An aerial view of a notice dug into the sand reading #STAYHOME on Tamarama Beach on April 02, 2020 in Sydney, Australia. James Gourley / Getty Images
By Ellen Wright Clayton
Will SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, fade away on its own this summer?
After all, other viruses – including influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which causes bronchiolitis in little children – are mostly seen in the winter.
The National Academies’ Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats recently addressed the question of whether SARS-CoV-2 will follow the same pattern. The group of experts corralled the research that’s been done so far – much of it not yet peer-reviewed – to assess the evidence.
While there is some reason to hope that things may get better as the weather warms up, there is plenty of reason for the U.S. to keep its guard up.
Are Heat and Humidity Reason for Hope?
Although the U.S. is early in the course of the pandemic, there is evidence from other countries that SARS-CoV-2 spreads more rapidly in cold, dry weather.
One preprint study of 30 Chinese provinces showed that the number of COVID-19 cases went down by between 36% and 57% for every 1.8 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature. When temperatures held steady in the low 40s F, the number of cases went down between 11% and 22% with each 1% increase in relative humidity (how much water is in the air).
A larger preprint study looking at 310 regions in 116 countries found that 11% more cases were reported when the temperature went down 9 degrees, the relative humidity went down 10% and when the wind speed went up.
Laboratory research also suggest that the virus survives longer in cold conditions. One study showed that SARS-CoV-2 lasts for 14 days at 40 F in lab media but is gone after one day at 98.6 F.
These and other studies suggest that warm, humid weather may slow the spread of this virus, although not all commentators agree.
New research on this topic appears almost daily, and scientists are watching to see what happens as summer comes to the Northern Hemisphere.
Which Clues Call for Caution?
COVID-19 is already spreading in many parts of the world where it’s hot, including Australia and South America, demonstrating that high temperatures are not enough to stop the disease.
The most important reason to be concerned about ongoing spread is the fact that this is a brand new virus for humans, so almost everyone is susceptible to being infected.
In fact, weather actually appears to play a minor role in the rate at which this virus spreads.
Other influences on infection rates include individual behaviors, cultural practices, geography, income and living conditions. Public health practices such as social distancing, the intensity of testing for infection, contact tracing, quarantine of people who are exposed and isolation of people who are actually infected also play a big role in how the coronavirus spreads.
The news from other viral diseases is not encouraging either. The two most serious coronavirus diseases that are closely related to COVID-19, the first SARS outbreak and MERS, did not vary with the seasons after they emerged. In fact, MERS is still found year-round in the Middle East, where it is hot and dry. Pandemic influenza infections have emerged at different times of the year as well.
What Should We Do?
The long-term solution to SARS-CoV-2 will be to develop a safe and effective vaccine. This work is proceeding at unprecedented speed, but it will still take anywhere from months to a few years and will require trials involving thousands of people and massive international leadership and collaboration.
Until there’s a vaccine, prevention will require avoiding exposure to people who can spread the virus. Communities need to test people to find out who is contagious and engage in serious contact tracing, quarantine and isolation. Scientists need to learn more about how to determine if someone is immune and how long immunity lasts, a big open question at the moment. As individuals, each of us will need to follow expert scientific advice about good hygiene practices and distancing.
SARS-CoV-2 is likely to keep circulating until the human population has widespread immunity, which hopefully will come not from an unchecked pandemic but from developing and deploying a safe and effective vaccine.
Ellen Wright Clayton is a Professor of Pediatrics and Law and Health Policy at Vanderbilt University.
Disclosure statement: Ellen Wright Clayton reviewed the statement on seasonality by the NASEM Standing Committee.
Reposted with permission from The Conversation.
A customer wearing a face mask exits a Walgreens pharmacy in South Beach on April 14, 2020 in Miami Beach, Florida. Cliff Hawkins / Getty Images
More Americans are turning to pharmaceuticals to help them cope with crippling anxiety during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report from Express Scripts.
The report, America’s State of Mind, found that Americans filled 21 percent more prescriptions for antidepressant, anti-anxiety and anti-insomnia medications from mid-February to mid-March when the COVID-19 social distancing protocols went into effect in the U.S. The largest increase was for anti-anxiety prescriptions, which rose 34.1 percent during that month, with an increase of 18 percent in the week leading up to March 15, according to the report.
The global pandemic was declared on March 12. Shelter-at-home orders went into effect shortly after that.
