We have to accept some risk of Covid-19
There’s a growing consensus among health experts: Covid-19 may never go away. We’ll likely always have some coronavirus out there, infecting people and, hopefully only in rare cases, getting them seriously ill. The realistic goal is to defang the virus — make it less deadly — not eliminate it entirely. This is not a surrender…
Why it’s so hard to be a nurse in America, according to two nurses
Last month, at the start of a fourth Covid-19 wave in the US, a nurse in a Seattle-area intensive-care unit announced her resignation on Twitter. “No amount of money could convince me to stay on as a bedside ICU nurse right now,” she wrote. “I can’t continue to live with the toll on my body…
Astronomers were skeptical about dark matter — until Vera Rubin came along
Vera Rubin didn’t “discover” dark matter, but she put it on the map. Dark matter is a wild concept. It’s the idea that some mind-boggling percentage of all the matter in the universe may be invisible, and wholly unlike the matter that makes up Earth. Rubin is celebrated because she forced much of the astronomy…
Solar farms are often bad for biodiversity — but they don’t have to be
Every several years — sometimes just once a decade — when the rains come in just the right amounts and at just the right times, rare flowers speckle the Mojave Desert in California. Some, like the Barstow woolly sunflower, emerge from plants no larger than a thumbnail. They spring forth from seeds that have persisted…
What we actually know about the vaccines and the delta variant
The Covid-19 pandemic has changed, and with it, so has the effectiveness of the vaccines. The bottom line remains the same: The mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna that are most prevalent in the US are still quite effective in preventing any illness from the novel coronavirus, and extremely effective in preventing the kind of…
What full FDA approval for Covid-19 vaccines really means
Nearly nine months after the first Americans received their shots, the Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration for people 16 and older on Monday. This could help increase the number of people willing to get vaccines and make it easier to compel those who are less willing —…
The lab leak hypothesis — true or not — should teach us a lesson
The origins of the novel coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic remain a mystery. US intelligence agencies have now completed a 90-day probe into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, but their classified findings, according to the New York Times, were inconclusive as to whether the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, or made a…
One of the worst public health dangers of the past century has finally been eradicated
On Monday, the United Nations announced an environmental and public health milestone: the end of the use of leaded gasoline in automobiles and road vehicles worldwide. The last holdout was Algeria, which had large stockpiles of leaded gasoline; in July, those stockpiles ran out, and Algeria has now made the transition to unleaded gasoline. Lead…
What an enormous global study can tell us about feeling better during the pandemic
During the pandemic, I’ve spent a lot of time alone. I live by myself. I work from home. At times, I experienced fits of fidgetiness and restlessness, contributing to feelings of burnout. Here’s what helped: reappraising the situation. What I was feeling was isolation, and the loneliness that comes with it. Instead of letting it…
“Back to normal” puts us back on the path to climate catastrophe
The Covid-19 pandemic upended daily life so drastically that there was a moment when it seemed to be making a dent in the climate crisis. Rush-hour traffic disappeared, global travel slowed to a crawl, and the resulting economic tailspin sent energy-related pollution plummeting almost 6 percent globally. This kind of decline in pollution is unprecedented…