March 2022 – Page 13

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

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sea ice has hit a record low for October

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

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

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

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

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

The consequences of an increasingly iceless Arctic Ocean

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tncse

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

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plastics are supposed to drive most oil demand growth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four reasons plastics may not grow as forecasted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. The plastics industry is extraordinarily wasteful

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

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

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

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

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

And the public is ready to disrupt it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are solutions at hand for reducing growth in plastic

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

Overall, bending the plastics curve looks like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policymakers just have to step up.

The politics of plastics are not favorable for Big Oil

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

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

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

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

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

By Tncse

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

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much of Europe made the same mistake as the US

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tncse

Polls show Trump is losing ground where the coronavirus is surging

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

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

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

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

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

Consider the recent data:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tncse

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

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why testing is less accurate before symptoms begin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Tncse

Giving thanks may make your brain more altruistic

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

Over Thanksgiving, in between mouthfuls of turkey and sweet potato pie, many of us will be asking ourselves: What are we grateful for?

Taking a moment to practice gratitude like this isn’t an empty holiday tradition. It’s good for our mental and physical health. And here’s another thing: It can actually change our brains in ways that make us more altruistic — just in time for Giving Tuesday.

The past two decades have seen a flurry of research on gratitude, beginning in the early 2000s with a series of landmark papers by Robert Emmons, Michael McCullough, and other psychologists. In recent years, we’ve learned through several scientific studies that there’s a deep neural connection between gratitude and giving — they share a pathway in the brain — and that when we’re grateful, our brains become more charitable.

Christina Karns, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon, is one of the leading researchers in this field. In 2017, she wondered what happens in the brain when you receive a gift versus when you give one — and whether the neural response differs depending on your character. So she placed study participants in a brain scanner and had them watch as a computer moved real money into their own account or gave it to a food bank instead.

Karns described what she learned:

It turns out that the neural connection between gratitude and giving is very deep, both literally and figuratively. A region deep in the frontal lobe of the brain, called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, is key to supporting both. Anatomically, this region is wired up to be a hub for processing the value of risk and reward; it’s richly connected to even deeper brain regions that provide a kick of pleasurable neurochemicals in the right circumstances.

The participants I’d identified as more grateful and more altruistic via a questionnaire [showed] a stronger response in these reward regions of the brain when they saw the charity gaining money. It felt good for them to see the food bank do well.

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Next, Karns wanted to know whether, by changing how much gratitude people felt, she could change the way the brain reacts to giving and getting. So she split participants into two groups. Over three weeks, one group journaled about the things they were grateful for, while the other group journaled about other (non-gratitude-specific) happenings in their lives.

The people in the gratitude-journaling contingent reported experiencing more thankfulness. What’s more, the reward regions of their brain started responding more to charitable giving than to gaining money for themselves. As Karns writes:

Practicing gratitude shifted the value of giving in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. It changed the exchange rate in the brain. Giving to charity became more valuable than receiving money yourself. After the brain calculates the exchange rate, you get paid in the neural currency of reward, the delivery of neurotransmitters that signal pleasure and goal attainment.

These are striking (though likely not permanent) effects. Of course, we still need more research to fully understand the brain mechanisms underlying gratitude, giving, and how they relate. But for those of us who don’t always find resonant the old adage that “giving is better than receiving,” Karns’s results, if true, offer a useful amendment: Giving really can be better — if you make it so. You can proactively choose to retrain your brain so it gets more pleasure out of giving.

Here are some effective ways to cultivate gratitude

If increasing people’s gratitude is an effective way to increase their charitableness, then maybe it’s worth nudging people to cultivate more gratitude.

For now, we’ve got at least one such nudge built into our calendar: Thanksgiving. Many religious traditions also include daily practices meant to foster gratitude, and scientific studies have shown that some — like prayer — really do have that effect.

If practicing gratitude isn’t yet part of your daily routine and you’d like to cultivate it throughout the year and not only on Thanksgiving, here are a few practices that researchers have found to be effective in boosting thankfulness.

