There are around 1,000 mountain gorillas left in the wild, and about 460 of them live in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda. In the park’s very dense, high-altitude forest (hence the name “impenetrable”), veterinarian Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is working to keep them alive through the Covid-19 pandemic.

No gorilla has come down with Covid-19, but Kalema-Zikusoka fears what might happen if one did. Gorillas live in tight-knit groups, so a respiratory infection could easily spread among them. Infected gorillas could get sick and die, or possibly suffer long-term consequences from the disease.

Kalema-Zikusoka founded the nonprofit Conservation Through Public Health, where she works with the local community, and the park, to keep the gorillas healthy, and create a tourism economy that’s sustainable for both the gorillas and the people who live near them.

“This virus is a threat to the gorillas,” she said on a recent Zoom call from Entebbe, Uganda, where she lives. “Before, we never used to have to wear a mask when you visit the gorillas, but now you have to.” Also new: Visitors must stay 32 feet (10 meters) away from the animals, up from 23 feet (7 meters) before the pandemic. Visitors now also get their temperatures checked upon arrival.

Kalema-Zikusoka told me about other precautions in place to protect the animals — what she’d do if one got sick, and how to quarantine these 300-plus-pound animals should they be exposed. She also described the intense and competing challenges conservation groups like hers face to keep the animals safe these days: When tourism dropped due to the pandemic, poaching increased. But when tourism resumed this fall, the threat of spreading disease to the gorillas increased.

“Tourism is a good thing, but it has to be done in a responsible way so that it doesn’t end up wiping out the very species,” she says. “It’s a very delicate balance.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

A gorilla can’t social distance

Brian Resnick

The gorillas in Bwindi — do they often come close to humans?

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

Yes. There’s about 459 gorillas in the park, and about 200 are habituated for tourism and research.

Brian Resnick

What does habituated mean? They will let people approach them?

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

Habituated generally means … you can get as close as 5, 7 meters to them. It means they won’t run away when they see a human being.

Brian Resnick

Do the gorillas come in close enough contact with people that you have to worry about respiratory diseases like Covid-19?

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

Yes, we definitely do worry about it.

There have always been strict guidelines [for humans to stay 23 feet away from them]. But some of the gorillas, which are so used to people, can get even closer. So actually, that’s why we thought that during the pandemic we really needed to reduce their proximity to people.

Before, we never used to have to wear a mask when you visit the gorillas, but now you have to wear a mask when you visit the gorillas.

And I think it’s going to continue to be emphasized even after the pandemic, whenever it ends. I think we’re going to continue with all these regulations.

Brian Resnick

I imagine you can’t put a mask on a gorilla or have them protect themselves.

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

Absolutely not. You can’t. And the problem with them is that they don’t know how to social distance. They are in a harem with a lead silverback and many females and babies and a few other adult males. And they’re always grooming each other, they’re always moving together as a group. So if one of them gets Covid-19, it’s very easy for the rest of them to get it because they don’t know how to social distance.

So the best we can do is teach people to social distance from them. And also at the same time, hand hygiene has really been reinforced, and use of hand sanitizer.

Many human diseases can infect gorillas
Brian Resnick

Is this a constant problem: diseases passing between people and these gorillas?

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

Yes. Disease becomes an issue once you habituate [gorillas] for tourism and research, because you get close enough to make them sick. Either when gorillas are visited inside the park [or] when gorillas go out of the park to people’s gardens, they can pick up diseases.

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In 1996, actually, one of the first outbreaks that I had to handle was when the gorillas walked outside the park to eat people’s banana plants and they found dirty clothing and scarecrows and got scabies. It caused death in an infant.

So, yeah, we’re worried about those kinds of diseases. Influenza viruses are also a very big worry for us, other diseases that cause the common cold, and other viral respiratory diseases.

Brian Resnick

Is it generally the case that any virus that can infect a human can infect a gorilla?

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

Yes, all of them, because we share 98.4 percent genetic material and can easily make each other sick.

Let’s say a gorilla gets Covid-19. What happens next?
Brian Resnick

Do you worry if one gorilla gets sick, it could kill them? Do we know how Covid-19 would present itself in a gorilla?

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

The same way that it has varied effects in people — some people don’t show symptoms, some people it’s mild symptoms, others it’s very severe. We feel that the same thing could happen with the gorillas. We’ve known that when gorillas get diseases like scabies, it’s very severe in the gorillas, more severe than it would be in a human being.

People, gorillas, chimps, and other old-world primates like some of the monkeys and baboons, we share the same protein receptor that the SARS-CoV-2 virus attaches to. Which probably means that the way that it can make us sick is the way that it can make them sick.

Brian Resnick

Are you prepared to treat the gorillas? Is there a plan?

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

We definitely would. If the gorillas were to get it, there’s a contingency plan that has been developed with other conservation partners. It’s been led by the International Gorilla Conservation Programme.

If Covid-19 gets into one gorilla, that gorilla group has to be quarantined — it’s not allowed to mix with any other gorilla group. Once they start to mix, then we have a complete disaster on our hands, complete disaster. So the first thing is to cordon off that group.

Brian Resnick

How do you quarantine gorillas?

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

So the park rangers have to be with them 24 hours basically to make sure they don’t mix with other groups. At least they have to be with them from the beginning of the day to the end of the day because at night they don’t move around. They just stay in their nests.

Brian Resnick

If one gets sick, would you use some of the therapies that have been developed for humans, or …

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

They’ll be treated with the same things that are being used to treat people.

But it’s much more difficult to treat a wild animal than it is to treat a human being. You can’t provide the same level of intensive treatment to a wild gorilla as you would a human being who you can put in a hospital ward, put on a ventilator for days and days. Because there’s just over 1,000 mountain gorillas remaining in the world … we wouldn’t want Covid-19 to be the reason why they’re being wiped out.

Brian Resnick

When you said you can’t put them on a ventilator for days: Why not?

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

Because the gorillas are living in the wild and as much as possible we don’t want to disrupt them, bring them into a captive setting, put them though all of this and then release them back to the wild, because they could even return with more diseases that can affect the others. So it’s a very delicate balance. It’s very, very rare that we take in a gorilla, treat it in a hospital setting, and then release them out. As much as possible, we do all the treatments in the field.

Brian Resnick

How do you treat them in the field?

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

You have to dart them with the drug because the mountain gorillas are not … they only eat the food that they’re supposed to eat in the forest. They’re not fed. We don’t feed the mountain gorillas. They’re completely free-ranging, they’re completely wild.

Why resuming gorilla tourism is worth the risk
Brian Resnick

Is resuming tourism worth the risk of potentially bringing Covid-19 into the park?

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

Yes. We think that is worth the risk, for sure. The local communities of Bwindi have become so reliant on gorilla tourism to survive — which is good and bad. It’s good in that they feel that the gorillas are their survival. The future of the gorillas is tied in with their future. So they really protect [them].

When tourism went down and there was no tourists coming in, everybody was struggling. The local economy suffered and poaching went up. In other parts of Africa, people actually eat gorillas as a delicacy.

So if you don’t have tourism, it’s very hard to protect the gorillas because grant money is not necessarily enough, especially now. The only gorilla subspecies whose population is increasing is the one where tourism is happening.

Do the gorillas notice anything unusual going on?
Brian Resnick

Do you think the gorillas know something different is happening? Have they noticed people wearing masks or noticed the greater distance between them and people?

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

I guess they were used to being visited often by people every day. Different people come and spend an hour with them and go away. And so one thing I think they’re finding a bit strange is that they can’t get close to people like they used to. So we’re kind of de-habituating them.

