Education – Page 20 – The Tarbabys Blog

Republicans Are Right: One Party Is ‘Anti-Family and Anti-Kid’

The New York Times – Opinion

Republicans Are Right: One Party Is ‘Anti-Family and Anti-Kid’

By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist – August 24, 2024

A photograph of a small child in a light blue suit holding the hand of a person in a darker suit. They are seen from behind. — Credit…Jamie Lee Taete for The New York Times

In attacking Democrats and Kamala Harris, Republicans have been making a legitimate point: One of our major political parties has worked to undermine America’s families.

The problem? While neither party has done enough to support families and children, the one that is failing most egregiously is — not surprisingly — the one led by the thrice-married tycoon who tangled with a porn star, boasted about grabbing women by the genitals and was found by a jury to have committed sexual assault.

You’d think that would make it awkward for the Republican Party to preach family values. But with the same chutzpah with which Donald Trump reportedly marched into a dressing room where teenage girls were half-naked, the G.O.P. claims that it’s the Democrats who betray family values.

“The rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country,” JD Vance said in 2021. Pressed on those remarks last month, he went further in a conversation with Megyn Kelly, saying that Democrats “have become anti-family and anti-kid.”

This is gibberish. Children are more likely to be poor, to die young and to drop out of high school in red states than in blue states. The states with the highest divorce rates are mostly Republican, and with some exceptions like Utah, it’s in red states that babies are more likely to be born to unmarried mothers (partly because of lack of access to reliable contraception).

One of President Biden’s greatest achievements was to cut the child poverty rate by almost half, largely with the refundable child tax credit. Then Republicans killed the program, sending child poverty soaring again.

Can anything be more anti-child?

Well, maybe our firearms policy is. Guns are the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers, largely because of Republican intransigence and refusal to pass meaningful gun safety laws.

It’s because of the G.O.P. that the United States is one of only a few countries in the world without guaranteed paid maternity leave. Republicans fought universal health care and resisted the expansion of Medicaid; that’s one reason a child in the United States is three times as likely to die by the age of 5 as a child in, say, Slovenia or Estonia.

Think of it this way: We’d be saving the life of one American child between the ages of 1 and 5 every three hours if we had the same child mortality level as Norway or Finland.

Project 2025, a blueprint for a Trump administration that Trump is frantically trying to disavow, would make things worse. It would end Head Start, a lifeline for low-income children, and would dismantle the Department of Education.

“My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” Trump posted on Friday. But even putting aside abortion rights, Republican extremism has led to obstacles to in vitro fertilization, especially after an Alabama court ruled that a frozen embryo must be considered a child. The Southern Baptist Convention, a bastion of support for Trump, this summer criticized I.V.F.

Vance has supported a watered-down bill that he says protects I.V.F., but Republican senators blocked stronger legislation to defend I.V.F. fertility treatments and expand access. They are leaving hanging so many of the one in seven women who have trouble conceiving or sustaining a pregnancy.

Can anything be more anti-family?

Look, I’ve repeatedly argued that growing up in a two-parent household is the one privilege that liberals ignore, that the left wrongly demonized Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his emphasis on family structure and that Democrats can do more to remove marriage penalties and bolster opportunities for children.

I’m troubled by the collapse of marriage in America’s working class — more than 70 percent of Americans without a high school diploma are unmarried. If we care about child poverty, we must face the reality that households headed by single moms are five times as likely to live in poverty as those with married couples. So concerns about family and children are legitimate, and Democrats should do better.

But for Republicans to blame Democrats is ludicrous, for the G.O.P. has seemingly gone out of its way to undermine families and children.

Union membership among men raises their marriage rates, for example, apparently because they then earn more money and become more stable and appealing as partners. But Republicans have worked for decades to undermine unions.

Likewise, one way to raise marriage rates may be to help teenage girls avoid pregnancy; then they may be more likely to marry in their 20s. But Republicans have often been suspicious of comprehensive sex education and have tried to defund Title X family-planning programs, and it’s no accident that the states with the highest rates of births to teenage mothers are all red states.

Republicans like the House speaker, Mike Johnson, object to no-fault divorce laws, which make it straightforward for couples to obtain divorces. They claim this is a pro-family stance. (Trump, understandably, appears more sympathetic to divorce.) But the evidence is overwhelming that before easy access to divorce, large numbers of women were trapped in violent marriages that terrorized them and their children.

One careful study by the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that the introduction of no-fault divorce in America was associated with about a 20 percent reduction in female suicides, at least a 25 percent reduction in wife-beating and an apparent decline in husbands murdering wives.

Is it really pro-family to increase the number of moms who are beaten and murdered?

I’m glad Republicans are squawking about the challenges facing families and children. But if Trump, Vance and other Republicans want to blame those most responsible for the plight of families and children in America today, they should look in the mirror and hang their heads in shame.

The Christian Persecution Narrative Rings Hollow

The New York Times – Opinion

The Christian Persecution Narrative Rings Hollow

By David French, Opinion Columnist – August 25, 2024

Students, seen from behind, bow their heads in prayer in a classroom in Texas in 1962. — Credit…Bettmann/Getty Images

This June, I was invited on a friend’s podcast to answer a question I’ve been asked over and over again in the Trump era. Are Christians really persecuted in the United States of America? Millions of my fellow evangelicals believe we are, or they believe we’re one election away from a crackdown. This sense of dread and despair helps tie conservative Christians, people who center their lives on the church and the institutions of the church, to Donald Trump — the man they believe will fight to keep faith alive.

As I told my friend, the short answer is no, not by any meaningful historical definition of persecution. American Christians enjoy an immense amount of liberty and power.

But that’s not the only answer. American history tells the story of two competing factions that possess very different visions of the role of faith in American public life. Both of them torment each other, and both of them have made constitutional mistakes that have triggered deep cultural conflict.

One of the most valuable and humbling experiences in life is to experience an American community as part of the in-group and as part of the out-group. I spent most of my life living in the cultural and political center of American evangelical Christianity, but in the past nine years I’ve been relentlessly pushed to the periphery. The process has been painful. Even so, I’m grateful for my new perspective.

