Hopes
for vaccine breathrough
If there is a breakthrough, we’ll have to decide “who gets
the vaccine first. Frontline health-care
workers will have priority, but deciding which high-risk groups (the elderly,
pregnant women, grocery clerks) come next is fraught with ethical dilemmas and
ripe for political power plays.” Then there’s the worry that the wealthy or politically
connected will jump the line, as they did with Covid-19 tests. If the
administration’s ham-fisted distribution of ventilators and medical masks is
any guide, this could get ugly fast.
--Sarah
Owermohle in Politico.com
Covid-19’s
possible legacy
The coronavirus has already had a huge and potentially
enduring impact on everyday life. Our work and social lives have gone virtual,
with even G-7 leaders conducting their meetings via videoconferencing. Movie
studios, gyms, musicians, and karaoke bars are streaming their content straight
into our homes. The outbreak has revived impassioned debates about the U.S.
health-care system, possibly offering a boon for those in favor of universal
coverage. And it may have an even wider geopolitical legacy. The Spanish Flu
and the economic depression that followed led to a wave of nationalism,
authoritarianism, and another world war. Science journalist Laura Spinney says the
same could happen in the aftermath of the coronavirus, reversing the tide of
globalization and fueling xenophobia at a time when countries should be united
sgainst a common viral enemy. “We’ve forgotten a lot of the lessons that we
learned after the Spanish Flu and other pandemics,” Spinney says. “We may be
about to learn them again.”
--The Week
Cities: Will the great exodus be permanent?
*****“Get me out of here!” That’s
the cry of many residents of America’s biggest cities as they respond to the
coronavirus pandemic by loading up their SUVs and heading for the hills. Real
estate brokers say they’ve had a surge in requests from city dwellers looking
for rentals elsewhere, and in New York City alone, the data shows that at least
420,000 have moved out—mostly from the wealthier ZIP codes. A national poll
found one-third of city folk are mulling a move to the suburbs, small towns, or
rural areas. College professor Lee-Sean Huang, 39, has lived in New York City
for 14 years, but grew weary of being caged in a small apartment as lockdowns
shuttered the restaurants, bars, clubs and cultural venues that made city life
worthwhile. Now that he can work remotely, he’s moved to a rental 90 miles away
on eastern Long Island. “It’s a shift in priorities,” he said, “to having
space.”
--Jessica Menton, USAToday.com
*****Big cities such as New York,
Los Angeles, and Chicago had already been losing population before the pandemic. Now Americans may have reached “a turning
point” in where most prefer to live. Many workers have been liberated from
offices, and employers may not require them to come back. Workers who’ve
temporarily relocated to smaller towns are finding they like the space, access
to nature, and cheaper cost of living. So why return? As Silicon Valley venture
capitalist Balaji Srinivasan put it in a pithy tweet, “Sell city, buy country.”
--Parag Khanna and Kailash Prasad, Politico.com
*****History suggests they’ll be
back, After 9/11, 4,500 people fled Lower Manhattan, which was shrouded in the
twin towers’ toxic dust. But residents returned in droves in the ensuing years
amid a housing boom in Lower Manhattan.
-- Catherine Schoichet and Athena
Jones, CNN.com
*****Disease outbreaks don’t end
cities, but they do transform them. The fear that “bad air” caused malaria
inspired New York’s Central Park and Boston’s Emerald Necklace. Already,
Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland have turned miles of roads “into public
promenades.” This is smart not just now, but permanently. More wide-open public
spaces will enhance the health, welfare, and equality of our cities for
decades to come.
--Nicholas de Monchaux, New York
Times
The ‘ebitdac’ profit fiction
Some companies are
tweaking their earnings reports to include profits they would have made without
the pandemic, Many
corporations have long reported “ebitda”—earnings before interest, tax,
depreciation, and amortization. Now they are adding “coronavirus.” A
Chicago-based manufacturer, Azek, raised $325 million of junk bonds and
“included a term that would allow it to add back ‘lost earnings’ as a result of
Covid in the future.” Don’t be fooled by the rosy “ebitdac” figures, said one
adviser. “These revenues will never come back,” she said. “It’s fiction.”
--Nikou Asgari, Financial Times
The infodemic and
the 5G theory
One of the most popular conspiracy
theories holds that the pandemic was actually caused by radio waves from that
new mobile technology, noting that it was deployed in Wuhan shortly before the
outbreak. In Britain, arsonists torched at least 20 cellphone towers and
engineers have been harassed. In one clip, viewed more than 2 million times, a
British woman asks telecom engineers why they are laying what she believes to
be 5G cables, saying the cables are going to “kill everyone.” In her video,
book, and tweets, Mikovits promotes even more bizarre ideas, including that
sheltering in place, washing your hands, and wearing a mask can increase
your likelihood of getting Covid-19. These protective measures, she says, are
“literally killing people.” In the scientific community, Mikovits is known as a
quack who was fired from a research institute and arrested for stealing
equipment. But in the social media era, said Renée DiResta, who studies
disinformation at the Stanford Internet Observatory, what millions of people
believe “is essentially determined by whoever runs the best marketing
campaign.”