“It’s hard to imagine we don’t have a lot of our fellow Americans under incredible stress right now, either from getting sick or being afraid of being sick or losing their jobs,” Dr. Glen Stettin, senior vice president and chief innovation officer at Express Scripts, told Newsweek. “It’s a stressful time and you can see it in the kinds of medications that have been increasing in terms of the use of medication.”
The numbers are startling since they reverse a trend, an analysis of the report noted. For the last five years, use of those anxiety medications known as benzodiazepines, which includes Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan and Valium, declined 12.1 percent. Anti-insomnia medications had declined roughly 11 percent from 2015 to 2019.
Doctors have shifted away from prescribing these medications, which are more prone to abuse, in favor of therapy, according to Stettin, as CNN reported.
“We were doing our five-year update to look at what was happening with the utilization of these medicines,” Stettin said to Newsweek. “Antidepressant use continued to increase but the anxiety and insomnia medication declined. All of a sudden, when the pandemic got declared, the use of the drugs combined increased by over 20 percent.”
The recent increase in prescriptions being filled was nearly twice as high for women, whose prescriptions jumped almost 40 percent, compared with men, who saw a 22.7 percent rise, according to the study, as CNN reported.
The recent analysis looked at medication usage of 31.5 million Express Scripts customers with work-based health insurance from Jan. 19 to March 15. The five-year analysis looked at 21 million commercially insured customers.
As weeks of distancing turn into months, many people are experiencing a greater sense of isolation. They’re also trying to handle the uncertainty of when and how the pandemic will end, the fear of infection, the economic crisis that has sent unemployment skyrocketing, and the inconsistent messaging from authority figures, as Vox reported.
“All aspects of life are affected” by the pandemic, said Arash Javanbakht, a psychiatrist and trauma specialist, according to Vox. “It was like one day, everything changed.”
Nearly 45 percent of participants in a Kaiser Family Foundation poll said in late March that worry or stress related to coronavirus has had a negative impact on their mental health, as CNN reported. That’s up from 32 percent who felt that way in the middle of the month.
Another poll, this time from the American Psychiatric Association, found that nearly half of Americans were anxious about possibly contracting COVID-19 while 62 percent were anxious about a loved one getting infected, as CNN reported.
“During this time, it is important to do what we can to maintain self-care and manage the stress,” said Dr. Bruce Schwartz, the association’s president.
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Aerial view of Lendbreen from the south-west. Light-grey areas (without lichen) have seen recent ice-melt. Arrows 1–3 indicate the locations of cairns visible on approach from Ottadalen. Arrow 4 indicates the location of a stone-built shelter. L. Pilø / CC BY 4.0
Global heating from the climate crisis is rapidly melting glaciers, revealing treasures underneath the ice from long ago. Retreating ice in Norway recently revealed a lost Viking mountain pass strewn with artifacts, according to a new study in the journal Antiquity.
The first discovery was an 1,800 year-old shirt, which spurred researchers to find what else was strewn around near the Lendbreen ice patch outside the alpine village of Lom, Norway. That led to an exploration that uncovered artifacts dating back to the late Roman Iron Age all the way to the Viking Age and the medieval period, as Scientific American reported.
When the researchers traipsed into the abandoned mountain pass that is rapidly melting due to warmer global temperatures, they found broken sleds, tools and other elements of daily life dating back nearly 2,000 years, as National Geographic reported.
“It dawned on us that we had found something really special,” said Lars Pilø, who leads the Glacier Archaeology Program in Oppland, Norway and is a co-author on the paper, according to National Geographic. “We sort of hit the motherlode.”
They found nearly 1,000 artifacts that run the gamut from 300 to 1500 AD, with the mountain pass falling out of use after the Black Death in the medieval period. The researchers used carbon dating to pinpoint when each finding is from. The bulk of what they collected comes from the period around 1000 AD at the height of the Viking era when trade and mobility in the region peaked, according to The Guardian.
“A lost mountain pass melting out of the ice is a dream discovery for us glacial archaeologists,” said Pilø in a statement, as CNN reported. “In such passes, past travelers left behind lots of artifacts, frozen in time by the ice. These incredibly well-preserved artifacts of organic materials have great historical value.”
While this is certainly a dream discovery for archaeologists, one of the study authors cautioned that it is also a “poignant and evocative reminder of climate change,” according to James Barrett, a medieval and environmental archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, who has been working with Norwegian archaeologists on the project since 2011, as The Guardian reported.