When you’re inside evangelicalism, Christian media is full of stories of Christians under threat — of universities discriminating against Christian student groups, of a Catholic foster care agency denied city contracts because of its stance on marriage or of churches that faced discriminatory treatment during Covid, when secular gatherings were often privileged over religious worship.

Combine those stories with the personal tales of Christians who faced death threats, intimidation and online harassment for their views, and it’s easy to tell a story of American backsliding — a nation that once respected or even revered Christianity now persecutes Christians. If the left is angry at conservatives for seeking the protection of a man like Trump, then it has only itself to blame.

But when you’re pushed outside evangelicalism, the world starts to look very different. You see conservative Christians attacking the fundamental freedoms of their opponents. Red-state legislatures pass laws restricting the free speech of progressives and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Christian school board members attempt to restrict access to books in the name of their own moral norms. Other conservatives want to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, to bring legal recognition of same-sex marriages to an end.

Combine those stories with personal tales of progressives and other dissenters experiencing threats from and intimidation by conservative Christians, and you begin to see why the Christian persecution narrative rings hollow. And if conservative Christians are angry at progressive Americans for believing they are hateful hypocrites, then they have only themselves to blame.

After living inside and outside conservative evangelicalism, I have a different view. While injustice is real, the Christian persecution narrative is fundamentally false. America isn’t persecuting Christians; it’s living with the fallout of two consequential constitutional mistakes that distort our politics and damage our culture.

First, for most of American history, courts underenforced the establishment clause of the First Amendment. It wasn’t even held clearly applicable to the states until 1947. Americans lived under what my colleague Ross Douthat calls the “soft hegemony of American Protestantism.” It was “soft” in part because America never possessed a national church on par with European establishments, but it was certainly hard enough to mandate Bible readings and prayer in schools and to pass a host of explicitly anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments that were intended to blunt Catholic influence in the United States.

This soft hegemony wasn’t constitutionally or culturally sustainable. Mandating Protestant Scripture readings is ultimately incompatible with a First Amendment that doesn’t permit the state to privilege any particular sect or denomination. Culturally, the process of diversification and secularization makes any specific religious hegemony impossible. There simply aren’t a sufficient number of Americans of any single faith tradition to dominate American life.

In the 1960s the Warren court began dismantling the soft Protestant establishment by blocking school prayer and Scripture reading. A series of cases limited the power of the state to express a religious point of view. But then state and local governments overcorrected. They overenforced the establishment clause and violated the free speech and free exercise clauses by taking aim at private religious expression.

The desire to disentangle church and state led to a search-and-destroy approach to religious expression in public institutions. Public schools and public colleges denied religious organizations equal access to public facilities. States and public colleges denied religious institutions equal access to public funds.

I started my legal career in 1994, when equal access was very much in doubt. I spent the better part of two decades filing lawsuit after lawsuit that made essentially the same claim: State actors must treat religious speech the same as they treat secular speech. The proper interplay between the free exercise clause and the establishment clause ought to mean that private religious speech should neither be favored nor disfavored by the government. The state can’t run the church, and the church can’t run the state.

The Supreme Court has spent much of the past two decades correcting the overcorrection that began in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, religious liberty proponents haven’t lost a significant Supreme Court case in 14 years. During that time, the court has established (often through supermajorities that include justices from the left and the right) that people of faith enjoy equal access to school facilities, equal access to public funds (including tuition assistance to fund private religious education) and extraordinary independence from nondiscrimination laws that would otherwise interfere with the hiring and firing of ministerial employees.

Conservative and liberal justices have created a different, sustainable equilibrium, but the religious liberty culture war rages on anyway — in part because millions of Americans don’t want to strike a balance. They actually prefer domination to accommodation. Many conservative evangelicals miss the old Protestant establishment, and they want it back. This is part of the impulse behind the recent Ten Commandments law in Louisiana, for example, or the recent effort in Oklahoma to establish a religious charter school, a public school run by the Catholic Church.

Combine these efforts at religious establishment with red-state legislation aimed at progressive and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, and one could fairly assert that Christians are persecuting their opponents.

But there’s more to it than that. There are secular Americans who do take aim at Christian expression and at Christian institutions. They don’t want separation of church and state so much as they seek regulation of the church by the state, to push the church into conformance with a secular political ideology.

Then both sides tear into each other with an inexcusable level of fury and malice. When I was representing conservative Christian organizations, I could regale Christian audiences with stories of extreme secular intolerance, and I never ran out of material — especially when discussing religious liberty on college campuses.

Then conservative evangelicalism ejected me from its ranks, and I experienced a level of anger and malice that eclipsed anything I experienced from the most vitriolic secular progressives. I started to hear from others who’d experienced the same thing, and my eyes opened. Christians are wrecking lives in the name of righteousness.

Every culture war battle has casualties. Take a 2022 Supreme Court case about a praying high school football coach. He was seeking the right to pray on the field, and he won. The Supreme Court said his personal prayer was constitutionally protected. But that’s not the entire story.

Employees in the coach’s school district endured their own ordeal. I was struck by the opening sentence of an essay I read by a former teacher in the district: “‘That was another death threat,’ our high school secretary said to me after hanging up the phone.” A legal dispute isn’t proof of persecution, but threats most definitely count.

Christians who bemoan cultural hostility to their faith should be humbled by a sad reality. When it comes to inflicting pain on their political adversaries, conservative Christians often give worse than they get.

David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.”

A stark social divide: Adults without a college degree more likely to have no close friends, survey finds

NBC News

A stark social divide: Adults without a college degree more likely to have no close friends, survey finds

Aria Bendix – August 25, 2024

People swim at the Astoria Pool on the opening day (Spencer Platt / Getty Images) — For those without a college degree, there may be fewer opportunities to engage in social activities.

The Summary

In a survey, nearly a quarter of U.S. adults without a college degree said they had no close friends.
People without a college degree also reported less participation in social activities like going to parks or restaurants than college-educated adults.
The findings come amid a documented rise in loneliness and social isolation.

Nearly all U.S. adults used to have close friends.

In 1990, the share of the population that said they didn’t was low and roughly the same no matter one’s education level: just 2% for people with college degrees and 3% for those without.

But a recent survey suggests that share has risen overall, particularly among those who did not graduate college — creating a kind of class divide in people’s level of social engagement and connection. Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults with a high school diploma or lower education level said they had no close friends. The number was even higher for Black adults in that group: 35%.