But one thing that we’ve been happy about is that more gorillas are being born. More gorillas are being born this year than other years. And we don’t know whether it’s to do with a lack of tourism or just coincidental. Research has to be done on that.

Could a gorilla be vaccinated?
Brian Resnick

As we see the vaccines for humans get approved by various governments, could you potentially vaccinate these gorillas, or is that not something that would happen?

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

Vaccination of gorillas cannot be ruled out, but to vaccinate gorillas we have to make sure that it’s really, really, really safe for humans. I think it’s going to take a while to see how humans react to the vaccine. And we need to see how much they are actually protected as a result of the vaccine.

Yeah, we need more data to know whether it’s safe on the gorillas.

Brian Resnick

Would you say this pandemic is an existential threat to gorillas?

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

This virus is a threat to the gorillas. It definitely is a threat to gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans — the three non-human great apes. Just this morning I was having a chat with people working with orangutans and we were talking about some of the things that I’m talking about with you: how do we protect these great apes during a pandemic like Covid-19, the people looking after them, the people who come to visit them.

It’s also a big threat to other wildlife. It came from wildlife, it can easily go back to wildlife, and that’s something that we’re all very concerned about.

The room didn’t spin like they say it does. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. I had no difficulty understanding the verdict: It was incurable.

They could offer no prognosis. They had some general ideas about how they might treat me; it was considered “manageable” in its normal form, but in my case, there was no telling what would or wouldn’t work. They told me that if they could find an effective treatment, I should expect to be on it “for life.”

The week of the 2016 election, my foot had gone numb — paralyzed, actually. I’d first arrived at the neurologist’s office unable to wiggle my toes, and now I was leaving with a singularly rare cancer diagnosis, a blood cancer that had jumped its track and hadn’t shown up as it was supposed to. Even though my blood, lymph, and bone marrow were all clear, a blood cancer had somehow emerged in my cerebrospinal fluid and lodged itself along my spinal cord, forming hundreds of microlesions. The oncologist (who specialized in rare lymphomas) responded, “Get out!” when the neurologist shared the results of my spinal tap. They were looking forward to meeting me. There isn’t much that’s good about being a unique cancer case, but at least the specialists are excited to see you.

It wasn’t until the drive home, as my husband, David, and I tried to figure out how and what to tell the children, that the terror overcame me. How could I prepare my middle schoolers for what we might face? There was no reassurance I could offer. Any expectation that the next day would be better or even vaguely resemble the days before had disappeared entirely.

We told them the naked truth. The doctors couldn’t say what might happen next because they had never seen this before. The outcome was uncertain, so hope and fear were both reasonable. Anything could happen: anything bad, anything good, or anything in between.

That night, unable to sleep, a strange, intrusive thought scrolled through my head: “The future has been amputated.” There would be weeks of hospitalizations, infusions, nausea, and fatigue before I could summon the presence of mind to interrogate that thought. On my first wobbly walk around the park near my home, I spotted a cute two-bedroom house on a side street.

“Maybe,” I wondered, “we could downsize to a cute little house like that once the kids are off to college … ?”

I stopped myself short. That would be seven years away. My survival relied on the efficacy of a chemotherapy, fresh out of trials, designed to treat cancers of the blood. My medical team wasn’t sure if it would work at all.

I might not live to see my eldest graduate. Who knew if I would survive even the year?

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I sat down on a bench, dizzy. People hurried past me, some rushing home from work, some squeezing in a run before dinner, others racing toward schools to fetch their kids. Everywhere they were headed, it seemed, was a lot more important than where they happened to be right now.

For decades, my life had been as organized as theirs. I was always ambitious, my calendar overflowing: a private psychotherapy practice, parenting, writing, martial arts, caring for elderly family members, volunteering as a community organizer. Friends and colleagues marveled at how I got so much done. Now it was clear I had been running on overdrive for years, racing toward some magical day in the future when I’d have accomplished enough and might allow myself to rest.

It was as if cancer had flung me into a parallel universe where I would never again spend, waste, or experience time as others did, or as I had before. Sitting on that bench watching the early winter sunset, I realized that I never had the ability to shape my future. I’d been chasing an illusion. The causal chain I’d been constructing was wiped away in a single stroke. The only real time was now: the sun setting, the park bench, the crisp, cold air filling my lungs.

I thought of the many future-focused conversations I had daily: psychotherapy clients dreaming of one day finding the right partner, or the right job, or hoping to eventually leave the wrong ones. Neighbors planning their vacations. Other parents fantasizing about their children’s college and career trajectories. Every weekday conversation filled with yearning for the next weekend. The systems that surround us intensify our future fantasies, like an unattainable carrot at the end of a proverbial stick, driving us all to press ourselves harder and faster toward some end that never quite comes in the way we imagine.

Ambition has a necessary function: It may offer hope in times of desolation, or motivate us out of states of suffering and depletion. Yet aspirations have their shadows. Striving can imply that the present moment is inadequate. It seems as though ambition has been elevated into a distorted religion. But our relentless cultural habit of structured goal-setting and futurizing are nonsensical once we gaze into the abyss. Existentialist philosophy and therapies, Buddhist notions of impermanence, and the Christian practice of memento mori (remember your death) all assert that the process of accepting the inescapability of death can help us to live a more meaningful life.

The amputation of my felt-sense of unfolding time was violent and sudden. It began with a visceral realization of how I spent my now-limited time. If lost time could not be recouped, did I really want to spend much (or any) of it at a professional association meeting, or organizing fundraisers, or trapped on long phone conversations with a needy acquaintance?

Over the next three years of treatment, I extricated myself from activities and relationships that either didn’t serve or took precious time away from core priorities: being present for my family, supporting my clients, giving what I could to my community, and — always — respecting my limitations. I no longer worried about reaching arbitrary goals, building “momentum,” or even growing a business. I sat with the person in front of me for the time they were in front of me. Each moment, pleasant or unpleasant, had become an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.

My small family downsized our home and our lives, and we adjusted expectations in order to reduce financial pressures. I abandoned long-term writing projects and wrote only when I felt I had something to say. I gave up the belts and stages of martial arts practice and instead took long walks. My book list shifted to shorter collected readings that would offer up new ideas along the way, free of the demand to reach every last page. Eventually, I had no more attachments or plans beyond a general weekly schedule, no more fantasies of a great come-and-get-it day. The tasks were simple: to fully live the one day I’d been given; to be who I meant to be in each moment, to the best of my abilities.

At first, this shift in my orientation to time was alienating and lonely as everyone around me continued to think ahead. Later, I realized I didn’t miss that. A large bite had been taken out of my sense of linear, causal, chronological time — the Greek notion of chronos. But what I’d found in its place was kairos: this particular, critical moment. The appointed time. The time of action.

My unpredictable cancer unpredictably became undetectable after 30 hard months of treatment. I have been off chemotherapy for a year and a half. It is possible that I have 10, even 20, years of time and health left. Or maybe this unpredictable cancer will reemerge when I least expect it. Maybe next week I’ll learn that I have a lesion on my optic nerve. No one knows, because there is no knowing.

A smaller, lighter sense of future has crept back into my life, terrifying in its own way. I can now permit myself to fantasize a year ahead, or sometimes two. I’ve noticed gentle new goals sneaking in: to spend a little more time teaching and a little less time counseling. I’ve applied to a seminary program, aware that I may not make it to enrollment or live to finish the program. But I do know this will be a pleasurable, meaningful project — one that I can make practical use of each new day. I can picture our home emptier as the kids move into the world. But my sense of meaning and identity aren’t dependent on any of these imaginings. I’ll be the best mother, partner, therapist, and friend that I can be, today. I will take long hikes and watch the hawks circle overhead. I will rest when I am tired. And when my time comes, it will have been enough.

