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rerobinson03

South Africa Halts Coronavirus Vaccine Rollout Because of New Variant - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ica-Covid-variant-vaccine.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 10 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • The new findings from South Africa were far from conclusive: They came from a small clinical trial that enrolled fewer than 2,000 people. And they did not preclude what some scientists say is the likelihood that the vaccine protects against severe disease from the variant — a key indicator of whether the virus will overwhelm hospitals and kill people.
  • “It’s becoming increasingly apparent that we’re going to be stuck in this whack-a-mole reality, where we have variants that don’t respond to vaccines,” said Andrea Taylor, the assistant director at Duke Global Health Innovation Center. “We’ll try to tweak those vaccines to target new variants, but because the virus will still be able to spread in some populations in some parts of the world, other variants will pop up.”
  • AstraZeneca is working to produce a version of its vaccine that can protect against the variant from South Africa by the fall.Still, the findings rattled scientists, undercutting the notion that vaccines alone will stop the spread of the virus anytime soon. And they led to new, and more urgent, demands that richer countries donate doses to poorer countries that could become breeding grounds for mutations if the virus spreads unchecked.
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  • Like many developing countries, South Africa was relying on the relatively cheap and easy-to-store AstraZeneca shot — “the people’s vaccine,” as Ms. Taylor put it — to tamp down new outbreaks. When airport workers rolled vaccine crates out of the belly of an airplane last week, President Cyril Ramaphosa watched from the rain-soaked tarmac.
  • Because the trial participants in South Africa were relatively young and unlikely to become severely ill, it was impossible for the scientists to determine if the vaccine protected people from hospitalization or death. Immune responses detected in blood samples from vaccinated people suggest it could.
  • he B.1.351 variant has already spread beyond South Africa to neighboring countries, the United States and Britain. Scientists believe one of its mutations may make it harder for antibodies to grab onto the virus and keep it from entering cells.Among scientists’ worries is that the variant first detected in Britain has acquired the same mutation, known as E484K, in some cases.
  • Given the proven safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine and the hope that it might yet prevent hospitalizations and deaths from the new variant, Professor Venter said that health officials should consider offering it to anyone who wanted it.
Javier E

Opinion | Yes, the Coronavirus Is in the Air - The New York Times - 0 views

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

Covid-19 transmission research

shared by Javier E on 30 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • The World Health Organization has now formally recognized that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is airborne and that it can be carried by tiny aerosols.
  • until earlier this month, the W.H.O. — like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or Public Health England — had warned mostly about the transmission of the new coronavirus through direct contact and droplets released at close range.
  • After several months of pressure from scientists, on July 9, the W.H.O. changed its position — going from denial to grudging partial acceptance: “Further studies are needed to determine whether it is possible to detect viable SARS-CoV-2 in air samples from settings where no procedures that generate aerosols are performed and what role aerosols might play in transmission.”
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  • A month later, I believe that the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 via aerosols matters much more than has been officially acknowledged to date.
  • This confirms the results of a study from late May (not peer-reviewed) in which Covid-19 patients were found to release SARS-CoV-2 simply by exhaling — without coughing or even talking. The authors of that study said the finding implied that airborne transmission “plays a major role” in spreading the virus.
  • Accepting these conclusions wouldn’t much change what is currently being recommended as best behavior. The strongest protection against SARS-CoV-2, whether the virus is mostly contained in droplets or in aerosols, essentially remains the same: Keep your distance and wear masks.
  • Rather, the recent findings are an important reminder to also be vigilant about opening windows and improving airflow indoors. And they are further evidence that the quality of masks and their fit matter, too.
  • here is no neat and no meaningful cutoff point — at 5 microns or any other size — between droplets and aerosols: All are tiny specks of liquid, their size ranging along a spectrum that goes from very small to really microscopic.
  • Yes, droplets tend to fly through the air like mini cannonballs and they fall to the ground rather quickly, while aerosols can float around for many hours.
  • The practical implications are plain:Social distancing really is important. It keeps us out of the most concentrated parts of other people’s respiratory plumes. So stay away from one another by one or two meters at least — though farther is safer.
  • “The smaller the exhaled droplets, the more important the short-range airborne route.”
  • Can you walk into an empty room and contract the virus if an infected person, now gone, was there before you? Perhaps, but probably only if the room is small and stuffy.
  • Can the virus waft up and down buildings via air ducts or pipes? Maybe, though that hasn’t been established.
  • another, recent, preprint (not peer reviewed) about the Diamond Princess concluded that “aerosol inhalation was likely the dominant contributor to Covid-19 transmission” among the ship’s passengers.
  • It might seem logical, or make intuitive sense, that larger droplets would contain more virus than do smaller aerosols — but they don’t.
  • The Lancet Respiratory Medicine that analyzed the aerosols produced by the coughs and exhaled breaths of patients with various respiratory infections found “a predominance of pathogens in small particles” (under 5 microns). “There is no evidence,” the study also concluded, “that some pathogens are carried only in large droplets.”
  • I believe that, taken together, much of the evidence gathered to date suggests that close-range transmission by aerosols is significant — possibly very significant, and certainly more significant than direct droplet spray.
  • But basic physics also says that a 5-micron droplet takes about a half-hour to drop to the floor from the mouth of an adult of average height — and during that time, the droplet can travel many meters on an air current. Droplets expelled in coughs or sneezes also travel much farther than one meter.
  • Wear a mask. Masks help block aerosols released by the wearer. Scientific evidence is also building that masks protect the wearer from breathing in aerosols around them.
  • When it comes to masks, size does matter.
  • My lab has been testing cloth masks on a mannequin, sucking in air through its mouth at a realistic rate. We found that even a bandanna loosely tied over its mouth and nose blocked half or more of aerosols larger than 2 microns from entering the mannequin.
  • Ventilation counts. Open windows and doors. Adjust dampers in air-conditioning and heating systems. Upgrade the filters in those systems. Add portable air cleaners, or install germicidal ultraviolet technologies to remove or kill virus particles in the air.
  • Avoid crowds. The more people around you, the more likely someone among them will be infected. Especially avoid crowds indoors, where aerosols can accumulate.
  • We also found that especially with very small aerosols — smaller than 1 micron — it is more effective to use a softer fabric (which is easier to fit tightly over the face) than a stiffer fabric (which, even if it is a better filter, tends to sit more awkwardly, creating gaps).
  • One study from 2013 found that surgical masks reduced exposure to flu viruses by between 10 percent and 98 percent (depending on the mask’s design).A recent paper found that surgical masks can completely block seasonal coronaviruses from getting into the air.To my knowledge, no similar study has been conducted for SARS-CoV-2 yet, but these findings might apply to this virus as well since it is similar to seasonal coronaviruses in size and structure.
  • What about the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship off Japan early this year? Some 712 of the 3,711 people on board became infected.
  • Consider the case of a restaurant in Guangzhou, southern China, at the beginning of the year, in which one diner infected with SARS-CoV-2 at one table spread the virus to a total of nine people seated at their table and two other tables.Yuguo Li, a professor of engineering at the University of Hong Kong, and colleagues analyzed video footage from the restaurant and in a preprint (not peer reviewed) published in April found no evidence of close contact between the diners.Droplets can’t account for transmission in this case, at least not among the people at the tables other than the infected person’s: The droplets would have fallen to the floor before reaching those tables.But the three tables were in a poorly ventilated section of the restaurant, and an air conditioning unit pushed air across them. Notably, too, no staff member and none of the other diners in the restaurant — including at two tables just beyond the air conditioner’s airstream — became infected.
Javier E

Health insurance whistleblower: I lied to Americans about Canadian medicine - The Washi... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...health-insurance-canada-lie

health insurance health insurance public pandemic crisis policy disinformation

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • In my prior life as an insurance executive, it was my job to deceive Americans about their health care. I misled people to protect profits
  • That work contributed directly to a climate in which fewer people are insured, which has shaped our nation’s struggle against the coronavirus, a condition that we can fight only if everyone is willing and able to get medical treatment. Had spokesmen like me not been paid to obscure important truths about the differences between the U.S. and Canadian health-care systems, tens of thousands of Americans who have died during the pandemic might still be alive.
  • In 2007, I was working as vice president of corporate communications for Cigna.
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  • I spent much of that year as an industry spokesman, my last after 20 years in the business, spreading AHIP’s “information” to journalists and lawmakers to create the impression that our health-care system was far superior to Canada’s, which we wanted people to believe was on the verge of collapse.
  • The campaign worked. Stories began to appear in the press that cast the Canadian system in a negative light. And when Democrats began writing what would become the Affordable Care Act in early 2009, they gave no serious consideration to a publicly financed system like Canada’s.
  • Today, the respective responses of Canada and the United States to the coronavirus pandemic prove just how false the ideas I helped spread were.
  • There are more than three times as many coronavirus infections per capita in the United States, and the mortality rate is twice the rate in Canada.
  • The most effective myth we perpetuated — the industry trots it out whenever major reform is proposed — is that Canadians and people in other single-payer countries have to endure long waits for needed care.
  • While it’s true that Canadians sometimes have to wait weeks or months for elective procedures (knee replacements are often cited), the truth is that they do not have to wait at all for the vast majority of medical services.
  • And, contrary to another myth I used to peddle — that Canadian doctors are flocking to the United States — there are more doctors per 1,000 people in Canada than here. Canadians see their doctors an average of 6.8 times a year, compared with just four times a year in this country.
  • Most important, no one in Canada is turned away from doctors because of a lack of funds, and Canadians can get tested and treated for the coronavirus without fear of receiving a budget-busting medical bill.
  • In America, exorbitant bills are a defining feature of our health-care system. Despite the assurances from President Trump and members of Congress that covid-19 patients will not be charged for testing or treatment, they are on the hook for big bills, according to numerous reports.
  • That is not the case in Canada, where there are no co-pays, deductibles or coinsurance for covered benefits. Care is free at the point of service. And those laid off in Canada don’t face the worry of losing their health insurance. In the United States, by contrast, more than 40 million have lost their jobs during this pandemic, and millions of them — along with their families — also lost their coverage.
  • Then there’s quality of care. By numerous measures, it is better in Canada. Some examples: Canada has far lower rates than the United States of hospitalizations from preventable causes like diabetes (almost twice as common here) and hypertension (more than eight times as common).
  • And even though Canada spends less than half what we do per capita on health care, life expectancy there is 82 years, compared with 78.6 years in the United States.
  • Of the many regrets I have about what I once did for a living, one of the biggest is slandering Canada’s health-care system. If the United States had undertaken a different kind of reform in 2009 (or anytime since), one that didn’t rely on private insurance companies that have every incentive to limit what they pay for, we’d be a healthier country today.
  • Living without insurance dramatically increases your chances of dying unnecessarily. Over the past 13 years, tens of thousands of Americans have probably died prematurely because, unlike our neighbors to the north, they either had no coverage or were so inadequately insured that they couldn’t afford the care they needed. I live with that horror, and my role in it, every day.
  • here were more specific reasons to be skeptical of those claims. We didn’t know, for example, who conducted that 2004 survey or anything about the sample size or methodology — or even what criteria were used to determine who qualified as a “business leader.” We didn’t know if the assertion about imaging equipment was based on reliable data or was an opinion. You could easily turn up comparable complaints about outdated equipment at U.S. hospitals.
  • Another bullet point, from the same book, quoted the CEO of the Canadian Association of Radiologists as saying that “the radiology equipment in Canada is so bad that ‘without immediate action radiologists will no longer be able to guarantee the reliability and quality of examinations.’ ”
  • Here’s an example from one AHIP brief in the binder: “A May 2004 poll found that 87% of Canada’s business leaders would support seeking health care outside the government system if they had a pressing medical concern.” The source was a 2004 book by Sally Pipes, president of the industry-supported Pacific Research Institute,
  • We enlisted APCO Worldwide, a giant PR firm. Agents there worked with AHIP to put together a binder of laminated talking points for company flacks like me to use in news releases and statements to reporters.
  • Clearly my colleagues and I would need a robust defense. On a task force for the industry’s biggest trade association, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), we talked about how we might make health-care systems in Canada, France, Britain and even Cuba look just as bad as ours.
  • That summer, Michael Moore was preparing to release his latest documentary, “Sicko,” contrasting American health care with that in other rich countries. (Naturally, we looked terrible.) I spent months meeting secretly with my counterparts at other big insurers to plot our assault on the film, which contained many anecdotes about patients who had been denied coverage for important treatments.
chrispink7