“Global warming is leading to the melting of mountain ice worldwide, and the finds melting out of the ice are a result of this,” said Pilø to Gizmodo. “Trying to save the remains of a melting world is a very exciting job — the finds are just an archaeologist’s dream — but at the same time, it is also a job you cannot do without a deep sense of foreboding.”
The large-scale melting in 2019 of most of the Lendbreen ice means there will soon be nothing left to discover, said Barrett. “On the other hand, there are a lot of ice patches in the high elevations in [this part of Norway], so there will always be another — for the time being,” he said, as The Guardian reported.
Combing through the rapidly depleting glacier, the archaeologists found horse snowshoes, the buried remains of packhorses and their associated dung piles, parts of sleds, a walking stick adorned with a runic inscription, a knife with well-preserved wooden handle, and a wood distaff used to hold wool during hand-spinning. They also dug up mittens, shoes and the remains of clothing, including a complete tunic from the Roman Iron Age. Some items defied description since there was nothing to compare them to, according to CNN.
Researchers found objects related to clothing and daily life. Pictured here: A) a possible goat or lamb bit; B) knife; C) shoe; D) mitten. Glacier Archaeology Program & J. Wildhagen / CC BY 4.0
“These finds tell us a rich history of the local farming community of which there are otherwise only meager sources,” said Pilø, as Gizmodo reported.
“The preservation of the objects emerging from the ice is just stunning,” said Espen Finstad, study co-author and co-director of the Glacier Archaeology Program, in a statement, as CNN reported. “It is like they were lost a short time ago, not centuries or millennia ago.”
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Aerial view of the Esperanca IV informal gold mining camp, near the Menkragnoti indigenous territory, in Altamira, Para state, Brazil, in the Amazon basin, on August 28, 2019. Joao LAET / AFP / Getty Images
Wildcat miners come to the area seeking their fortune. Every day, hundreds of laborers embark on long journeys up and down the Crepori river to reach the gold pits, while others fly in on small planes that land on makeshift airstrips. Such scenes have become common across the world’s largest rainforest, and are being held up as the cause of widespread destruction.
Jose Maria, a miner from the state of Maranhao, some 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) to the east — who does not reveal his full name — is waiting on the river banks for a ride. “We’re here to do honest work and earn a living,” he said. “I don’t see what the problem is.”
But the pits where Jose Maria and fellow miners work are located on the more than two million-hectare territory of the Munduruku, one of the largest indigenous tribes in the Amazon, whose mineral-rich lands are protected under Brazil’s 1988 Constitution.
A 2019 survey by polling institute Datafolha showed 86% of Brazilians oppose mining on indigenous territory, yet it has been encouraged by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s controversial bill, which calls for the legalization of commercial mining on indigenous land.
Submitted to Brazil’s Congress in early February, the bill has yet to be put to a vote. A planned ballot was pushed back with the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Rodrigo Maia, telling Congress it was “not the right moment.” But he also stressed that the bill was “not unconstitutional.”
Brazil’s Ministry of Mines and Energy told DW it was planning to “regulate activities” on indigenous land, adding that the process would require “consultation with the indigenous communities,” which would be able to participate in mining activity.
While some in the Munduruku have been won over by the allure of riches, and allow gold extraction on their land in exchange for money, the majority remain opposed to illegal mining.
‘Full-scale gold rush’
About 13% of Brazil’s territory is classified as indigenous land, spread across more than 400 reserves. But according to the Amazon Geo-Referenced Socio-Environmental Information Network, there are more than 450 illegal mining sites in the Brazilian Amazon, where most of those reserves are located.
The proposed law would likely lead to a dramatic rise in the level of mining activity.
“Once you open the door, it will become a flood,” Glenn Shepard, an American anthropologist who works with indigenous populations affected by illegal mining, told DW. “The law will create a precedent for miners to go in. It’s already a full-scale gold rush going on, and these indigenous groups are losing control.”
Greenpeace’s journalism team, Unearthed, has reported that gold miners planned to continue working through the coronavirus pandemic, increasing fears of spreading the disease to indigenous groups.
In advance of the vote on the bill, the Ministry of Mines and Energy told DW it had received more than 4,000 applications for mining-related activities on indigenous land.