Martha M. Crawford is a psychotherapist, coach and supervisor in private practice since 1998 in NYC and now in Santa Fe and the author of the blog What a Shrink Thinks.

As of mid-December, hospitals on average had just 22 percent of their intensive care unit (ICU) beds available across the country, and many were completely full. As the Covid-19 surge continues to intensify, lack of ICU beds can have dire consequences, including not being able to properly care for the sickest patients, potentially rationing lifesaving care.

But even these bed capacity numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Adding extra critical-care beds in other departments or buildings takes precious time, resources, and space. But adding trained staff is much more difficult, especially deep into a pandemic.

When trained staff are in short supply, it’s even harder for hospitals to best meet the needs of critical-care patients. These patients include people very sick with Covid-19, but also many who need to be in the ICU for other reasons, such as those who have had a heart attack or stroke, are recovering from major surgery, or are sick with the flu, among others.

Only about a dozen states had more than 30 percent ICU capacity left on December 15, and coronavirus case numbers have only accelerated since then. And the reality on the ground in many areas is much worse, as reporting by the New York Times has shown.

From the Times’s data, gathered from the US Department of Health and Human Services, of about 100 hospitals in the Los Angeles area, more than 65 reported ICU occupancy at 90 percent or higher. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center had an occupancy at 112 percent of its capacity.

In Dallas, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country, of the 47 hospitals with more than 20 Covid-19 patients, 80 percent of them had zero or just one ICU bed left. The most open beds any hospital had was five.

In the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, half of the hospitals with more than 20 Covid-19 patients were at more than 95 percent ICU bed capacity.

In Oklahoma, which has the third-highest per capita new case rate in the country, of the hospitals with more than 20 Covid-19 cases, the majority were at more than 90 percent ICU bed occupancy.

Nancy Nagle, a pulmonologist and critical-care physician at Integris health system in Oklahoma City, which reported full ICU occupancy in the most recent data to the HHS, says they have turned regular patient rooms into ICU rooms to try to handle the rush of severely ill people. Even so, she said, “occasionally Covid-19 patients must remain in the emergency department for several hours waiting for a bed to become available.”

And there is little sign of relief in many places around the country, with an average of more than 200,000 new Covid-19 cases reported daily since early December.

“Patients keep coming, and we have to take care of them regardless of our staffing levels,” Gisella Thomas, a respiratory therapist at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs, California, wrote to Vox in an email. “I worry that there is only so long staff can hold up before breaking, which ultimately, in itself, could limit capacity” further.

Covid-19 can be a long, unpredictable, complicated illness

The sickest Covid-19 patients can linger in the ICU for weeks — or longer. And although we have learned a lot since the spring about how to better treat severely ill Covid-19 patients, the disease itself is still challenging to address, and we don’t have a cure for it. Which means the 2 percent of people who get Covid-19 and end up needing critical care are often in ICUs until either they are able to recover — which often includes invasive intubation treatment — or die.

One of the reasons ICUs have been filling up is that once a patient with Covid-19 gets that sick, they are not likely to stabilize very quickly. A September study found that an average ICU stay for a Covid-19 patient was about a week — almost double the typical stay of 3.8 days for other ICU patients. Other anecdotal reports show that many patients can be in the ICU for weeks or even months. And pinning down this number is crucial for projecting how many beds might be available in the future if cases continue to climb.

As an October study pointed out, if an average length of stay in the ICU is 10 days, that means that every day there is only a 10 percent chance of a new bed opening up. So when admissions exceed that rate, ICUs are likely to get overwhelmed.

This is something those working with critically ill coronavirus patients have to contend with every day. “Covid-19 patients unfortunately stay in the ICU for a long time,” Nagle said. “The course of the disease is very slow, and this contributes to the shortage of available beds.”

And while Covid patients are there, meeting their needs can be extremely labor-intensive. “Covid-19 patients can be incredibly ill, with multiple machines to watch and adjust, multiple medications to give, and lab results to draw and results to watch,” Nagle said. And although we now have a better understanding of possible treatments for seriously ill patients, “patients still respond in varying ways, and their progress and possible outcome is always unpredictable.” This is another reason hospitals don’t always have a good projection for how many ICU beds they might have in the coming weeks or days.

Caring for Covid-19 patients also requires many more steps and precautions than when ICU staff work with other patients, further jamming units. All staff entering an ICU Covid-19 room must don full gowns and PPE each time, which is resource-intensive. “This also creates real difficulties if someone crashes because it slows down our response,” Thomas said. “The need to more thoroughly clean all equipment also creates delays and makes normal staffing levels inadequate for the pandemic.”

In the meantime, doctors, nurses, and other health care workers are struggling to provide the best care they can while being asked to handle more and more patients. “Critically ill patients are very complex,” said Orlando Garner, a pulmonary critical-care physician at Baylor College of Medicine. “There are a lot of moving parts at the same time that require the same amount of priority.” But, he said, “when you are stretched out beyond capacity, you can’t deliver the same quality care unless you create more skilled health care workers, and as we have found out, these are a scarce resource.”

Staff are even scarcer than ICU beds

Although hospitals can often somewhat expand the number of beds and amount of supplies, staff are in much shorter supply. “The most precious resource in any hospital are the human beings who are knowledgable and capable of caring for patients,” Sarah Delgado, an acute care nurse practitioner and clinical practice specialist with the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, wrote to Vox in an email. “It is the limiting factor.” Without enough of these people to care for all of those who are very sick, “patient outcomes are likely to suffer,” she said.

And it is not just ICU physicians and nurses who are in short supply. “Critical care is more of a team sport,” Garner said. “This means physician-delivered care and interventions, but also careful medication selection dosage with pharmacists, skilled nursing care, respiratory therapists, midlevel providers, nutritionists, early mobilization with physical therapists.” To that list, Nagle also adds all of the other hospital staff needed to perform other essential tasks in ICUs, including bathing patients, changing linens, and other functions.

To accommodate surges of very ill Covid-19 patients, many hospitals have had to rework their staffing structure. At Christiana Hospital in Delaware, critical-care nurse Lauren Esposito and her colleagues typically work with critical cardiac patients. But this year, her unit has served as overflow for critical Covid-19 cases. “At first it was a little uneasy,” she wrote for the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses.

Their hospital implemented a tiered staffing strategy in which cardiac nurses would work under trained ICU nurses. “During the shift, if a patient was crashing, we were able to flex and have the ICU nurse go to that patient to provide care,” she wrote. They were also able to provide quick training to nursing staff, for example, on working with intubated patients. Still, the overflow duties were straining, and they weren’t made easier given the intensive isolation these patients are in to stop the spread of infection. “I remember the first time I walked into a patient’s room, it really hits you that you are the primary caregiver and no one else can come in.”

Also, staff now often have to attend to more patients at a time. In California, where last week an average of more than 44,600 people each day tested positive for the coronavirus, Gov. Gavin Newsom dropped the state’s nurse-to-patient ratio from 1:2 to 1:3 in an effort to meet the surging numbers of Covid-19 hospitalizations.

In Oklahoma, Nagle notes that although the ICU nurses she works with usually take care of one to two patients during a shift, “with the shortage of critical-care nurses, each nurse may have three, and under very extreme conditions, even four patients to care for.”