Just 10% of those with a college degree said the same.

The findings come from a survey of around 6,600 adults conducted by the Survey Center on American Life, a nonprofit that researches how people’s lives are shaped by culture, politics and technology.

“Our social fabric seems to have two layers now,” said Daniel Cox, the center’s director and a co-author of a report published this week summarizing the findings. “It has one for college-educated folks that seems to be relatively intact, and then one for those without college degrees, which seems to be in tatters.”

The findings come amid a documented rise in social isolation nationwide. Around 30% of adults say they’ve felt lonely at least once per week over the past year, and 10% say they’re lonely every day, according to a January poll from the American Psychiatric Association.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic last year, citing its links to heart disease, stroke, dementia and premature death. San Mateo County, California, which includes part of Silicon Valley, subsequently declared a public health emergency over high rates of loneliness among residents.

“There’s been considerable decline and atrophy in American social connection,” said Cox, who is also a senior fellow of polling and public opinion at the conservative Washington think tank American Enterprise Institute, adding that although the pandemic helped bring the issue to light, “this decline had gone on for decades before.”

He offered a few ideas that might explain the trend. One is that being alone is less boring now, thanks to video games and streaming services, so people may be less likely to join social groups or spend time with friends or family. Another is that for those without a college degree, there are fewer opportunities to engage in social activities, perhaps because their access to free public spaces is more limited or they lack the time or money to frequent venues like bars and restaurants.

Cox’s survey found that college-educated adults were more likely to go to restaurants or coffee shops and to strike up conversations with neighbors, compared to people without a college degree. They were also more likely to be members of a neighborhood association, sports league or hobby group (like a book club or regular poker game).

“We put so much of the onus of creating and maintaining friends on individuals instead of institutions,” Cox said. “We’ve shifted all the work, all the effort, onto individuals who now have to coordinate, organize, schedule their social engagements, as opposed to having them occur organically out of the things that they’re already doing.”

People with a college degree were also more likely to be part of a labor union or to regularly attend church, the survey found — two venues that have historically given people with less formal education opportunities to socialize.

The survey even found an educational divide when it comes to free public venues like libraries and parks. Nearly 4 in 10 college-educated adults said they had visited a park or community garden at least once a month in the past year, compared to less than a quarter of those without a college education. And nearly half of college graduates said they had visited a library at least a few times in the past year, compared with a quarter of adults with a high school diploma or less.

“The places that are legitimately free — community centers and libraries — their hours of operation aren’t regular enough for a lot of folks,” Cox said. “Many of those places are closed in the evenings, and then there’s just not enough of them to meet the need.”

Part of the issue may have to do with geography: A 2022 study found that neighborhoods with higher poverty rates have fewer public gathering spaces. And many communities don’t have the money to invest in their public spaces, Cox said.

Limited free time and poor access to transportation likely play a role, as well, said Adam Roth, an assistant professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University, who wasn’t involved in the survey.

“If you live out in the suburbs and you have to change buses or trains or get in your car and do that however-long commute, that is going to be a prohibitive factor,” Roth said.

The story isn’t entirely bleak, though. A collection of surveys from 2022 and 2023 found that even though people in the U.S. desired to be closer to their friends, less than 3% reported having no friends at all. The surveys looked at both close friendships and casual acquaintances.

“Our data didn’t really spell doom and gloom,” said Amanda Holmstrom, a communication professor at Michigan State University who conducted that research. “People have friends — they feel like they don’t necessarily have the time to nurture those friends.”

Casual friendships still offer benefits, of course. Roth said that people report better psychological well-being on days when they have more interactions with a wider variety of people, including ones they barely know. Social interactions in general help reduce or stave off symptoms of anxiety and depression. Face-to-face interactions and engagement in community events have even been linked to lower levels of inflammation.

“The bottom line is, all types of social interactions and relationships matter, particularly for health and well-being,” Roth said. “But the probability of actually experiencing certain types of social interactions is at least partially dependent on the communities we live in.”

Putin Is Getting Rattled

The New York Times

Putin Is Getting Rattled

By Serge Schmemann – August 23, 2024

A picture of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, sitting at a table. — Credit…Pool photo by Gavriil Grigorov

Mr. Schmemann is a member of the editorial board and a former Moscow bureau chief for The Times.

In purely military terms, Ukraine’s surprise incursion of Russia earlier this month is a dubious gamble. Moscow has not diverted forces from its grinding advances on the Donetsk front, a main focus of the current fighting, and the physical cost in dead or captured troops and evacuated citizens does not concern Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

The more significant potential of the invasion lies on the other front — that of information, propaganda, morale, image and competing narratives. That is where the fight is being fought to keep the West involved, to keep Ukrainians hopeful and to get Russians worried about the toll of the war in lives and treasure. And this is where Ukraine may see an advantage.

The very invocation of Kursk, the region where Ukraine made its advance, is familiar to every Russian as the site of not only a great World War II Soviet triumph but also the catastrophic accident that sank a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine in 2000. By moving into Kursk, Ukraine’s military has loudly advertised its boldness just when it looked like its troops might never regain the initiative.

The surprise and speed of the Ukrainian attack and the flaccid Russian response have given new strength to calls by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for the United States and his other Western supporters to abandon their insistence that he not use their weapons to attack Russian territory. Mr. Zelensky calls this the “naïve illusion of so-called red lines,” and so far, his allies have not complained about the Kursk invasion. They may see little value in scolding Ukraine, the plucky David in this war, right after he has landed an audacious strike against a plodding Goliath.

Just as important, Ukraine’s move into Kursk highlights the inherent contradiction in Mr. Putin’s propaganda, which portrays the conflict as a proxy war against Western powers trying to deny Russia its destiny, and one in which a calm, united and prosperous Russia is certain to prevail. But that illusion falls apart once Ukrainian forces have succeeded in slicing into Russia and forcing tens of thousands of Russians to flee their homes.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

The overriding imperative of Mr. Putin’s propaganda, inherited from the Soviet Union, is to enforce the belief that whatever is happening, however grave it may seem and whatever the cost, the Kremlin — Vladimir Putin, to be precise — is in full control. The depth of the disaster precipitated by Russia’s war is revealed by the intensity of the effort — the euphemisms, insinuations, scapegoats and excuses — marshaled toward propaganda.