New Ebola outbreak detected in northwest Democratic Republic of the Congo; WHO surge te... - 0 views

www.who.int/...e-team-supporting-the-response

shared by chrispink7 on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • The Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo announced today that a new outbreak of Ebola virus disease is occurring in Wangata health zone, Mbandaka, in Équateur province. The announcement comes as a long, difficult and complex Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo is in its final phase, while the country also battles COVID-19 and the world’s largest measles outbreak. Initial information from the Ministry of Health is that six Ebola cases have so far been detected in Wangata, of which four have died and two are alive and under care. Three of these six cases have been confirmed with laboratory testing. It is likely more people will be identified with the disease as surveillance activities increase. “This is a reminder that COVID-19 is not the only health threat people face,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “Although much of our attention is on the pandemic, WHO is continuing to monitor and respond to many other health emergencies.”This is the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s 11th outbreak of Ebola since the virus was first discovered in the country in 1976. The city of Mbandaka and its surrounding area were the site of Democratic Republic of the Congo’s 9th Ebola outbreak, which took place from May to July 2018. “It’s happening at a challenging time, but WHO has worked over the last two years with health authorities, Africa CDC and other partners to strengthen national capacity to respond to outbreaks,” said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa. “To reinforce local leadership, WHO plans to send a team to support scaling up the response. Given the proximity of this new outbreak to busy transport routes and vulnerable neighbouring countries we must act quickly.”WHO is already on the ground in Mbandaka supporting the response to this outbreak, as part of capacity built during the 2018 outbreak. The team supported the collection and testing of samples, and reference to the national laboratory for confirmation. Contact tracing is underway. Work is ongoing to send additional supplies from North Kivu and from Kinshasa to support the government-led response. A further 25 people are expected to arrive in Mbandaka tomorrow. WHO is also working to ensure that essential health services are provided to communities despite these emergency events.The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s 10th outbreak of Ebola, in North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri provinces, is in its final stages. On 14 May 2020, the Ministry of Health began the 42-day countdown to the declaration of the end of that outbreak. New outbreaks of Ebola are expected in the Democratic Republic of the Congo given the existence of the virus in an animal reservoir in many parts of the country. 
anonymous

History's deadliest pandemics: Plague, smallpox, flu, covid-19 - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...oronavirus-deadliest-pandemics

history US

shared by anonymous on 20 May 20 - No Cached
  • But history shows that past pandemics have reshaped societies in profound ways. Hundreds of millions of people have died. Empires have fallen. Governments have cracked. Generations have been annihilated. Here is a look at how pandemics have remade the world.
  • Many historians trace the fall of the Roman empire back to the Antonine Plague, which swept Rome during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Nobody has ever nailed down the exact cause, but symptoms recorded by a physician named Galen — gruesome skin sores, high fever, diarrhea and sore throats — strongly suggest it was smallpox and measles.
  • Thought to be the world’s first episode of bubonic plague, its namesake was the Byzantine emperor who was in power when it hit, likely arriving in the form of infected fleas hitching rides across the world on the backs of rodents.
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  • Frank M. Snowden, a Yale historian who studies pandemics, wrote in his book “Epidemics and Society” that definitive accounts of this plague have largely vanished.
  • History Today, a monthly magazine of historical writing published in London, calls this pandemic “the greatest catastrophe ever.” The number of deaths — 200 million — is just astounding. Put it this way: That would be like wiping out roughly 65 percent of the current U.S. population. (Covid-19 disease modeling predicts U.S. deaths to potentially reach 240,000.)
  • Like the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death was caused by the bubonic plague.
  • Explorers arrived to the New World bearing more than just turnips and grapes. They also brought smallpox, measles and other viruses for which New World inhabitants had no immunity.
  • it is estimated that upwards of 80–95 percent of the Native American population was decimated within the first 100–150 years following 1492
  • Again, blame the rats with those pesky fleas on their backs: “They were attracted by city streets filled with rubbish and waste, especially in the poorest areas,” according to the National Archives in England. While doctors, lawyers and royalty fled town, the poor were ravaged by the disease
  • There were no treatments. If you caught it, you had roughly two weeks to live. This caused people to become desperate.
  • The epidemic that swept London in 1854 spawned the sort of epidemiological investigations that take place in disease outbreaks today. That’s thanks to John Snow, an English physician who almost single-handedly took on the bacteria. While some scientists suspected cholera was transmitted through the air, Snow thought otherwise. “Through carefully mapping the outbreak, he finds that everyone affected has a single connection in common: they have all retrieved water from the local Broad Street pump,”
  • according to a CDC history. He ordered the pump-handle turned off, and people stopped getting sick.
  • In 1793, yellow fever swept through Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital, killing roughly 10 percent of the population. President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson high-tailed it out of town, ultimately settling on Washington as the nation’s capital.
  • It wasn’t until 1900 that U.S. Army researchers “pinpointed mosquitoes as the transmission vector for the disease,” according to a vaccine history project at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
  • The covid-19 pandemic has inspired lots of comparisons to the 1918 flu, sometimes called the Spanish flu, which got its name not because it originated in Spain but because it was World War I, and Spain was the only country being honest about the toll the pandemic took on the country.
  • The flu came in two waves, starting in 1918 and ending in 1920. The number of infected is staggering —as many as 500 million, with estimates of 50 million deaths worldwide, according to the CDC.
  • One man saw it coming: Maurice Hilleman. The doctor later regarded as the godfather of vaccines was working at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 1957 when he read a New York Times article about a nasty flu outbreak in Hong Kong that mentioned glassy-eyed children at a clinic.
  • Hilleman requested samples of the virus be shipped to U.S. drugmakers right away so they could get a vaccine ready. Though 70,000 people in the United States ultimately died, “some predicted that the U.S. death toll would have reached 1 million without the vaccine that Hilleman called for,” according to the Philadelphia vaccine history project. “Health officials widely credited that vaccine with saving many lives.”
  • Before covid-19, this was the world’s most recent pandemic, infecting as much as 21 percent of the world’s population. Swine flu was a hodgepodge of several different flu strains that had never been collectively seen together
Javier E

239 Experts With 1 Big Claim: The Coronavirus Is Airborne - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-coronavirus-is-airborne.html