This increase in patients each nurse is seeing — especially in a complex illness like Covid-19 — is a major adjustment. “Nurses are at the patient’s side every hour of every day, administering lifesaving medications, collaborating with other health care team members, translating information to families, and providing end-of-life presence when those families cannot visit due to strict isolation requirements,” Delgado said. “This work cannot be done when the number of patients exceeds staffing capacity.”

And staff themselves often fall ill with the virus. According to a November report, as many as a quarter of Covid-19 infections in some states are among health care workers.

“It could have been me”

Garner, whose whole family got sick with Covid-19 earlier this year, including his 4-month-old daughter, says getting the illness himself gave him a new perspective on the patients now flooding into local Texas ICUs.

“It could have been me, my wife, or one of my kids on that ICU bed,” he said. “It’s easy to rationalize the amount of sick patients by thinking, ‘oh, well they weren’t distancing,’ or, ‘they weren’t wearing masks,’ but the fact is that nobody deserves to catch this virus and get sick from it, not even the people who doubt it. As the spike continues to grow, compassion is the only thing that can keep us from becoming jaded and burned out.”

The flip side of that is remembering compassion for the health care workers caring for these patients, especially as the holidays approach. Not only will many of these workers continue long shifts through the holidays, they will do so knowing that many people are disregarding public health warnings to avoid gatherings.

“We need the public to do its part,” Delgado said. “Stop nonessential travel, adhere strictly to mask-wearing and social distancing guidelines, and limit gatherings with those outside your household,” Delgado said.

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

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Governors, mayors, and public health officials are sounding the alarm about rising levels of Covid-19 across every part of the country. The disease is surging, the death toll is soaring, and it’s clear that some states need more restrictive measures to control the spread.

What continues to frustrate so many leaders is that nine months into this pandemic, science and data have painted a clear path for how to beat the virus and reduce transmission. But the disappointing and deadly truth is that in many cases, it’s difficult to get Americans to follow the rules.

Boosted by a president who celebrates breaking rules and deliberately defies science and time-tested norms of civility, millions of Americans have been flagrantly flouting simple requests to wear masks in public, to refrain from congregating in large groups, or to limit their unnecessary travel. With the rule-makers themselves publicly disregarding the recommendations of experts and scientists of their own administration, rule-breaking Americans have quickly followed.

As it happens, the US loves rule breakers; the ethos of breaking with tradition is in our country’s DNA. New Hampshire’s state motto is “Live Free or Die,” Western states like Arizona famously celebrate rugged individualism, the country’s founders are revered as rebels who defied a demanding government, and even a reality TV star could be elected president.

But in a pandemic, what public health officials are pleading for is a little more conformity. Flattening the curve requires Americans to all take fairly uniform actions — wearing masks, not gathering — for the betterment of the whole of society. It isn’t a time to bristle at being “told what to do.” President-elect Joe Biden has already signaled that he intends, unlike President Trump, to follow the science and issue a national 100-day mask-wearing campaign. While we wait for the months-long rollout of a vaccine to hundreds of millions of Americans, people must fall in line with this and other public health recommendations if there’s to be any hope of beating the virus. But will they?

While it may seem unlikely that Biden and public health officials can really encourage many more Americans to follow rules, there are ways to bring Americans together to support conformity. This, in turn, could help get Americans through the last several months of the pandemic with tens of thousands of fewer lives lost.

It’s important to think carefully about the message, because there’s more than one type of conformity. The type we think about most often — self-focused conformity — describes actions taken to fit in with a group. (These can be conspicuous inactions, too, such as some Trump supporters refusing to wear masks.)

But my research with collaborator Matthew Wice, assistant professor of psychology at SUNY New Paltz, looks at others-focused conformity, what we call “benevolent conformity,” and shows how following norms or rules can benefit others.

In one study, we asked more than 300 participants to think back to a time when they saw someone conform to their group. Some participants were asked to think about an instance when someone conformed because they wanted others to like them. Others were asked to think about a time when someone conformed for others’ sake. We then asked all of our participants to report what they thought about this person whose public behavior differed from their privately held beliefs. Did this person have a strong moral character? Were they competent people? Were they kind and friendly?

While participants in our research scoffed at conformity when it was perceived as selfish, they respected and appreciated benevolent conformity, seeing it as courageous and praiseworthy. Our experiments showed that Americans found people who conform to protect others’ feelings or to maintain group harmony to be warmer, more competent, and more authentic.

This is a key lesson for Biden and for governors who seek to enforce conformity to help protect people from a deadly virus. They should emphasize that sometimes conformity takes courage. This point should be made loud and clear: In the battle against Covid-19, the courageous and commendable thing to do is to put other people first.

So when presented with the idea that following Covid-19 safety measures is “weak” or “un-American,” public health experts should flip this argument on its head: emphasize the benefits of people’s helpful actions. Wherever possible, leaders must employ the benevolent conformity Americans seem to gravitate toward and respect.

Emphasizing a strong sense of shared identity can remind Americans that the real reason for adhering to safety measures is not just to fit in, but also to protect the group to which they belong. When adhering to simple safety measures can save tens of thousands of American lives, wearing a mask is not an act of blind obedience, it is an act of patriotism. As vaccines begin to be deployed (with vaccine hesitancy still high) and the pandemic reaching new heights, this kind of messaging will be increasingly urgent to get us back on track.

Our research makes one thing clear: Americans love rule breakers, but they also hold a special place in their heart for benevolent, other-focused rule followers. If 2020 has shown us anything, it’s that sometimes, we need to conform for others’ sake.

Shai Davidai is assistant professor in the management division of Columbia Business School with expertise in the psychology of judgment and decision-making, economic inequality and social mobility, social comparisons, and zero-sum thinking. A social psychologist, his research examines people’s everyday judgments of themselves, other people, and society as a whole.

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It’s the year 2020, and scientists are still discovering new species of life on Earth. No one knows exactly how many types of life are yet undescribed in the scientific literature; estimates range from around 86 percent to as high as 99.99 percent. And even though we’re living through an age of great biodiversity loss, the scope and breadth of life on planet Earth is still revealing itself to scientists around the world.

This year, researchers at the California Academy of Sciences have described 213 new species in scientific journals: “101 ants, 22 crickets, 15 fishes, 11 geckos, 11 sea slugs, 11 flowering plants, eight beetles, eight fossil echinoderms, seven spiders, five snakes, two skinks, two aphids, two eels, one moss, one frog, one fossil amphibian, one seahorse, one fossil scallop, one sea biscuit [a.k.a. sand dollar], one fossil crinoid (or sea lily), and one coral,” the academy lists in a press release.

These species weren’t necessarily first spotted this year. Instead, they were officially described in the scientific literature as unique species, some after decades of research.

Terry Gosliner, a curator of invertebrate zoology at the California Academy of Sciences, added one species of sea slug he first saw on a dive in the Philippines 23 years ago. As a sea slug expert, he knows immediately when he’s spotted one he hasn’t seen before. “It’s like if you walk into a room, and you know, almost immediately, if there’s a person in there who you haven’t met before,” he says.

But on that first encounter decades ago, Gosliner didn’t collect a specimen that would allow for DNA analysis, which is crucial for understanding if a presumed new species is actually new to science. Plus, this particular sea slug was nocturnal. “You just happen to have a chance encounter with it on a night dive,” he says. He found a second specimen in 2010. By then, “it was like encountering an old friend that you hadn’t seen forever,” he says.