Mr. Putin, a product of the old K.G.B., is well practiced in this dark art. From the moment the war against Ukraine began in February 2022, he has been ruthless in enforcing a ban against even calling it a war. Russians are subject to arrest if they fail to call it a “special military operation,” even though Mr. Putin himself has occasionally slipped. When the Russian caterer and warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a suspicious plane crash after sending his mercenaries who were fighting in Ukraine to march on Moscow, Mr. Putin kept a straight face as he offered his condolences, noting only that his latest victim had “made serious mistakes in life.”

So when the Ukrainian army launched its unexpected drive into the Kursk region on Aug. 6, the Kremlin propaganda mill got to work. There was no invasion, of course, only an “armed provocation,” a “situation,” a “terrorist attack” or “events in the Kursk region.” And of course, the insidious West was to blame. At a televised meeting at his residence with security chiefs and regional governors six days into the Kursk invasion, Mr. Putin declared that once again, it was “the West fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians.” He insisted that Russian forces would retaliate appropriately and still accomplish “all our goals.”

When the acting governor of the Kursk region, speaking over a video link, began giving some actual details of the invasion, including the number of towns and villages affected and the amount of territory seized by the Ukrainian army, Mr. Putin sharply cut him off, saying he should leave such detail to the military and focus on the humanitarian response. The poor governor, who probably never imagined having his remote province invaded by anyone, must have assumed that his president wanted to learn what was really happening. Perhaps he was unaware that his job was not to worry the population with facts, but only to show that the government was in control and taking care of its people.

Mr. Putin has so far held firm to the line “We have everything under control.” He has not bothered to visit Kursk, and he has not delivered a rousing speech calling for a grand defense of the motherland. The state-controlled media has focused on showing the government ensuring that evacuees are safe and cared for and that the nation was rallying with an outpouring of humanitarian aid. The latest report from Russia’s emergencies ministry on Tuesday said more than 122,000 civilians had been relocated, including more than 500 in the previous 24 hours, many to shelters across Russia.

At the same time, the Kremlin has not reined in bellicose bloggers and commentators who are demanding a brutal retaliation for Kursk or shaming evacuees for not standing and fighting against the foreign invaders. Such critics actually serve a purpose for Mr. Putin. Hawks who call on an authoritarian ruler to be even more authoritarian are a useful foil, presenting the ruler as relatively reasonable.

Though public opinion is hard to gauge in a country where candor is dangerous, some discontent over Kursk has been gleaned on social media, and it does seem that Mr. Putin has been rattled. His irritation with the acting governor was one sign; another was his display of anger when he declared that the Ukrainian initiative undermined the possibility of negotiations. “What kind of negotiations can we talk about with people who indiscriminately attack the civilian population and civilian infrastructure, or try to create threats to nuclear power facilities?” he asked, oblivious to the rich irony of his words.

Whether the rant revealed that Mr. Putin was considering negotiations or that he was warning the West that it has to keep Ukraine in check if it wants negotiations is unclear. Mr. Zelensky has said only that the goal was to push the Russians further back from Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have made little headway in Kursk after the initial assault, while to the south, Russian troops are advancing on their next major target, the city of Pokrovsk.

Whatever happens next in this unpredictable war, the importance of the information front must not be underestimated. Any operation that raises Ukrainian morale, bolsters Western support and jolts Mr. Putin’s narrative is a battle won.

Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and worked as the bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations. He was editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.

Officials offer critical warning after US state confirms cases of rare but serious infection spread by animals: ‘It is transmitted by various rodents’

The Cool Down

Officials offer critical warning after US state confirms cases of rare but serious infection spread by animals: ‘It is transmitted by various rodents’

Doric Sam – August 19, 2024

Health officials in Arizona have grown concerned after seeing an increase in a rare virus spread by rodents that can cause serious health issues.

What’s happening?

As explained by Physician’s Weekly, the Arizona Department of Health Services announced in an alert that the state has seen an uptick in hantavirus infections, with seven confirmed cases and three deaths over the past six months.

“Hantavirus is a rare but important cause of serious, even fatal respiratory infection,” Dr. Aaron Glatt, chief of infectious diseases at Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital in New York, told NBC News, per Physician’s Weekly. “It is transmitted by various rodents, especially the deer mouse, and can cause mild disease, but it does cause fatal illness in a significant percentage of people who acquire this illness.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most cases of hantavirus in the U.S. are reported in western and southwestern states, but Arizona is among the leaders in reported infections in the country. Health officials reported that there have been 11 hantavirus cases in Arizona between 2016 and 2022, per Physician’s Weekly.

Why is this important?

Hantavirus is spread when particles containing the virus get into the air from urine, saliva, or feces from deer mice. An infection can lead to hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS).

Symptoms include fever, fatigue, muscle aches, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. Without treatment, the infection can spread to the lungs and cause shortness of breath, chest tightness and cough, according to the American Lung Association and summarized by Physician’s Weekly. Around 38% of those who experience lung symptoms may die from the infection.

Though it is a rare disease in the U.S., with the CDC reporting 850 cases between 1993 and 2021 (about 30 per year), the increase in hantavirus cases is an indication of a deeper problem.

According to Physician’s Weekly, experts theorized that “climate change, such as the extreme heat waves that have been sweeping across the county this summer, may also be partly to blame” for the rising number of infections.

Trish Lees, public information officer at Coconino County Health and Human Services in Arizona, told NBC News that cases are seen more frequently in the summer because of increased rodent activity and people coming into contact with rodents more often.

Dr. Camilo Mora, a professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, explained that rising temperatures cause rodents to seek shelter in similar ways that humans do.

“Many carrying-disease species get on the move with climate change — so while for any specific case it is difficult to conclude the role of climate change, climate change has all the attributes to cause outbreaks of vector-borne diseases,” Mora said, per Physician’s Weekly.

What’s being done about this?

Officials warned that the best way to protect yourself against hantavirus is to wear N95 masks, gloves, and protective clothing when entering an area that is dirty or riddled with rodents. Anyone who experiences symptoms should seek immediate medical attention.

