall drop in sea ice is starkly evident in the chart below. It shows this year’s sea ice levels fall well below the median from 1981-2010. What this trend means is that the formerly snow-covered sea ice of the northernmost latitudes is increasingly turning into dark blue open ocean.

2020 produced frightening signs of the precariousness of Arctic sea ice. This month broke the record for the lowest sea ice extent in October, over 1.5 million square miles less than the 1980s average — an area larger than India, according to Labe.

This year’s sea ice minimum, which typically occurs in September after the summer melt, was also the second-lowest on record after 2012. The chart below shows how sea ice recovery in October has lagged behind the typical pattern of previous decades.

What has caused large parts of the Arctic to remain ice-free well into the fall? As Andres Flij of Severe Weather Europe points out, the Eastern Arctic Ocean (north of Siberia) has been several degrees Celsius warmer than the 1981 to 2010 average. These warm temperatures are making it difficult for ice to form.

The chart below shows that the Eastern Siberian, Laptev, and Kara seas (all part of the Eastern Arctic Ocean) have had particularly low sea ice formation compared to the recent past.

The consequences of an increasingly iceless Arctic Ocean

This October’s low sea ice extent might hold the record for a period, but climate scientists expect it will be surpassed in the years to come.

“We can expect to see substantial year-to-year variability, but overall the ice cover is becoming smaller and thinner during the fall months,” Labe said. “While 2020 is currently a record low, it may resemble a typical October in the not too distant future.” The Arctic Ocean is even projected to be ice-free in the summer as soon as 2050.

The decrease in ice has already affected indigenous people who use the sea ice to hunt for whales and seals. This has contributed to increasing food insecurity — in 2014, a Washington food bank supplied 10,000 pounds of halibut to indigenous communities in Alaska when the walrus hunt came up short, Ed Struzik reported for Yale Environment 360.

It also spells peril for polar bears, which also use the ice to hunt for food. A recent study in Nature Climate Change projects that polar bears will be nearly extinct by the end of the century due to the loss of habitat.

Changes in the ice are part of a larger “cascade effect,” as Webster describes it, in which delayed winter ice growth leads to thinner ice, which melts more easily in the summer months compared to older, thicker sea ice. This creates more open ocean.

This transformation contributes to both regional and global warming. Where a white sea ice surface would have reflected sunlight, the dark water absorbs heat, which further reduces ice growth. This change in albedo (or reflectivity) on sea and land in the Arctic is one of the main reasons the region is heating at twice the global average rate, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2019 Arctic Report Card. According to the recent Nature Communications study, it will also be a significant contributor to global warming.

Near Greenland — which holds a massive ice sheet — the warming loop set off by sea ice loss has a minor effect on its warming, but not a substantial effect on the ice sheet itself, researchers found in a 2019 study in Geophysical Research Letters.

The sea ice shift could also impact seasonal weather, potentially intensifying extreme weather. However, Labe says the issue requires further research. “Scientists are actively studying the connections between Arctic sea ice loss and wintertime weather patterns in North America, Europe, and Asia,” he said. “However, these relationships remain highly uncertain in the scientific literature and for seasonal weather forecasts.”

For now, the plummeting sea ice volumes are a startling reminder of just how rapidly the planet is changing, and how dire the consequences of delaying radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions will be.

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Big Oil’s hopes are pinned on plastics. It won’t end well.

The fossil fuel industry has not been doing well lately. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, growth in global demand had slowed to 1 percent annually. Now, lockdowns and distancing to stop the spread of the coronavirus have decimated the industry. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently released projections of rapid short-term decline in global demand, to the tune of 9 percent for oil, 8 percent for coal, and 5 percent for gas.

Depending on how long and severe the economic crisis proves to be, it will take years for demand to recover. Indeed, with electric vehicles cutting into oil demand by the end of the decade, it may never fully recover. Industry analysts like Carbon Tracker’s Kingsmill Bond are speculating that 2019 may turn out to be the peak of fossil fuel demand, and historically, in other industries, a peak in demand “tends to mark the beginning of a period of low prices and poor returns,” says Bond.

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But the industry has a response to this dire forecast, and it can be summarized in one word: plastics.

Overall, plastics represent a fairly small sliver of oil demand. Annually, the world consumes around 4,500 million tonnes (mt) of oil but only around 1,000mt of petrochemicals (oil and natural gas used to make chemical products), and of that 1,000mt, only about 350mt are plastics. (A tonne is a metric ton, about 1.1 US tons.)

Nonetheless, plastics are commonly projected to be the biggest source of new demand for oil over coming decades — in some projections, the only real source. It is these projections that the industry is using to justify billions in new projects, as oil companies across the world shift investment toward petrochemicals.