It’s taken even more time to determine that this creature — now named Hoplodoris rosans — is a truly new entry in the scientific books of life. “The easiest part is finding them,” Gosliner says of discovering new species. The hard part is the scientific work that comes next.

After finding a species, “it’s a very lengthy process after that,” he says to describe a new species. Scientists need to study the DNA, the internal anatomy and external anatomy, “so that you can make comparisons about how that species differs from all the other species that are known.” Then those discoveries have to be written up and submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.

Gosliner and his colleagues also got to name the new species. They call it Hoplodoris rosans for a few reasons. Hoplodoris is the genus of the sea slug. But its species name, rosans, is named after the rose. They chose that because, for one, there are reddish-pink spots on the underside of the body. And two: “It has in its reproductive system this very large spine that holds mates when mating that was shaped like a rose thorn,” Gosliner says.

Along with Hoplodoris rosans, researchers at the California Academy of Sciences have described this year:

A pygmy seahorse about the size of a grape, called Hippocampus nalu.

A gecko residing in the city of Guwahati, India, called Cyrtodactylus urbanus.

The first species of pipefish known to live among red algae, called Stigmatopora harastii.

A newly described flowering plant in Brazil in the Microlicia genus, Microlicia capitata.

And a new sea biscuit (sand dollar) in the Philippines, Clypeaster brigitteae.

Why scientists need to keep documenting life on Earth. And how you can, too.

It’s been a tough year full of sickness and death with the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s hopeful knowing how much there is yet to be discovered about our world. And it’s important work, too.

Between 2010 and 2020, 467 species have been declared extinct (though they might have actually gone extinct in decades prior), according to the global authority on species conservation status, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN. Others have been brought to the brink, and still more are seeing serious declines in their population numbers.

In all, the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services estimates as many as 1 million species are now at risk of extinction if we don’t act to save them; that number includes 40 percent of all amphibian species, 33 percent of corals, and around 10 percent of insects.

A species can be discovered nearly anywhere: In 2012, a new species of ant was discovered in New York City, of all places. If you’re interested in species sleuthing, Gosliner recommends using the iNaturalist app to document critters and plants you see out in the world.

There, a community of citizen scientists can help determine if what you’ve scouted is truly new. And you don’t need to find something new, per se, to contribute to science. “Just yesterday,” he told me on December 18, “on iNaturalist there was a species of nudibranch [sea slug] that was found in the tide pools just south of San Francisco, that nobody had seen for many, many years. And so that was a really exciting thing to have documented.”

To protect more species, scientists need to know they exist in the first place.

“Describing new species is really documenting biodiversity on the planet,” Gosliner says. “There’s so many areas that we may lose species before we even know that they existed. If you never knew it existed, [and] then it disappeared — that’s kind of a tragedy from my standpoint. There’s the element of the excitement of discovering something new. But also, there’s the urgency that we really need this information to be able to protect biodiversity on the planet.”

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Two highly effective Covid-19 vaccines are now being administered across the United States, and more are in the pipeline. Almost 2 million people have already received the first of two doses of these vaccines, and officials are aiming to immunize one-third of the US population by the end of March 2021.

It’s a stunning accomplishment for a disease that was barely known to the world a year ago, and it means that an end to the crisis is in sight. Yet the US remains in the worst throes of the pandemic to date, with hospitalizations and deaths continuing to break records.

Vaccines are critical in drawing down the pandemic as we know it, but it won’t be a simple return to the world before Covid-19. It will likely be a process that lasts several months, and precautions like social distancing and wearing masks will still be needed until there is widespread immunity to the virus.

“It’s a bit of a glide path in my mind toward a new normal, and a new normal that will continue to get better and better,” said Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University. “Ultimately, the mental model that I’m going for is ‘When are people going about their day and not thinking about Covid?’”

Exactly when and how this will happen hinges on several key variables relating to vaccines that scientists and health officials are still trying to sort out.

The vaccines being administered right now — the Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine — have only received emergency use authorizations, not full approval, from the Food and Drug Administration. Regulators have determined that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks for most adults at high risk of exposure, but there are still some unanswered questions, such as how long protection lasts and how well these vaccines block transmission of the virus between people.

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And beyond the vaccines themselves, how quickly and how readily people accept them can change the course of the pandemic.

How well a Covid-19 vaccine contains the pandemic depends on the answers to several key questions

The clinical trials for Covid-19 vaccines are still ongoing, and more clarity will emerge in the coming months. But for now, these remain some of the most important unknowns.

How well do vaccines prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2?

Both the Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine reported efficacies of roughly 95 percent against Covid-19 disease, meaning they protected the vast majority of recipients from getting sick enough to have disease symptoms, like loss of smell, fever, and cough.

However, Covid-19 is caused by a virus, SARS-CoV-2, that some people can carry and transmit without having any symptoms at all — whether or not they eventually end up feeling ill.

Finding the people who are carrying the virus (and preventing them from infecting others) is therefore critical to control the spread of the virus, but has proven to be a persistent obstacle during the pandemic. Currently, the main way to identify the infected is by proactively testing for the virus and, ideally, tracing who else they encountered. It’s a tedious, time-consuming process.

This is also true in vaccine clinical trials. Phase 3 trials mainly look at how well vaccines prevent disease in the real world, something that’s readily apparent when comparing the number of disease events in the vaccine group to the placebo group. It only takes 150 events or so to yield results on how well the vaccine prevents disease.

But to gauge efficacy against preventing infections, including low-grade infections that don’t generate symptoms, researchers will have to test the tens of thousands of participants in their phase 3 trial. It’s likely that a Covid-19 vaccine would reduce transmission, but it’s not clear yet by how much.

“What we know is that we’ve been seeing studies focusing specifically on efficacy with regards to severity of disease, meaning ameliorating the severity of the disease itself, but there’s still no studies that really are going to help us understand how we can certainly interrupt transmission,” said Maria Elena Bottazzi, a co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.

The companies conducting trials do plan to test their participants to see if there were any hidden infections, but it may be a while before they report their results.

That said, Moderna presented some early data showing that its vaccine does begin to reduce infections between its doses, which are spaced 28 days apart.

“There were approximately 2/3 fewer swabs that were positive in the vaccine group as compared to the placebo group at the pre-dose 2 timepoint, suggesting that some asymptomatic infections start to be prevented after the first dose,” according to Moderna’s report to the FDA. However, these results are preliminary and will require follow-up testing to see if this effect lasts longer than a few weeks.

The more that a vaccine can reduce the virus’s transmission, the more quickly a population can move toward herd immunity, the point where the virus can no longer spread easily between people. Scientists estimate that herd immunity threshold is when roughly between 60 percent and 90 percent of a population is immune to this virus, whether through a vaccine or from natural exposure. (A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that health workers in the United Kingdom exposed to SARS-CoV-2 produced protective antibodies against the virus and were protected against reinfection for at least six months.)

But vaccines might not protect every single person who gets a shot from getting infected, just like they don’t provide a 100 percent guarantee against getting sick. That means even the vaccinated will still have to wear face masks and keep their distance from others to prevent virus transmission until immunity is widespread.

How long do vaccines protect against Covid-19?

The Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech trials have shown that their vaccines start to provide protection against Covid-19 illness quickly — and that protection starts building up right after the first dose.

Whether that protection fades after a few months or a few years is unclear. And researchers can only find out by waiting and observing. That means monitoring the thousands of participants of clinical trials, as well as recipients of the vaccines in the general population, for years. Pfizer and BioNTech, as well as Moderna, have committed to actively monitoring the participants in their clinical trials for at least two years. They are also keeping an eye on people who are receiving their vaccines.