“The best way to prevent infection with this illness is by carefully disinfecting and cleaning up any waste products from the rodents and by not coming into contact with them,” Glatt told NBC News.

$15 million Ohio State study takes aim at molecule at the heart of Long COVID

The Columbus Dispatch

$15 million Ohio State study takes aim at molecule at the heart of Long COVID

Samantha Hendrickson, Columbus Dispatch – August 14, 2024

COVID-19 is here to stay, and for some, that means symptoms last months, even years after developing the little-understood Long COVID — but a team at the Ohio State University has received millions to find out more.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded $15 million over the next five years to fund the university’s efforts, including developing new ways to treat COVID-19 and to further understanding of why Long COVID happens and how to fend it off.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that millions of adults and children have suffered — and continue to — suffer from Long COVID.

Dr. Amal Amer, center with glasses, stands with fellow Ohio State University researchers, who have been granted $15 million over five years to study Long COVID. The research is personal for Amer, who suffered from Long COVID herself.

The disease can be present for as short as three months, but can also last years after someone is first infected. It’s defined as a chronic condition that occurs after a COVID-19 infection with a wide range of debilitating symptoms such as severe fatigue, brain fog, heart and lung problems, bodily pain or exacerbating already existing health issues, all of which can impact someone’s daily life.

“It’s just unacceptable, you can’t just let that happen,” said Dr. Amal Amer, a professor of microbial infection and immunity at OSU and a principal investigator in the project, “We have to understand it, and if somebody, not just us, anybody, happens to have a clue or the beginning of the story, we have to follow it.”

Tiny creatures lead to big discoveries

This massive undertaking started with simple mice and a single molecule.

An OSU study published in 2022 found that mice infected with COVID-19 reacted differently to the disease depending on if they had a certain enzyme-producing molecule known as caspase 11.

More: Steady ‘summer surge’ sees Ohio COVID cases nearly triple in July

Research showed that blocking this molecule in the infected mice resulted in lower inflammation, tissue injury and fewer blood clots in the animals’ lungs.

Humans have their own version of this molecule, or caspase 4, Amer said, and researchers discovered high levels of the enzyme in patients hospitalized for COVID-19 in intensive care units — a direct link to severe disease.

“It starts getting high because it has useful functions, but any molecule, when it gets too high, then these useful functions start becoming harmful,” Amer said.

The new work funded by the NIH will go beyond the study of the lungs and into how this molecule may impact the brain and the rest of the body, interfering with immune responses and possibly resulting in more blood clots in pathways leading to the brain and other vital organs – an entertained explanation for why Long COVID impacts people differently from case to case.

Currently, there are over 200 serious symptoms associated with Long COVID, according to the CDC.

Understanding how Long COVID comes to be is the first step in creating a treatment, Amer said. “Once you know the mechanism, then you can design what to target, where to target it and how to target it in order to reduce the damage being done.”

No one left behind

For Dr. Amer, finding that mechanism is an incredible research opportunity, but it’s also personal.

She herself contracted Long COVID during the pandemic. For three months, the leader in cutting edge research in her field suffered from terrible brain fog and other neurological symptoms after her second, thought seemingly mild, COVID-19 infection.

Amer has traveled all over the world, and confessed she’s gotten sick in many countries, including contracting the often deadly malaria. But nothing compared to Long COVID.

Amer would receive emails from her students, and read one sentence, but not remember what it said after reading it. She started having trouble typing on a keyboard. She couldn’t recall things people had just said to her moments before.

“I started thinking, ‘what’s gonna happen to my life?’ My job is a brain job. I lose my job, then what’s gonna happen to me?” Amer recalled. Now, she’ll head the brain-focused part of the project.

This continued for three months, before she gradually started to recover. Around six months, Amer said she began to feel normal again. Though she can’t be certain that she’s back to where she was before Long COVID, she acknowledges some people aren’t as lucky as she is.

“I have to find out, and I have to understand it, and I’m not going to let anybody be left behind,” she said.

Senators urge better access to disability payments for Long COVID patients

Michigan Advance

Senators urge better access to disability payments for Long COVID patients

Casey Quinlan – August 14, 2024

People with symptoms of long COVID attend a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing on long COVID in January. A group of senators is now urging the Social Security Administration to grant greater access to disability payments for people with long COVID symptoms. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Several U.S. senators have called on the Social Security Administration to take steps to make it easier for people with long COVID to access disability benefits, actions that disability rights advocates and patients say are desperately needed.

Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA), Ed Markey (D-MA), and Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Tina Smith (D-MN), Angus King (I-ME), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) signed the letter released on Monday. They said the agency should make the process more transparent, track and publish data on long COVID applications, and consider expanding the listing of impairments the SSA considers in applications for benefits.

“In some situations, these symptoms can be debilitating and prevent an individual from being able to work, take care of their family, manage their household, or participate in social activities,” the senators wrote to SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley.

Long COVID is a chronic health condition, which often includes fatigue, brain fog, and shortness of breath, following a COVID-19 infection. About three in 10 American adults have had long COVID at some point according to KFF’s April analysis of long COVID data. About 17 million people had it in March 2024. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released guidance on long COVID as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Kaine has been outspoken about his own experience with long COVID and Sanders introduced legislation this month to provide $1 billion in funding each year for 10 years to support long COVID research by the National Institutes of Health.

Lisa McCorkell, co-founder of the Patient Led Research Collaborative, a group of long COVID patients and patients with associated illnesses, told States Newsroom, “Creating a ruling or listing would be a huge improvement — having that specific guidance for how to document long COVID, its related diagnoses, and its associated impairment would assist physicians who may not be as knowledgeable about long COVID.”

The SSA administers disability benefits through Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs. The former program requires past employment payment into Social Security. The latter one does not have those restrictions and is based on financial need but to receive benefits, applicants have to prove they qualify as having a disability. The average monthly disability benefit for Social Security Disability Insurance is $1,538.

Long COVID’s economic cost

Researchers and economists are still trying to understand the full impact of COVID-19 infections and long COVID on the workforce. A 2023 study estimated that COVID-19 brought down the labor force by 500,000 people and that the average loss of labor is equivalent to $9,000 in earnings. More than 25% of people with long COVID said their condition had an impact on their employment or work hours, according to a 2022 Minneapolis Fed paper.