Gratitude journaling: This simple practice — jotting down things you’re grateful for — has gained popularity over the past few years. But studies show there are more and less effective ways to do it. Researchers say it’s better to write in detail about one particular thing, really savoring it, than to dash off a superficial list of things. They recommend that you try to focus on people you’re grateful to, because that’s more impactful than focusing on things, and that you focus on events that surprised you, because they generally elicit stronger feelings of thankfulness.

Researchers also note that writing in a gratitude journal once or twice a week is better for your well-being than doing it every day. In one study, people who wrote once a week for six weeks reported increased happiness afterward; people who wrote three times a week didn’t. That’s because our brains have an annoying habit called hedonic adaptation. “We adapt to positive events quickly, especially if we constantly focus on them,” Emmons explains. “It seems counterintuitive, but it is how the mind works.”

Gratitude letters and visits: Another practice is to write a letter of gratitude to someone. Research shows it significantly increases your levels of gratitude, even if you never actually send the letter. And the effects on the brain can last for months. In one study, subjects who participated in gratitude letter writing expressed more thankfulness and showed more activity in their pregenual anterior cingulate cortex — an area involved in predicting the outcomes of our actions — three months later.

Some psychologists, like Martin Seligman, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and Jeffrey Froh, have studied a variation on the gratitude letter practice by having participants write a letter to someone they’ve never properly thanked, then visit the person and read the letter aloud to them. A 2009 study led by Froh found that teens experienced a big increase in positive emotions after doing a gratitude visit — even two months later.

Experiential consumption: There’s another way to foster gratitude and thwart hedonic adaptation that seems especially relevant to the upcoming gift-buying season: Spend your money on experiences, not things. The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley summarizes a major study on experiential consumption like this:

Across six experiments, this study found that people felt and expressed more gratitude following a purchase of an experience (e.g., concert tickets or meals out) than a purchase of a material good (e.g., clothing or jewelry). According to the researchers, these experiments suggest that “as a naturalistic behavior that is relatively resistant to adaptation, experiential consumption may be an especially easy way to encourage the experience of gratitude.”

In other words, if you’re going to buy something special this holiday season, consider making it an experience. The resultant gratitude is more likely to stick around in the brain — and where gratitude abounds, altruism may follow.

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.

By Tncse

Covid-19 vaccine efficacy results are not enough

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

The recent results of Covid-19 vaccine clinical trials from teams at the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer and BioNTech have been some of the most exciting and promising developments in the pandemic to date.

All three vaccine candidates appear to be highly effective against Covid-19, the research teams say. Pfizer and BioNTech say their vaccine had an efficacy of 95 percent against Covid-19, meaning 95 percent of people who received the vaccine were protected against the disease. Moderna reported that its product was 94.5 percent effective. Oxford and AstraZeneca reported that theirs was 62 percent effective in one dosing regimen and 90 percent effective in another, averaging to 70 percent.

Determining efficacy is a crucial step, and these results are far better than many scientists expected. They’re also based on what may seem like a small number of cases, ranging from 131 detected Covid-19 cases to 170, out of a pool of tens of thousands of participants in the trials. But researchers say these numbers are enough to establish how well a vaccine prevents the disease.

Then why haven’t regulatory authorities like the Food and Drug Administration given the green light to a Covid-19 vaccine?

Clinical trials are designed to answer multiple questions, and efficacy is only one of them. Vaccines also have to meet a high bar for safety, much higher than conventional drugs. Since vaccines are given to millions of people — most of whom are healthy and some who have preexisiting conditions — complications have to be rare events.

Oxford and AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer and BioNTech reported minimal side effects for their vaccines, which is encouraging. Pfizer and BioNTech have already applied for emergency approval for their vaccine, which would likely make it available to people in high-risk positions like health workers at the outset. Full approval, however, would require the companies to produce a lot more safety data than what they summarized in their press releases. At that point, average, generally healthy people can start getting injections.

