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How Herd Immunity Happens - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...614035

immunity pandemic response

shared by Javier E on 16 Jul 20 - No Cached

Chaos theory applies neatly to the spread of the coronavirus, in that seemingly tiny decisions or differences in reaction speed can have inordinate consequences.
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Effects can seem random when, in fact, they trace to discrete decisions made long prior. For example, the United States has surpassed 125,000 deaths from COVID-19. Having suppressed the virus early, South Korea has had only 289. Vietnam’s toll sits at zero. Even when differences from place to place appear random, or too dramatic to pin entirely on a failed national response, they are not.
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When phenomena appear chaotic, mathematical modelers make it their job to find the underlying order. Once models can accurately describe the real world, as some now do, they gain the predictive power to give clearer glimpses into likely futures.
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Now, based on the U.S. response since February, Lipsitch believes that we’re still likely to see the virus spread to the point of becoming endemic.
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That would mean it is with us indefinitely, and the current pandemic would end when we reach levels of “herd immunity,” traditionally defined as the threshold at which enough people in a group have immune protection so the virus can no longer cause huge spikes in disease.
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Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that, because of a “general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-vaccine feeling,” the U.S. is “unlikely” to achieve herd immunity even after a vaccine is available.
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The case-fatality rate for COVID-19 is now very roughly 1 percent overall. In the absolute simplest, linear model, if 70 percent of the world were to get infected, that would mean more than 54 million deaths.
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Without a better plan, this threshold—the percentage of people who have been infected that would constitute herd immunity—seems to have become central to our fates.
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Some mathematicians believe that it’s much lower than initially imagined. At least, it could be, if we choose the right future.
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Gomes explains, “There doesn’t need to be a lot of variation in a population for epidemics to slow down quite drastically.”
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in dynamic systems, the outcomes are more like those in chess: The next play is influenced by the previous one. Differences in outcome can grow exponentially, reinforcing one another until the situation becomes, through a series of individually predictable moves, radically different from other possible scenarios. You have some chance of being able to predict the first move in a game of chess, but good luck predicting the last.
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“selective depletion” of people who are more susceptible—can quickly decelerate a virus’s spread. When Gomes uses this sort of pattern to model the coronavirus’s spread, the compounding effects of heterogeneity seem to show that the onslaught of cases and deaths seen in initial spikes around the world are unlikely to happen a second time.
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Based on data from several countries in Europe, she said, her results show a herd-immunity threshold much lower than that of other models.“We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent,” Gomes said. “It’s very striking.”
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If that proves correct, it would be life-altering news. It wouldn’t mean that the virus is gone. But by Gomes’s estimates, if roughly one out of every five people in a given population is immune to the virus, that seems to be enough to slow its spread to a level where each infectious person is infecting an average of less than one other person
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That’s the classic definition of herd immunity. It would mean, for instance, that at 25 percent antibody prevalence, New York City could continue its careful reopening without fear of another major surge in cases.
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Lipsitch also believes that heterogeneity is important to factor into any model. It was one reason he updated his prediction, not long after we spoke in February, of what the herd-immunity threshold would be. Instead of 40 to 70 percent, he lowered it to 20 to 60 percent. When we spoke last week, he said he still stands by that, but he is skeptical that the number lands close to the 20 percent end of the range. “I think it’s unlikely,” he said, but added, “This virus is proving there can be orders-of-magnitude differences in attack rates, depending on political and societal decisions, which I don’t know how to forecast.”
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he believes that the best we can do is continually update models based on what is happening in the real world. She can’t say why the threshold in her models is consistently at or below 20 percent, but it is. “If heterogeneity isn’t the cause,” she said, “then I’d like for someone to explain what is.”
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Biological variations in susceptibility could come down to factors as simple as who has more nose hair, or who talks the loudest and most explosively, and Langwig shares the belief that these factors can create heterogeneity in susceptibility and transmission. Those effects can compound to dramatically change the math behind predictions for the future.
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What’s important to her, rather, is that people are not misled by the idea of herd immunity. In the context of vaccination, herd-immunity thresholds are relatively fixed and predictable. In the context of an ongoing pandemic, thinking of this threshold as some static concept can be dangerously misleading.
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She worries that many people conflate academic projections about reaching herd immunity with a “let it run wild” fatalism. “My view is that trying to take that route would lead to mass death and devastation,” she says.
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Left totally unchecked, Bansal says, the percentage of infected people could go even higher than 70 percent.
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“Within certain populations that lack heterogeneity, like within a nursing home or school, you may even see the herd-immunity threshold be above 70 percent,” Bansal says. If a population average led people in those settings to get complacent, there could be needless death.
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Bansal believes that heterogeneity of behavior is the key determinant of our futures. “That magic number that we’re describing as a herd-immunity threshold very much depends on how individuals behave,” Bansal says, since R0 clearly changes with behaviors. On average, the R0 of the coronavirus currently seems to be between 2 and 3, according to Lipsitch.
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Social distancing and other reactive measures changed the R0 value, and they will continue to do so. The virus has certain immutable properties, but there is nothing immutable about how many infections it causes in the real world.
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The threshold can change based on how a virus spreads. The spread keeps on changing based on how we react to it at every stage, and the effects compound. Small preventive measures have big downstream effects
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In other words, the herd in question determines its immunity. There is no mystery in how to drop the R0 to below 1 and reach an effective herd immunity: masks, social distancing, hand-washing, and everything everyone is tired of hearing about. It is already being done.
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“I think it no longer seems impossible that Switzerland or Germany could remain near where they are in terms of cases, meaning not very much larger outbreaks, until there’s a vaccine,” he said. They seem to have the will and systems in place to keep their economies closed enough to maintain their current equilibrium.
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Other wealthy countries could hypothetically create societies that are effectively immune to further surges, where the effective herd-immunity threshold is low.
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We have the wealth in this country to care for people, and to set the herd-immunity threshold where we choose. Parts of the world are illuminating a third way forward, something in between total lockdown and simply resuming the old ways of life. It happens through individual choices and collective actions, reimagining new ways of living, and having the state support and leadership to make those ways possible
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as much attention as we give to the virus, and to drugs and our immune systems, the variable in the system is us. There will only be as much chaos as we allow.
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Reasons for COVID-19 Optimism on T-Cells and Herd Immunity - 0 views