Long COVID is not going to go away, particularly as government protections on the federal, state, and local level to reduce the spread of COVID are “severely lacking,” said Marissa Ditkowsky, who serves as the disability economic justice counsel at the National Partnership for Women & Families, an organization focused on health, economic justice, and reproductive rights for women and families.

“While COVID continues to be a reality, we know that COVID disproportionately impacts women, disabled folks, and people of color, and the folks who are most impacted already have issues with access to appropriate health care, access to employment, and access to equitable wages,” said Ditkowsky, who has long COVID herself. “A lot of folks might be working in low-wage jobs where they’re in the service industry and constantly out there and more likely to contract COVID. It starts not just with the programs for how to deal with folks with long COVID, but how to prevent people from getting long COVID.”

In the meantime, she said people with long COVID, as well as other people with disabilities, would benefit from the changes senators are advocating, such as restoring the treating physician rule, which was repealed in 2017. The rule allowed the agency to give greater weight to medical evidence from a physician who treated a patient for years compared to, say, a doctor who examines a patient once.

“Giving your own doctor the weight [they] deserve is huge,” Ditkowsky said.

Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the disability justice initiative at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, said there is an opportunity for the Biden administration or the next administration to revamp how the agency administers disability benefits. She said that given the aging population, there is more reason than ever for the agency to make significant improvements to the application process. Advocates for people with disabilities say it’s also imperative to boost funding for the agency.

“Not only are we seeing an increase in disability in younger folks, but we’re also looking at the big boomer generation getting older … We’re going to see a huge pressure on the [SSA] and we need to see real changes and funding and think of ways to manage the wide variety of experiences that people have in order to deal with differences in applying for these benefits,” she said.

Scientists Drilled So Deep Into the Center of the Earth, They Knocked on the Mantle’s Door

Popular Mechanics

Scientists Drilled So Deep Into the Center of the Earth, They Knocked on the Mantle’s Door

Darren Orf – August 13, 2024

a drill breaks into the ground — Scientists Go Deeper Into Mantle Than Ever BeforeBloomberg Creative – Getty Images

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To understand the mantle—the largest layer of Earth’s rocky body—scientists drill deep cores out of the Earth.
In May of 2023, scientists drilled the deepest core yet and recovered serpentinized peridotite that forms when saltwater interacts with mantle rock.
Although this is the deepest into the mantle scientists have ever drilled, the mission didn’t uncover pristine mantle that lies beyond the Mohorovičić discontinuity, or Moho, boundary.

If you want to understand the geology of our home planet, studying the mantle is a great place to start. Separating the planet’s rocky crust and the molten outer core, the mantle makes up 70 percent of the Earth’s mass and 84 percent of its volume. But despite its outsized influence on the planet’s geologic processes, scientists have never directly sampled rocks from this immensely important geologic layer.

And that’s understandable, especially when you consider that the crust is roughly 9 to 12 miles thick on average. Luckily, that average contains outliers—areas of the world where the crust is actually incredibly thin and faulting exposes the mantle through cracks. One such area is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, specifically near an underwater mountain called the Atlantis Massif.

On the south side of this massif is an area known as the Lost City—a hydrothermal field whose vent fluids are highly alkaline and rich in hydrogen, methane, and other carbon compounds. This makes the area a particularly compelling candidate for explaining how early life evolved on Earth. Additionally, it contains mantle rock that interacts with seawater in a process known as “serpentinization,” which alters the rock’s structure and gives it a green, marble-like appearance.

It was here, 800 meters south of this field, in May of 2023 that members of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP)—aboard the JOIDES Resolution, a 470-foot-long research vessel rented by the U.S. National Science Foundation—extracted a 1,268-meter core containing abyssal peridotites, which are the primary rocks that make up the Earth’s upper mantle. The results of the study were published last week in the journal Science.

Although this makes this particular drill core the deepest sample of the mantle yet, going that deep into the rock wasn’t the goal of this record-breaking expedition.

“We had only planned to drill for 200 meters, because that was the deepest people had ever managed to drill in mantle rock,” Johan Lissenberg, a petrologist at Cardiff University and co-author of the study, told Nature. He said that the drilling was so easy that they progressed three times faster than usual. The team eventually drilled a staggering 1,268 meters, and only stopped due to the mission’s limited operations window.

Andrew McCaig—study co-author and University of Leeds scientist—said in an article from The Conversation that, according to a preliminary analysis of the rock, the core’s composition contains a variety of peridotite called harzburgite that forms via partial melting of mantle rock. It also contained rocks known as gabbros, which are coarse-grained igneous rocks. Both of these rocks then chemically reacted with seawater, changing their composition.

While this core represents an incredibly opportunity to learn more about the Earth’s mantle, as well as give an in-depth look at the geologic substrate upon which the Lost City rests, the mission didn’t quite complete the “grand challenge” of crossing the Mohorovičić discontinuity. Otherwise known as the Moho, the Mohorovičić discontinuity is recognized as the true boundary between the crust and pristine mantle.

Future missions could continue exploring this site near the Atlantis Massif, but sadly, those missions won’t include JOIDES Resolution—the NSF declined to fund more core drilling past 2024. Just as scientists are finally knocking on the door to the Earth’s most ubiquitous geologic layer, the future of these kinds of drilling missions is now uncertain.

11 Top COVID Symptoms People Are Experiencing During the Summer Surge

Good Housekeeping

11 Top COVID Symptoms People Are Experiencing During the Summer Surge

Irina Gonzalez – August 13, 2024

There are several COVID variants right now which have the same “set of mutations,” and are being referred to as FLiRT. Another strain, LB.1, is also on the rise.
KP.3.1.1 — which comes from the JN.1 strain — is now the most dominant variant, accounting for an estimated 27.8% of cases.
The symptoms are similar to other COVID strains. Being sick and experiencing a chronic cough, elevated fever, sore throat or a runny nose should prompt you to get a COVID-19 test to ensure you are not contagious.

If it seems like more people around you have gotten COVID in the last couple of months, that’s probably true. Right now, cases are on the rise and the COVID-19 FLiRT variants are dominating.