Health officials will also need more information about how the vaccines performed in different age brackets and ethnic groups, and among people with preexisting conditions, before they recommend how these vaccines should be administered, though experimenters have noted that they went to great lengths to recruit a diverse pool of volunteers.

Overall, their results are only preliminary findings, and more validation is needed to answer critical questions before the billions of people who remain vulnerable to Covid-19 can gain protection from a vaccine. It’s worth unpacking, then, how these clinical trials reached their preliminary conclusions, and why they have to continue despite these early promising results.

How phase 3 clinical trials showed that these Covid-19 vaccines are effective

Vaccines, like many other drugs, are tested in stages to gauge how well they work and how safe they are. In phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials, vaccines are tested in hundreds and up to several thousand healthy volunteers who are monitored to figure out what doses are effective, to see if any problems arise, and to see if their immune systems start to generate a response, an early sign that a vaccine may offer protection.

But to truly know if a vaccine works, it has to be tested against the actual virus, in the real world, in a broad swath of the population, including people with some preexisiting health issues. That’s what happens in phase 3, the largest, most complicated, and often slowest phase of clinical trials prior to approval. There are currently 12 Covid-19 vaccines in phase 3 clinical trials.

In phase 3, the vaccines are tested in tens of thousands of people. Researchers divide the pool of participants into a group that receives a vaccine and a group that receives a placebo or a comparison vaccine. Simply enrolling enough volunteers can take months.

Moderna enrolled more than 30,000 participants in its phase 3 trial. Pfizer and BioNTech recruited more than 43,000 people for their trial. Oxford and AstraZeneca’s recent results came from a pool of more than 11,000 volunteers. After giving everyone the requisite doses of the vaccine or a placebo/comparison (all three are two-dose regimens, with doses spaced weeks apart), the companies then wait to see how many people end up getting sick with Covid-19 as they go about their daily lives. These cases, also called “events,” have to be confirmed with laboratory testing.

So how many Covid-19 events are enough to draw conclusions about the efficacy of a vaccine? Fewer than one might guess. In some cases, just dozens.

What companies — and regulators — are looking for is fewer cases of confirmed Covid-19 in participants who received the vaccine than in those who just got the placebo. If there is no difference in the split of infections between the placebo and vaccine treatment groups, the trial could potentially end early and be declared futile. If there is a moderate difference, the trial may continue further. And if there is a big difference, it could serve as the basis for emergency approval.

Moderna says its trial efficacy endpoint is 151 confirmed Covid-19 cases. Pfizer and BioNTech set an endpoint of 164 cases. There are also interim checkpoints where the vaccine companies can meet with independent trial monitors known as the Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) to gauge progress. Since these trials are double-blind, where neither the experimenters nor the participants know who is slated to receive a vaccine or placebo, the DSMB regulates when experimenters can peek behind the curtain.

Companies typically tell the DSMB how many cases they are looking for at the start of the trial and what checkpoints they will use to assess progress, a safeguard to prevent experimenters from moving the goalposts.

Oxford and AstraZeneca reported their efficacy results based on 131 cases. Moderna reported its efficacy based on an interim number of 95 cases, and Pfizer and BioNTech reached an even higher benchmark with 170 cases.

Moderna’s interim analysis found that of their 95 events, 90 of them were in the placebo group and five were in the treatment group. Of Pfizer and BioNTech’s 170 Covid-19 cases, 162 were in their placebo group and eight in the group that received their vaccine. Oxford and AstraZeneca did not report the exact split between the group that received their vaccine and the comparison group.

There are some important nuances to the recent vaccine efficacy announcements. Beyond the fact that the results were announced in press releases rather than peer-reviewed papers (although companies say they will publish in scientific journals after the trials are complete), the reported efficacies here are mainly against disease — i.e., people getting sick — and not infection, i.e., people carrying the virus. One of the frustrating things about SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is that it can spread between people while causing few or no symptoms. Though the Oxford-AstraZeneca trial did regularly screen volunteers for infection, how these vaccines perform at preventing infection rather than just disease remains unclear at the moment.