Tensions between miners and local communities are already high. In June last year, Brazil’s indigenous rights agency, Funai, reported dozens of miners dressed in military uniform invading the Wajapi community, in the Brazilian Amazon, stabbing and killing one of its leaders.
According to research by international NGO, Global Witness, 20 land and environmental defenders were killed in Brazil in 2018 alone. Globally, the nonprofit cited mining as the deadliest sector, with 46 reported murders in the same year.
The deforestation issue
Environmentally, one of the biggest impacts of mining is logging. A 2017 report published in the journal Nature Communications found that mining accounted for 9% of all forest loss in the Amazon between 2005 and 2015.
Satellite analysis published by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project revealed that 2,000 hectares of gold mining-related deforestation occurred in 2019 across the Munduruku indigenous reserve, more than double the amount recorded the year before.
Last November dozens of tribal leaders from the Amazon met with officials in Brasilia to file claims and report serious threats to their territories.
Alessandra Korap Munduruku, a leader from Para state who attended the meeting, says the legalization of mining would “be the death of our people.”
Besides bringing “disease and prostitution to our people, drug addiction to our children, and violent conflict to the Munduruku men,” she said gold mining activity is also killing fish through mercury poisoning.
Released across the region’s major Tapajos River during the mining process, mercury is seeping into the tributaries like those that snake past the mining town of Creporizao. Local communities rely on these rivers for many of their water needs.
Late last year, in the first study of its kind, Erik Jennings, a neurologist based in the city of Santarem, took blood and hair samples from 112 tribespeople to assess mercury levels.
“It’s a slow genocide,” Jennings told DW. “The mercury can cause serious cognitive and visual impairment, and deform fetuses.”
Problematic legal trade
Even the legal gold trade in Brazil is largely unregulated, which facilitates illegal business and plays a significant role in the destruction of the Amazon. Prosecutors in Para state say the lack of regulation in the legal trade and the fact that receipts are paper-based carbon copies make it easy for criminals to thrive and illegal gold to enter the legal system.
“The practice of fraud in the sector is quite easy, and the investigation of illegalities becomes an almost insurmountable obstacle,” Luis de Camoes Lima Boaventura, public prosecutor in the Amazonian city of Santarem said.
“Until a computerized system is installed, the authorities cannot check, in real time, the legality of the transactions. To make a transaction of illegal gold, all you currently need is a pen and paper.”
According to National Mining Agency estimates, around 30 tons of gold worth some 4.5 billion reals ($1.1 billion, €900 million) are illegally traded in the state of Para annually. That is around six times more than the amount legally declared.
When miners like Jose Maria return to Creporizao at the end of what can be days away, they come to one of a dozen gold shops that line the main drag to melt what they have mined into standardized bars. Once that is done, illegally-mined gold, which is responsible for widespread deforestation, pollution and violence in the Amazon, has entered the system and can no longer be traced.
Reposted with permission from Deutsche Welle.
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A gas flare from the Shell Chemical LP petroleum refinery illuminates the sky on August 21, 2019 in Norco, Louisiana. Drew Angerer / Getty Images
According to FOE’s report, The Big Oil Money Pit:
Of that amount, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin enjoys direct control over a comparatively small $46 billion reserved for aviation and industries deemed essential to “national security.” But the remaining $454 billion went to the Federal Reserve, which will use the money to implement emergency lending programs for corporations and municipalities. Secretary Mnuchin must approve these lending programs and wields considerable power over their design, but the money itself will move through the Fed.
After weeks of unprecedented human suffering and an ongoing failure to support frontline workers, the Fed announced on April 9, 2020 how it would spend the first $195 billion of the slush fund. A full $75 billion would go to buy corporate debt. But because the Fed can leverage money appropriated by Congress, the real size of this program is $750 billion. Considering that a majority of the money from the first stimulus [is] still unspent, there is plenty of room for this program to grow.
FOE found that the fossil fuel giants ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Conoco “are together eligible for a maximum $19.4 billion in benefits, based on their credit ratings and outstanding long-term debt.”
The Fed has hired BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, to administer part of its debt-buying efforts related to the pandemic. “As BlackRock begins purchasing ‘high yield’ exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to bolster corporate debt markets,” FOE warns, “energy companies (predominantly oil and gas) stand to benefit disproportionately as the largest single issuer of junk bonds, at 11% of the entire U.S. market.”