nymag.com/...t-cells-and-herd-immunity.html

immunity Covid-19 research science

shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 20 - No Cached

Friston suggested that the truly susceptible portion of the population was certainly not 100 percent, as most modelers and conventional wisdom had it, but a much smaller share — surely below 50 percent, he said, and likely closer to about 20 percent. The analysis was ongoing, he said, but, “I suspect, once this has been done, it will look like the effective non-susceptible portion of the population will be about 80 percent. I think that’s what’s going to happen.”
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one of the leading modelers, Gabriela Gomes, suggested the entire area of research was being effectively blackballed out of fear it might encourage a relaxation of pandemic vigilance. “This is the very sad reason for the absence of more optimistic projections on the development of this pandemic in the scientific literature,” she wrote on Twitter. “Our analysis suggests that herd-immunity thresholds are being achieved despite strict social-distancing measures.”
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Gomes suggested, herd immunity could happen with as little as one quarter of the population of a community exposed — or perhaps just 20 percent. “We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent,” she told Hamblin. “It’s very striking.” Such findings, if they held up, would be very instructive, as Hamblin writes: “It would mean, for instance, that at 25 percent antibody prevalence, New York City could continue its careful reopening without fear of another major surge in cases.”
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But for those hoping that 25 percent represents a true ceiling for pandemic spread in a given community, well, it almost certainly does not, considering that recent serological surveys have shown that perhaps 93 percent of the population of Iquitos, Peru, has contracted the disease; as have more than half of those living in Indian slums; and as many as 68 percent in particular neighborhoods of New York City
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overshoot of that scale would seem unlikely if the “true” threshold were as low as 20 or 25 percent.
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But, of course, that threshold may not be the same in all places, across all populations, and is surely affected, to some degree, by the social behavior taken to protect against the spread of the disease.
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we probably err when we conceive of group immunity in simplistically binary terms. While herd immunity is a technical term referring to a particular threshold at which point the disease can no longer spread, some amount of community protection against that spread begins almost as soon as the first people are exposed, with each case reducing the number of unexposed and vulnerable potential cases in the community by one
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you would not expect a disease to spread in a purely exponential way until the point of herd immunity, at which time the spread would suddenly stop. Instead, you would expect that growth to slow as more people in the community were exposed to the disease, with most of them emerging relatively quickly with some immune response. Add to that the effects of even modest, commonplace protections — intuitive social distancing, some amount of mask-wearing — and you could expect to get an infection curve that tapers off well shy of 60 percent exposure.
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Looking at the data, we see that transmissions in many severely impacted states began to slow down in July, despite limited interventions. This is especially notable in states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas. While we believe that changes in human behavior and changes in policy (such as mask mandates and closing of bars/nightclubs) certainly contributed to the decrease in transmission, it seems unlikely that these were the primary drivers behind the decrease. We believe that many regions obtained a certain degree of temporary herd immunity after reaching 10-35 percent prevalence under the current conditions. We call this 10-35 percent threshold the effective herd immunity threshold.
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Indeed, that is more or less what was recently found by Youyang Gu, to date the best modeler of pandemic spread in the U.S
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he cautioned again that he did not mean to imply that the natural herd-immunity level was as low as 10 percent, or even 35 percent. Instead, he suggested it was a plateau determined in part by better collective understanding of the disease and what precautions to take
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Gu estimates national prevalence as just below 20 percent (i.e., right in the middle of his range of effective herd immunity), it still counts, I think, as encouraging — even if people in hard-hit communities won’t truly breathe a sigh of relief until vaccines arrive.
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If you can get real protection starting at 35 percent, it means that even a mediocre vaccine, administered much more haphazardly to a population with some meaningful share of vaccination skeptics, could still achieve community protection pretty quickly. And that is really significant — making both the total lack of national coordination on rollout and the likely “vaccine wars” much less consequential.
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At least 20 percent of the public, and perhaps 50 percent, had some preexisting, cross-protective T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2, according to one much-discussed recent paper. An earlier paper had put the figure at between 40 and 60 percent. And a third had found an even higher prevalence: 81 percent.
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The T-cell story is similarly encouraging in its big-picture implications without being necessarily paradigm-changing
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These numbers suggest their own heterogeneity — that different populations, with different demographics, would likely exhibit different levels of cross-reactive T-cell immune response
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The most optimistic interpretation of the data was given to me by Francois Balloux, a somewhat contrarian disease geneticist and the director of the University College of London’s Genetics Institute
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According to him, a cross-reactive T-cell response wouldn’t prevent infection, but would probably mean a faster immune response, a shorter period of infection, and a “massively” reduced risk of severe illness — meaning, he guessed, that somewhere between a third and three-quarters of the population carried into the epidemic significant protection against its scariest outcomes
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the distribution of this T-cell response could explain at least some, and perhaps quite a lot, of COVID-19’s age skew when it comes to disease severity and mortality, since the young are the most exposed to other coronaviruses, and the protection tapers as you get older and spend less time in environments, like schools, where these viruses spread so promiscuously.
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Balloux told me he believed it was also possible that the heterogeneous distribution of T-cell protection also explains some amount of the apparent decline in disease severity over time within countries on different pandemic timelines — a phenomenon that is more conventionally attributed to infection spreading more among the young, better treatment, and more effective protection of the most vulnerable (especially the old).
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Going back to Youyang Gu’s analysis, what he calls the “implied infection fatality rate” — essentially an estimated ratio based on his modeling of untested cases — has fallen for the country as a whole from about one percent in March to about 0.8 percent in mid-April, 0.6 percent in May, and down to about 0.25 percent today.
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even as we have seemed to reach a second peak of coronavirus deaths, the rate of death from COVID-19 infection has continued to decline — total deaths have gone up, but much less than the number of cases
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In other words, at the population level, the lethality of the disease in America has fallen by about three-quarters since its peak. This is, despite everything that is genuinely horrible about the pandemic and the American response to it, rather fantastic.
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there may be some possible “mortality displacement,” whereby the most severe cases show up first, in the most susceptible people, leaving behind a relatively protected population whose experience overall would be more mild, and that T-cell response may play a significant role in determining that susceptibility.
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That, again, is Balloux’s interpretation — the most expansive assessment of the T-cell data offered to me
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The most conservative assessment came from Sarah Fortune, the chair of Harvard’s Department of Immunology
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Fortune cautioned not to assume that cross-protection was playing a significant role in determining severity of illness in a given patient. Those with such a T-cell response, she told me, would likely see a faster onset of robust response, yes, but that may or may not yield a shorter period of infection and viral shedding
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Most of the scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, and immunologists I spoke to fell between those two poles, suggesting the T-cell cross-immunity findings were significant without necessarily being determinative — that they may help explain some of the shape of pandemic spread through particular populations, but only some of the dynamics of that spread.
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he told me he believed, in the absence of that data, that T-cell cross-immunity from exposure to previous coronaviruses “might explain different disease severity in different people,” and “could certainly be part of the explanation for the age skew, especially for why the very young fare so well.”
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the headline finding was quite clear and explicitly stated: that preexisting T-cell response came primarily via the variety of T-cells called CD4 T-cells, and that this dynamic was consistent with the hypothesis that the mechanism was inherited from previous exposure to a few different “common cold” coronaviruses
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“This potential preexisting cross-reactive T-cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 has broad implications,” the authors wrote, “as it could explain aspects of differential COVID-19 clinical outcomes, influence epidemiological models of herd immunity, or affect the performance of COVID-19 candidate vaccines.”
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“This is at present highly speculative,” they cautioned.
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Opinion: The danger of a giant Covid belly flop - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 09 Apr 21 - No Cached