Holly Janes, a professor of biostatistics at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, explained that, statistically, these findings do show that these vaccines are highly effective in preventing Covid-19 disease, even though they are a tiny fraction of the overall pool of volunteers.

“If we had a trial that enrolled 100,000 people, that accrued 164 events versus a trial that has 2,000 people and accrued 164 events, the amount of information we would have would be the same in terms of efficacy,” she said.

While Covid-19 is running rampant around the world, it’s still only infecting a small fraction of the population at a given moment. So a confirmed case of Covid-19 disease is a rare enough event that less than a couple hundred cases are enough to make a statistical conclusion.

And right now, phase 3 trials in the United States are accruing cases at a rapid clip, a grim consequence of the uncontrolled spread of Covid-19 in the country.

What we still need to find out from Covid-19 vaccine trials

So if several dozen cases are enough to gauge efficacy, why did vaccine developers have to run such a big clinical trial?

One reason is practical. Having more volunteers can speed up the rate at which they accumulate disease events in the trial pool.

“Unlike human challenge trials, where people are intentionally infected, in standard efficacy trials participants are exposed in their communities, in the same way that people not enrolled in a trial would be,” said Natalie Dean, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida, in an email. “So we need large numbers of participants to observe relatively few events, and this is exactly why trials number in the thousands.”

The other big reason is that efficacy is not the only parameter in a phase 3 clinical trial. Safety is a huge consideration, and experimenters have to look for any potential complications and mitigate them. “Those [rare events] would only be captured in a very large trial, and you wouldn’t capture those in a very small study,” Janes said.

For example, Guillain-Barré syndrome is an uncommon autoimmune disorder that is associated with the influenza vaccine, but ever since researchers discovered the link, they worked to reduce its frequency from 1 in 100,000 vaccinations to roughly 1 in 1 million. That means the rate of this complication from getting the vaccine is lower than the likelihood of getting Guillain-Barré syndrome from an influenza infection itself, making the vaccine safer than getting the illness based on that outcome alone.

Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford and AstraZeneca have all reported that their vaccines have so far reported no serious safety concerns from their respective DSMBs. The Oxford-AstraZeneca trial was paused twice to investigate neurological complications among two volunteers, but the trials resumed once researchers reported they found no link between the issues and vaccines.

To gain emergency approval in the US, the companies need two months of monitoring their volunteers to have enough safety data before applying for an Emergency Use Authorization. The Pfizer-BioNTech team reported that they have met this benchmark and filed for an EUA last week. The other vaccine developers expect to file for emergency approvals within a few weeks.

But experimenters need to collect long-term safety data too. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have committed to watching their pool for at least two years, while Oxford and AstraZeneca committed to at least one year, actively checking volunteers for any potential health concerns that might emerge later. Companies will also have to keep tabs on the broader population that receives their respective vaccines after they’re licensed.

These trials also need to reveal more information about how well these vaccines protect against both very mild Covid-19 cases and very severe cases. Pfizer and BioNTech reported nine severe Covid-19 cases in their placebo group and one in their vaccine group, while Moderna reported that all 11 severe Covid-19 cases were in their placebo group. Oxford and AstraZeneca also reported no severe illness in the group that received the vaccine. While this hints that these vaccines make a difference against severe disease, the data is not as robust as it is for Covid-19 cases in general.

“We can more reliably estimate vaccine efficacy against disease than we can estimate efficacy against severe disease, because, again, it all comes down to how many events of each type that have occurred,” Janes said.

On the other hand, it is also possible that people who received the vaccine may have been infected with the virus but had only mild or no symptoms, so they might not have been captured in the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases so far. Oxford-AstraZeneca conducted weekly swab tests of volunteers as part of its trial, which may have detected mild infections. But the Moderna trial and the Pfizer-BioNTech trial only reported people who experienced symptoms and were later confirmed to be infected.