Covid-19 research transmission

shared by Javier E on 05 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • The coronavirus is finding new victims worldwide, in bars and restaurants, offices, markets and casinos, giving rise to frightening clusters of infection that increasingly confirm what many scientists have been saying for months: The virus lingers in the air indoors, infecting those nearby.
  • If airborne transmission is a significant factor in the pandemic, especially in crowded spaces with poor ventilation, the consequences for containment will be significant. Masks may be needed indoors, even in socially distant settings.
  • Health care workers may need N95 masks that filter out even the smallest respiratory droplets as they care for coronavirus patients.
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  • Ventilation systems in schools, nursing homes, residences and businesses may need to minimize recirculating air and add powerful new filters.
  • in an open letter to the W.H.O., 239 scientists in 32 countries have outlined the evidence showing that smaller particles can infect people, and are calling for the agency to revise its recommendations
  • Whether carried aloft by large droplets that zoom through the air after a sneeze, or by much smaller exhaled droplets that may glide the length of a room, these experts said, the coronavirus is borne through air and can infect people when inhaled
  • But the infection prevention and control committee in particular, experts said, is bound by a rigid and overly medicalized view of scientific evidence, is slow and risk-averse in updating its guidance and allows a few conservative voices to shout down dissent.
  • “If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do,” she said. “I think it’s a good idea, a very good idea, but it will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”
  • In early April, a group of 36 experts on air quality and aerosols urged the W.H.O. to consider the growing evidence on airborne transmission of the coronavirus. The agency responded promptly, calling Lidia Morawska, the group’s leader and a longtime W.H.O. consultant, to arrange a meeting.
  • But the discussion was dominated by a few experts who are staunch supporters of handwashing and felt it must be emphasized over aerosols, according to some participants, and the committee’s advice remained unchanged.
  • Dr. Morawska and others pointed to several incidents that indicate airborne transmission of the virus, particularly in poorly ventilated and crowded indoor spaces. They said the W.H.O. was making an artificial distinction between tiny aerosols and larger droplets, even though infected people produce both.
  • We’ve known since 1946 that coughing and talking generate aerosols,
  • Scientists have not been able to grow the coronavirus from aerosols in the lab.
  • Most of the samples in those experiments have come from hospital rooms with good air flow that would dilute viral levels.
  • In most buildings, she said, “the air-exchange rate is usually much lower, allowing virus to accumulate in the air and pose a greater risk.”
  • The W.H.O. also is relying on a dated definition of airborne transmission, Dr. Marr said. The agency believes an airborne pathogen, like the measles virus, has to be highly infectious and to travel long distances.
  • Dr. Marr and others said the coronavirus seemed to be most infectious when people were in prolonged contact at close range, especially indoors, and even more so in superspreader events — exactly what scientists would expect from aerosol transmission.
  • Experts all agree that the coronavirus does not behave that way.
  • “We have this notion that airborne transmission means droplets hanging in the air capable of infecting you many hours later, drifting down streets, through letter boxes and finding their way into homes everywhere,”
  • The agency lagged behind most of its member nations in endorsing face coverings for the public. While other organizations, including the C.D.C., have long since acknowledged the importance of transmission by people without symptoms, the W.H.O. still maintains that asymptomatic transmission is rare.
  • Many experts said the W.H.O. should embrace what some called a “precautionary principle” and others called “needs and values” — the idea that even without definitive evidence, the agency should assume the worst of the virus, apply common sense and recommend the best protection possible.
  • “There is no incontrovertible proof that SARS-CoV-2 travels or is transmitted significantly by aerosols, but there is absolutely no evidence that it’s not,
  • So at the moment we have to make a decision in the face of uncertainty, and my goodness, it’s going to be a disastrous decision if we get it wrong,” she said. “So why not just mask up for a few weeks, just in case?”
  • he agency also must consider the needs of all its member nations, including those with limited resources, and make sure its recommendations are tempered by “availability, feasibility, compliance, resource implications,” she said.
  • if the W.H.O. were to push for rigorous control measures in the absence of proof, hospitals in low- and middle-income countries may be forced to divert scarce resources from other crucial programs.
  • That’s the balance that an organization like the W.H.O. has to achieve,” he said. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to say, ‘We’ve got to follow the precautionary principle,’ and ignore the opportunity costs of that.”
  • In interviews, other scientists criticized this view as paternalistic. “‘We’re not going to say what we really think, because we think you can’t deal with it?’ I don’t think that’s right,”
  • Even cloth masks, if worn by everyone, can significantly reduce transmission, and the W.H.O. should say so clearly, he added.
  • The W.H.O. tends to describe “an absence of evidence as evidence of absence,” Dr. Aldis added. In April, for example, the W.H.O. said, “There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.”
  • The statement was intended to indicate uncertainty, but the phrasing stoked unease among the public and earned rebukes from several experts and journalists. The W.H.O. later walked back its comments.
  • In a less public instance, the W.H.O. said there was “no evidence to suggest” that people with H.I.V. were at increased risk from the coronavirus. After Joseph Amon, the director of global health at Drexel University in Philadelphia who has sat on many agency committees, pointed out that the phrasing was misleading, the W.H.O. changed it to say the level of risk was “unknown.”
  • But W.H.O. staff and some members said the critics did not give its committees enough credit.“Those that may have been frustrated may not be cognizant of how W.H.O. expert committees work, and they work slowly and deliberately,”
Javier E

The Pandemic's Big Mystery: How Deadly Is the Coronavirus? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-death-rate.html

pandemic death fatality rate research

shared by Javier E on 05 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data suggesting that for every documented infection in the United States, there were 10 other cases on average that had gone unrecorded, probably because they were very mild or asymptomatic.
  • If there are many more asymptomatic infections than once thought, then the virus may be less deadly than it has appeared. But even that calculation is a difficult one.
  • the consensus for now was that the I.F.R. is about 0.6 percent — which means that the risk of death is less than 1 percent.
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  • 0.6 percent of the world’s population is 47 million people, and 0.6 percent of the American population is 2 million people. The virus remains a major threat.
  • China had reported 90,294 cases as of Friday and 4,634 deaths, which is a C.F.R. of 5 percent. The United States was very close to that mark. It has had 2,811,447 cases and 129,403 deaths, about 4.6 percent
  • So far, in most countries, about 20 percent of all confirmed Covid-19 patients become ill enough to need supplemental oxygen or even more advanced hospital care
  • it is difficult to measure fatality rates during pandemics, especially at the beginning.
  • In the chaos that ensues when a new virus hits a city hard, thousands of people may die and be buried without ever being tested, and certainly without them all being autopsied.
  • Normally, once the chaos has subsided, more testing is done and more mild cases are found — and because the denominator of the fraction rises, fatality rates fall. But the results are not always consistent or predictable.
  • Ten sizable countries, most of them in Western Europe, have tested bigger percentages of their populations than has the United States, according to Worldometer, which gathers statistics. They are Iceland, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Britain, Israel and New Zealand.
  • But their case fatality rates vary wildly: Iceland’s is less than 1 percent, New Zealand’s and Israel’s are below 2 percent. Belgium, by comparison, is at 16 percent, and Italy and Britain at 14 percent
  • Those percentages are far higher rates than the 2.5 percent death rate often ascribed to the 1918 flu pandemic.
  • Whether those patients survive depends on a host of factors, including age, underlying illnesses and the level of medical care available.
  • Death rates are expected to be lower in countries with younger populations and less obesity, which are often the poorest countries. Conversely, the figures should be higher in countries that lack oxygen tanks, ventilators and dialysis machines, and where many people live far from hospitals. Those are also often the poorest countries.
  • new evidence that people with Type A blood are more likely to fall deathly ill could change risk calculations. Type A blood is relatively rare in West Africa and South Asia, and very rare among the Indigenous peoples of South America.
  • it had relied on a mix of data sent in by member countries and by academic groups, and on a meta-analysis done in May by scientists at the University of Wollongong and James Cook University in Australia.
  • Those researchers looked at 267 studies in more than a dozen countries, and then chose the 25 they considered the most accurate, weighting them for accuracy and averaged the data. They concluded that the global I.F.R. was 0.64 percent.
  • The 25 studies that the Australian researchers considered the most accurate relied on very different methodologies. One report, for example, was based on diagnostic PCR tests of all passengers and crew aboard the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship that docked in Japan after it was overcome by the coronavirus. Another study drew data from an antibody survey of 38,000 Spaniards, while another included only 1,104 Swedes.
  • To arrive at the C.D.C.’s new estimate, researchers tested samples from 11,933 people for antibodies to the coronavirus in six regions in the United States. New York City reported 53,803 cases by April 1, but the actual number of infections was 12 times higher — nearly 642,000, the agency estimated.
  • The global fatality rates could still change. With one or two exceptions, like Iran and Ecuador, the pandemic first struck wealthier countries in Asia, Western Europe and North America where advanced medical care was available.
  • Many experts fear that infections and deaths will shoot up in the fall as colder weather forces people indoors, where they are more likely to infect one another. Discipline about wearing masks and avoiding breathing on one another will be even more important then.
  • In each of the eight influenza pandemics to hit the United States since 1763, a relatively mild first wave — no matter what time of year it arrived — was followed by a larger, much more lethal wave a few months later
  • More than a third of all the people killed by the Spanish flu, which lasted from March 1918 to late 1920, died in the short stretch between September and December 1918 — about six months after a first, relatively mild version of what may have been the same virus broke out in western Kansas.
Javier E

With Department Stores Disappearing, Malls Could Be Next - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...artment-stores-bankruptcy.html

retail stores trends shopping history crisis

shared by Javier E on 05 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • The standard American mall — with its vast parking lots, escalators and air conditioning, and an atmosphere heavy on perfume samples and the scent of Mrs. Fields cookies — was built around department stores. But the pandemic has been devastating for the retail industry and many of those stores are disappearing at a rapid clip. Some chains are unable to pay rent and prominent department store chains including Neiman Marcus, as well as J.C. Penney, have filed for bankruptcy protection. As they close stores, it could cause other tenants to abandon malls at the same time as large specialty chains like Victoria’s Secret are shrinking.
  • Malls were already facing pressure from online shopping, but analysts now say that hundreds are at risk of closing in the next five years. That has the potential to reshape the suburbs, with many communities already debating whether abandoned malls can be turned into local markets or office space, even affordable housing.
  • she anticipated that about 25 percent of the country’s nearly 1,200 malls were in danger.
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  • more than half of all mall-based department stores would close by the end of 2021.
  • Many small mall retailers have clauses in their leases — so-called co-tenancy clauses — that allow them to pay reduced rent or even break the lease if two or more anchor stores leave a location.
  • Mr. Tibone said he was pessimistic about the ability of most malls to fill vacant spaces, especially during the pandemic. Entertainment options like Dave & Buster’s are off the table, for instance.
  • Macy’s, which also owns Bloomingdale’s, said in February that it would close 125 stores in “lower-tier malls” during the next three years, and Nordstrom just recently said it would close 16 of its 116 full-line department stores. While Neiman Marcus, which filed for bankruptcy in May, said it plans to reopen all its stores, landlords are watching warily.
  • Already this year, Victoria’s Secret said it would close 250 stores in North America, while the Gap brand is closing at least 170 stores globally. Financial troubles are plaguing mall chain companies like Ascena Retail, which owns Ann Taylor and Loft, and the owner of New York & Company. And bankruptcies since early 2019 have included mall staples like Forever 21, Things Remembered, Payless ShoeSource and GNC. Lucky Brand Dungarees filed for bankruptcy on Friday.
Javier E