And Big Oil is working its hardest to make the projections come true: The New York Times recently ran an investigative piece revealing the industry’s plans to push more plastic, and plastic waste, into Kenya. Plastics are the thin reed upon which the industry is placing all its hopes.

But a new report released in September by Carbon Tracker throws a big bucket of cold water on these hopes. It argues that, far from a reliable source of growth, plastics are uniquely vulnerable to disruption. They are coming under increasing scrutiny and regulation across the world. Huge consumer product companies like Unilever are phasing them out. And the public is turning against them.

If existing solutions are fully implemented, growth in plastics could fall to zero. And if that happens, then there is no remaining source of net oil demand growth and 2019 will almost certainly prove to be the year of peak fossil fuels.

Let’s look at a few highlights from the report.

Plastics are supposed to drive most oil demand growth

The report breaks down the projections of two widely respected sources of energy data and analysis, BP and the IEA.

From 2020 to 2040, BP expects plastics to represent 95 percent of the net growth in demand for oil.

In the IEA projections, plastics are the biggest single source of demand growth, representing 45 percent of the total. Both BP and IEA have the plastics industry growing at about 2 percent annually in the coming year.

Oil majors are more bullish. They claim the plastics industry will maintain the rate of growth it has shown since 2010, i.e., 4 percent. (For instance, Exxon touted 4 percent at its May 2020 investor day.) That kind of growth would mean a doubling of demand in 18 to 24 years, “and this appears to be what the industry is tooling up for,” says the report. “The petrochemical industry already faces huge overcapacity, but is planning to spend a further $400 billion on 80mt of new capacity.”

Global and national oil companies are shifting investment into petrochemicals, from Saudi Arabia to China. But the industry’s rosy growth projections may not come to pass.

“In order to reach global demand growth of 4 percent, you’ve got to have 2 percent growth across the OECD, 4 percent growth in China, and 6 percent growth in the rest of the world,” says Bond, a lead author of the report. “I would suggest that all three of those are a bit of a stretch.”

Four reasons plastics may not grow as forecasted

Industry projections of growth in plastics take place in a bit of a dreamworld, ignoring several recent trends and changes. The report identifies four.

1. Rising carbon emissions are not cool in the age of the Paris agreement

Calculating the carbon footprint of plastics is a complicated business — it produces CO2 at every stage of its lifecycle, including disposal — but the best research suggests that it averages out to about 5 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of plastic (more if it’s burned, less if it’s landfilled). That’s roughly twice the CO2 produced by a tonne of oil.

If plastic demand were to grow as projected, annual emissions associated with plastic would double by mid-century, to around 3.5 gigatons. And if it did that, SYSTEMIQ (a company that researches and pushes for changes in materials use, which provided input to the report) calculates that it would use 19 percent of the entire remaining global carbon budget.

“To have one sector planning on doubling its carbon footprint while the rest of the world plans to phase out emissions,” says the report, “clearly makes no sense.” Policymakers aren’t going to let it happen.

2. Plastic produces external costs that are almost equal to its total market value

The plastics industry imposes all kinds of costs on society that it doesn’t have to pay (“externalities”): It emits carbon dioxide, it generates air pollution, it must be collected and sorted, and a great deal of it ends up in the ocean.

Adding up all those costs, drawing on the latest research, the report comes up with with a total externalities cost of between $800 and $1,400 per tonne, with “at least $1,000” used as a reasonable rule of thumb.

And this doesn’t include some of the costs the report couldn’t quantify, including microplastics (in seas, waters, and food) and “terrestrial leakage,” or plastic that ends up as rubbish on land.

With these costs in mind, the report looks at the subsidies and taxes facing the industry, to find out if any of these costs are incorporated. Long story short: they are not. The industry receives roughly $33 per tonne in subsidies ($12 billion cumulatively), which isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things, but it turns out to be more than the industry pays in taxes ($2 billion cumulatively, with optimistic assumptions).

All told, then, a tonne of plastic imposes about $1,000 in unpaid external costs, which is about $1 per kilogram, or $350 billion a year. “The average cost of a tonne of plastic is $1,000 – $1,500,” the report says, “so the subsidy from the rest of society to the plastics industry is only a little less than the total sales value of the industry.”

Those “unpaid” external costs are being paid today, of course — they don’t vanish. It’s just that they are overwhelmingly being paid by poor people and people living in poor countries, the ones living next to toxic incinerators, gathering plastic waste, and living with the most concentrated air and water pollution.

Imposing costs on poor people so that wealthy plastics companies can profit is a human rights abuse.

3. The plastics industry is extraordinarily wasteful

The report summarizes four aspects of the industry’s wasteful ways.