“There are likely many more infections than there are disease events, and even more than that, there are many more exposures,” Janes said. “We will ultimately capture the infections that accrue in the trial, but it will be a while longer before we know anything about those.”

That could have big implications for public health and ending the pandemic as we know it. If people can get a vaccine that is quite effective in preventing Covid-19 symptoms but still carry the virus, they could still potentially spread SARS-CoV-2. This is an important issue because there will only be very limited doses of the vaccine available once it’s cleared for emergency use — and it will likely be many months after that before a sizable amount of the US population will be able to be vaccinated. That means people who have received the injections might need to maintain precautions like wearing masks and social distancing to prevent further spread of the virus before the vast majority of people have been vaccinated.

Outside of the vaccine clinical trials for Oxford-AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer-BioNTech, health officials will also be paying attention to the outcomes of the other vaccines in development. Johnson & Johnson, for instance, is developing a Covid-19 vaccine that requires just a single dose. That could solve the administrative challenges of deploying a two-dose vaccine. Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine also has some of the most stringent cold storage requirements of any Covid-19 vaccine, adding to the challenge of deploying it to areas without ultra-cold freezers.

The vaccination strategy for Covid-19 will have to balance all these variables, which are also changing rapidly as clinical trials progress and more information is revealed. With a variety of Covid-19 vaccines likely to enter the market, each with its own upsides and drawbacks, the next major task is figuring out who gets what and when. That’s why even with promising early efficacy results, vaccine developers must continue to forge ahead with their clinical trials so that we have robust data to answer those questions.

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By Tncse

New talent, untouchables and depth: How has your county’s manager used his squad?

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

Some of the managers in this year’s top flight.

Source: Inpho

DUBLIN AND WEXFORD have been the surprise packages of the Allianz Hurling League so far, going unbeaten in the opening three rounds of action.

Cork have responded well to their 2021 All-Ireland final hammering, winning every game so far. Their form was crowned by a nine-point defeat of Limerick last Sunday, where they had powered 14 points clear by half-time.

John Kiely’s men have lost a trio of successive games, prompting questions about how seriously they are taking the competition.

Henry Shefflin’s tenure in Galway has been a mixed bag so far and the same could be said of Colm Bonnar’s opening few games in charge of Tipperary. Clare and Kilkenny have yet to pick up a win over established Liam MacCarthy opposition, while Antrim have performed well but lost all three game.

Laois and Offaly are up against it in their battle for survival and both have shipped heavy beatings.

Now that we’re over halfway through the league campaign, it’s an opportune time to look at how managers have been using their squads. How many players have they used and what does it tell us about how a team is approaching the league? Who has shown the greatest squad depth? What teams are working off the smallest panels?

Wexford have claimed three wins from three (defeating Clare, Galway and Limerick) and with bottom side Offaly up next, another victory could seal a place in the Division 1 semi-finals.

Dublin lifted the Walsh Cup in the pre-season, then drew with Waterford in their league opener before sealing away wins against Antrim and, most notably, Tipperary.

However, a reason for their bright starts to the season can be put down to the consistent selections Darragh Egan and Mattie Kenny have put out. Wexford and Dublin lead the way in terms of relying on the same core of players in each game.

In his fourth year in charge, Kenny has started the same 13 players in Dublin’s opening three weekends of action. Goalkeeper Sean Brennan started two games, with Alan Nolan lining out between the stick for the other. In attack, Colin Currie, Paul Crummey and Aidan Mellett have all come into start a game each, but otherwise Kenny knows his best selection and is sticking to it.

Danny Sutcliffe is one of 13 regulars in the Dublin team.

Source: Lorraine O’Sullivan/INPHO

He has looked at just 21 players, which is by a distance the lowest of any side in Division 1, four lower than next placed Antrim’s 25.