According to the most recent estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released on August 3rd, 27.8% of cases are the KP.3.1.1 strain and 20.1% of current infections are KP.3. Both of these variants stem from the FLiRT family of the coronavirus. Another variant that is not a descendant of FLiRT, named LB.1, makes up an estimated 16% of COVID-19 cases at the moment.

“The FLiRT variant appeared in March,” says Tammy Lundstrom, M.D., J.D., the senior vice president at Trinity Health who led their COVID-19 response. “Throughout the COVID-19 era, new strains have continued to arise. Like other strains, it appears highly transmissible, but it does not appear more virulent at this point.”

While it’s great that COVID-19 cases don’t seem to be as dangerous as they used to be, it still causes unpleasant symptoms which can be severe for people with certain risk factors. Unfortunately, just 22.5% of American adults had received the most recent COVID-19 vaccine as of May 11, 2024 (when the latest data was released). Could this be contributing to the summer surge we’re experiencing? We turned to experts to learn more about the newest variants, important COVID-19 symptoms to be aware of and how to protect yourself and your loved ones.

What are the FLiRT and LB.1 variants?

As fun as the name sounds, FLiRT is not the official designation for the dominant COVID-19 variant. That is actually a cheeky nickname for a whole family of different variants (any that start with KP). “The FLiRT variants came to the forefront at the end of April,” says Nikhil K. Bhayani, M.D., FIDSA, an infectious disease specialist and assistant professor at the Burnett School of Medicine at Texas Christian University.

KP.2, KP.2.3, KP.3 and KP.3.1.1 are official names of the FLiRT variants that are circulating right now. While FLiRT took over JN.1 as the dominant variant, it’s actually a descendant of JN.1. Essentially, the “parent” variant (JN.1) was unseated by several “child” variants. Various variations of JN.1 are still swirling in some capacity, but they make up a smaller percentage of COVID-19 cases. LB.1, another variant that has been circulating this summer, is not a member of the FLiRT family, but another descendant of JN.1.

Is there a summer surge?

Yes, the wastewater viral activity for COVID-19 — how the CDC tracks trends in infectious disease circulating in a community — is currently listed as “very high,” according to the most recent CDC data. However, a summer surge is not unique to FLiRT.

“Throughout the COVID-19 era, we have seen a rise in infections during summer,” says Dr. Lundstrom. Two reasons for this, according to the CDC, are that people tend to do more traveling during the summer and also congregate indoors with air conditioners on when it’s very hot outside.

What are the symptoms?

The good news is that the FLiRT and LB.1 strains of the coronavirus don’t seem to spark any surprise symptoms. “The symptoms are similar to other COVID-19 strains,” says Dr. Lundstrom. The CDC updated its list of possible symptoms on June 25th, and those include:

Fever or chills
Cough
Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
Sore throat
Congestion or runny nose
New loss of taste or smell
Fatigue
Muscle or body aches
Headache
Nausea or vomiting
Diarrhea

“Like similar recent strains, the incidence of loss of taste and smell are not prominent,” adds Lundstrom.

How long do symptoms last?

It really depends on the person. Typically, people with mild cases will experience symptoms for 5-10 days, however, many may start to feel better sooner than that. According to the CDC, most people with long COVID will start to feel better after three months, although it can last years. It’s best to speak to your doctor if any of your symptoms are lingering.

Is there a new vaccine?

Our experts said that vaccines still provide good protection against COVID-19, “especially against severe illness and hospitalization,” says Dr. Lundstrom. However, a study published in April found that KP.2 is proving to have “the most significant resistance” to the 2023-24 COVID-19 booster, and that this “increased immune resistance ability of KP.2 partially contributes to the higher” prevalence of infections “than previous variants, including JN.1.”

At the end of June, the CDC recommended that everyone ages 6 months and older receive the updated 2024-25 COVID-19 vaccine, which was tweaked based on the most dominant variants circulating this year. The most updated COVID-19 vaccine is expected to be rolled out this fall. “The World Health Organization is recommending the upcoming COVID booster to be based on the predominant lineage for the year,” adds Dr. Bhayani.

However, the CDC and our experts still recommend the current vaccine to protect yourself before the 2024-25 booster is made available in the fall. “Adults over the age of 65 should get the last COVID-19 vaccine available,” says Bhayani. Dr. Lundstrom suggests that older adults “should be vaccinated four months after their last vaccination” and those with compromised immune systems “should get vaccinated two months after their last dose.”

How to protect yourself

In March, the CDC updated the Respiratory Virus Guidance as COVID-19 cases have decreased over time. “It is still an important health threat, but it is no longer the emergency that it once was, and its health impacts increasingly resemble those of other respiratory viral illnesses, including flu and RSV,” the new guidance states.

“The same precautions will help protect against the spread of most respiratory viruses: wash hands frequently, cover your mouth and nose when sneezing/coughing, stay up to date with vaccinations and stay home when ill to prevent spreading infection to others,” suggests Dr. Lundstrom. However, Dr. Bhayani reminds us that the elderly, individuals with compromised immune systems and kids “should take extra precautions, such as avoiding large crowds and wear masks if COVID-19 cases are on the rise locally.”

If you do get sick, the CDC still recommends staying at home until your symptoms are improving overall, and you have not had a fever (and are not using fever-reducing medication). Afterward, you can resume normal activities and “use added prevention strategies over the next five days.”

This is now California’s worst summer COVID wave in years. Here’s why

The Los Angeles Times

This is now California’s worst summer COVID wave in years. Here’s why

Rong-Gong Lin II – August 12, 2024

Laguna Beach, CA - July 28: Individuals walk along Laguna Beach, CA on Sunday, July 28, 2024. (Zoe Cranfill / Los Angeles Times) — Individuals, some wearing face masks, walk in Laguna Beach on July 28. (Zoe Cranfill / Los Angeles Times)

California’s strongest summer COVID wave in years is still surging, and an unusual midsummer mutation may be partly to blame.

There are a number of possible culprits behind the worst summer infection spike since 2022, experts say. A series of punishing heat waves and smoke from devastating wildfires have kept many Californians indoors, where the disease can more easily spread. Most adults are also well removed from their last brush with the coronavirus, or their last vaccine dose — meaning they’re more vulnerable to infection.