Can You Get Covid-19 Twice? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...get-covid-19-twice-11589388593

immunity Covid-19 personal

shared by Javier E on 20 May 20 - No Cached
  • More than 160 South Koreans tested positive a second time for the novel coronavirus last month, weeks after being discharged from medical supervision. Some symptom-free Americans have been barred from donating their blood plasma to help treat others because they are still testing positive.
  • The revelations are generating concern that people who have had Covid-19 are getting infected anew—something scientists say current evidence doesn’t support.
  • Here is what we know, and don’t know, about the possibility of becoming sick with the virus more than once.
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  • ost scientists say that people who have had Covid-19 gain some immunity to the virus that causes it. What they don’t know is whether that protection lasts a few months, a few years or a lifetime.
  • The immune system wards off infections by producing antibodies that fight invaders. A range of hereditary and environmental factors, including diet and sleep patterns, typically affect the strength and longevity of those defenses.
  • Immunity also depends on the pathogen. For example, infection by the virus that causes measles confers lifelong immunity. Others, like the influenza virus, can mutate so rapidly that protective antibodies might not recognize them during a reinfection.
  • The novel coronavirus mutates more slowly than the influenza virus. That gives researchers hope that any natural immunity, or vaccine, would offer more lasting protection. Even if someone gets sick again, researchers believe a second infection might be milder than the first.
  • Data are scant, but preliminary research shows antibodies can emerge within days or several weeks of the onset of symptoms. A study involving 34 hospitalized cases in China found that two patients, both in their 80s, produced antibodies within three days of symptom onset. The rest produced them two weeks after symptoms first surfaced.
  • A group of Chinese researchers reported in March that they had infected four rhesus macaques, allowed them to recover and then tried to reinfect two of them with the same strain of the virus. Neither became sick again.
  • Then why are some people testing positive again? South Korean health officials are refraining from labeling them as “reinfections.” Korean doctors involved in a continuing government review believe that those patients likely harbored low levels of the virus that diagnostic polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests failed to pick up. In later stages of the disease, the virus settles into the lungs where it can elude detection. The virus, they say, hadn’t been fully cleared from the body.
  • ow do I know I’ve fully recovered? Clinicians have mixed views on what constitutes recovery because long-term data aren’t yet available. Guidelines vary across the globe, and even within countries. In a peer-reviewed study published last month, researchers in Hong Kong detected the virus in the feces of Covid-19 survivors even as their respiratory samples tested negative. Viral fragments can linger in the body after symptoms disappear, but it doesn’t mean that a person is infectious, or that the disease will make a comeback.
Javier E

Covid Testing, Not a Cure, Is What Investors Need to Watch - WSJ - 1 views

www.wsj.com/...tors-need-to-watch-11599211803

testing pandemic Covid-19

shared by Javier E on 06 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • An invasive nasopharyngeal swab, which is the current standard for patients who feel sick or have been in close contact with a person who tested positive, is an effective way to test specific individuals, but its limitations make regular testing of large groups impractical. It must be administered by a health worker and sent off-site to a lab, a process which takes days to complete
  • Quicker, more convenient options are needed for applications like regular testing of students at an elementary school or screening cruise ship customers before embarking.
  • Quest Diagnostics has reported 13.2 million cumulative Covid-19 tests performed since the start of the pandemic through the end of August; more than 10 million of those came after May. Those tests are also turning around more quickly: Quest said this week the average turnaround time is one to two days for high-priority patients and two days for all others.
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  • “The U.S. requires testing of six to 10 million people per day to contain and monitor the infection,” Fluidigm CEO Chris Linthwaite says.
  • Fresh options can help. Food and Drug Administration regulators last week authorized a new test by Abbott for emergency use that can yield results in as little as 15 minutes. Regulators also authorized a new test developed by Fluidigm that uses saliva rather than a nasal swab. The clinical study associated with Fluidigm’s submission to the FDA demonstrated 100% agreement between the saliva results and paired nasopharyngeal samples. Fluidigm’s test returns results in several hours. Meanwhile, OraSure Technologies is developing a nasal-swab test that is potentially suitable for at-home use and could be ready this fall.
Javier E

A year after Wuhan alarm, China seeks to change Covid origin story | China | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...s-to-change-covid-origin-story

china who Covid-19 origins development

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The official People’s Daily newspaper claimed in a Facebook post last week that “all available evidence suggests that the coronavirus did not start in central China’s Wuhan”
  • “Wuhan was where the coronavirus was first detected but it was not where it originated,” it quoted Zeng Guang, formerly a chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, as saying
  • A foreign ministry spokesman, asked about state media reports that the virus originated outside China, said only that it was important to distinguish between where Covid-19 was first detected and where it crossed the species barrier to infect humans.
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  • Chinese scientists have even submitted a paper for publication to the Lancet – although it has not yet been peer-reviewed – that claims “Wuhan is not the place where human-to-human Sars-CoV-2 transmission first happened”, suggesting instead that the first case may have been in the “Indian subcontinent”.
  • Claims that the virus had origins outside China are given little credence by western scientists. Michael Ryan, director of the health emergencies programme at the World Health Organization (WHO), said last week that it would be “highly speculative” to argue that the disease did not emerge in China. “It is clear from a public health perspective that you start your investigations where the human cases first emerged,” he told a news briefing in Geneva.
  • Reports of Covid circulating in Italy in autumn 2019, based on samples from a cancer unit, seem “weak”, said Prof Jonathan Stoye, a virologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “The serological data [from Italy] can most likely be explained by cross-reactive antibodies directed against other coronaviruses.” In other words, antibodies found in the cases in Italy had been triggered in individuals who had been infected by different coronaviruses, not those responsible for Covid-19
  • And while traces of coronavirus have been found on frozen food packaging, scientists think that represents a very low risk for a disease now believed to be overwhelmingly transmitted through respiratory droplets.
  • A positive test “doesn’t indicate infectious virus, just that some signal from the virus is present on that surface,” Andrew Pekosz of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University told AP. “I’ve seen no convincing data that Sars-CoV-2 on food packaging poses a significant risk for infection.”
  • But as the human and economic toll of the pandemic mounts, Beijing is keen to protect its reputation at home and abroad. Covid-19 has now infected over 60 million people and killed nearly 1.5 million.
  • “China is still struggling to deal with the fact that it is held responsible for the “original sin” of the outbreak, which undercuts virtually every effort to salvage its image,” said Andrew Small, a China scholar and senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund, a US thinktank.
  • “Recent months have shown what a catastrophic impact the pandemic has had for China in international public opinion.”
  • He does not think there is any doubt in the minds of senior Chinese leadership about the origin of the virus, and sees the focus on reporting possible alternative origins as a propaganda campaign.
  • The reports fit an internal narrative of a strong China led by an efficient Communist party. Domestically, Beijing has promoted its enormous success in virtually eradicating the disease and returning life within its borders to something like normal
  • Internationally, China’s aims probably include introducing some doubt for global audiences who are likely to believe it, turning basic facts into a “contested, politically sensitive matter” in relations with Beijing, Small said.
  • China’s questioning of the origin of the virus in Wuhan might be more credible if it was supporting an independent investigation into the disease, but instead authorities have repeatedly proved obstructive
  • WHO investigators who visited Wuhan earlier this year were not able to visit the food market linked to the initial outbreak. A new team is expected to head to China soon to build on initial work by a Chinese team, but they still don’t have a date for travel, with the WHO saying only that they will travel “in due time”.
clairemann

Young Adults Less Likely to Take COVID-19 Prevention Actions | Time - 0 views

time.com/...mask-wearing-age-breakdown

crisis Culture policy US COVID

shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • According to the agency’s analysis of the survey results, older respondents are more likely to take certain actions or refrain from certain activities in order to mitigate the chances of spreading and contracting COVID-19.
  • As shown in the below chart, which captures the situation in June, 38% of 18-to-29 year olds engaged in all six behaviors, while 53% of people age 60 and older did the same.
  • “they might be more concerned about COVID-19, based on their higher risk for severe illness compared with that of younger adults.”
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  • engaged in at least four behaviors over the survey time period, and only 6% from the entire sample reported one or fewer behaviors.
  • Only face mask use increased, going from 78% in April to 89% in June. The other prevention measures declined marginally, except avoiding restaurants, which stayed flat.
  • The lower prevalence of mitigation behaviors in younger adults “might contribute to the high incidence of confirmed COVID-19 cases” among that group, the CDC notes.
  • U.S. While this group is less likely to suffer severe illness from COVID-19, it isn’t out of the question.
  • Additionally, young people’s risk tolerance for COVID-19, and their decisions to forego social health measures, affects not just their peers but also their older and more vulnerable neighbors.
  • “protect persons of all ages by preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2.” That should be reason enough to step up.
ethanshilling

Immunity to the Coronavirus May Last Years, New Data Hint - The New York Times - 0 views

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

coronavirus data pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 17 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Blood samples from recovered patients suggest a powerful, long-lasting immune response, researchers reported.
  • How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study
  • Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come.
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  • “That amount of memory would likely prevent the vast majority of people from getting hospitalized disease, severe disease, for many years,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology who co-led the new study.
  • A study published last week also found that people who have recovered from Covid-19 have powerful and protective killer immune cells even when antibodies are not detectable.
  • These studies “are all by and large painting the same picture, which is that once you get past those first few critical weeks, the rest of the response looks pretty conventional,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona
  • A small number of infected people in the new study did not have long-lasting immunity after recovery, perhaps because of differences in the amounts of coronavirus they were exposed to.
  • Although antibodies in the blood are needed to block the virus and forestall a second infection — a condition known as sterilizing immunity — immune cells that “remember” the virus more often are responsible for preventing serious illness.
  • More often, people become infected a second time with a particular pathogen, and the immune system recognizes the invader and quickly extinguishes the infection. The coronavirus in particular is slow to do harm, giving the immune system plenty of time to kick into gear.
  • “It may be terminated fast enough that not only are you not experiencing any symptoms but you are not infectious,” Dr. Sette said.
  • Dr. Sette and his colleagues recruited 185 men and women, aged 19 to 81, who had recovered from Covid-19. The majority had mild symptoms not requiring hospitalization
  • The team tracked four components of the immune system: antibodies, B cells that make more antibodies as needed; and two types of T cells that kill other infected cells.
  • He and his colleagues found that antibodies were durable, with modest declines at six to eight months after infection, although there was a 200-fold difference in the levels among the participants.
  • The study is the first to chart the immune response to a virus in such granular detail, experts said. “For sure, we have no priors here,” Dr. Gommerman said. “We’re learning, I think for the first time, about some of the dynamics of these populations through time.”
  • Exactly how long immunity lasts is hard to predict, because scientists don’t yet know what levels of various immune cells are needed to protect from the virus. But studies so far have suggested that even small numbers of antibodies or T and B cells may be enough to shield those who have recovered.
delgadool