First, the best research indicates that about 36 percent of all plastic produced is for single-use applications. Second, 40 percent of plastic waste is mismanaged — “5% ends up in ocean leakage, 22% in open burning, and 14% in terrestrial leakage,” the report says. Third, recycling rates in the industry are abysmally low; 20 percent of plastics are sent for recycling, but only about 5 percent actually end up substituting for virgin plastic. (Compare that to 60-80 percent recycling rates in steel, aluminum, and paper.)

And fourth, there have been virtually no guidelines or regulations on the design of plastic products, so just about anything goes. The result has been a tide of disposable, nonrecyclable plastic junk.

The industry has mostly responded to these kinds of criticisms with misdirection and propaganda rather than improving its products (which, to be fair, has traditionally worked pretty well for it).

“This is not an industry which has focused at all on efficiency or maximising utility,” the report says. “It is a bloated behemoth, ripe for disruption.”

And the public is ready to disrupt it.

4. The public is waking up to the enormous costs of plastic

Broadly speaking, the public and lawmakers are becoming more concerned and active on climate change, and “it is simply delusional for investors in the plastics sector to believe that the sector will be immune from attempts to resolve this issue,” the report says.

The public is also upset about plastic waste, especially in oceans. An IPSOS polls in 2019 found that between 70 and 80 percent of the public wants to reduce plastics and force industry to go along, including a ban on single-use plastics.

This kind of sentiment is driving regulators to crack down, as in the EU, which introduced a €800/ton tax on unrecycled plastic waste as part of its green stimulus package.

Evidence shows that demand for plastic is largely saturated in OECD countries, which means the bulk of the alleged demand growth is supposed to come from China and other emerging markets, but there, too, steps are being taken to curtail plastic use and disposal. China recently banned a range of single-use plastic items; many other countries are expected to follow suit.

New York state began enforcing its ban on plastic bags on October 19, a policy that took effect on March 1.

“You see plastic bags hanging in trees, blowing down the streets, in landfills and in our waterways, and there is no doubt they are doing tremendous damage,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said when he signed the legislation. “Twelve million barrels of oil are used to make the plastic bags we use every year and by 2050 there will be more plastic by weight in the oceans than fish.”

In summary, the plastics industry is bloated and wasteful, it imposes enormous social and ecological costs, and people are sick of it. That is not a recipe for robust growth.

There are solutions at hand for reducing growth in plastic

As policymakers get serious about plastics, there are a number of existing solutions ready to go, which are cheaper than the status quo. Those solutions were itemized and costed out by SYSTEMIQ in a report called “Breaking the Plastic Wave,” released earlier this year.

Overall, bending the plastics curve looks like this:

Maximizing the three most scalable and cost-effective solutions — reducing demand through design, reuse, and new delivery models; substituting other products like compostables or paper; and better recycling — together constitutes what SYSTEMIQ calls the System Change Scenario (SCS).

Under SCS, total global plastic demand plateaus in 2020 and peaks in 2030.

(These projections were done before Covid-19, so as in many other areas, it’s possible that the peak has been pulled forward. Wood Mackenzie projects a 4 percent drop in plastics demand in 2020, though it also says the virus “has paused the shift away from single-use plastics.”)

Notably, SCS is also cheaper for industry than business as usual. Investment in new technologies goes up, but investment in virgin production and conversion are sharply reduced.

SCS would also reduce the amount of money governments spend on plastics (mainly on waste) and create more jobs than business as usual.

If you are interested in the details — how to better design plastic products, make them last longer, make then more recyclable, and ensure they are properly disposed of — the SYSTEMIQ report goes deep in the weeds. Suffice it to say, solutions to the profusion of cheap plastic and plastic waste are available. They would save money relative to the status quo. They would reduce pollution and create jobs.

And together, they would ensure that global demand for plastics peaks and begins declining within a decade, which would in turn ensure that global demand for oil does the same.

Policymakers just have to step up.

The politics of plastics are not favorable for Big Oil

Pouring money into plastics is a desperate gamble for Big Oil. Social pressure, technological innovations, and economic trends are all closing in on its main product, so it’s trying to make a lateral move into another bloated, polluting industry.

The petrochemicals industry is already burdened with overcapacity, even as it pours billions into capacity expansions. If the anticipated 4 percent growth does not miraculously manifest out of the coronavirus-hobbled global economy in the next few years — and there are many reasons to believe it won’t — the cumulative overcapacity will be crippling, enough to suppress prices and investment returns for years.

By the time the industry crawls out of the hole, it will find a different world, with electric vehicles and heat pumps eating away at its core market.

“I’m not suggesting that we will lose the cyclicality of oil,” says Bond, “I’m sure we’ll have higher prices again at some stage in the future. But it is cyclicality around a falling mean.”