But hints on the durability of vaccine protection could arrive sooner. Looking at vaccine recipients six months or one year after they receive their injections, researchers should be able to see how many were infected with SARS-CoV-2 — and when — to get an early estimate of how quickly protection weakens.

“That would give us potentially some information for what future years will look like,” said Meagan Fitzpatrick, an assistant professor at the center for vaccine development and global health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “You will definitely get some signal, but you don’t know really for sure in a way that’s backed up by data until that amount of time passes from when the first people got their first doses.”

Longer protection would buy time for the health sector as vaccines roll out since they wouldn’t have to worry about reinfections or revaccinating people. Evidence from past coronavirus outbreaks like SARS and MERS showed that among survivors, protection for those diseases lasted for several years. But SARS-CoV-2 is a new virus, and much remains uncertain.

There’s also a chance that SARS-CoV-2 could mutate in a way that would escape the protection offered by a vaccine. However, scientists say that’s unlikely in the near term because Covid-19 vaccines target several different parts of the virus and the odds of simultaneous mutations in all of those regions are low.

But more study is needed to yield more definite answers, and the best way to reduce the likelihood of major mutations in SARS-CoV-2 is to limit its spread.

How quickly can we get the vaccine to everyone?

The United States is now in the midst of its largest vaccination campaign in history, an endeavor that’s anywhere from three to four times as big as vaccinating against seasonal flu, according to Moncef Slaoui, the scientific lead for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Operation Warp Speed vaccine program.

It’s a delicate and critical process. “How soon can we really start driving our Covid numbers low really definitely depends on rollout,” Fitzpatrick said. “A vaccine is only as good as the doses that actually get into people.”

However, the debut of Covid-19 vaccines has already hit several bumps. Some states have reported that their initial allotments of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine were cut, while the manufacturer reported that many doses have gone unclaimed.

Part of the challenge is technical constraints of the vaccines themselves. Both the Moderna and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines require maintaining cold temperatures from factories to transportation to clinics. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in particular demands ultra-cold storage at temperatures of minus 70 degrees Celsius (minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit).

Another complicating factor is simply sorting out who should get the vaccines and when. Enough doses are not immediately available for everyone, so health officials have to make delicate decisions about who to prioritize.

The vaccines available so far have to be administered as two doses spaced several weeks apart, so everyone will have to come back for a second shot. Doses have to be set aside for follow-ups and if people don’t get their second dose, they may have protection that’s less robust or less durable than expected. In a large enough population, that could erode the power of a vaccine to contain the virus.

At the same time, health officials will have to overcome vaccine hesitancy. Getting a high uptake of vaccines is critical in drawing down pandemic restrictions. And the more holdouts there are, the longer it will take. The good news is that reluctance to getting a vaccine seems to have diminished in the United States. A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 71 percent of Americans said they would likely get a Covid-19 vaccine, up from 63 percent in September.

A vaccine is not just about protecting individuals, but protecting a population as a whole. With enough people immunized, even people who haven’t received the vaccine — including those who can’t get vaccinated for health reasons — will experience a much lower risk of infection.

“If you really, really, really want to interrupt and really get rid of this pandemic, you really need high levels of [vaccine] coverage and very high levels of efficacy,” Bottazzi said.

And over the coming months, more Covid-19 vaccines will likely gain approval. That will help ease some of the supply constraints, but will add to the complexity of administering them. Each vaccine has its own storage requirements, dosing schedule, and may be best suited for different demographics.

Taken together, there’s a lot that can go wrong with distributing vaccines. But getting these steps right would mean a much faster route out of the Covid-19 crisis.

How well will the US control the spread of the virus?

In addition to vaccinating millions of people, controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is critical. Efforts to contain the virus will allow the vaccine to have a much greater impact. Vaccines could be targeted to hot spots, for instance, rather than having to push back against a national onslaught.

As mentioned earlier, curtailing the virus’s transmission also reduces the likelihood of a mutation that could render a vaccine less effective. (But if virus variants discovered in the UK that appear more transmissive spread widely in the US, that could complicate efforts of curbing spread, even if the vaccine is just as effective against these variants.)

If all goes fairly well with the logistics of vaccine distribution, it will take weeks to months for it to actually start reducing hospitalizations and fatalities from Covid-19.

A vaccine is meant to prevent illness, so it will do little for people who are already ill with Covid-19. And the SARS-CoV-2 virus can incubate in a person for up to two weeks before the individual starts to show symptoms, and it can take longer after that for them to seek treatment.

As such, there will be a lag in seeing the impacts of a vaccine across the population. But slowing the spread of the virus would make vaccines a more powerful tool to end the pandemic, and results would start to manifest much sooner. Vaccination is also going to be working in tandem with immunity people have built up from surviving infection. Almost 20 million people in the US have been infected to date. “Around 30 percent population immunity, things start slowing a little bit, especially in the places that have been hit hard,” Jha said.

Conversely, if Covid-19 continues to rage out of control, it will be much harder for a vaccine to make a difference in morbidity and mortality, and it will take even longer to see results.

We still need testing, masking, distancing, and treatments

While scientists and health experts have been elated at the speed at which Covid-19 vaccines have been developed, they’ve also been adamant that vaccines on their own are not enough to control the Covid-19 pandemic.

The existing measures for slowing Covid-19 remain just as important as they’ve ever been, if not more so, given that hospitalizations and daily deaths are continuing to mount. Tactics like wearing face masks, rigorous hand-washing, and avoiding large gatherings and close contact with others will still be needed in the coming months, even among people who have been immunized.

Treatments for Covid-19 are also critical since they are the most immediate way to reduce fatalities. Approaches like monoclonal antibodies will be needed to help people survive the illness.

Widespread testing for Covid-19 will also continue to be crucial to identify potential spreaders and to allow people in key jobs to continue working.

It’s a sliding scale between these variables. For example, better testing and tracing could allow people more freedom even if they are not immune. Or effective treatments can drastically reduce fatality rates, reducing the burden of the disease.

However, pressure on all fronts — vaccines, treatment, testing, social distancing — is what will end the crisis the soonest. “The vaccine works at a population level a lot faster if we’re introducing it into a context into which we are throwing all of our other methods to interrupt the virus,” Fitzpatrick said.

While millions of people are growing weary of all the drastic restrictions imposed by the pandemic and the efforts to contain it, keeping them up in the coming months will help ensure that the US finds the quickest and least painful way out of routines bound by Covid-19.

It’s year-end-list season. Usually, the Vox science team has some fun and compiles a year-end list of bad ideas in health and science that ought to die with the end of the year. In the past, we’ve targeted homeopathic medicine, declared it was time to end the relevance of the fatally flawed Stanford Prison Experiment, and dispelled myths about climate change. This year, though, we have only one target for intellectual demolition.

With the end of 2020, let’s leave behind the idea of using herd immunity acquired through natural infections as a means of combating the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s a lot of words to describe a simple, terrible idea: that we could end the pandemic sooner if more people — particularly young, less at-risk people — get infected with the coronavirus and develop immunity as a result.

As a response to a pandemic, the idea is unprecedented. “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in October. “It is scientifically and ethically problematic.”

And yet it held sway — at the White House, in particular.

Former White House adviser Scott Atlas (who is a neuroradiologist, not an epidemiologist) was particularly vocal about pursuing more infections. “When younger, healthier people get infected, that’s a good thing,” Atlas said in a July interview with the San Diego news station KUSI-TV. “The goal is not to eliminate all cases. That’s not rational, it’s not necessary if we just protect the people who are going to have serious complications.”