Other key takeaways from the report include:
- There are 12 fracking-focused oil and gas companies that could potentially qualify for the new program. Together, they may be eligible for over $24.1 billion in potential benefits.
- Major fracking company Continental Resources, whose debt was recently downgraded to below investment grade by S&P, is potentially eligible for as much as $1.5 billion under new, weaker standards announced by the Federal Reserve.
Echoing climate campaigners’ comments after President Donald Trump met with fossil fuel executives at the White House earlier this month, FOE senior policy analyst Lukas Ross said in a statement Wednesday that “oil company bailouts are simply throwing good money after bad.”
“Congress and the Democrats must stop this endless stream of handouts to an industry that is exploiting a public health crisis for financial gain,” Ross declared. “These potential payoffs to major campaign contributors are the least efficient way of re-starting the economy and will just serve to enrich oil executives.”
“Oil companies are trying to punt the financial reckoning of their fracking debacle and Congress should not enable their addiction with public tax dollars,” he added. “Instead of pumping money into an irresponsible industry that plays shell games with its debt, Congress should focus on providing direct support to workers and communities on the frontlines of coronavirus.”
As the Trump administration has tried to spend billions of taxpayers dollars to “fill up” the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) and major banks are reportedly preparing to take over fossil fuel assets with CARES Act funding, climate action advocates have charged that “we need a people’s bailout, not a polluters’ bailout!”
Hundreds of community leaders, lawmakers, and groups—including FOE—have joined the demand for Congress to pursue a people’s bailout guided by five key principles:
The new FOE report includes some specific calls to action directed at Congress:
- Prioritize direct aid to still neglected workers and communities on the frontlines of the crisis.
- Engage in aggressive oversight to ensure BlackRock does not benefit unfairly from purchasing its own products or needlessly bolster fossil fuel assets.
- Eliminate Secretary Mnuchin’s authority to waive crucial protections banning companies receiving bailouts stock buybacks.
- Make future stimulus aid conditional on new and binding protections for workers and the environment.
- Make oil, gas, and coal companies ineligible for support from existing stimulus programs, unless it is conditioned on a phaseout of existing production and an iron-clad commitment to existing pension and environmental liabilities.
“Much more work needs to be done, both to support workers and families in the face of COVID-19 and to prevent a runaway bailout of the fossil fuel industry,” the report says. “Congress cannot afford to wait.”
Reposted with permission from Common Dreams.
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Keystone XL pipes for construction in Swanton, Nebraska on Aug. 13, 2009. shannonpatrick17 / CC BY 2.0
A federal judge delivered a win to endangered species and a blow to the controversial Keystone XL pipeline on Wednesday when he tossed a crucial permit it needed to cross hundreds of rivers and streams.
The ruling marks yet another setback for the 1,200 mile-long fossil fuel project that was first proposed in 2008 but canceled twice during the Obama administration over climate concerns before President Donald Trump resuscitated it in the early days of his administration, The Associated Press Reported.
“The court has rightfully ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to fast track this nasty pipeline at any cost,” Tamara Toles O’Laughlin of environmental group 350.org said in a statement reported by The Guardian. “We won’t allow fossil fuel corporations and backdoor politicians to violate the laws that protect people and the planet.”
Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Morris ruled in Montana in favor of a coalition of green groups including the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) who brought the suit challenging the permit last year, HuffPost reported.
He found that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did not consider how a 2017 water crossing permit would impact endangered species like pallid sturgeon.
While the decision comes less than two weeks after pipeline construction started on the U.S. / Canada border in Montana, it won’t immediately halt that construction, The Associated Press reported. However, it could cause major delays going forward.
“It creates another significant hurdle for the project,” Anthony Swift of NRDC told The Associated Press. “Regardless of whether they have the cross border segment … Keystone XL has basically lost all of its Clean Water Act permits for water crossings.”
Pipeline owner TC Energy said it would review the decision but pledged to move ahead.
“We remain committed to building this important energy infrastructure project,” the company said in a statement reported by The Guardian.
However, the project could face an even more immediate setback. The same judge will hear a case Thursday, April 16 brought by tribal communities seeking an injunction to halt the just-started construction on the border over concerns construction worker could bring the new coronavirus to rural communities there.
If and when the project is completed, it would would transport around 830,000 barrels of oil a day from the tar sands in Alberta, Canada to Nebraska, where it would connect to pipelines leading to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
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