Plastics are probably not going to save the oil and gas industry. It is more likely that the peak point in humanity’s centuries-long, planet-shaping fossil fuel binge is already in the rearview mirror, and that “cyclicality around a falling mean” will be the core truth of fossil fuels for the remainder of the century.

Polls show Trump is losing ground where the coronavirus is surging

The third — and largest — coronavirus wave is hitting the US just in time for the presidential election, with surges in key Midwestern swing states. Numerous polls suggest voters may be taking their pandemic pain and panic with them to the ballot boxes in these places: President Donald Trump isn’t just down in national polls — he’s faring especially poorly in battlegrounds where infection rates are spiking.

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Over the last two weeks, the coronavirus case count in Wisconsin — where Trump won by a single percentage point in 2016 — has jumped 36 percent, to an average of 4,200 new infections per day. And that’s just among the people who’ve been diagnosed. The test positivity rate in the state is a staggering 28 percent, according to Covidexitstrategy.org, and health officials have already had to transform the state fair park into a field hospital to manage the crush of new patients.

The situation is nearly as worrisome in Michigan: Cases there have risen 73 percent in the last two weeks, to 2,600 per day, while the number of Covid-19 patients in hospital has more than doubled since the end of September. It’s another swing state, which Trump won by an even tinier margin — of 0.3 — in 2016.

In these places, and the states around them, the majority of voters apparently prefer Biden. That has mostly been the state of things for some time, but is perhaps even clearer as Election Day approaches. “Biden is doing well everywhere — but his leads are even more solid in places where the coronavirus is hitting the hardest,” said Mike Greenfield, the chief executive officer of Change Research, who has been tracking the impact of the pandemic on voter decision-making.

Consider the recent data:

According to a pair of Washington Post-ABC News polls, likely voters in Michigan have put Biden ahead of Trump 51 percent to 44 percent, while a Financial Times analysis of RealClearPolitics polling data gives Biden a 7.9 point lead.
In Wisconsin, the Post-ABC polls favor Biden by a stunning 17 points, and again, the FT finding was more modest — a 6.8-point edge for the Biden. Registered voters also favor Biden in both states, according to the Post-ABC, which found the Democrat is more trusted when it comes to the pandemic response than Trump. There has also been a small recent shift in Biden’s favor in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average.
In states that border Wisconsin, including Iowa and Minnesota, Biden is also polling well, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis. In Iowa, a RABA Research poll has Biden at 50 percent and Trump at 46 percent; a Gravis Marketing survey has Biden carrying Minnesota by 14 points.

These findings square with Change Research’s analysis. Looking at 110,000 survey responses from a variety of polls between June and October, they found whether a state was experiencing a Covid-19 spike or not moved the election by 3 percentage points on average.

The trend even held for Trump supporters. Overall, voters who favored Trump in 2016 and who are living in states with higher Covid-19 rates are about 50 percent more likely than voters in states where the virus is better controlled to support Biden in 2020, Change Research found.

“We suspect that Biden’s especially strong lead in Wisconsin is the result of people seeing the ineffectiveness of Trump’s policies in that state,” Greenfield said.

We won’t really know the extent to which the spread of Covid-19 in swing states might influence the election until after November 3 — when all the ballots are counted. Voting decisions are complicated, polls can mislead, and we’ll need more data to gauge how much coronavirus motivated decision-making.

At the same time, the pandemic has emerged as a key election issue, one that has deeply affected, and continues to affect, all voters’ lives — how they give birth and say goodbye to loved ones who’ve died, how they work (if they still work), shop for groceries, and whether their kids can go to school or college. Most Americans are somewhat or very worried about both being infected by the virus, and even more so, the virus’s effects on the economy.

“[People in] places that were hit hard or are currently being hit hard are going to be looking to some solutions for their day-to-day problems,” said Amesh A. Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. They “may be looking to find a solution in the other candidate,” he added.

From failing to get Covid-19 testing up and running, to sidelining America’s leading public health agency, to politicizing mask wearing and lying about the danger of the virus, the Trump administration has grossly mishandled the pandemic. And these public health failures don’t even account for the collateral damage from the virus: the stock market is cratering, there are record unemployment claims, people are losing their health insurance and homes, and more Americans are literally going hungry. Rebuilding from the pandemic will take a war-time effort, at a moment when 1,000 Americans are dying each day from the disease and the US has reported a record 500,000-plus new cases in the past week

“It is not surprising to me that voters are recognizing the sheer incompetence of the current administration — some of it deliberate — at this task,” Adalja added.

Days before the election, Trump is still lying about the reality of the pandemic. “We’re rounding the turn,” he said at an October 25 rally in Lumberton, North Carolina. “Our numbers are incredible.”