Why Polling on The 2020 Presidential Election Missed the Mark - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lection-polls-trump-biden.html

election trump history politics

shared by delgadool on 13 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • And most polls underestimated President Trump’s strength, in Iowa, Florida, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin and elsewhere. Instead of winning a landslide, as the polls suggested, Joseph R. Biden Jr. beat Mr. Trump by less than two percentage points in the states that decided the election.
  • “This was a bad year for polling,” David Shor, a data scientist who advises Democratic campaigns, said. Douglas Rivers, the chief scientist of YouGov, a global polling firm, said, “We’re obviously going to have a black eye on this.”
  • This year’s misleading polls had real-world effects, for both political parties. The Trump campaign pulled back from campaigning in Michigan and Wisconsin, reducing visits and advertising, and lost both only narrowly. In Arizona, a Republican strategist who worked on Senator Martha McSally’s re-election campaign said that public polling showing her far behind “probably cost us $4 or $5 million” in donations. Ms. McSally lost to Mark Kelly by less than three percentage points.
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  • People’s decreasing willingness to respond to polls
  • Some types of voters seem less willing to respond to polls than others, perhaps because they are less trusting of institutions, and these voters seem to lean Republican.
  • A much-hyped theory that Trump supporters lie to pollsters appears to be wrong or insignificant. Polls did not underestimate his support more in liberal areas, where supporting Mr. Trump can be less socially acceptable, than in conservative areas.
  • Although Literary Digest’s sample of 2.4 million respondents was enormous, it was not representative. The magazine’s circulation skewed toward affluent Americans, who were more hostile to Roosevelt and the New Deal than most voters. A less prominent pollster that year, George Gallup, had surveyed many fewer people — about 50,000 — but he had been careful to ensure they matched the country’s demographic mix. Mr. Gallup correctly predicted a Roosevelt win.
  • In 1948, the pollsters’ luck ran out. They continued to overestimate the Republican vote share, reporting throughout the campaign that President Harry Truman trailed his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey. This time, the election was close enough that the polls pointed to the wrong winner, contributing to perhaps the most famous error in modern journalism, The Chicago Tribune’s banner headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
  • Nearly every poll showed Hillary Clinton to be leading Mr. Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The leads were big enough that her campaign paid relatively little attention to those states. But she lost all three narrowly, giving Mr. Trump a stunning victory.
  • One factor was largely unsolvable: Late-deciding voters, accurately identified as undecided in polls, broke strongly for Mr. Trump.
Javier E

Can History Predict the Future? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...616993

historiography history culture forecasting modeling population ecology

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”)
  • He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.
  • The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions.
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  • In War and Peace and War (2006), his most accessible book, he likens himself to Hari Seldon, the “maverick mathematician” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, who can foretell the rise and fall of empires. In those 10,000 years’ worth of data, Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the fates of human societies.
  • The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,”
  • The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of demo­cratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem.
  • Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.” The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—­­is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.
  • Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—­the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill.
  • Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.
  • “You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.
  • Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country
  • Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one.
  • Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels
  • Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard.
  • The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people.
  • Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.
  • “I gave up because I solved the problem.” Turchin published one final monograph, Complex Population Dynamics: A Theoretical / Empirical Synthesis (2003), then broke the news to his UConn colleagues that he would be saying a permanent sayonara to the field
  • “Does population ecology have general laws?” Turchin asked. Most ecologists said no: Populations have their own dynamics, and each situation is different.
  • All sciences go through this transition to mathematization,” Turchin told me. “When I had my midlife crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.”
  • After its long adolescence of collecting and cataloging, ecology had enough data to describe these universal laws—and to stop pretending that every species had its own idiosyncrasies. “Ecologists know these laws and should call them laws,” he said.
  • The laws Turchin applied to ecology—and his insistence on calling them laws—­generated respectful controversy at the time. Now they are cited in textbooks.
  • Having left ecology, Turchin began similar research that attempted to formulate general laws for a different animal species: human beings.
  • Turchin suggested that “there are several very general law-like propositions” that could be applied to ecology.
  • If the historians weren’t going to usher in a mathematical revolution themselves, he would storm their departments and do it for them.
  • “There is a longstanding debate among scientists and philosophers as to whether history has general laws,” he and a co-author wrote in Secular Cycles (2009). “A basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems.”
  • he likened historians reluctant to build general principles to his colleagues in biology “who care most for the private life of warblers.” “Let history continue to focus on the particular,” he wrote. Cliodynamics would be a new science
  • To seed the journal’s research, Turchin masterminded a digital archive of historical and archaeological data.
  • The coding of its records requires finesse, he told me, because (for example) the method of determining the size of the elite-aspirant class of medieval France might differ from the measure of the same class in the present-day United States. (For medieval France, a proxy is the membership in its noble class, which became glutted with second and third sons who had no castles or manors to rule over. One American proxy, Turchin says, is the number of lawyers.)
  • Historians of religion have long pondered the relationship between the rise of complex civilization and the belief in gods—especially “moralizing gods,” the kind who scold you for sinning. Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database (“records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality”) to answer the question conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding after the societies get complex, not before
  • One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale
  • the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex socie­ties because they kill off simpler ones.
  • Certain aspects of this cyclical view require relearning portions of American history, with special attention paid to the numbers of elites. The industrialization of the North, starting in the mid-19th century, Turchin says, made huge numbers of people rich. The elite herd was culled during the Civil War, which killed off or impoverished the southern slaveholding class, and during Reconstruction, when America experienced a wave of assassinations of Republican politicians.
  • “There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival.”
  • Also unwelcome: the conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country. In 2012, Turchin published an analysis of political violence in the United States, again starting with a database. He classified 1,590 incidents—riots, lynchings, any political event that killed at least one person—from 1780 to 2010. Some periods were placid and others bloody, with peaks of brutality in 1870, 1920, and 1970, a 50-year cycle.
  • In 2010, when Nature surveyed scientists about their predictions for the coming decade, most took the survey as an invitation to self-promote and rhapsodize, dreamily, about coming advances in their fields. Turchin retorted with his prophecy of doom and said that nothing short of fundamental change would stop another violent turn.
  • It wasn’t until the Progressive reforms of the 1920s, and later the New Deal, that elite overproduction actually slowed, at least for a time.
  • This oscillation between violence and peace, with elite over­production as the first horseman of the recurring American apocalypse, inspired Turchin’s 2020 prediction
  • The notion that democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful. Instead, democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present,
  • Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren—tax the elites until there are fewer of them
  • others, such as a call to reduce immigration to keep wages high for American workers, resemble Trumpian protectionism.
  • He opposes credential-­oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-­producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise.
  • We need to stop the runaway process of elite overproduction, but I don’t know what will work to do that, and nobody else does. Do you increase taxation? Raise the minimum wage? Universal basic income?” He conceded that each of these possibilities would have unpredictable effects
  • practice “adaptive management,” changing and modulating your approach as you go.
  • Eventually, Turchin hopes, our understanding of historical dynamics will mature to the point that no government will make policy without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically pre­ordained disaster.
  • He says he could imagine an Asimovian agency that keeps tabs on leading indicators and advises accordingly. It would be like the Federal Reserve, but instead of monitoring inflation and controlling monetary supply, it would be tasked with averting total civilizational collapse.
  • Since at least the 19th century, the discipline has embraced the idea that history is irreducibly complex, and by now most historians believe that the diversity of human activity will foil any attempt to come up with general laws, especially predictive ones.
  • The idea that one thing causes another, and that the causal pattern can tell you about sequences of events in another place or century, is foreign territory.
  • Turchin counters that he has heard claims of irreducible complexity before, and that steady application of the scientific method has succeeded in managing that complexity.
  • One social scientist who can speak to Turchin in his own mathematical argot is Dingxin Zhao, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago who is—incredibly—­also a former mathematical ecologist.
  • in a way I am sympathetic to Turchin. If you come to social science from natural sciences, you have a powerful way of looking at the world. But you may also make big mistakes.”
  • Turchin is nonetheless filling a historiographical niche left empty by academic historians with allergies not just to science but to a wide-angle view of the past.
  • humans are much wilier social creatures, Zhao said. A woodpecker will eat a termite, but it “will not explain that he is doing so because it is his divine right.” Humans pull ideological power moves like this all the time, Zhao said, and to understand “the decisions of a Donald Trump, or a Xi Jinping,” a natural scientist has to incorporate the myriad complexities of human strategy, emotion, and belief. “I made that change,” Zhao told me, “and Peter Turchin has not.”
  • Zhao said that human beings are just much more complicated than bugs.
  • He places himself in a Russian tradition prone to thinking sweeping, Tolstoyan thoughts about the path of history. By comparison, American historians mostly look like micro-historians.
  • Rather than bending toward progress, the arc in his view bends all the way back on itself, in a never-­ending loop of boom and bust. This puts him at odds with American historians, many of whom harbor an unspoken faith that liberal democracy is the end state of all history.
  • Writing history in this sweeping, cyclical way is easier if you are trained outside the field. “If you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not, it’s not actual historians,”
  • The genre’s most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), beheld 13,000 years of human history in a single volume. Its author, Jared Diamond, spent the first half of his career as one of the world’s foremost experts on the physiology of the gall­bladder.
  • Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist who studies how children acquire parts of speech, has written a megahistory about the decline of violence across thousands of years, and about human flourishing since the Enlightenment
  • Most historians I asked about these men—and for some reason megahistory is nearly always a male pursuit—used terms like laughingstock and patently tendentious to describe them.
  • Pinker retorts that historians are resentful of the attention “disciplinary carpet­baggers” like himself have received for applying scientific methods to the humanities and coming up with conclusions that had eluded the old methods.
  • “Given the noisiness of human behavior and the prevalence of cognitive biases, it’s easy to delude oneself about a historical period or trend by picking whichever event suits one’s narrative,” he says. The only answer is to use large data sets.
  • “There’s no reason that traditional history and data science can’t merge into a cooperative enterprise,” Pinker wrote. “Knowing stuff is hard; we need to use every available tool.”
  • Turchin’s conclusions are only as good as his databases, she told me, and any database that tries to code something as complex as who constitutes a society’s elites—then tries to make like-to-like comparisons across millennia and oceans—will meet with skepticism from traditional historians
  • Turchin’s data are also limited to big-­picture characteristics observed over 10,000 years, or about 200 lifetimes. By scientific standards, a sample size of 200 is small, even if it is all humanity has.
  • Privately, some historians have told me they consider the tools he uses powerful, if a little crude. Clio­dynamics is now on a long list of methods that arrived on the scene promising to revolutionize history. Many were fads, but some survived that stage to take their rightful place in an expanding historiographical tool kit
  • Turchin’s methods have already shown their power. Cliodynamics offers scientific hypotheses, and human history will give us more and more opportunities to check its predictions—­revealing whether Peter Turchin is a Hari Seldon or a mere Nostradamus.
Javier E