Let’s be clear: It’s not a “good thing” when young people get sick. For one, some of these young people may die, more may get severely ill, and a not-yet-understood proportion of them could suffer long-term consequences. The more people infected, the more chances for rare, horrible things to happen, like a 4-month-old developing brain swelling after testing positive for Covid-19. For that reason, among others, attempting to keep infections to only young or lower-risk people is a foolhardy game to play.

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Why building up herd immunity through natural infections is a bad idea

There’s an almost-understandable case for why some people would push for a herd immunity strategy. We are isolated from those we care about, businesses are hurting, education has suffered, and so has our mental health. What if we could just get back to some parts of normal life and contain the risks to those who are least likely to get hurt?

This thinking has proved reckless. Sweden, a country that pursued a more permissive strategy when it came to social distancing, has a much higher death rate than fellow Scandinavian countries.

And look at what happened in Manaus, Brazil: The city of around 2 million people experienced one of the most severe, unchecked Covid-19 outbreaks in the world. Researchers now estimate that between 44 and 66 percent of the city’s population was infected with the virus, which means it’s possible herd immunity has been achieved there (another estimate pegged the infection rate at 76 percent). But during its epidemic period, there were four times as many deaths as normal in Manaus for that point in the year.

More typically, the term “herd immunity” is referred to in the context of vaccination campaigns against contagious viruses such as measles. The concept helps public health officials think through the math of how many people in a population need to be vaccinated to prevent outbreaks. It’s not meant to be applied to control a pandemic through natural infection. Here are five reasons why:

1. Even if we could limit exposure to the people least likely to die of Covid-19, this group still can suffer immense consequences from the infection — such as hospitalization, long-term symptoms, organ damage, missed work, high medical bills, and yes, death.
2. Herd immunity is a very high bar to reach from natural infections. There’s no single, perfect estimate of what percentage of the US population has already been infected by the virus. But by all accounts, it’s nowhere near the figure needed for herd immunity to kick in. The CDC now estimates that there have been 91 million SARS-CoV-2 infections in the US — around 27 percent of the population (though this may be an overestimate). It would take around 60 percent of the population to achieve herd immunity. That’s a rough guess; it could be higher. So we’re about halfway there. Who wants to double the destruction already caused by this virus? In the US, more than 330,000 people have died. (Plus, herd immunity doesn’t work on a nationwide basis but a community-by-community basis. In other words, some communities are still much more vulnerable than others.)
3. Scientists don’t know how long naturally acquired immunity to the virus lasts, or how common reinfections might be. If immunity wanes and the reinfection rate is high, it will be all the more difficult to build up herd immunity.
4. By letting the pandemic rage, we risk overshooting the herd immunity threshold. Once you hit the herd immunity threshold, it doesn’t mean the pandemic is over. “All it means is that, on average, each infection causes less than one ongoing infection,” Harvard epidemiologist Bill Hanage told me. “That’s of limited use if you’ve already got a million people infected.” If each infection causes an average of 0.8 new infections, the epidemic will slow. But 0.8 isn’t zero. If a million people are infected at the time herd immunity is reached, per Hanage’s example, those already-infected people may infect 800,000 more.
5. A herd immunity strategy is likely to harm some groups more than others. There are multiple reasons someone could experience a severe case of Covid-19. It’s not just age — conditions such as diabetes and hypertension also exacerbate risk. So do societal factors including poverty, working conditions, and incarceration.

In the US, severe Covid-19 deaths have disproportionately impacted minorities and less advantaged populations. Encouraging herd immunity through coronavirus infection risks further isolating these already marginalized communities from society, since they may not feel safe in a more relaxed environment. Or, even worse, we risk sacrificing their health in the name of reaching a level of population immunity sufficient to control the virus.

Soon, herd immunity will be a good thing — because of vaccines

Thankfully, we now have a means of building up herd immunity without the risks conferred by infections: vaccines. Unlike the immunity conferred by an actual viral infection, immunity obtained via vaccine doesn’t come with the cost of sickness and death. Vaccines are safe. And while they won’t turn the pandemic around overnight, they will help end it.

We still have to do some difficult waiting. Vaccine rollouts will be slow. Throughout 2020, “herd immunity” was used as a stand-in for “let the pandemic spread.” There was also persistent and erroneous wishful thinking by some who said herd immunity had already been reached, or could be reached sooner than scientists say, or without incurring horrible losses. Yes, the economic restrictions of the pandemic were, and still are, painful. But it’s also true the government could have done more to help.

Soon, herd immunity will become a good-news phrase as we build toward it collectively — and safely — through vaccines. As the vaccines get distributed, herd immunity will develop in a controlled, ethical manner. The pandemic will wane.

And as it does, let’s not forget: The calls to build up herd immunity through infections were a terrible idea. Let’s not repeat them in the future.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the Covid-19 death rate in Sweden compared to other European countries.

Updated Thu 8:10 PM

Ardscoil Rís 1-17
St Kieran’s College 0-15

Robert Cribbin reports from Croke Park

ARDSCOIL RÍS OF Limerick captured their first ever All-Ireland senior hurling colleges title after claiming a five-point victory over Kilkenny aristocrats St Kieran’s College in Croke Park this afternoon.

Ardscoil Rís were appearing in their fourth ever final and after losing out in all three previous deciders to St Kieran’s in 2010, 2011 and 2016, Niall Moran’s side finally reversed the trend.

Kieran’s themselves were in a seventh consecutive showpiece and they were hoping to make it five wins in six, and despite Harry Shine giving them an opening minute lead, they were chasing shadows for the majority of the contest as the Limerick school were fully warranted winners.

Despite Niall O’Farrell squandering a 19th minute penalty for the Munster finalists, the youngster who was a late addition to the team caused huge problems for Kieran’s as he finished with seven points in total.

It was nip and tuck up until that point with Kieran’s leading 0-5 to 0-4 after Shine and Joe Fitzpatrick impressed early on but the final 10 minutes of the half belonged to Ardscoil Rís as they hit six points on the trot to go into the break with a commanding advantage.

Source: Tom Maher/INPHO

As they always tend to do, Kieran’s battled back and when they got within two points of their opponents with the wind at their back they appeared to be in prime position to catch the Limerick side in the final stretch.

Unlike previous years, though, it was Niall Moran’s Ardscoil Rís team who finished the better and when David Kennedy shot past Alan Dunphy in the 55th minute for the game’s only goal, celebrations could begin in earnest as they powered to a 1-17 to 0-15 success.

Scorers for Ardscoil Ris – Niall O’Farrell (0-7, 0-4f, 0-1 65), David Kennedy (1-3), Shane O’Brien (0-4), Rian O’Byrne, Jack Golden, Dylan Lynch (0-1 each).

Scorers for St Kieran’s College – Harry Shine (0-4, 0-2f), Joe Fitzpatrick (0-4, 0-1f), Ben Whitty (0-3, 0-1 65), James Carroll, Donagh Murphy, Padraig Naddy, Paddy Langton (0-1each).

Ardscoil Ris – Seimi Gully; Evan O’Leary, John Fitzgerald, Colm Flynn; Michael Gavin, Cian Scully, Vince Harrington; JJ Carey, Rian O’Byrne; Shane O’Brien, Niall O’Farrell, Jack Golden; Brian O’Keeffe, Oisin O’Farrell, David Kennedy. Subs: Dylan Lynch for Flynn 48 mins, Diarmuid Stritch for O’Byrne 58 mins, Sean McMahon for O’ Keeffe 59 mins.