Biden has cast himself as the candidate who will help America rebuild. There’s no overstating the size of the challenge the former vice president faces in doing that — but he’s the candidate who is owning up to the scale of the problem, said Shannon Monnat, professor and co-director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health Lab at Syracuse University.

“The president has been asking Americans to deny what they see happening right in front of them,” she added. “People are tired. They want to see some leadership and a coordinated national coronavirus response.”

Europe’s second wave of Covid-19 doesn’t excuse Trump’s failures

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Europe suffered a big Covid-19 outbreak in the spring, then subsequently suppressed the virus while the United States continued to struggle. But now cases in Europe are surging once again: France is bringing back a lockdown, the UK is escalating restrictions, and even Germany, widely seen as a coronavirus success story, is again imposing closures, trying to avoid the overwhelming wave of cases that its neighbors are now dealing with.

President Donald Trump has cited Europe’s spike to argue his administration’s handling of Covid-19 wasn’t so bad. “It’s a worldwide pandemic,” Trump said at the final presidential debate. “It’s all over the world. You see the spikes in Europe and many other places right now.”

If Europe couldn’t contain it, the argument goes, then maybe everything that’s happened in the US isn’t so bad, or unique, after all.

The causes of the European spike are part of a familiar story, with experts blaming a mix of pandemic fatigue, complacency, and denial. When the Czech Republic ended its lockdown, its capital, Prague, held a massive public dinner party to celebrate the supposed victory — but the celebration was premature, and the country now has among the highest rate of daily new coronavirus cases in the world.

But Europe’s failure, experts say, doesn’t let the US — or Trump — off the hook.

For one, the US’s coronavirus cases are now surging too, though not as much as in Europe. America reported an all-time record of more than 90,000 coronavirus cases in one day this week (partly but not entirely due to more testing). Some states, like the Dakotas, have levels of Covid-19 cases that match those in the hardest-hit European countries, like Belgium and the Czech Republic. The US’s most recent surge started later than Europe’s, but it’s well on its way up.

The US is also still faring worse than most of its developed peers. It reports more daily new coronavirus cases per capita than the majority of developed countries. Canada, after controlling for population, reports a third of daily new Covid-19 cases as the US, and both New Zealand and Australia report less than 1 percent of the cases as America. The US also reports more deaths, after adjusting for population, than most of its developed peers (although deaths tend to lag behind cases, so Europe’s death toll will likely get worse soon).

Trump “is absolutely right this is a global pandemic,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. “What he’s not right about is that somehow it’s uncontrollable. The truth is there’s lots of countries that have controlled it.” To that end, the US “remains a singularly poor performer,” even as some countries mismanage the virus and see surges, too.

Experts have put this largely on Trump. The evidence supports several measures to combat the coronavirus: social distancing, aggressive testing and tracing, and widespread masking.

Trump has effectively rejected all of these over the past several months. He’s pushed for states to open up quickly and early, fueling new and continuing Covid-19 outbreaks across the country. Rather than having the federal government take charge on testing and tracing, he’s punted the issue down to the states and private sector — and even pushed his public health agencies to recommend less testing. He’s mocked masks and questioned if they’re even effective, even as the evidence increasingly shows they are.

“What this outbreak gives you is the same problem for every country around the world,” Clare Wenham, a global health policy expert at the London School of Economics and Political Science, told me. “So you can really see the impact of different policies that were launched.” The US’s performance “is a testament to failures of the Trump administration.”

A remaining contrast is how seriously Europe is taking its Covid-19 surge compared to the US. Some European countries are bringing back lockdowns. Others are enacting curfews, more targeted closures, and mask mandates. European leaders have warned that they will take even more aggressive actions if cases don’t stop rising.

Meanwhile, the US has continued to resist action even as the country sees a third surge of Covid-19. Most of the country has reopened, with risky spaces like bars and restaurants now regularly serving customers nationwide. Seventeen states still don’t have mask mandates. Suffering the worst outbreaks in the US today, North and South Dakota have rejected government mandates for social distancing or masking, and Wisconsin’s Republicans have hamstrung the Democratic governor from taking more aggressive actions to slow the virus.

So the current global surge could play out as a repeat of the first several months of the pandemic: The US and Europe both see new outbreaks, and Europe reacts with serious action while the US doesn’t.

The US’s failure on Covid-19 still looms large

Regardless of what Europe is currently going through, it’s clear that the US has failed to contain the coronavirus.

The US is in the top four, out of the world’s 36 developed countries (most of which are European), for Covid-19 deaths per million people. America has roughly six times the death rate as the median developed country.