While just 18 Dublin players have been given a start, Egan has tinkered even less. 17 players on the Wexford panel have lined out in their first 15, although the new manager handed minutes to 26 players.

He has taken a look at youth, with Connal Flood and Mikey Dwyer starting all three games, Oisín Foley starting two and Oisín Pepper featuring off the bench.

Egan has put his own stamp on the team since taking over from Davy Fitzgerald. His use of Paudie Foley at centre-back, Jack O’Connor at centre-forward and Rory O’Connor roaming from the full-forward line has freshened up the team, with Lee Chin yet to return from injury.

At the other end of the scale, Galway, Kilkenny, Cork and Limerick have cast net wide in search of talent.

Henry Shefflin is in his first year over Galway, so it’s hardly a surprise to see him assessing his options in the early months of his reign.

He has taken a look at 33 players, more than any other county and two ahead of second-placed Cork. However, the spine of Shefflin’s team has a settled look to it. Seven players have started all three games, mainly in defence and midfield.

Jack Grealish, Daithi Burke, Gearoid McInerney and Padraic Mannion have been regulars at the back. Fintan Burke started both games since the St Thomas’ contingent returned after their club run. That will most likely be five of his six defenders when the championship rolls around.

The midfield partnership of Joseph Cooney and Ronan Glennon have also started all three games, with Tom Monaghan the only forward in that category.

Most of Shefflin’s experimentation has come in attack, even if Conor Cooney, Cathal Mannion, Conor Whelan and Jack Hastings have started two games each. He’s given starts to 24 players in total, with only Limerick and Kilkenny starting more players.

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Limerick’s slow start to the campaign has been widely discussed in the media, yet they’ve mixed and matched more than any other team. Just three players (Dan Morrissey, Cathal O’Neill and David Reidy) have started all three games, with 30 used in total.

Cathal O’Neill has been a bright spark in Limerick’s league.

Source: Ken Sutton/INPHO

That includes two-time Hurler of the Year Cian Lynch who was left to play Fitzgibbon Cup with NUIG for the early part of the year.

Mike Casey will also be hoping for game-time before the end of the league as he returns from a knee injury.

Kiely is spreading the minutes around his squad and given the fact 25 players have been given at least one start so far, it shows Kiely is searching for squad depth rather than points. Wing-forward Cathal O’Neill has provided his manager with the most food for thought, with a four-point haul against Galway followed up with a goal against Cork.

Cork gave run outs to 31 players which leaves them joint-second in that table alongside Kilkenny.

Youngsters Daire O’Leary, Tommy O’Connell, Sam Quirke, Colin O’Brien, Cormac O’Brien, Sean Twomey and Ciarán Joyce have all been handed chances to impress, though only O’Leary and Joyce have started games.

Joyce looks to have the best chance of nailing down a starting spot in the summer. He started two games, at midfield and wing-back, missing the Offaly game due to Freshers hurling commitments.

The Rebels are in the middle of the pack for starts handed out (22) and for players who’ve been in the first XV for all three games. Kingston has built a settled back seven, with five regulars to date: Patrick Collins, Niall O’Leary, Sean O’Donoghue, Tim O’Mahony and Mark Coleman.

Ciaran Joyce has put his hand up for the Rebels.

Source: Bryan Keane/INPHO

Of the rest, Shane Kingston has started the season on fire. He posted 4-17 in three starts, averaging over nine points per game. Veteran Patrick Horgan has been eased back into action, arriving off the bench at half-time against Offaly and assuming free-taking duties for the win over Limerick.

Brian Cody has blooded plenty of players too. The Cats used 34 players in 2020, 31 last year and sit on 31 already this campaign.

There have been interesting aspects to Cody’s selections, not least his use of Paddy Deegan at midfield, Padraig Walsh at centre-forward and Martin Keoghan at full-forward.

With the Ballyhale Shamrocks men yet to return, Kilkenny’s figure will reach at least the mid-30s before the league is over. Cody has handed out starts to 25 players in total with seven starting all three games.