How Coronavirus Overpowered the World Health Organization - WSJ - 1 views

www.wsj.com/...ak-for-coronavirus-11598625537

WHO politics history pandemic crisis reforms policy

shared by Javier E on 25 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The WHO spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars honing a globe-spanning system of defenses against a pandemic it knew would come. But the virus moved faster than the United Nations agency, exposing flaws in its design and operation that bogged down its response when the world needed to take action.
  • The WHO relied on an honor system to stop a viral cataclysm. Its member states had agreed to improve their ability to contain infectious disease epidemics and to report any outbreaks that might spread beyond their borders. International law requires them to do both.
  • Time and again, countries big and small have failed to do so. The WHO, which isn’t a regulatory agency, lacks the authority to force information from the very governments that finance its programs and elect its leaders
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • years of painstakingly worded treaties, high-level visits and cutting-edge disease surveillance—all meant to encourage good-faith cooperation—have only bitten around the edges of the problem.
  • “It can’t demand entry into a country because they think something bad is happening.”
  • Nearly 200 countries were counting on an agency whose budget—roughly $2.4 billion in 2020—is less than a sixth of the Maryland Department of Health’s. Its donors, largely Western governments, earmark most of that money for causes other than pandemic preparedness.
  • In 2018 and 2019, about 8% of the WHO’s budget went to activities related to pandemic preparedness
  • It took those experts more than four months to agree that widespread mask-wearing helps, and that people who are talking, shouting or singing can expel the virus through tiny particles that linger in the air. In that time, about half a million people died.
  • To write its recommendations, the WHO solicits outside experts, which can be a slow process.
  • the agency’s bureaucratic structure, diplomatic protocol and funding were no match for a pandemic as widespread and fast-moving as Covid-19.
  • As months rolled on, it became clear that governments were reluctant to allow the U.N. to scold, shame or investigate them.
  • In particular, The Wall Street Journal found:
  • * China appears to have violated international law requiring governments to swiftly inform the WHO and keep it in the loop about an alarming infectious-disease cluster
  • —there are no clear consequences for violations
  • * The WHO lost a critical week waiting for an advisory panel to recommend a global public-health emergency, because some of its members were overly hopeful that the new disease wasn’t easily transmissible from one person to another.
  • * The institution overestimated how prepared some wealthy countries were, while focusing on developing countries, where much of its ordinary assistance is directed
  • Public-health leaders say the WHO plays a critical role in global health, leading responses to epidemics and setting health policies and standards for the world. It coordinates a multinational effort every year to pick the exact strains that go into the seasonal flu vaccine, and has provided public guidance and advice on Covid-19 when many governments were silent.
  • The world’s public-health agency was born weak, created in 1948 over U.S. and U.K. reluctance. For decades, it was legally barred from responding to diseases that it learned about from the news. Countries were required to report outbreaks of only four diseases to the WHO: yellow fever, plague, cholera and smallpox, which was eradicated in 1980.
  • SARS convinced governments to retool the WHO. The next year, delegates arrived in the Geneva palace where the League of Nations once met to resolve a centuries-old paradox: Countries don’t report outbreaks, because they fear—correctly—their neighbors will respond by blocking travel and trade.
  • Nearly three times that amount was budgeted for eradicating polio, a top priority for the WHO’s two largest contributors: the U.S. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
  • “Everybody pushed back. No sovereign country wants to have this.”
  • China wanted an exemption from immediately reporting SARS outbreaks. The U.S. argued it couldn’t compel its 50 states to cooperate with the treaty. Iran blocked American proposals to make the WHO focus on bioterrorism. Cuba had an hourslong list of objections.
  • Around 3:15 a.m. on the last day, exhausted delegates ran out of time. The treaty they approved, called the International Health Regulations, imagined that each country would quickly and honestly report, then contain, any alarming outbreaks
  • In return, the treaty discouraged restrictions on travel and trade. There would be no consequences for reporting an outbreak—yet no way to punish a country for hiding one.
  • The treaty’s key chokepoint: Before declaring a “public health emergency of international concern,” or PHEIC, the WHO’s director-general would consult a multinational emergency committee and give the country in question a chance to argue against such a declaration.
  • Delegates agreed this could give some future virus a head start but decided it was more important to discourage the WHO from making any unilateral announcements that could hurt their economies.
  • Over the next few years, emergency committees struggled over how to determine whether an outbreak was a PHEIC. It took months to declare emergencies for two deadly Ebola epidemics
  • On Jan. 3, representatives of China’s National Health Commission arrived at the WHO office in Beijing. The NHC acknowledged a cluster of pneumonia cases, but didn’t confirm that the new pathogen was a coronavirus, a fact Chinese officials already knew.
  • That same day, the NHC issued an internal notice ordering laboratories to hand over or destroy testing samples and forbade anyone from publishing unauthorized research on the virus.
  • China’s failure to notify the WHO of the cluster of illnesses is a violation of the International Health Regulations
  • China also flouted the IHR by not disclosing all key information it had to the WHO
  • The WHO said it’s up to member states to decide whether a country has complied with international health law, and that the coming review will address those issues.
  • While Chinese scientists had sequenced the genome and posted it publicly, the government was less forthcoming about how patients might be catching the virus.
  • WHO scientists pored over data they did get, and consulted with experts from national health agencies, including the CDC, which has 33 staff detailed to the WHO.
  • Then a 61-year-old woman was hospitalized in Thailand on Jan. 13.
  • The next day, Dr. van Kerkhove told reporters: “It’s certainly possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission.” MERS and SARS, both coronaviruses, were transmissible among people in close quarters. Epidemiological investigations were under way, she said.
  • On Jan. 22, a committee of 15 scientists haggled for hours over Chinese data and a handful of cases in other countries. Clearly, the virus was spreading between people in China, though there was no evidence of that in other countries. The question now: Was it mainly spreading from very sick people in hospitals and homes—or more widely?
  • The committee met over two days, but was split. They mostly agreed on one point: The information from China “was a little too imprecise to very clearly state that it was time” to recommend an emergency declaration,
  • On Jan. 28, Dr. Tedros and the WHO team arrived for their meeting with Mr. Xi
  • Leaning across three wooden coffee tables, Dr. Tedros pressed for cooperation. In the absence of information, countries might react out of fear and restrict travel to China, he repeated several times throughout the trip. Mr. Xi agreed to allow a WHO-led international team of experts to visit. It took until mid-February to make arrangements and get the team there.
  • China also agreed to provide more data, and Dr. Tedros departed, leaving Dr. Briand behind with a list of mysteries to solve. How contagious was the virus? How much were children or pregnant women at risk? How were cases linked? This was vital information needed to assess the global risk, Dr. Briand said
  • Back in Geneva, Dr. Tedros reconvened the emergency committee. By now it was clear there was human-to-human transmission in other countries. When it met on Jan. 30, the committee got the information the WHO had been seeking. This time the committee recommended and Dr. Tedros declared a global public-health emergency.
  • President Trump and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo both assured constituents their health systems would perform well. The U.K.’s chief medical officer described the WHO’s advice as largely directed at poor and middle-income countries. As for keeping borders open, by then many governments had already closed them to visitors from China.
  • The WHO shifted focus to the developing world, where it believed Covid-19 would exact the heaviest toll. To its surprise, cases shot up just across the border, in northern Italy.
  • the WHO’s health emergencies unit should report to the director-general and not member states, and its budget should be protected so it doesn’t have to compete with other programs for money.
  • If there were one thing the WHO might have done differently, it would be to offer wealthier countries the type of assistance with public-health interventions that the WHO provides the developing world
  • the WHO’s warning system of declaring a global public-health emergency needs to change. Some want to see a warning system more like a traffic light—with color-coded alarms for outbreaks, based on how worried the public should be
  • Emergency committees need clearer criteria for declaring a global public-health emergency and should publicly explain their thinking
  • The WHO should have more powers to intervene in countries to head off a health crisis
  • Lessons learned
  • Implementing many of those ideas would require herding diplomats back for another monthslong slog of treaty revisions. If and when such talks begin, new governments will likely be in place, and political priorities will float elsewher
  • “Unfortunately, I’m very cynical about this,” he said. “We are living through cycles of panic and neglect. We’ve been through all of this before.”
lenaurick