If the US had the same Covid-19 death rate as Canada, nearly 140,000 more Americans would be alive today, out of more than 225,000 total deaths. If it had the same death rate as Germany, more than 187,000 more Americans would be alive today. If it was like Australia, almost 216,000 more Americans would be alive today.

The US faced unique challenges, given its large size, fragmented federalist system, and libertarian streak. The public health system was already underfunded and underprepared for a major disease outbreak before Trump.

But similar problems also applied to other countries. Australia, Canada, and Germany have federalist systems of government, individualistic societies, or both, and underfunded public health systems. Yet they’ve all fared much better (though cases are now rising rapidly in Germany).

Unlike these other countries, though, the US didn’t take stronger action early and sustain it. America never took social distancing very seriously, with states reopening far before they truly suppressed cases, unlike almost all other developed nations in the spring and summer. It took months to really build up testing capacity — and based on positivity rates, it’s still far behind the likes of Australia. It never developed a national contact tracing system, as South Korea did. It never embraced universal masking, as Japan did.

The clearest evidence was America’s large wave of Covid-19 cases in the summer — a surge that the vast majority of other developed countries, including Europe as a whole, avoided. Unlike much of Europe, the US has never actually suppressed its Covid-19 cases down to zero or more manageable levels — to the point that some experts question if the US is truly seeing a “third wave” right now or if the country is still seeing a continuation of its first wave. Europe, by contrast, is generally understood to be in the middle of a “second wave.”

Without that summer surge, the US could be much closer to its European peers. The US began April at around the middle of the pack among developed countries for confirmed Covid-19 deaths. But the country steadily climbed up the ranks through the rest of spring and then the summer.

“We never really got it under control,” Jha said. “We never brought case numbers down the way most of the Europeans did — partly because we didn’t shut down hard enough, and we didn’t stay shut down long enough.”

There’s no reason it should have played out this way. Before the coronavirus pandemic, a 2019 ranking of countries’ disease outbreak preparedness from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and Nuclear Threat Initiative had the US at the top of the list. Although the report warned that “no country is fully prepared for epidemics or pandemics,” it at the very least suggested that the US should have done better than most other countries. And America very clearly hasn’t.

Again, the failures largely lie with Trump. Even as coronavirus cases have surged again and again, Trump has continued to downplay Covid-19 — telling journalist Bob Woodward, “I wanted to always play it down.” The goal for Trump is to perpetuate a false sense of normalcy that he believes could help him win reelection. He’s continued that even after he got sick himself with Covid-19 — tweeting as he got out of the hospital, “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”

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By never taking the coronavirus seriously, though, Trump has ensured that a massive, ongoing Covid-19 epidemic has dominated and will continue to dominate American life until a vaccine is developed and widely distributed.

Much of Europe made the same mistake as the US

Just as some states in the US are doing better, some countries in Europe are too. Germany, for example, has fared better than much of the continent, although it recently brought back some “lockdown lite” restrictions as coronavirus cases increased.

Still, it’s true that Europe is suffering a massive surge of Covid-19 now. Experts say that’s largely because the continent is repeating many of the same mistakes the US made over the past several months.

The constant lesson of Covid-19 outbreaks in the US — whether New York, Florida, or the Dakotas — is that not taking aggressive action quickly enough and sustaining it will leave a place very vulnerable to the coronavirus. Once that happens, cases can very quickly grow, forcing drastic measures over weeks or months to bring things down. The virus has proven, across different states from the spring to now, that it will pierce these vulnerabilities.

One lesson is that “lockdowns do not eradicate the disease,” Kalipso Chalkidou, director of global health policy at the Center for Global Development, told me. They slow it down — which still saves lives — but suppressing cases with a lockdown doesn’t mean a country is cured, the virus is gone forever, and everything can return to normal with no precautions.

Over time, however, countries around the globe have eased up, opening themselves to an outbreak. Experts pin this on a mix of fatigue, as people get tired of dealing with the virus, as well as complacency and denial, as people grow accustomed to the virus or believe that they’ve managed to completely suppress it. That leads to places opening back up, the public going out more, and then outbreaks.

Europe is no different in this regard. After the continent as a whole truly suppressed the virus over the spring and summer, places started to loosen their restrictions. They ended mask mandates. They allowed bars and indoor dining again. They eased up on testing and tracing. The public started to get comfortable, assuming that the virus was gone and things could get back to normal.

“The numbers [in Europe] got low — much lower than the US,” Wenham said. “So people did become more confident.”

The story of Prague, in the Czech Republic, provides an extreme example. When the country ended its lockdown after crushing its Covid-19 curve, the city built a 1,600-foot table for a public dinner party, which organizers described to reporters as a celebration of “the end of the coronavirus crisis.”