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Colm Bonnar is another new manager attempting to assess his options ahead of the Munster round-robin. Interestingly, he started the same XV for his first two games and also introduced the same five substitutes.

He made eight changes for the third round loss to Dublin, leaving Tipperary on 27 players used, with 23 given starts. Six players (Craig Morgan, Alan Flynn, Michael Breen, Dan McCormack, Jason Forde and Jake Morris) have been regular starters, while McGrath brothers Noel and John returned off the bench last weekend.

Despite the absence of the Ballygunner contingent, Liam Cahill has experimented with 28 players so far. Jamie Barron is another star name yet to return, but the Deise have managed to kick things off with two wins and a draw.

It must be said they enjoyed a relatively easy start with Laois and Antrim arriving in their first three games, but the early season form of Austin Gleeson at centre-forward is promising.

Austin Gleeson has started the season in fine fettle.

Source: Declan Roughan/INPHO

He’s one of six who’ve started all three games alongside the new-look half-back line of Jack Fagan, Iarlaith Daly and Tom Barron, with 22 given starts in total. Tadhg de Búrca has stepped up his return from a second cruciate injury and youngster Carthach Daly has started twice at centre-field.

Clare have been hampered by injuries with Aidan McCarthy, Shane O’Donnell, Patrick O’Connor, Ian Galvin and Cian Nolan yet to see any action due to injury. Promising young talent Mark Rodgers looks set to miss the remainder of the season with a knee injury suffered in Fitzgibbon Cup action for UL.

The injuries have forced the Banner to work off a smaller squad than most.

Tony Kelly did return to start the win over Offaly, scoring 2-12, and Peter Duggan came on as a substitute, bringing Brian Lohan to 26 players used so far. He has spread starting places around the panel as 24 began at least one game.

John Conlon featured in two, lining out at centre-forward in before returning to the centre-back role he grew into in 2021.

Three counties battling relegation are Antrim, Laois and Offaly. It’s clear all three are attempting to be as competitive as possible and don’t have the luxury of resting their key men.

Darren Gleeson, Cheddar Plunkett and Michael Fennelly have settled units, starting 10 players throughout the first three rounds. Laois (28) have used more players than Offaly (27) and Antrim (25), although Offaly lead the way in terms of players given at least one start on 20, ahead of Antrim’s 19 and Laois’s 18.

Players used in opening 3 rounds of the Allianz Hurling League

33 – Galway
31 – Cork
31 – Kilkenny
30 – Limerick
28 – Waterford
28 – Laois
27 – Tipperary
27 – Offaly
26 – Clare
26 – Wexford
25 – Antrim
21 – Dublin

Players that started at least 1 game

25 – Limerick
25 – Kilkenny
24 – Galway
24 – Clare
23 – Tipperary
22 – Cork
22 – Waterford
20 – Offaly
19 – Antrim
18 – Laois
18 – Dublin
17 – Wexford

Players that started all 3 games

13 – Dublin
12 – Wexford
10 – Laois
10 – Offaly
10 – Antrim
9 – Clare
8 – Cork
7 – Galway
7 – Kilkenny
6 – Tipperary
6 – Waterford
3 – Limerick

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‘Great position to be in’ – Getting married and back-to-back All-Ireland finals in two months

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

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IT WAS AFTER her club defeated Slaughtneil in the 2020 All-Ireland camogie club semi-final that Stacey Kehoe could see a hectic schedule of events coming down the line.

The concluding stages of that competition was delayed until the end of last year due to the Covid pandemic. There was also a high-profile fight to protect the All-Ireland series from being dropped that season.

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The affected club teams rejoiced at the decision to proceed, but for Kehoe, it would be a tight squeeze to the finish line.

Her husband-to-be was waiting for her at the altar in the Ballagh Church on Friday, 17 December, and Sarsfields of Galway were waiting for Kehoe’s Oulart at Nowlan Park in the All-Ireland final 24 hours later.