St Kieran’s College- Alan Dunphy; Jack Butler, Adam O’Connor, Paddy Langton; Padraig Lennon, Joe Fitzpatrick, Conor Cody; James Carroll, Killian Doyle, Ted Dunne, Harry Shine, Ben Whitty, Donagh Murphy, Luke Connellan, Padraig Naddy. Subs: Anthony Ireland Wall for Naddy 41 mins, Alex Sheridan for Murphy 51 mins, Nick Doheny for Dunne 56 mins.

Referee – Liam Gordon (Galway)

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There’s a growing consensus in the climate change community that the key to transitioning the US economy from fossil fuels is to electrify everything — shift the electricity grid over to carbon-free power and shift other big polluting sectors like transportation and heating over to electricity.

When it comes to transportation, electrification is going to be tricky. Not long ago, the consensus was that the cost and power limitations of batteries would make it difficult to fully electrify anything larger than passenger vehicles.

But batteries have been progressing in leaps and bounds. Full electrification is still beyond the reach of huge vehicles, the long-distance airliners and container ships, but recently it has become a possibility for a large and significant category of vehicles in the middle: medium- and heavy-duty trucks and buses.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, just 6 percent of the registered vehicles on US roads in 2018 were medium- and heavy-duty, but they were responsible for 23 percent of transportation-sector greenhouse gas emissions (about 7 percent of total US emissions).

Since they mostly run on diesel engines, they also produce enormous amounts of air and noise pollution, which fall disproportionately on low-income and communities of color that may live closer to highways and are more likely to use buses. Long-haul trucks alone, while responsible for less than 6 percent of vehicle miles traveled on US highways, produce about 40 percent of its particulate pollution and 55 percent of its nitrogen oxides.

The global toll is immense: 180,000 deaths a year from diesel pollution.

That’s where medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks (MHDETs) come in. They are quiet, emit zero tailpipe pollution, and draw power from an increasingly clean electricity grid. An impossible dream a decade ago, they are now the subject of fierce competition from big automakers like Daimler, Volvo, VW, and Tesla, with multiple models slated to hit the road in coming years.

As countries across the world start cracking down on carbon emissions — and cities ramp up their fight against diesel pollution — there’s going to be an enormous market for clean alternatives. According to the Department of Transportation, there are over 14 million large trucks and buses on US roads. Wood Mackenzie expects the number of electric trucks on US roads to rise from 2,000 in 2019 to more than 54,000 by 2025, around 27 times growth. The research firm IDTechEx expects the MHDET market to reach $47 billion by 2030.

Demand is partly being driven by big fleet owners like Amazon, Walmart, Ikea, Anheuser-Busch, and Pepsi, which are transitioning to MHDETs. (Amazon recently ordered 100,000 electric delivery vans.)

Policymakers are helping, too. In July, governors of 15 states signed a memorandum agreeing to set up a MHDET task force, develop an action plan, and jointly “strive to make sales of all new medium- and heavy-duty vehicles in our jurisdictions zero emission vehicles by no later than 2050,” and in the interim, “strive to make at least 30 percent of all new medium- and heavy-duty vehicle sales in our jurisdictions zero emission vehicles by no later than 2030.” New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, and other cities are already exploring electric buses.

And don’t forget Jeff Bezos. One of his big climate gifts was $100 million over five years to the World Resources Institute, which will use it in part on a program to electrify school buses. Before him was the Hewlett Foundation’s 2020 Zero Emission Road Freight Strategy 2020-2025.

MHDETs are gaining momentum and there is every reason to believe that they will come to dominate the market. But societies do not have to simply sit back, watch markets, cross their fingers, and hope for the best. They can accelerate the spread of MHDETs — and their associated health and climate benefits — by targeting the many barriers that remain in a smart, proactive way.

To get a better sense of those barriers and opportunities, let’s look at two reports that were recently released on the subject, one from the Electrification Coalition (a collection of businesses and nonprofits) and one from the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Both focus on the challenges of electrifying MHDETs and how to overcome them.

The total cost of fleet electrification remains high

The purchasers of big buses and trucks are not typically buying single vehicles. They are almost all managers of fleets of vehicles. So the question of whether to electrify goes beyond whether the next truck might be cheaper electric. Electrifying a fleet is a big, complicated process that involves buying and installing new charging infrastructure and changing operational procedures, in the face of considerable uncertainty and risk.

EDF offers a framework that tries to pull all these costs and risks together into a single metric: the total cost of electrification (TCE). TCE goes beyond the conventional metric of total cost of ownership (TCO), meant to be inclusive of capital, operations, and infrastructure costs, to include less quantifiable social, operational, and even psychological costs.

So what are these barriers to MHDETs? The Electrification Coalition identifies nine:

1. Higher upfront vehicle costs and associated tariffs

Several surveys have found that the higher upfront costs associated with fleet electrification — not only the vehicles but the associated infrastructure — are the primary deterrent for fleet managers. And upfront costs are higher today, though that is changing. Bloomberg New Energy Finance expects medium-duty EVs to reach cost parity by 2025 and heavy-duty EVs by 2030.

Here’s a graph from the Hewlett Foundation showing when TCO parity will be reached by various kinds of electric trucks. Note that all classes of EV trucks will be cheaper on a TCO basis by 2030:

In addition, new heavy-duty trucks face a steep (12 percent) federal excise tax, which is even more on the higher-price EVs.

“The near-term higher upfront costs associated with MHDETs are likely to remain a substantial barrier to fleets for the next five to 10 years,” the Coalition writes.

2. Costly and complex charging infrastructure processes

Fleet managers are daunted by the complicated considerations involved in determining how much charging infrastructure is needed to support a fleet of MHDETs, finding a way to pay for it, and then fighting through the siting, permitting, and interconnecting hassles.

3. Early market and limited model availability versus limited fleet demand

Because there hasn’t been much regulatory pressure and MHDETs are relatively new and untested, fleet managers have been wary and demand has been low; because demand has been low, there are limited models and options available. (This should change soon as models roll out in coming years.)

4. Entrenched market advantages of diesel trucks

Diesel has been playing a big role in commercial transportation for a century; consequently, the vehicles, supply chains, and service networks are well-developed. MHDETs are newer and still trying to work all that stuff out.

5. Commercial and industrial electricity rate structures not aligned to charging needs

On average, electricity is a cheaper fuel than gas or diesel, but that cost advantage can be eroded or erased by bad rate design, with fixed rates or high peak charges.

6. Lack of verified data on total cost of ownership and performance specifications

Because there aren’t that many MHDETs on the road, and pre-production models don’t release their specs, it can be difficult for fleet managers to verify whether particular MHDETs can meet their fleet’s operational needs.

7. Limited availability of certified service centers and technicians

Again, because this is nascent technology, there aren’t many support services and trained technicians — that’s a major problem when it comes to these big vehicles because they tend to be used intensely and require continual support.

8. Concerns with grid resiliency

As more fleets electrify, there are greater concerns about the pressure put on electrical infrastructure that is in some cases already under stress, especially in congested areas. “Without proactive evaluation and investment to support these potential grid and generation upgrades,” the Coalition writes, “the transition to electrified freight could see significant delays and infrastructure impediments.”

9. Antiquated vehicle and facility ownership structures

Many fleet operators use leased facilities that may not have the infrastructure to handle electrification, and even if they can persuade the owners to allow upgrades, they have little incentive to take on all the costs for a property they don’t own. The cost of facility upgrades needs to be shared, perhaps with utilities as well.