Now, the Czech Republic leads all but one other nation, Andorra, in coronavirus cases per capita. The country this month entered a second lockdown — a move that Czech leaders previously claimed wouldn’t be necessary — to avoid overwhelming its health care system.

“I apologize even for the fact that I ruled out this option in the past because I was not able to imagine it might happen,” Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said. “Unfortunately, it has happened and now, above all, we have to protect the lives of our citizens.”

In that sense, one of the US’s biggest mistakes isn’t completely unique: Other countries have also at times developed a false sense of normalcy around Covid-19.

What makes the US different is how often it has repeated this mistake in the face of outbreak after outbreak. As Jha has told me, “I, at this point, feel like I clearly no longer understand why our country can’t learn its lessons and why we keep repeating the same mistakes.”

With winter coming, Europe is reacting, but America isn’t

Another difference may be emerging between Europe and the US: While European countries are now taking big steps to contain their new Covid-19 surge — including lockdowns — the US appears content with not really doing more than it’s been doing.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows acknowledged as much. In an appearance on CNN, Meadows said, “We are not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics, and other mitigation areas.” Asked why it won’t be contained, Meadows responded, “Because it is a contagious virus, just like the flu.” (The coronavirus is much worse than the flu.)

In the absence of federal leadership, the policy response has been largely left to the states. That’s led to disparities: While some states have mask mandates and restrictions on indoor dining and large gatherings, others have no statewide rules at all.

North and South Dakota, for example, don’t have mask mandates or any restrictions for businesses, at best providing recommendations that the public and businesses don’t have to follow. That’s continued as the Dakotas have dealt with the two worst ongoing outbreaks in the US.

Elsewhere, the vast majority of states have reopened, with at best limits on capacity in businesses and the size of gatherings, along with weakly enforced guidelines for social distancing. That’s remained true, so far, even as Covid-19 cases have surged.

Most states have mask mandates, but they’re enforced to varying degrees. Contact tracing doesn’t exist at any effective level in all but a few states.

Europe, in comparison, is taking much stronger actions, including lockdowns, curfews, limits on how large gatherings can be, and restrictions on different households interacting with each other. Mask mandates are also widespread. Several countries are trying to scale up contact tracing.

Some European countries have tried less restrictive measures first because, as Wenham said, “no one wants to go into a full lockdown again.” It remains to be seen, given the scale of some of the continent’s outbreaks, if these milder measures will work. Some experts say many places are past the point where weaker actions are enough, so more lockdowns are likely in the future.

Still, at least European countries are collectively trying something. That can’t be said for the US as a whole.

Time may be running out. Throughout the fall and winter, several factors will likely hasten the coronavirus’s spread: Schools will continue to reopen; the cold will push people into indoor spaces in which ventilation is worse and the virus spreads more easily; the holidays will bring friends and family together in potentially large gatherings; and another flu season could strain health care systems. If a place is suffering a high baseline of coronavirus cases as all of that happens, outbreaks could spin further out of control.

With the clock ticking on those issues, and the US not moving to take much more action, the country may once again splinter from Europe and produce yet another unique failure in its response to the coronavirus.

“The countries that remain vigilant and focused have performed the best,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told me. “These surges in cases are not inevitable — they result from the choices we make.”

Why a negative Covid-19 test before Thanksgiving isn’t an all-clear

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More frequent Covid-19 testing is one key to help end the pandemic. But as individuals, we can’t rely on testing alone to protect ourselves and others.

Take this recent example: Public health officials in New Zealand reported on a cluster of cases that likely spread aboard a long-haul flight. Yet the suspected index cases — the people who likely spread the virus to others — tested negative for the virus a couple of days before boarding their plane in Switzerland and thought they weren’t infected.

This goes to show: A negative test is not an all-clear in terms of being able to safely interact with others without masks or other precautions. “Testing negative is not like a passport for people to go out and do whatever they want to do,” as Muge Cevik, a virologist and physician at the University of St. Andrews, told me earlier this fall.

As people make (unwise) plans to travel this Thanksgiving week, they should understand that testing negative does not mean it’s safe to be in close contact with other people. It does not mean it’s safe to take masks off.

Scientists don’t yet know exactly when a person who is infected with the coronavirus will start testing positive for the virus. There are situations when a person could test negative, be infected, and also be contagious. It’s also possible — since the virus multiplies itself exponentially in the body very quickly — that someone could test negative in the morning (and not be contagious), but by the afternoon test positive (and be very contagious).

Confusing? Yes, it is. But the bottom line is that Covid-19 diagnostic tests (both the slower, more common, viral genetic test — called RT-PCR — and the more rapid viral protein test, called an antigen test) are most accurate when used on people experiencing symptoms.