As more and more vaccinations are administered in the US, the Covid-19 story, which once was nothing more than a tale of enormous tragedy, now has a new plotline: how best to return to normal.
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transmission of a virus depends on a non-immune person bumping into an actively infected person. With more and more vaccination, the likelihood that a non-immune person will come in contact with an infected person is progressively reduced until -- poof -- the risk of catching the infection is almost gone (though never zero).
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The issue in 1918, when the first article describing herd immunity was published, was the threat of epidemic miscarriage due to a bacterium among pregnant cows in Kansas.
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Consider a calculation to determine the threshold for herd immunity: Vc=(1− 1/R0)/E. "Vc" is the proportion of people who must be vaccinated to protect the rest of the herd, "R0," pronounced R-naught, is an estimate of the number of secondary cases from the original infected person and "E" represents effectiveness of a given vaccine against transmission. And this, which resembles a brutal SAT math section entry, is the dumbed-down version.
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This is not a fund-raiser with a fixed universal goal we all are striving to reach. The above equation evaluates the nation as a homogenized entity, but people live in communities
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In other words, susceptible cows should be culled to lessen the risk of new infections
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Though, of course, the fix -- culling -- is not an option for human disease, the benefit of an immune herd is self evident.
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Fast forward to the 21st century world of vaccines. Pandemics and health care are decidedly more complex, which has led all to wonder: what is the magic number of people we need to vaccinate so we can all forget these disastrous last 14 months?close dialogOur free Provoke/Persuade newsletter compiles the week’s most thought-provoking pieces and delivers them straight to your inbox. Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Thanks for Subscribing!Continue ReadingBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1295603 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1295603 *//* custom css from creative 52220 */.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 42px;}@media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 35px;}}/*Validation border*/.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-row-validation .bx-input { border-color: #B50000; /*Specify border color*/ border-width: 1px; box-shadow: none; background-color: transparent; color: #B50000; /*Specify text color*/}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1295603 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 220px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;vertical-align: middle;padding: 10px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 20px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-y4M7jyO {width: 660px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-y4M7jyO {text-align: center;width: 315px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-tVcUlRZ {padding: 0;width: auto;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-tVcUlRZ> *:first-child {background-color: transparent;background-size: contain;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-BpRQ7DR {width: 660px;text-align: left;padding: 25px 0 15px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-BpRQ7DR {width: 310px;padding: 15px 0 15px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-oUX5Jvf {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-oUX5Jvf {width: auto;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-family: CNN Business,CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 24px;line-height: 1.1em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-size: 16px;padding: 6px 0 0;line-height: 1.2;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-PZ8dLrW {width: 660px;padding: 0;min-width: 550px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-PZ8dLrW {min-width: auto;width: 310px;padding: 0;}}@media all and (min-wi
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Lessening the threat of fetal loss therefore was straightforward: farmers should "retain" immune cattle -- those who had already had a spontaneous abortion -- and not waste "material, time, and energy ... on animals of doubtful value." Rather, they advised to butcher the non-immune cows and concentrate on the immune, "profitable" ones.
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A famous mumps outbreak in adolescent boys from the Orthodox Jewish community is thought to have been exacerbated by the school practice of promoting close, sustained (15 hours a day) contact with a study partner ("chavrusa") including "animated" face-to-face discussion resulting in transmission despite the fact that most had been vaccinated years before.
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Stated more simply, the herd likely is protected at a very different percent of vaccinated people in an Orthodox Jewish community in San Diego where people live near the school and walk to most activities compared to a gated community in a Minneapolis suburb where many prefer to keep to themselves.
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We have received a master class in viral variants in recent months, witnessing day by day the alarming uptick in new cases as the B.1.1.7. variant has been introduced to new communities. But a single R-naught cannot fit all variants of Covid-19; a community with higher rates of B.1.1.7. and, therefore, a higher R-naught will require, among other things, a higher level of vaccination to designate the herd as sufficiently immune.
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There is not one magic number to signal to the entire country that we have finally made it;
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This is extremely important to keep in mind in the weeks and months ahead as we continue to vaccinate and wait and vaccinate and wait, chasing a number that is fundamentally misleading.
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The heterogeneity of human behavior, geography and the virus itself explains the vagueness of the pronouncements of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, and other experts as they seek to evade specifying just how many more people need vaccination before we officially can claim victory.
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As we have seen in the US during the 15-month arc of the pandemic, trust in science and scientists has been the key to progress. Masks work. Vaccines work. Certain medications work.
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Brazil coronavirus: Retreat of covid-19 in Amazon's Manaus raises questions of herd imm... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-930e-d88518c57dcc_story.html

immunity amazon brazil research pandemic

shared by Javier E on 24 Aug 20 - No Cached

researchers have been studying what’s known as “heterogeneity in susceptibility.” Early herd immunity models — and vaccination campaigns — have operated from the assumption that everyone’s the same. But individuals vary: Some people are more socially active, others are more physically vulnerable.
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Heterogeneity, researchers say, reduces the percentage of infection at which herd immunity may be achieved. The people most likely to get the disease and pass it on — the most socially active, the most susceptible — catch it first. But once they’re out of the pool of potential victims, the risk is less for everyone else.
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“The effect of their immunity will be bigger,” Britton said.
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he and other researchers estimated that population heterogeneity shaves the coronavirus herd immunity rate to 43 percent. Others say it might be lower.
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Gabriela Gomes, a mathematician at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, has scrutinized European cities overwhelmed by the disease. In a paper she wrote with nine other researchers, which hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, she arrived at a striking conclusion: Herd immunity could be lower than 20 percent.
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many researchers have been reluctant to say whether they believe the worst in some of the hardest-hit cities has already passed. No one knows how long immunity lasts. The virus could mutate.
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“I would love that as well. But the reality is that it’s wishful thinking. It’s confirmation bias. We can’t pick evidence we hope is true. We have to be very careful about this because it could blow up in your face very quickly.”
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Officials weren’t willing to impose a lockdown. In impoverished Manaus, where many already live on the brink, the mayor said it would lead to social chaos and violence. So Pinheiro Alves spent his off hours trying to jury-rig ventilators.
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“There isn’t a concrete explanation,” said Henrique dos Santos Pereira, a scientist at the Federal University of Amazonas. Maybe there’s an unseen biological immunity in the population. Or the city’s relative youth staved off the worst.
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“The problem is that we don’t know how many people are susceptible,” dos Santos Pereira said. “In the beginning, we were thinking it was everywhere, but it doesn’t seem like the whole world is susceptible … It is causing us to reconsider the theory of herd immunity.”
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Virgílio, the mayor, hopes the scientists are right. The medical system in Manaus has failed once. If a second wave does come, he has little doubt what would happen.“Our capacities would be overwhelmed.”
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15 Chinese Elephants Are On a 300-Mile Journey. Why, No One Knows. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-elephants.html

china elephants

shared by ethanshilling on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached

No one is quite sure. But for some reason, a herd of 15 Asian elephants has been lumbering its way across China for more than a year, traveling more than 300 miles through villages, forest patches — and, as of 9:55 p.m. on Wednesday, the edges of the city of Kunming, population 8.5 million.
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It’s the farthest-known movement of elephants in China, according to experts. Where they’ll go next, no one knows. When they’ll stop? Also unclear.
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What is certain is that they have captivated Chinese social media, jolted local officials and caused more than $1.1 million of damage. They have also left elephant researchers scratching their heads.
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Experts are urging the public to temper its delight with awareness of the ecological significance, in a country where avid enthusiasm for conservation has not necessarily coincided with a reckoning of what it will mean to live alongside more elephants.
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But movement is normal for elephants, which have large “home ranges” over which they travel searching for food or mates, said Dr. Campos-Arceiz. So it was not until relatively recently that researchers and government officials began to notice just how far this herd had wandered. In April, the elephants were spotted around Yuanjiang County, about 230 miles north of the nature reserve.
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It’s not clear what spurred the elephants to leave their home. But after conservation efforts, China’s elephant population has grown in recent years, from fewer than 200 several decades ago to around 300 today, according to official statistics.
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The elephants’ growing proximity to humans — and their strictly protected status — has emboldened the animals, according to Dr. Campos-Arceiz. And, they’re smart: As they began breaching the boundaries of nature reserves and crossing into more populated areas, they discovered that crops were more appealing than their usual forest fare.
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As a result, it’s unsurprising to see elephants wandering beyond their usual habitats, he said, and the phenomenon is likely to continue as their population continues to grow.
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Still, that doesn’t explain the long-distance movement of the “northbound wild elephant herd,” as the other herd has come to be known on social media.
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While acknowledging the public’s amusement, the government has warned people to stay away from the animals, reminding them that they can be dangerous. The wandering herd has yet to cause any injuries to humans, but there were more than 50 casualties involving Asian elephants between 2011 and 2019, according to state media.
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The best-case outcome, Ms. Chen said, would be for the attention that the herd has drawn to raise more awareness around the possibility of human-elephant conflict, which is likely to increase. Only by preparing people for that reality, she said, would conservation efforts really succeed.
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I'm an epidemiologist. When I heard about Britain's 'herd immunity' coronavirus plan, I... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-immunity-coronavirus-covid-19