But changes in the virus have also widened the scope of the surge.

Of particular concern is the rise of a hyperinfectious subvariant known as KP.3.1.1, which is so contagious that even people who have eluded infection throughout the pandemic are getting sick.

“COVID is extraordinarily common now,” said Dr. Elizabeth Hudson, regional chief of infectious diseases for Kaiser Permanente Southern California’s 16-hospital healthcare system.

COVID hospitalizations are ticking up, but remain lower than the peaks for the last two summers, probably thanks to some residual immunity and the widespread availability of anti-COVID drugs such as Paxlovid.

The World Health Organization has warned of COVID infections rising around the world, and expressed concern that more severe variants could emerge.

“In recent months, regardless of the season, many countries have experienced surges of COVID-19, including at the Olympics,” said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on COVID.

Among those caught up was 27-year-old American sprinter Noah Lyles, who after winning the gold in the men’s 100-meter finals, came up short Thursday during the 200-meter finals, taking the bronze. Lyles collapsed after the race, fighting shortness of breath and chest pain, and was later taken away in a wheelchair.

“It definitely affected my performance,” he said of the illness, estimating that he felt “like 90% to 95%” of full strength.

The rate at which reported coronavirus tests are coming back positive has been rising for weeks — to above 10% globally and more than 20% in Europe. In California, the coronavirus positive test rate was 14.3% for the week that ended Aug. 5 — blowing past the peaks from last summer and winter — and up from 10% a month ago.

There were already indications in May that the typical U.S. midyear wave was off to an early start as a pair of new coronavirus subvariants — KP.2 and KP.1.1, collectively nicknamed FLiRT — started to make a splash, displacing the winter’s dominant strain, JN.1.

But by July, a descendant strain, KP.3.1.1, had clearly taken off.

“KP.3.1.1 is extremely transmissible and a little bit more immune evasive. It kind of came out of the blue during the summer,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious-diseases specialist at UC San Francisco.

Cases are up at Kaiser Permanente Southern California, and “looking through the CDC data … KP.3.1.1 is really what is driving this particular surge,” Hudson said. “We are certainly much higher than we were last summer.”

Anecdotally, some infected people report being “pretty darn miserable, actually — really severe fatigue in the first two days,” Hudson said.

People may want to think their symptoms are just allergies, she said, but “it’s probably COVID. So we’re just really encouraging folks to continue to test.”

An initial negative test doesn’t necessarily mean you’re out of the woods, though. Officials recommend testing repeatedly over as many as five days after the onset of symptoms to be sure.

California has now reported four straight weeks with “very high” coronavirus levels in its wastewater, according to data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday. That followed five weeks of “high” viral levels.

Last summer, California recorded only eight weeks with “high” coronavirus levels in wastewater, and never hit “very high” levels. In the summer of 2022, California spent 16 weeks with “high” or “very high” levels of coronavirus in wastewater.

“Fewer people got immunized this year compared to last year at this time,” Chin-Hong said. “That means, particularly amongst people who are older, they’re just not equipped to deal with this virus.”

There are 44 states with “high” or “very high” coronavirus levels in their wastewater, according to the CDC. Five states, and the District of Columbia, have “moderate” levels, and there were no data for North Dakota.

The CDC said coronavirus infections are “growing” or “likely growing” in 32 states, including California; are “stable or uncertain” in seven states, as well as the District of Columbia; are “likely declining” in Connecticut; and “declining” in Hawaii and Nevada. There were no estimates in eight states.

In Los Angeles County, coronavirus levels in wastewater jumped to 54% of last winter’s peak over the 10-day period ending July 27, the most recent available. A week earlier, coronavirus levels in wastewater were at 44% of last winter’s peak.

For the week ending Aug. 4, L.A. County reported an average of 479 coronavirus cases a day, double the number from five weeks earlier. Cases are an undercount, only reflecting tests done at medical facilities — not self-tests conducted at home.

In Santa Clara County, the most populous in the San Francisco Bay Area, coronavirus levels were high in all sewersheds, including San Jose and Palo Alto.

Hospitalizations and emergency room visits related to the coronavirus are also rising. Over the week ending Aug. 3, there were an average of 403 coronavirus-positive people in hospitals in L.A. County per day. That’s double the number from five weeks earlier, but still about 70% of last summer’s peak and one-third the height seen in summer 2022.

For the week ending Aug. 4, 4% of emergency room encounters in L.A. County were classified as related to the coronavirus — more than double the figure from seven weeks earlier. The peak from last summer was 5.1%.

“We’ve had a few people who have become very ill from COVID. Those are people who tend to be pretty severely immunocompromised,” Hudson said.

UC San Francisco has also seen a rise in the number of coronavirus-infected hospitalized patients. As of Friday, there were 28, up from fewer than 20 a week earlier, Chin-Hong said.

In the Bay Area, three counties have urged more people to consider masking in indoor public settings because of the COVID surge. Contra Costa County’s public health department “recommends masking in crowded indoor settings, particularly for those at high risk of serious illness if infected,” the agency said Tuesday, following similar pleas from San Francisco and Marin County health officials.

Compared with advice such as washing hands and staying away from sick people, suggesting wearing a mask can provoke strong opposition from some.

“The moment people see this, like in their mind, it sets off this chain reaction of, like, all the negative things of the pandemic, having to have society shut down and social isolation,” said Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious-disease doctor and researcher at Stanford University.

But masks do help reduce the risk of infection, and people don’t have to wear them all the time to benefit. Karan says he socializes and eats at indoor restaurants. But he’ll decide to mask in other situations, like “when I’m traveling,” and, obviously, at work.

Doctors say that wearing a mask is one of many tools people can use to reduce their risk, and can be especially helpful when in crowded indoor settings.

Karan said he’s seen more coronavirus-positive patients while working shifts in urgent care, and he suggested that more healthcare providers take the time to order tests. He said he worries that when people come in with relatively mild symptoms, they may be sent home without testing.

But that could miss potential COVID diagnosis, which could allow a patient to get a prescription for an antiviral drug like Paxlovid.

Without testing, “you run the risk of taking shortcuts and not prescribing people meds that they actually should technically be getting,” Karan said.