--The Week
The
rental crisis Wall Street loves
The next housing crisis is already here. As tenants and landlords wrangle over next
month’s rent, an approaching avalanche of evictions threatens to bury them
both. Half of the 43 million rental units in the U.S. are owned by small
businesses, and their margins are dangerously thin. Only about nine cents for
every $1 in rent gets returned to the owner, with the rest going toward the
mortgage, property taxes, and the salaries of caretakers and maintenance
workers. Their fate is tied to renters now urgently focused on their own
self-preservation. Congress has yet to assist renters beyond the $1,200
stimulus checks and beefed-up unemployment benefits. But without a national
rental-market bailout, the economic pain is likely to spread as efficiently as
the virus that caused it. Lenders will be caught up as “collateral damage,”
with defaults on mortgages predicted to double from the last recession, and
cities will lose crucial property tax payments. Renters might not shed a tear
now. But if rent strikes and bans on evictions persist, smaller investors could
be forced to sell their properties. Wall Street firms with deeper pockets will be waiting to pounce—in many cases, ready to squeeze struggling renters
even harder, or push them out in favor of wealthier occupants.
--Prashant Gopal and Oshrat Carmiel, Bloomberg
Businessweek
Accepting incompetence as normal
During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, 30 U.S. newspapers urged
President Bill Clinton to resign. President Richard Nixon faced widespread
calls for his resignation for months before he finally gave in. With 84,000
Americans dead in just two months from a virus President Trump kept insisting
would just “go away,” and the economy collapsing, why aren’t there newspaper
editorials and major political figures clamoring for him to resign and leave
the leadership of the country in more competent hands? Americans seem to have
developed “a high tolerance for failure”—indeed, a weary expectation that
political and business leaders will make catastrophic errors. In recent years,
we’ve endured 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2008 financial meltdown, the Boeing 737
Max debacle, and Russian election interference. Trump’s epic mishandling of the
coronavirus pandemic has been even more costly, with far higher death tolls
than any other nation by far and no end in sight. But his shamelessness—his
unwillingness to express contrition—seems to have become a kind of shield. He
brazenly insists he has “no responsibility at all”—and people just wince. “The
silence is yet another indication of how warped our politics has become.”
--Michael Steinberger, The Atlantic,com
Extreme-heat living
By 2070, as many as 3 billion people—a third of the world’s
population—will likely live in areas considered too hot for humans. That’s the
conclusion of a new study that analyzed data on historical global temperature and
population trends, reports. Researchers found that for the past 6,000 years,
humans, crops and livestock have thrived best in a “climatic envelope” where
mean average temperatures are between 51.7 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Fewer
than 25 million people, most of them in Saharan Africa, live in areas with
extreme heat—defined as mean annual temperatures above 84 degrees. But the
researchers found that if global warming continues on its current trajectory,
such extreme heat would be felt in a much larger swath of Africa, as well as
parts of India, the Middle East, South America, Southeast Asia, and Australia.
Many of these areas are currently experiencing rapid population growth, the
researchers note, and billions of residents could head north as the mercury
rises. “The people,” says study co-author Marten Scheffer, of the Santa Fe
Institute and Wageningen University in the Netherlands, “won’t stay where the
trouble is.”
--Washington Post
Sniff test for brain injuries
Scientists at Cambridge University have found a simple way to
determine whether unresponsive patients with severe brain injuries are likely
to recover: wafting the scent of shampoo or rotten fish under their nose. Smell
may be a good indicator of consciousness, because the olfactory system has a
direct link to the brain. The researchers presented the scents to 43 patients
who showed zero or minimal awareness of their surroundings, and measured how
much air, if any, the patient inhaled. Every patient in a vegetative state who
sniffed at the smells later transitioned to a “minimally conscious state,”
having periods where they showed signs of awareness or responded to commands.
About one third of the patients who did not sniff also eventually regained some
consciousness. Overall, 91 percent of those who responded to the smell test
were still alive 3½ years later, compared with 63 percent of those who didn’t.
“In some cases this was the only sign that their brain was going to recover,”
study leader Anat Arzi tells The Times (U.K.). “We saw it days, weeks,
and even months before any other signs.”
--The Week