Covid-19 Policy crisis UK

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 20 - No Cached

My colleagues here in the US, even as they are reeling from the stumbling response of the Donald Trump administration to the crisis, assumed that reports of the UK policy were satire – an example of the wry humour for which the country is famed. But they are all too real.
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The stated aim has been to achieve “herd immunity” in order to manage the outbreak and prevent a catastrophic “second wave” next winter
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the reasoning goes that even though in a perfect world we’d not want anyone to take the risk of infection, generating immunity in younger people is a way of protecting the population as a whole.
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...10 more annotations...
We talk about vaccines generating herd immunity, so why is this different? Because this is not a vaccine. This is an actual pandemic that will make a very large number of people sick, and some of them will die
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Even though the mortality rate is likely quite low, a small fraction of a very large number is still a large number.
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There might well be a second wave, I honestly don’t know. But vulnerable people should not be exposed to a virus right now in the service of a hypothetical future
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This virus is capable of shutting down countries. You should not want to be the next after Wuhan, Iran, Italy or Spain. In those places, the healthcare systems have broken down. In Italy, the choices of whom to save and whom to allow to die are real
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You should instead look to the example of South Korea, which, through a combination of intense surveillance and social distancing, appears to have gained some semblance of control over the virus. We can learn from South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, all of which have so far done a good job mitigating the worst outcomes despite having reported cases early in the pandemic, and in the case of South Korea, suffering a substantial outbreak.
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The UK should not be trying to create herd immunity, that will take care of itself. Policy should be directed at slowing the outbreak to a (more) manageable rate. What this looks like is strong social distancing.
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If you hear any talking head on TV explain that kids don’t get sick, remember that doesn’t mean kids cannot be infected and transmit. It’s probably a good idea to hold off on visits to Nana and Grandpa.
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The most fundamental function of a government is to keep its people safe. It is from this that it derives its authority, the confidence of the people and its legitimacy
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Nobody should be under the illusion that this is something that can be dodged through somehow manipulating a virus that we are only beginning to understand. This will not pass you by; this is not a tornado, it is a hurricane.
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Don’t panic, but do prepare. If your government won’t help you, do it yourself.
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Opinion | The Covid-19 Pandemic Ends With Exponential Decay - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-exponential-decay.html

pandemic math exponent decay

shared by Javier E on 29 Apr 21 - No Cached

Reaching herd immunity is a key goal. It drives cases toward zero by slowing the spread of the virus through a combination of vaccination and infection-acquired immunity to maintain exponential decay — even as society resumes normal activities.
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But contrary to popular belief, reaching herd immunity doesn’t prevent all outbreaks, at least not initially. It simply means so few people are susceptible to infections that any outbreaks that do happen tend to be snuffed out and case counts decline. Over time, outbreaks themselves become less and less common.
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It is possible to bring Covid-19 case numbers down quickly via exponential decay even before vaccination rates reach herd immunity. We just need to keep transmission rates below the tipping point between exponential growth and exponential decay: where every person with Covid-19 infects fewer than one other person, on average
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...2 more annotations...
Every single thing people can do to slow transmission helps — including wearing masks, getting tested and avoiding crowded indoor spaces — especially given concerns about current and future variants, since it could be what gets us past the threshold into exponential decay.
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As more and more people get vaccinated, people can gradually ease precautions while cases continue to decline. Keeping cases down gets easier over time until — and this is the beauty of vaccine-driven herd immunity — it’s almost effortless, once enough people are vaccinated, to keep cases sustainably low. That’s the power of exponential decay.
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1 in 4 Americans Don't Want A Vaccine, Putting Herd Immunity At Risk : Shots - Health N... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...unity-at-risk-researchers-warn

pandemic GOP politics US trump crisis Culture policy

shared by carolinehayter on 08 Apr 21 - No Cached

A recent NPR/Marist poll found that one in four Americans said they would refuse a coronavirus vaccine outright if offered. Another 5% are "undecided" about whether they would get the shot.
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there were still a significant number of people across all ages and demographic groups who claim they will say "no."
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Now some researchers are increasingly worried that this reticence will be enough to prevent the nation from reaching what's known as herd immunity, the point at which the coronavirus can no longer spread easily through the population and transmission peters out.
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...16 more annotations...
"Vaccine hesitancy is a big problem for all of us,"
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Up until now, the nationwide vaccine campaign has seen demand outstrip supply, but Mokdad says he believes that will soon change. By May, he believes, "We will have more vaccines than people willing to take the vaccine."
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The numbers who may refuse the vaccine remain potentially too high to contain a respiratory virus such as SARS-CoV-2, which requires a large segment of the population to be immune.
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But the fall and winter could be a different story. Scarpino says he believes that more contagious variants such as the one first reported in the U.K. will dominate the fall and winter COVID-19 season, raising the herd immunity threshold. Variants with higher transmissibility may require a larger share of the population to be immune before they can be contained.
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"What most of us want is a safe return to something that looks more normal," says Samuel Scarpino, who models the coronavirus outbreak at Northeastern University. "That to me means 80% to 85%, probably, vaccinated."
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And roughly 20% of the population are children under the age of 16, who are not yet eligible to receive a vaccine — making it even more crucial that adults do get vaccinated.
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Scarpino and Mokdad say the problem will not be immediately apparent. Both scientists expect COVID-19 cases to drop over the summer months when a combination of vaccinations and warm weather will dramatically slow the virus down. Mokdad says he thinks the improved conditions will paradoxically make vaccination more difficult.
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"It's very hard to convince people to take the vaccine in summer, when everything is going good,"
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Nobody knows exactly how large, but based on other diseases, researchers believe it is far above the current 32% of the U.S. population that's gotten at least one shot to date.
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Moderate rates of vaccination will prevent a nationwide crisis such as that seen during the winter of 2020 and 2021, he says. But he worries regional outbreaks could still overwhelm hospitals, close schools and force local governments to reinstitute restrictions in different parts of the United States, especially in areas where vaccination rates are low.
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The reasons for saying "no" to a vaccine are often complex.
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"I don't think there's one particular group," says Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "I don't think that it works to classify people who are vaccine hesitant all having the same reason for being vaccine hesitant."
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Koltai says that misinformation is proliferating right now, often tailored to different groups with different grievances
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"You need to speak to these different groups: the minority groups, the Republicans and the other people who feel like they have some distrust in science," she says. Often the best way to do so, she says, is through groups and leaders at a local level who are in favor of vaccination.
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Last week, the Biden administration launched a major initiative to try and encourage vaccination by enlisting faith groups, unions and even NASCAR to promote getting vaccinated. It's the kind of broad, grassroots effort experts say can help.
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The question is, will it be enough? "We need to vaccinate as much as possible right now, stop the circulation of this virus in the U.S. and elsewhere," Mokdad says. "Then we can control it."
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Why Vaccines Are Essential to Herd Immunity - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...l-to-herd-immunity-11600594200

vaccine graphic explanation process immunity pandemic

shared by Javier E on 20 Sep 20 - No Cached

Scientists estimate that 60% to 70% of the population might need to gain immunity to Covid-19 before herd immunity is reached. That’s based on an estimated R0 number of 2.5 to 3. Compare that with measles, a highly contagious pathogen with an R0 number of 12 to 18 and a 90%-to-95% herd threshold.
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Depending on how effective a vaccine is, it might not provide complete immunity. In that case, more people might need to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity.
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Waiting for 60% of the global population to gain natural immunity could mean billions of infections and millions of deaths.
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Some Vials Of COVID-19 Vaccine Contain Extra Doses, Expanding Supply, FDA Says : Corona... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...n-extra-doses-expanding-supply