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“One of the huge gaps now in the data is: What is the probability of testing positive before you get symptoms?” Benny Borremans, a disease ecologist at UCLA, said in October. Right now, scientists just don’t know for sure.

Why testing is less accurate before symptoms begin

There are several reasons scientists are unsure about when people will start testing positive for SARS-CoV-2. To understand why, and to make this less confusing, it’s helpful to think through all the things that have to happen for a Covid-19 test to come back positive.

First, the virus needs time to establish itself in a person’s body. This is called the incubation period, and it can take upward of two weeks. On average, this happens in about five or six days. During the incubation period, a person might not test positive because there’s not enough virus in their body to detect in a test.

“The virus particles, day by day, will multiply,” Cevik says. “The virus needs to reach a threshold for the PCR [i.e. viral genetic] tests to pick it up.” PCR is the more common Covid-19 diagnostic test because it requires a lower threshold of the virus to test positive; rapid antigen tests would require a higher level of virus to register a positive test.

Testing positive should coincide with being contagious. But it doesn’t always.

Generally, a person can start being infectious for the virus around two days before they start to show symptoms, in what’s known as the presymptomatic phase.

And, generally — but not always — scientists would expect that if a person is contagious, they’d test positive. After all, if they’re spewing enough virus out to get another person sick, they’re probably spewing enough virus out for a diagnostic test to pick up.

But when exactly a person makes the jump from testing negative and being non-infectious to testing positive and being infectious is hard to predict.

“If everything works as it should, the test should be positive if you are infectious at the very moment of the test, as there must be virus present then,” Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, says. “However, you could easily test negative then become infectious a day, or even hours, after the test.” Unless you’re testing every hour, it’s impossible to get a fine-grained view on when the infectious period truly begins. (Also possible, but probably rarer: A person tests positive before they start to be contagious.)

Even if a person is contagious, they may not test positive. It could come down to where the sample for testing was taken from.

In general, “we consider the gold standard to be the nasopharyngeal swab,” Bobbi Pritt, the director of clinical microbiology at the Mayo Clinic, says. “That’s the deep nasal swab that goes all the way back into the back of your nose. Whereas other specimens — like a throat swab or just the very outer edge of your nose, like right inside your nostril — that’s not going to contain as much virus.”

Early on in the infection, a person who is incubating the virus is expected to test negative. Over the summer, Johns Hopkins researchers — including Lessler — published a paper estimating the likelihood of a false negative test in the first few days after being exposed to the virus. On the first day, they found the chance of a false negative near 100 percent. No test is going to find the virus so early. Through the first four days, that rate drops to 67 percent on day four, on average, but with a very large range of error. On the day people first reported symptoms, there’s still a significant false negative rate, at 38 percent.

What does this all add up to? “What we’re saying is don’t test anyone in less than four days after exposure,” Cevik says. It’s not going to tell you much about the person’s status. Or if a person is tested in that time, they ought to be retested a few days later.

“In general, five to eight days after exposure is the best time to test,” Cevik says. “Or day three after symptom onset.” That’s when the genetic RT-PCR tests are most likely to reveal a true positive.

Because nothing about Covid-19 can be simple, here’s another thing to consider: The antigen tests that produce quick results have a shorter window in which you’d expect a person would test positive.

They are also slightly less accurate, but this limitation can be overcome if they are used repeatedly. If used correctly, these tests will flag a positive in the window when a person is most likely to be contagious. And with repeated use, scientists hope these quick tests could help stop outbreaks from growing out of control.

A negative test without symptoms might not mean much. Keep your mask on.

Here’s the bottom line: “We don’t know when one will test positive pre-symptom onset for PCR or antigen tests,” epidemiologist A. Marm Kilpatrick writes in an email. He points to a few papers that try to quantify the probability of testing positive while asymptomatic, but they are hard to draw conclusions and recommendations from.

That’s because the incubation period — the time it takes from initial exposure for a person to become infectious — can vary greatly from person to person. (It can happen in four or five days, or up to two weeks.) “If someone has a long incubation period, our [work] suggests their infectiousness rises later and thus there would be a longer period where they’d test negative.”

If you have symptoms, you’re likely to test positive the day you start feeling ill, but not guaranteed. The first few days after starting to feel sick, you have a very high probability of testing positive.

We could learn more in the months ahead about testing asymptomatic and presymptomatic people, with studies following people after they have been exposed to the virus, and testing them repeatedly over a few weeks to determine the likelihood of testing positive before symptoms begin. “We have a lot of data from symptom onset onwards, but we don’t have data in terms of presymptoms,” Cevik says.

This is why testing is no replacement for other Covid-19 mitigation measures, like quarantining people exposed to the virus, mask-wearing, and social distancing. Please, please remember this.