The rise of American authoritarianism - Vox - 1 views

www.vox.com/...trump-authoritarianism

election politics US authoritarianism psychology crisis policy economic

shared by lenaurick on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Trump currently does surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the towns of upstate New York, and he won a resounding victory in the Nevada caucuses
  • it wasn't just Trump but his supporters who seemed to have come out of nowhere, suddenly expressing, in large numbers, ideas far more extreme than anything that has risen to such popularity in recent memory
  • CBS News exit poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. A PPP poll found that a third of Trump voters support banning gays and lesbians from the country. Twenty percent said Lincoln shouldn't have freed the slaves.
  • ...86 more annotations...
  • MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders.
  • He polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism.
  • Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians' fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.
  • He realized that he and a fellow political scientist, the University of North Carolina's Jonathan Weiler, had essentially predicted Trump's rise back in 2009, when they discovered something that would turn out to be far more significant than they then realized.
  • That year, Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.
  • This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which "activated" authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.
  • What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator
  • According to Stenner's theory, there is a certain subset of people who hold latent authoritarian tendencies. These tendencies can be triggered or "activated" by the perception of physical threats or by destabilizing social change, leading those individuals to desire policies and leaders that we might more colloquially call authoritarian
  • What we found is a phenomenon that explains, with remarkable clarity, the rise of Donald Trump — but that is also much larger than him, shedding new light on some of the biggest political stories of the past decade. Trump, it turns out, is just the symptom. The rise of American authoritarianism is transforming the Republican Party and the dynamics of national politics, with profound consequences likely to extend well beyond this election.
  • a small but respected niche of academic research has been laboring over a question, part political science and part psychology, that had captivated political scientists since the rise of the Nazis.
  • How do people come to adopt, in such large numbers and so rapidly, extreme political views that seem to coincide with fear of minorities and with the desire for a strongman leader?
  • They believe that authoritarians aren't "activated" — they've always held their authoritarian preferences — but that they only come to express those preferences once they feel threatened by social change or some kind of threat from outsiders.
  • a button is pushed that says, "In case of moral threat, lock down the borders, kick out those who are different, and punish those who are morally deviant."
  • Authoritarians prioritize social order and hierarchies, which bring a sense of control to a chaotic world. Challenges to that order — diversity, influx of outsiders, breakdown of the old order — are experienced as personally threatening because they risk upending the status quo order they equate with basic security.
  • . The country is becoming more diverse, which means that many white Americans are confronting race in a way they have never had to before.
  • If you were to read every word these theorists ever wrote on authoritarians, and then try to design a hypothetical candidate to match their predictions of what would appeal to authoritarian voters, the result would look a lot like Donald Trump.
  • But political scientists say this theory explains much more than just Donald Trump, placing him within larger trends in American politics: polarization, the rightward shift of the Republican Party, and the rise within that party of a dissident faction challenging GOP orthodoxies and upending American politics. More than that, authoritarianism reveals the connections between several seemingly disparate stories about American politics. And it suggest that a combination of demographic, economic, and political forces, by awakening this authoritarian class of voters that has coalesced around Trump, have created what is essentially a new political party within the GOP — a phenomenon that broke into public view with the 2016 election but will persist long after it has ended.
  • This study of authoritarianism began shortly after World War II, as political scientists and psychologists in the US and Europe tried to figure out how the Nazis had managed to win such wide public support for such an extreme and hateful ideology.
  • Feldman, a professor at SUNY Stonybrook, believed authoritarianism could be an important factor in American politics in ways that had nothing to do with fascism, but that it could only reliably be measured by unlinking it from specific political preferences.
  • Feldman developed what has since become widely accepted as the definitive measurement of authoritarianism: four simple questions that appear to ask about parenting but are in fact designed to reveal how highly the respondent values hierarchy, order, and conformity over other values. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: obedience or self-reliance? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?
  • Trump's rise. And, like them, I wanted to find out what the rise of authoritarian politics meant for American politics. Was Trump just the start of something bigger?
  • In the 1960s, the Republican Party had reinvented itself as the party of law, order, and traditional values — a position that naturally appealed to order- and tradition-focused authoritarians. Over the decades that followed, authoritarians increasingly gravitated toward the GOP, where their concentration gave them more and more influence over time.
  • Stenner argued that many authoritarians might be latent — that they might not necessarily support authoritarian leaders or policies until their authoritarianism had been "activated."
  • This activation could come from feeling threatened by social changes such as evolving social norms or increasing diversity, or any other change that they believe will profoundly alter the social order they want to protect. In response, previously more moderate individuals would come to support leaders and policies we might now call Trump-esque.
  • Ever since, political scientists who study authoritarianism have accumulated a wealth of data on who exhibits those tendencies and on how they align with everything from demographic profiles to policy preferences.
  • People do not support extreme policies and strongman leaders just out of an affirmative desire for authoritarianism, but rather as a response to experiencing certain kinds of threats.
  • when non-authoritarians feel sufficiently scared, they also start to behave, politically, like authoritarians.
  • a distinction between physical threats such as terrorism, which could lead non-authoritarians to behave like authoritarians, and more abstract social threats, such as eroding social norms or demographic changes, which do not have that effect. That distinction would turn out to be important, but it also meant that in times when many Americans perceived imminent physical threats, the population of authoritarians could seem to swell rapidly.
  • Together, those three insights added up to one terrifying theory: that if social change and physical threats coincided at the same time, it could awaken a potentially enormous population of American authoritarians, who would demand a strongman leader and the extreme policies necessary, in their view, to meet the rising threats.
  • This theory would seem to predict the rise of an American political constituency that looks an awful lot like the support base that has emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, to propel Donald Trump from sideshow loser of the 2012 GOP primary to runaway frontrunner in 2016.
  • If this rise in American authoritarianism is so powerful as to drive Trump's ascent, then how else might it be shaping American politics? And what effect could it have even after the 2016 race has ended?
  • The second set asked standard election-season questions on preferred candidates and party affiliation. The third set tested voters' fears of a series of physical threats, ranging from ISIS and Russia to viruses and car accidents. The fourth set tested policy preferences, in an attempt to see how authoritarianism might lead voters to support particular policies.
  • If the research were right, then we'd expect people who scored highly on authoritarianism to express outsize fear of "outsider" threats such as ISIS or foreign governments versus other threats. We also expected that non-authoritarians who expressed high levels of fear would be more likely to support Trump. This would speak to physical fears as triggering a kind of authoritarian upsurge, which would in turn lead to Trump support.
  • We asked people to rate a series of social changes — both actual and hypothetical — on a scale of "very good" to "very bad" for the country. These included same-sex marriage, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States, and American Muslims building more mosques in US cities.
  • If the theory about social change provoking stress amongst authoritarians turned out to be correct, then authoritarians would be more likely to rate the changes as bad for the country.
  • Authoritarianism was the best single predictor of support for Trump, although having a high school education also came close.
  • people in this 44 percent only vote or otherwise act as authoritarians once triggered by some perceived threat, physical or social. But that latency is part of how, over the past few decades, authoritarians have quietly become a powerful political constituency without anyone realizing it.
  • More than 65 percent of people who scored highest on the authoritarianism questions were GOP voters. More than 55 percent of surveyed Republicans scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians.
  • People whose scores were most non-authoritarian — meaning they always chose the non-authoritarian parenting answer — were almost 75 percent Democrats.
  • this is not a story about how Republicans are from Mars and Democrats are from Venus. It's a story of polarization that increased over time.
  • Democrats, by contrast, have positioned themselves as the party of civil rights, equality, and social progress — in other words, as the party of social change, a position that not only fails to attract but actively repels change-averse authoritarians.
  • Over the next several decades, Hetherington explained to me, this led authoritarians to naturally "sort" themselves into the Republican Party.
  • It is not for nothing that our poll found that more than half of the Republican respondents score as authoritarian.
  • Our results found that 44 percent of white respondents nationwide scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians, with 19 percent as "very high." That's actually not unusual, and lines up with previous national surveys that found that the authoritarian disposition is far from rare1.
  • among Republicans, very high/high authoritarianism is very predictive of support for Trump." Trump has 42 percent support among Republicans but, according to our survey, a full 52 percent support among very high authoritarians.
  • Trump support was much lower among Republicans who scored low on authoritarianism: only 38 percent.
  • But that's still awfully high. So what could explain Trump's support among non-authoritarians? I suspected the answer might lie at least partly in Hetherington and Suhay's research on how fear affects non-authoritarian voters,
  • Authoritarians, we found in our survey, tend to most fear threats that come from abroad, such as ISIS or Russia or Iran. These are threats, the researchers point out, to which people can put a face; a scary terrorist or an Iranian ayatollah. Non-authoritarians were much less afraid of those threats. For instance, 73 percent of very high-scoring authoritarians believed that terrorist organizations like ISIS posed a "very high risk" to them, but only 45 percent of very low-scoring authoritarians did. Domestic threats like car accidents, by contrast, were much less frightening to authoritarians.
  • A subgroup of non-authoritarians were very afraid of threats like Iran or ISIS. And the more fear of these threats they expressed, the more likely they were to support Trump.
  • that non-authoritarians who are sufficiently frightened of physical threats such as terrorism could essentially be scared into acting like authoritarians.
  • That's important, because for years now, Republican politicians and Republican-leaning media such as Fox News have been telling viewers nonstop that the world is a terrifying place and that President Obama isn't doing enough to keep Americans safe.
  • Republican voters have been continually exposed to messages warning of physical dangers. As the perception of physical threat has risen, this fear appears to have led a number of non-authoritarians to vote like authoritarians — to support Trump.
  • But when establishment candidates such as Marco Rubio try to match Trump's rhetoric on ISIS or on American Muslims, they may end up deepening the fear that can only lead voters back to Trump.
  • pushing authoritarians to these extremes: the threat of social change.
  • This could come in the form of evolving social norms, such as the erosion of traditional gender roles or evolving standards in how to discuss sexual orientation. It could come in the form of rising diversity, whether that means demographic changes from immigration or merely changes in the colors of the faces on TV. Or it could be any changes, political or economic, that disrupt social hierarchies.
  • What these changes have in common is that, to authoritarians, they threaten to take away the status quo as they know it — familiar, orderly, secure — and replace it with something that feels scary because it is different and destabilizing, but also sometimes because it upends their own place in societ
  • Authoritarians were significantly more likely to rate almost all of the actual and hypothetical social issues we asked about as "bad" or "very bad" for the country.
  • an astonishing 44 percent of authoritarians believe same-sex marriage is harmful to the country. Twenty-eight percent rated same-sex marriage as "very bad" for America, and another 16 percent said that it’s "bad." Only about 35 percent of high-scoring authoritarians said same-sex marriage was "good" or "very good" for the country.
  • Non-authoritarians tended to rate same-sex marriage as "good" or "very good" for the country.
  • The fact that authoritarians and non-authoritarians split over something as seemingly personal and nonthreatening as same-sex marriage is crucial for understanding how authoritarianism can be triggered by even a social change as minor as expanding marriage rights.
  • A whopping 56.5 percent of very high-scoring authoritarians said it was either "bad" or "very bad" for the country when Muslims built more mosques. Only 14 percent of that group said more mosques would be "good" or "very good."
  • The literature on authoritarianism suggests this is not just simple Islamophobia, but rather reflects a broader phenomenon wherein authoritarians feel threatened by people they identify as "outsiders" and by the possibility of changes to the status quo makeup of their communities.
  • This would help explain why authoritarians seem so prone to reject not just one specific kind of outsider or social change, such as Muslims or same-sex couples or Hispanic migrants, but rather to reject all of them.
  • Working-class communities have come under tremendous economic strain since the recession. And white people are also facing the loss of the privileged position that they previously were able to take for granted. Whites are now projected to become a minority group over the next few decades, owing to migration and other factors. The president is a black man, and nonwhite faces are growing more common in popular culture. Nonwhite groups are raising increasingly prominent political demands, and often those demands coincide with issues such as policing that also speak to authoritarian concerns.
  • the loss of working-class jobs in this country is a real and important issue, no matter how one feels about fading white privilege — but that is not the point.
  • mportant political phenomenon we identify as right-wing populism, or white working-class populism, seems to line up, with almost astonishing precision, with the research on how authoritarianism is both caused and expressed.
  • It all depends, he said, on whether a particular group of people has been made into an outgroup or not — whether they had been identified as a dangerous other.
  • Since September 2001, some media outlets and politicians have painted Muslims as the other and as dangerous to America. Authoritarians, by nature, are more susceptible to these messages, and thus more likely to come to oppose the presence of mosques in their communities.
  • , it helps explain how Trump's supporters have come to so quickly embrace such extreme policies targeting these outgroups: mass deportation of millions of people, a ban on foreign Muslims visiting the US. When you think about those policy preferences as driven by authoritarianism, in which social threats are perceived as especially dangerous and as demanding extreme responses, rather than the sudden emergence of specific bigotries, this starts to make a lot more sense.
  • authoritarians are their own distinct constituency: effectively a new political party within the GOP.
  • Authoritarians generally and Trump voters specifically, we found, were highly likely to support five policies: Using military force over diplomacy against countries that threaten the United States Changing the Constitution to bar citizenship for children of illegal immigrants Imposing extra airport checks on passengers who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent in order to curb terrorism Requiring all citizens to carry a national ID card at all times to show to a police officer on request, to curb terrorism Allowing the federal government to scan all phone calls for calls to any number linked to terrorism
  • What these policies share in common is an outsize fear of threats, physical and social, and, more than that, a desire to meet those threats with severe government action — with policies that are authoritarian not just in style but in actuality
  • The real divide is over how far to go in responding. And the party establishment is simply unwilling to call for such explicitly authoritarian policies.
  • There was no clear correlation between authoritarianism and support for tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 per year, for example. And the same was true of support for international trade agreements.
  • he way he reduces everything to black-and-white extremes of strong versus weak, greatest versus worst. His simple, direct promises that he can solve problems that other politicians are too weak to manage.
  • That's why it's a benefit rather than a liability for Trump when he says Mexicans are rapists or speaks gleefully of massacring Muslims with pig-blood-tainted bullets: He is sending a signal to his authoritarian supporters that he won't let "political correctness" hold him back from attacking the outgroups they fear.
  • Rather, it was that authoritarians, as a growing presence in the GOP, are a real constituency that exists independently of Trump — and will persist as a force in American politics regardless of the fate of his candidacy.
  • If Trump loses the election, that will not remove the threats and social changes that trigger the "action side" of authoritarianism. The authoritarians will still be there. They will still look for candidates who will give them the strong, punitive leadership they desire.
  • ust look at where the Tea Party has left the Republican establishment. The Tea Party delivered the House to the GOP in 2010, but ultimately left the party in an unresolved civil war. Tea Party candidates have challenged moderates and centrists, leaving the GOP caucus divided and chaotic.
  • Authoritarians may be a slight majority within the GOP, and thus able to force their will within the party, but they are too few and their views too unpopular to win a national election on their own.
  • the rise of authoritarianism as a force within American politics means we may now have a de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP authoritarians.
  • It will become more difficult for Republican candidates to win the presidency because the candidates who can win the nomination by appealing to authoritarian primary voters will struggle to court mainstream voters in the general election. They will have less trouble with local and congressional elections, but that might just mean more legislative gridlock as the GOP caucus struggles to balance the demands of authoritarian and mainstream legislators. The authoritarian base will drag the party further to the right on social issues, and will simultaneously erode support for traditionally conservative economic policies.
  • Norms around gender, sexuality, and race will continue evolving. Movements like Black Lives Matter will continue chipping away at the country's legacy of institutionalized discrimination, pursuing the kind of social change and reordering of society that authoritarians find so threatening.
  • The chaos in the Middle East, which allows groups like ISIS to flourish and sends millions of refugees spilling into other countries, shows no sign of improving. Longer term, if current demographic trends continue, white Americans will cease to be a majority over the coming decades.
  • t will be a GOP that continues to perform well in congressional and local elections, but whose divisions leave the party caucus divided to the point of barely functioning, and perhaps eventually unable to win the White House.
  • For decades, the Republican Party has been winning over authoritarians by implicitly promising to stand firm against the tide of social change, and to be the party of force and power rather than the party of negotiation and compromise. But now it may be discovering that its strategy has worked too well — and threatens to tear the party apart.
lucieperloff