Science politics us trump culture policy pandemic vaccine

shared by carolinehayter on 17 Dec 20 - No Cached

The Food and Drug Administration says that some of the vials of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine being distributed throughout the U.S. contain extra doses and the agency is encouraging hospitals and clinics to use the additional shots to speed up the nationwide immunization campaign.
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The agency issued the guidance Wednesday after health care workers reported throwing out the excess vaccine, fearing it would be against the rules to use it. "At this time, given the public health emergency, FDA is advising that it is acceptable to use every full dose obtainable
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As health care workers prepared for the vaccine's arrival, they expected to receive vials holding five doses. That left many surprised by the overfilled containers.
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...9 more annotations...
Inoculations began in the U.S. on Monday with health care workers and the elderly being the first in line to get it.
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Leading health experts say that even if all goes well, the vaccine will not be available to the general public until the end of March or beginning of April.
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Permission to use the additional portions means the limited supply could increase by up to 40%, Politico reported.
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A vaccine developed by Moderna is expected to get emergency use authorization from the FDA as early as this week. Clinical data shows it is nearly as effective as the Pfizer injections.
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"It's pretty unusual to have a full extra dose or more though — but it does seem to be there!" Erin Fox, a pharmacist at University of Utah who monitors drug shortages, told the news outlet.
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However, because there are no preservatives in the vaccines, partial doses from separate vials shouldn't be combined.
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There are conflicting reports about when the U.S. is poised to receive another batch of the medicine from Pfizer.
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Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that a second allotment of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine may not be available to the U.S. until next June, given the combination of short supply and global demand.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's senior official for infectious diseases, told NPR this week that half of all Americans would need to be vaccinated before seeing an impact on the spread of the virus, and that 75% to 85% of the population would need to be vaccinated to create herd immunity. He predicted the U.S. could begin to see early stages of herd immunity by late spring or summer.
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The U.K.'s Coronavirus 'Herd Immunity' Debacle - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608065

uk immunity

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 20 - No Cached

Herd immunity is typically generated through vaccination, and while it could arise through widespread infection, “you don’t rely on the very deadly infectious agent to create an immune population,” says Akiko Iwasaki, a virologist at the Yale School of Medicine. And that seemed like the goal.
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Vallance and others certainly made it sound like the government was deliberately aiming for 60 percent of the populace to fall ill. Keep calm and carry on … and get COVID-19.
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He says that the actual goal is the same as that of other countries: flatten the curve by staggering the onset of infections. As a consequence, the nation may achieve herd immunity; it’s a side effect, not an aim.
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...9 more annotations...
“The messaging has been really confusing, and I think that was really unfortunate,” says Petra Klepac, who is also an infectious-disease modeler at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “It’s been a case of how not to communicate during an outbreak,”
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critics of the U.K. strategy argue that swift, decisive action matters more than future hypotheticals do. The country’s current caseload puts it only a few weeks behind Italy, where more than 24,000 cases have so overburdened hospitals that doctors must now make awful decisions about whom to treat.
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First, we don’t know how long immunity against the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, lasts. When people are infected with OC43 and HKU1—two other coronaviruses that regularly circulate among humans and cause common colds—they stay immune for less than a year. By contrast, immunity against the first SARS virus (from 2003) holds for much longer. No one knows whether SARS-CoV-2 will hew to either of these extremes, and according to one recent study, its behavior could mean anything from annual outbreaks to a decades-long quiet spell.
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making a decent long-term strategy is hard when there are still two big unknowns that substantially affect how the pandemic will progress
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a more granular analysis across Chinese provinces showed that the virus can still easily spread in humid areas, and a third modeling study concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 can proliferate at any time of year.” The bottom line: There’s a very wide range of possible futures.
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South Korea, by contrast, seems to have brought COVID-19 to heel through a combination of social-distancing measures and extensive testing. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan have been similarly successful.
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In a similar letter, more than 500 behavioral scientists called on the government to disclose the evidence behind its contention that the public will experience “behavioral fatigue” if restrictions are put in place too early.
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Without strong guidance, British institutions and citizens have begun making their own decisions, going well over what the government recommends. Universities haven’t been told to close, but many have, sending students home, moving classes and exams online, and postponing graduations. Many care homes will not be admitting visitors. Soccer leagues have been suspended. The Queen has canceled public engagements. The Scottish government is planning to close schools and expand testing.
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“We really need people to engage and to sustain individual control measures, like social distancing, for months at a time,” Klepac adds. “We’re in this for the long term and we need everyone to do their part. It is a very big ask.
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Why so many people are skipping their second Covid shot - and why they shouldn't - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 03 May 21 - No Cached

When the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that almost 8% of the millions who have received the first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine hadn't returned to get the second shot they need, it raised concerns that the country might not be able reach herd immunity.
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It's not unusual for people to forgo a required second shot of a vaccine, health experts say. The skip rate for the second shot of the vaccine that prevents shingles, for example, was about 26% among Medicare beneficiaries, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis.
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"I am concerned about each individual who is not coming back for a second shot of course, but I actually would have thought that there would be a higher rate of people not coming back," said Dr. Leana Wen, a CNN medical analyst.
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...17 more annotations...
The CDC said the number of people missing doses — 5 million — may not be exact. If a person got the two doses from different reporting entities — for example, first from a state-run clinic and then from a local health clinic — the two doses may not have been linked by databases, a CDC spokeswoman said.
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Several people have reported that they got their second shot at a different place than their first, and administrators at the first site contacted them repeatedly about making an appointment for a second shot, which had already been administered elsewhere.
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But some people are certainly missing their second dose
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When Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, got his second shot, "it was on a day that was horribly inconvenient, and I tried to move it around. They're like: You got to show up on this day at this time," he said.
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The authors analyzed results from a survey of 1,027 US adults taken between February 11 and 15 through a panel created by the National Opinion Research Center.
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Within the St. Luke's University Hospital Network in Pennsylvania, the success rate in getting people fully vaccinated is at 99%, said Dr. Jeffrey Jahre, an infectious diseases expert there, in part because the network made it easy to get the second appointment, assigning it when the first shot was given.
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The network then followed up with multiple reminders of the appointment -- five days out, three days out and then the day before -- and those who were unable to keep that appointment were "given an easy methodology of changing it," Jahre said.
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"My sense is, a lot of this is, it's hard to get. People miss appointments, people miss doctor's appointments," Jha said on a teleconference with reporters Tuesday.
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But another reason people may be skipping the second dose is not understanding the importance of it or being misinformed. And that may be harder to fix.
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Some people skip the second shot because they think the first one offers them sufficient protection
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More than 43% of the US population has had at least one shot of a vaccine, and 30% are fully vaccinated,
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About 20% of those surveyed believed the vaccines gave recipients strong protection after the first dose, and another 36% were unsure.Just 44% of vaccinated people reported that the vaccines conferred "strong protection" one to two weeks after the second dose, as the CDC guidelines state.
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Earlier this year, there was a public debate among health officials about delaying second doses to focus on building partial immunity to a larger swath of the population before giving everyone the second dose.
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In fact, the first dose just "primes the immune system, then the second shot sort of boosts it. This makes it a better option for obtaining immunity,"
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"There's a 36-fold difference of getting fully vaccinated versus partially," Dr. Anthony Fauci said at a news briefing Friday.
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And then there's the question of whether the country can obtain herd immunity -- meaning 70% to 85% of the population is immune -- if the number of people who don't get a second vaccine dose keeps rising.
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People also need to know, according to Wen and others, is that if you are among the 8% who have gotten only one shot of Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, it may not be too late to get that second shot.
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US coronavirus: America is at a crossroads in this pandemic as Covid-19 deaths near 500... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 22 Feb 21 - No Cached