Not your traditional wedding weekend, but the busy turnaround seemed to bring out the best in Kehoe, and her twin sister Shelly. The new bride picked up the Player of the Match award while Shelly bagged 1-3 as Oulart dethroned Sarsfields to finish the staggered season as All-Ireland champions.

On Sunday, they’ll have to do it all again as Oulart and Sarsfields square off in the 2021 AIB All-Ireland final.

“It’s a great position to be in playing two All-Ireland’s in the space of a couple of months,” says Stacey Kehoe. “We’re happy to be there and we’ll go hell for leather on Sunday and please God we’ll get over the line.

“We’re looking forward to getting back to Croke Park and that’s what you dream of, playing with your club in a senior final in Croke Park. We’re all looking forward to it.

“There is a great buzz around the village of Oulart, everyone you meet is stopping to talk to you. It’s so uplifting for the parish when you get to these All-Irelands to see how much it means to the people, and the generosity from the people.”

Reflecting on that 24-hour block in December, Kehoe added:

“We all knew we had job to do on the Saturday, this, after the time and effort that went into the training and all the arguments to get the final played. Thankfully we got over the line.

“It was only when we beat Slaughtneil (in the semi-final) that it became an issue, that the final was the day after the wedding. Everything was in place to get married in December, not thinking that we were going to be playing camogie in December. We were delighted we got to play the 2020 championship. Everything went according to plan and we couldn’t have asked for better.”

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This Sunday, the Galway champions will have revenge on their mind when the sides collide at Croke Park. The senior final will be the main event of a double-header at GAA headquarters, and will be preceded by the intermediate final between Salthill/Knocknacarra [Galway] and St Ryangh’s of Offaly.

Oulart had little trouble accounting for Clare’s Scariff/Ogonnelloe in the semi-final, but Kehoe is confident that they are adequately prepared to face Sarsfields who defeated camogie heavyweights Slaughtneil in the other final-four tie.

“We’re facing a huge battle on Sunday,” Kehoe notes.

“Any team you meet will be the best of the best. We will take nothing for granted. All the hard work is done now. It’s going to be a real dogfight and it will be down to who wants it more, who wants to win the dirty ball in the rucks.”

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Cork announce new three-year sponsorship deal covering all county teams

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

CORK CAMOGIE HAS announced a new three-year sponsorship deal with Kearys Motor Group.

Laura Treacy, Amy Lee and Amy O’Connor.

Source: Morgan Treacy/INPHO

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Cork lost last year’s All-Ireland senior final against Galway but enjoyed recent O’Duffy Cup triumphs in 2014, ’15, ’17 and ’18.

The new sponsorship deal will cover the Cork senior, intermediate, minor and U16 teams for the next three years, along with getting involved with the U16 and U14 local club championships. Cork were previously sponsored by Blackbee and have a new manager in charge for the 2022 season in Matthew Twomey, he succeeded Paudie Murray, with Clare All-Ireland winner Davy Fitzgerald coming on board in a coaching capacity.

Source: Morgan Treacy/INPHO

“We are delighted and proud to partner Cork Camogie for the next three years with this significant sponsorship that reflects Kearys’ culture, values and team spirit,” said Brendan Keary, CEO of Kearys Motor Group.

“We look forward to a great relationship with all the teams and promoting camogie in our community in Cork and women’s sport in general throughout the county.”

Cork camogie chairperson Mairead O’Donovan welcomed the new sponsorship.

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“The Cork camogie teams are an amazing group of athletes and fantastic ambassadors for Cork as we have a great talent pool and determination to succeed. We look forward to working with Kearys Motor Group and forging a successful relationship together over the next three years.”

Comedian Michael Fry is our special guest on this week’s episode of The Front Row, in partnership with Guinness. Joining host Seán Burke, Eimear Considine and Murray Kinsella, he chats about his family’s rugby background and his short-lived playing days, before using his musical ear to rank the anthems of each Guinness Six Nations team. Click here to subscribe or listen below:

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