An Extraordinary Iceberg Is Gone, but Not Forgotten - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iceberg-a68a-antarctica.html

climate international

shared by lucieperloff on 26 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The iceberg drifted slowly through the icy Weddell Sea for a few years, before picking up steam as it entered the Southern Ocean. When last we heard from it, in 2020, it was bearing down on the island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic, a bit shrunken and battered from a journey of more than a thousand miles.
  • Ecologists and others had feared that during its journey the iceberg might become grounded near South Georgia. That could have kept the millions of penguins and seals that live and breed there from reaching their feeding areas in the ocean.
  • As it traveled through the relatively warm waters of the Southern Ocean into the South Atlantic, it melted from below, eventually releasing a huge quantity of fresh water into the sea near the island. The influx of so much fresh water could affect plankton and other organisms in the marine food chain.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The imagery showed how the area of the iceberg changed over time. The researchers also determined its thickness using data from satellites that measure ice height. By the time it broke up, Ms. Braakmann-Folgmann said, A68a was more than 200 feet thinner overall.
  • When the iceberg was near South Georgia, scientists with the survey were able to deploy autonomous underwater gliders to take water samples. On the island, they used tracking devices on some gentoo penguins and fur seals, to see whether the presence of the iceberg affected their foraging behavior.
  • A large influx of fresh water on the surface could affect the growth of phytoplankton, at the lower end of the food change, or it could alter the mix of phytoplankton species available, he said.
criscimagnael

C.D.C. Recommends Pfizer or Moderna Vaccines Over J.&J - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hnson-vaccine-blood-clots.html

shared by criscimagnael on 17 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday recommended that Covid vaccines other than Johnson & Johnson’s should be preferred,
  • The risk was greatest among women aged 30 to 49, estimated at 1 in 100,000 who had received the company’s shot.
  • Several laboratory experiments suggest that a single dose of Johnson & Johnson’s shot may offer little defense against infection with Omicron. The company said late last month that it was testing blood samples from clinical trial participants who have received its shot as a booster to see how their vaccine-induced antibodies fare against Omicron.
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  • Among Americans who have received a booster, just 1.6 percent chose Johnson & Johnson.
  • An increased risk for the condition has also been linked to the shot from AstraZeneca, which is not authorized in the United States. It has not been linked to the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines.
  • “It’s really important, though, that we not completely eliminate this vaccine,”
  • The people who died ranged in age from 28 to 62. Seven were women, and all were white. Obesity was the most common underlying medical condition. Two of the people who died did not have known medical problems, he said.
  • It was previously reported that males between 16 and 29 years had a heightened risk of developing myocarditis. Nearly 11 out of every 100,000 of them developed the condition a few days after being fully vaccinated. On balance, it was estimated that for boys 12 to 17, the shots would cause an estimated 70 myocarditis cases but prevent 5,700 infections, 215 hospitalizations and two deaths, the C.D.C. said. But most recovered within a short period of time.
  • despite the clotting concerns, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine prevented thousands of U.S. Covid hospitalizations compared to three to a dozen cases of the clotting syndrome, depending on the age group. Those over 64 avoided the most hospital stays. Like those immunized with other vaccines, thousands avoided hospitalization
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The Kunga Was a Status Symbol Long Before the Thoroughbred - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ient-horses-kungas-hybrid.html

shared by criscimagnael on 15 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • In ancient Mesopotamia 4,500 years ago, long before horses arrived in the region, another spirited member of the equine family, the kunga, took a starring role in pulling four-wheeled wagons into battle.
  • Archaeologists had suspected that these animals — depicted in art, their sales recorded in cuneiform writing, their bodies sometimes laid to rest in rich burial sites — were the result of some kind of crossbreeding. But proof was lacking.
  • studies of ancient DNA showed the kunga was a cross between a female donkey (Equus Africanus asinus) and a male Syrian wild ass (Equus hemionus hemippus).
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  • The kunga is the first known instance of a human-engineered hybrid of two species, a production far beyond the traditional processes of the domestication of animals, the researchers found.
  • Like mules, which are hybrids between horses and donkeys, and which were created much later, the kungas were sterile. Each new kunga was a one-off, a mating between a wild ass stallion and a donkey.
  • The stallions had to be captured and kept in captivity, even though they were highly aggressive, as modern records have indicated.
  • Kungas held their high status for at least 500 years, Dr. Geigl said. Horses did not appear until around 4,000 years ago to take their place in battle and ceremony, and to contribute to the creation of other hybrids. Before the current research, the oldest known hybrid was a mule from a site in Turkey dating to 3,000 years ago. Members of the same team reported on that find in 2020.
  • the “results were very convincing,” showing that people “were experimenting with hybrid equids long before the arrival of the horse.”
  • Fiona Marshall, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who has researched the prehistory of donkeys and their domestication, said the study was “enormously significant” partly because it showed that the breeders had clear intentions. The early process of domestication was always murky — probably part accident, part human intervention — but this research showed what the ancient Syrians were after.
  • “People wanted the qualities of a wild animal,” she said. Donkeys might have been tamer than their ancestors, the African wild ass, but the breeders in Mesopotamia wanted to back breed to other wild asses for strength and speed — and perhaps size.
  • the team sequenced DNA from numerous sources, including modern donkeys, horses and several species of wild asses, and museum samples.
  • Of particular importance were the bones of 44 kungas interred at a rich burial site in Syria called Umm el-Marra. Those skeletons had earlier led Dr. Weber and others to hypothesize that they were hybrids and that they were the kungas described in tablets and represented in art.
  • Their teeth showed bit marks and indicated they had been fed a special diet.
  • Donkeys are plentiful, of course, but the last known Syrian wild asses died in the late 1920s.
  • “The recipe for making the kunga was unknown for thousands of years,” Dr. Bennett said. “And we finally decode it not even 100 years since one element has become extinct.”
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