On the brink of a devastating milestone -- 500,000 US Covid-19 deaths -- the US is at a crossroads in the course of this pandemic.
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And while vaccinations slowly increase, some Americans say they won't get a Covid-19 vaccine -- hurting the chances of herd immunity and hindering a return to normal life.
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More than 43.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of their two-dose vaccines, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. close dialogCovid-19Your local resource.Set your location and log in to find local resources and information on Covid-19 in your area.Please enter aboveSet Locationclose dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css from creative 50769 */.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-input {border-color: white !important;border-width: 1px !important;background-color: white !important;box-shadow: 0px 2px 8px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.12) !important;}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext { color: #e53841 !important; font-size: 11px !important; position: absolute !important; bottom: -1.8em !important;} @media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext {font-size: 10px !important; }}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 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...15 more annotations...
About 18.8 million have been fully vaccinated. That's about 5.7% of the US population -- far less than the estimated 70% to 85% of Americans who would need to be immune to reach herd immunity.
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To speed up vaccinations, some experts have suggested delaying second vaccine doses to get more first doses into people's arms.
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Both vaccines on the US market -- developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna -- require two doses, the second of which are intended to be administered 21 days and 28 days after the first, respectively.
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Nationwide, the rates of new Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are declining.The number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has fallen for the 40th day in a row, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
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Fauci hopes that doesn't happen, he said, adding it's "possible" people may be wearing masks in 2022.
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And daily new cases have dropped 23% over the same time period, according to Johns Hopkins. (But testing is also down by 17%, according to the COVID Tracking Project.)
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Daily deaths have declined 24% this past week compared to the previous week
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Experts with the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said over the weekend that while the B.1.1.7 strain likely accounts for less than 20% of current infections in the US, that number will likely soar to 80% by late April.
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"Managing the epidemic in the next four months depends critically on scaling up vaccination, trying to increase the fraction of adults willing to be vaccinated above three-quarters, and strongly encouraging continued mask use and avoiding situations where transmission is likely, such as indoor dining, going to bars, or indoor gatherings with individuals outside the household," the team wrote.
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"With new, more contagious variants of the virus circulating throughout the U.S., now is not the time to let your guard down and scale back on the measures that we know will work to prevent further illness and deaths -- wearing masks, practicing physical distancing, and washing hands," a joint statement said.
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About 1,700 cases of variant strains first spotted in the UK, South Africa and Brazil have been reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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"I do think we're looking at some new normals. I think the handshake, for example, is probably going away," she said."I do think masks in the cough/cold/flu season in the winter months would make a lot of sense. That clearly, really insulated the Southeast Asian countries from some of the worst of this, understanding the importance of wearing masks."
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"It's estimated that about 70% of Americans must be vaccinated before we get to herd immunity through vaccination," CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said. "That's the point where enough people have the immune protection that the virus won't spread anymore."
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"The evidence was pretty compelling by last March or April that uniform wearing of masks would reduce transmission of this disease," National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins told Axios on HBO on Sunday.
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"A mask is nothing more than a life-saving medical device, and yet it got categorized in all sorts of other ways that were not factual, not scientific and frankly, dangerous," he added. "And I think you can make a case that tens of thousands of people died as a result."
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Trump team thought UK officials 'out of their minds' aiming for herd immunity, book say... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...herd-immunity-aftershocks-book

history politics US UK EU pandemic trump crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 20 Aug 21 - No Cached

US officials thought their British counterparts “were out of their minds” in aiming for herd immunity as part of Boris Johnson’s initial policy on dealing with the coronavirus, according to a new book about the global response to the pandemic.
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As the scale of the threat became increasingly clear in January and February 2020, officials in Donald Trump’s administration were trying to convince him to take the threat seriously, despite personal reassurances he had been given by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, that it was under control.
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But they were even more shocked by the approach being taken in the UK. In a book to be published next Tuesday, Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order, British health experts at the time are described as being “oddly pessimistic about their capacity to defeat the virus”, rejecting measures such as a ban on mass gatherings.
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“We thought they were out of their minds. We told them it would be an absolutely devastating approach to deal with the pandemic,” one US official told the authors
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Johnson and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, backed Trump’s call for an in-person G7 summit at Camp David in the summer, which the US president saw as a way to show leadership and demonstrate that things were getting back to normal.
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But the plan was torpedoed by Angela Merkel’s decision not to attend. According to Aftershocks, the refusal was only partly motivated by the German chancellor’s concern about the health risks of an in-person summit. She also thought her mere presence would be counterproductive to reaching agreement because of Trump’s viscerally hostile reaction to her.
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Merkel told Trump of her decision not to come Camp David on 28 May and he reacted furiously, yelling and then hanging up on her. The president then announced the summit would be canceled and called into question the G7’s relevance, using the occasion to repeat his earlier calls for Russia to be readmitted.
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“With the Europeans now fully estranged from the United States, for all practical purposes the G7 ceased to exist,” Wright and Kahl argue. “As Covid-19 swept through every part of the world in 2020, it would be every nation for itself.”
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Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...climate-change-siberia

warming siberia global warming crisis

shared by Javier E on 04 Oct 19 - No Cached

Siberia has warmed up faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. Scientists say the planet's warming must not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius — but Siberia's temperatures have already spiked far beyond that.
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the region near the town of Zyryanka, in an enormous wedge of eastern Siberia called Yakutia, has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times — roughly triple the global average.
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The permafrost that once sustained farming — and upon which villages and cities are built — is in the midst of a great thaw, blanketing the region with swamps, lakes and odd bubbles of earth that render the land virtually useless.
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For the 5.4 million people who live in Russia’s permafrost zone, the new climate has disrupted their homes and their livelihoods. Rivers are rising and running faster, and entire neighborhoods are falling into them. Arable land for farming has plummeted by more than half, to just 120,000 acres in 2017.
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As the permafrost thaws, animals and plants frozen for thousands of years begin to decompose and send a steady flow of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere — accelerating climate change.
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Siberians who grew up learning to read nature’s subtlest signals are being driven to migrate by a climate they no longer understand.
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This migration from the countryside to cities and towns — also driven by factors such as low investment and spotty Internet — represents one of the most significant and little-noticed movements to date of climate refugees. The city of Yakutsk has seen its population surge 20 percent to more than 300,000 in the past decade.
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In Yakutia, an area one-third the size of the United States, cattle and reindeer herding have plunged 20 percent as the animals increasingly battle to survive the warming climate’s destruction of pastureland.
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Winters, though still brutal, turned milder — and shorter. Fed by the more rapidly thawing permafrost, rivers started flooding more, leaving some communities inaccessible for months and washing others away, along with the ground beneath them.
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a booming cottage industry in mammoth hunting has taken hold
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ornithologists in the region have identified 48 new bird species in the past half century, an increase of almost 20 percent in the known diversity of bird life.
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“It used to be man was in control,” said Pyotr Kaurgin, head of the Chukchi indigenous community in the village of Kolymskoye, on the northern reaches of the Kolyma River. “Now nature is in control.”
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Formed during the late Pleistocene, the Earth’s last glacial period, which ended about 11,700 years ago, Yedoma consists of thick layers of soil packed around gigantic lodes of embedded ice. Because Yedoma contains so much ice, it can melt quickly — reshaping the landscape as sudden lakes form and hillsides collapse.
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In the summer, huge blazes tore through Siberian boreal forests, unleashing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Some scientists fear worsening northern fires are amplifying the permafrost damage.
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on the Yamal Peninsula, monstrous craters have opened up in the tundra. Scientists suspect they represent sudden explosions of methane gas freed by thawing permafrost.
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Due to thawing permafrost — along with the demise of Soviet-era state farms — the area of cultivated land in Yakutia has plummeted by more than half since 1990. The region’s cattle herds have shrunk by about 20 percent, to 188,100 head in 2017 from 233,300 in 2011. Reindeer herds have also declined sharply
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he degradation of crop and pastureland caused by the thawing permafrost helped bring about the collapse of the region’s agriculture.
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Yegor Prokopyev, the retired head of Nelemnoye, says climate change is the latest shock to befall the Kolyma River region. There was communism and forced collective farming. Then capitalism and government cutbacks.
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. The radical transformation underway here, she said, should serve as a warning to people in every corner of the globe. “Changing our ways is imminent,” Crate said.
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The town of Zyryanka has warmed by just over 2 degrees Celsius from 1966 to 2016, according to their analysis.
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The Post’s analysis, which uses a data set from Berkeley Earth, looks further back. It shows that Zyryanka and the roughly 2,000-square-mile area surrounding it has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius when the past five years are compared with the mid- to late 1800s.
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From 2005 to 2014, his team found, the number of days with below-freezing temperatures three feet below the surface fell from around 230 days a year to 190.
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enormous wedges of ice lie under Yakutia.
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“The permafrost is thawing so fast,” said Anna Liljedahl, an associate professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “We scientists can’t keep up anymore.”
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In the 1970s, Desyatkin said, the ground in the Middle Kolyma District, just north of Zyryanka, thawed to a depth of about two feet every summer. Now it thaws to more than three feet. That extra foot of thawing means that, on average, every square mile of territory has been releasing an additional 700,000 gallons of water into the environment every year
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Meanwhile, ancient plant and animal remains trapped inside the Yedoma are exposed to nonfreezing temperatures — or even the open air. That, in turn, activates microbes, which break down the remains and unleash carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, especially from the thawing plant material.
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Scientists estimate that the Earth’s Yedoma regions contain between 327 billion and 466 billion tons of carbon. Were it all released into the atmosphere, that would amount to more than half of all human-caused emissions from greenhouse gases and deforestation between 1750 and 2011
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As the permafrost thaws and riverbanks erode, more tusks will emerge. Though mammoths disappeared from the Siberian mainland some 10,000 years ago, the government estimates that 500,000 tons of their tusks are still buried in the frozen ground.
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Supply and demand are so great that some people are collecting mammoth tusks at near-industrial scale. They use high-pressure hoses to blast away riverbanks and hire teams of young men to comb the wilderness for months at a time.
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. In the glutted market, Sivtsev said, the price for top-quality tusks has fallen from about $500 a pound five years ago to around $180.
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climate change is leaving people with few choices. “They have to somehow support and feed their families.”
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The ducks and geese are just about gone, he said, possibly moving to new habitats in Siberia as the climate shifts. The sable pelts aren’t as thick as they used to be. The shorter winters mean that once reliably frozen-over lakes and rivers are now less predictable, making hunting grounds harder to reach and restricting his ability to get goods to market.
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In Nelemnoye, the population has declined to 180 from 210 in the past decade, according to village head Andrei Solntsev. Just 82 of the residents have work. Many factors are pushing people to move to the city — lack of Internet access, poor flight connections, limited job opportunities — but the uncertainty born of a changing climate looms over everything
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As the permafrost thaws and recedes, a handful of apartment buildings there are showing signs of structural problems. Sections of many older, wooden buildings already sag toward the ground — rendered uninhabitable by the unevenly thawing earth. New apartment blocks are being built on massive pylons extending ever deeper — more than 40 feet — below ground
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a study published this year that the value of buildings and infrastructure on Russian permafrost amounts to $300 billion — about 7.5 percent of the nation’s total annual economic output. They estimate the cost of mitigating the damage wrought by thawing permafrost will probably total more than $100 billion by 2050.
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Opinion | Please, Don't Intentionally Infect Yourself With Coronavirus - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rus-parties-herd-immunity.html

Covid-19 response research

shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 20 - No Cached

1. Immunity isn’t a sure thingWe have not yet established that those who recover from this infection indeed develop long-term immunity. Herd immunity projections depend completely on such a sustained immune response, and we haven’t found out whether that even exists.
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the C.D.C. has estimated that about one in every five or six people aged 20 to 44 with confirmed Covid-19 has required hospitalization.
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These apparent cases of reinfection may actually be remission and relapse, or false test results. However, researchers need more time to figure out what is happening with these patients, and the implications.
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What’s more, even if it is determined that reinfection cannot occur shortly after recovery, it could still happen later if immunity is only seasonal
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If reinfection is indeed possible, we need to know whether it will result in disease that is milder or more severe.
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While antibodies to a previous infection generally reduce risk the second time around, for some viruses, such as dengue fever, they can lead to severe and even fatal disease.
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3. The virus could continue living inside youWe don’t know that recovered patients actually clear the virus from their bodies. Many viruses can remain in reservoirs, parts of the body where they hang out quietly, and re-emerge to cause disease later in life
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We now know that in some patients, detectable virus can be found in feces and even blood after apparent recovery. Does the coronavirus remain in the body, or are these just residual bits of virus?
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2. Reinfection could be possibleThere are documented cases where people who appear to recover from the virus test positive again, which calls even short-term immunity into question.
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5. Survivors could suffer long-term damage
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We do know that previously healthy people are being left with potentially long-term lung and heart damage.
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6. A ‘mild’ case is hardly mildAs more patients recount enduring painful coughing, disorientation and difficulties breathing, people are coming to understand that the 80 percent to 85 percent of cases considered mild are not necessarily “mild” in its usual sense
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7. There’s no shortcut to immunityHerd immunity requires a high proportion of a population to be immune (the actual percentage varies for different infections), but we want to get there slowly or, ideally, through vaccines
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Slowing down the spread of the coronavirus won’t just save lives in the coming few months; it also gives us time to study treatments, and to expand or reconfigure hospital services for Covid-19 patients.
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We need to keep in mind that the science is moving fast right now. It is unprecedented to see such an intensive effort internationally being put into studying one disease.
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While it is hard to be patient, the best way out of this will likely be much clearer to us in a month or two than it is now
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Opinion | Who Is Immune to the Coronavirus? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-immunity.html

research science Covid-19 immunity vaccine

shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 20 - No Cached

No such human-challenge experiments have been conducted to study immunity to SARS and MERS. But measurements of antibodies in the blood of people who have survived those infections suggest that these defenses persist for some time: two years for SARS, according to one study, and almost three years for MERS, according to another one. However, the neutralizing ability of these antibodies — a measure of how well they inhibit virus replication — was already declining during the study periods.
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These studies form the basis for an educated guess at what might happen with Covid-19 patients. After being infected with SARS-CoV-2, most individuals will have an immune response, some better than others. That response, it may be assumed, will offer some protection over the medium term — at least a year — and then its effectiveness might decline.
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One concern has to do with the possibility of reinfection. South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that 91 patients who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and then tested negative for the virus later tested positive again. If some of these cases were indeed reinfections, they would cast doubt on the strength of the immunity the patients had developed.
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Several of my colleagues and students and I have statistically analyzed thousands of seasonal coronavirus cases in the United States and used a mathematical model to infer that immunity over a year or so is likely for the two seasonal coronaviruses most closely related to SARS-CoV-2 — an indication perhaps of how immunity to SARS-CoV-2 itself might also behave.
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Mild illness, in other words, might not always build up protection. Similarly, it will be important to study the immune responses of people with asymptomatic cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection to determine whether symptoms, and their severity, predict whether a person becomes immune.
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the issue might be resolved by comparing the viral genome sequence from the first and the second periods of infection.
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it is reasonable to assume that only a minority of the world’s population is immune to SARS-CoV-2, even in hard-hit areas. How could this tentative picture evolve as better data come in? Early hints suggest that it could change in either direction.
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One recent study (not yet peer-reviewed) suggests that rather than, say, 10 times the number of detected cases, the United States may really have more like 100, or even 1,000, times the official number
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if this one is correct, then herd immunity to SARS-CoV-2 could be building faster than the commonly reported figures suggest.
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another recent study (also not yet peer-reviewed) suggests that not every case of infection may be contributing to herd immunity. Of 175 Chinese patients with mild symptoms of Covid-19, 70 percent developed strong antibody responses, but about 25 percent developed a low response and about 5 percent developed no detectable response at all
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An alternative possibility, which many scientists think is more likely, is that these patients had a false negative test in the middle of an ongoing infection, or that the infection had temporarily subsided and then re-emerged
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The balance between these uncertainties will become clearer when more serologic surveys, or blood tests for antibodies, are conducted on large numbers of people. Such studies are beginning and should show results soon. Of course, much will depend on how sensitive and specific the various tests are: how well they spot SARS-CoV-2 antibodies when those are present and if they can avoid spurious signals from antibodies to related viruses.
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Based on the volunteer experiments with seasonal coronaviruses and the antibody-persistence studies for SARS and MERS, one might expect a strong immune response to SARS-CoV-2 to protect completely against reinfection and a weaker one to protect against severe infection and so still slow the virus’s spread.
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But designing valid epidemiologic studies to figure all of this out is not easy — many scientists, including several teams of which I’m a part — are working on the issue right now.
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getting a handle on this fast is extremely important: not only to estimate the extent of herd immunity, but also to figure out whether some people can re-enter society safely, without becoming infected again or serving as a vector, and spreading the virus to others. Central to this effort will be figuring out how long protection lasts.
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Experimental and statistical evidence suggests that infection with one coronavirus can offer some degree of immunity against distinct but related coronaviruses.
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then there is the question of immune enhancement: Through a variety of mechanisms, immunity to a coronavirus can in some instances exacerbate an infection rather than prevent or mitigate it.
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administering a vaccine against dengue fever, a flavivirus infection, can sometimes make the disease worse.
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concern that they might be at play is one of the obstacles that have slowed the development of experimental vaccines against SARS and MERS.
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The good news is that research on SARS and MERS has begun to clarify how enhancement works, suggesting ways around it, and an extraordinary range of efforts is underway to find a vaccine for Covid-19, using multiple approaches.
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Opinion | Will We Struggle to Reach Herd Immunity? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-hesitancy-deserts-oases.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached

Consider a slice of Florida’s seniors, ages 65 to 74, who have been eligible for vaccination for four months. Almost all seniors in the state’s wealthiest county, St. Johns, have been vaccinated. (The numbers may be inflated because of seasonal residents, or snowbirds, who aren’t necessarily counted as part of the county’s population but are still counted among people getting vaccinated there.) But the first county west of St. Johns is one of the state’s poorest: Putnam, where the median annual income is about $35,000. Only half of the county’s residents ages 65 to 74 have been vaccinated.
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When eligibility is expanded in other states, vaccinations are expected to surge among the wealthiest Americans and lag among the poorest. At the rates that Florida’s poorer counties are vaccinating people ages 65 to 74, it will take months for the rest of the state’s seniors to catch up with higher-income Floridians.
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Data published by Idaho reveals how the current vaccination efforts are reaching a plateau in poorer parts of the state. The poorest 25 percent of ZIP codes in the state are seeing vaccination rates stalling below 70 percent for people ages 65 to 74.
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Logistical hurdles and missteps could drive slower vaccination campaigns. But states may also be falling behind because of high levels of vaccine hesitancy. If that's the case, it will take more than just opening up eligibility to get the country to levels of vaccination that can reach herd immunity — when roughly 70 percent of people are vaccinated, making it too difficult for the virus to spread.
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Opinion | As pediatricians, we say please don't use precious coronavirus vaccines on he... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...irus-vaccines-healthy-children

children pandemic vaccine policy

shared by Javier E on 13 May 21 - No Cached

As vaccination programs work their way through younger cohorts, the number of people needed to be vaccinated to prevent a death rapidly climbs. By the time young children are being considered, there are almost no deaths to prevent and only very small numbers of hospitalizations.
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At that point, the rationale behind mass immunization shifts increasingly toward indirect protection, or herd immunity. With growing evidence that coronavirus vaccines prevent asymptomatic infection and onward transmission, an argument used to justify immunizing young children is that it would mean reaching herd immunity faster.
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That approach can be useful with influenza or pneumonia, because children play a large role in their transmission. But young children do not appear to be important transmitters of covid. Population-based studies in Iceland showed that children younger than 10 were far less likely to be infected with the virus or transmit it to others. Similar results were found in Israel.
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Consider that in Israel, more than 60 percent of the adult population had received the Pfizer vaccine by last month, and covid had been virtually eradicated. There was a 98 percent reduction of covid in all age groups, yet no child under age 16 had been vaccinated.
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Much discussion has focused on the percentage of individuals needed to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity, with most estimates in the range of 60 to 70 percent. Instead, the focus should be on those who are the most likely to transmit the virus; in the United States, with much of the elderly population vaccinated, that means young adults.
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The universal vaccination of healthy children 2 to 11 years old simply shouldn’t be a priority and may ultimately prove unnecessary.
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Opinion: The big problem with 'herd immunity' - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US Covid19 Pandemic Herd Immunity

shared by yehbru on 31 May 21 - No Cached

The United States reached a significant milestone this week: More than 50% of adults have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19.
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But in Mississippi, only 35% of adults are fully vaccinated. In Alabama, it's 37%. In Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wyoming, they're all at or under 43%.
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Estimates for achieving this nebulous goal vary widely, but states are clearly on different trajectories, and disparities in vaccination rates are sometimes even more stark at the local level.
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A new Kaiser Health News analysis of the 42 states reporting racial and ethnic breakdowns of vaccine recipients offers a compelling portrait of the challenges ahead. Some populations hit hardest by Covid-19 still have among the lowest vaccination rates: only 22% of Black Americans and 29% of Hispanics have been vaccinated nationwide, compared with 33% of White Americans. Vaccination rates for Black Americans trail that of Whites in nearly every state.
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Take my home state of New Jersey, for example, where 60% of the adult population is fully vaccinated. This is one of the highest percentages of any state in the country, but the number doesn't reflect conditions across different communities
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It will not be easy balancing the freedoms of the fully vaccinated with our duty to protect those who are still unvaccinated, but we must be up to the task.
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Too often, though, we take a simplistic and myopic view of health and progress in America, touting national numbers while neglecting community needs at the local level.
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How Herd Immunity Happens - The Atlantic - 0 views

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