Officials confirm first fatal case of mosquito-borne virus in nearly two decades: ‘A stark reminder’
Juliana Marino – September 3, 2024
County officials in the Bay Area confirmed a death related to a mosquito-borne disease for the first time in nearly 20 years, according to a report published by the San Francisco Chronicle.
What’s happening?
Officials in Contra Costa County announced that a resident died from West Nile virus in July. It was the first death from West Nile in Contra Costa since 2006.
Mosquitoes can carry West Nile virus after feeding on an infected bird. Though many cases of West Nile virus do not lead to any symptoms, some patients experience a fever, headache, body aches, and vomiting.
While most cases of West Nile virus are not fatal, officials in Contra Costa viewed the death as a wake-up call.
“We are deeply saddened by the loss of a Contra Costa County resident to West Nile virus,” Contra Costa Mosquito and Vector Control District general manager Paula Macedo told the Chronicle. “This tragic event serves as a stark reminder of the importance of protecting ourselves from mosquito bites and supporting community efforts to control mosquito populations.”
Increasing global temperatures have created more ideal conditions for disease-spreading mosquitoes. The tragic death of the Contra Costa resident is a reminder to take necessary precautions to prevent mosquito bites, especially during summer months.
Using insect repellent and wearing loose-fitting clothing that covers your arms and legs are ways you can protect yourself from bug bites.
What’s being done about West Nile in the Bay Area?
Moving toward a more sustainable future to keep the planet’s temperatures in balance not only helps protect the environment but also global health. Simple actions to reduce pollution causing Earth to warm at an accelerated rate include switching to LED light bulbs and unplugging appliances when they aren’t in use.
In Contra Costa, officials are still investigating the cause of the disease, per the Chronicle. While they have not provided updates on where the infection happened, they have detected additional cases of West Nile virus in a bird and five chickens, according to district spokesperson Nola Woods.
NH man fights for life with 3 mosquito viruses, including EEE
Paul Burton – September 3, 2024
KENSINGTON, N.H. – A New Hampshire man is fighting for his life because of a mosquito bite. Fifty-four-year-old Joe Casey of Kensington has tested positive for three mosquito-borne viruses, including eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) and West Nile Virus.
“He’s my brother. It’s very difficult, especially because it’s from a mosquito,” his sister-in-law Angela Barker told WBZ-TV, fighting back tears. “He was positive for EEE, for West Nile, and St. Louis Encephalitis, but the CDC, the infectious disease doctors, they don’t know which one is making him this sick.”
Barker said Casey started to feel sick back in early August. He now has swelling in the brain and is barely able to communicate at Exeter Hospital.National & World NewsLatest U.S. and global stories
“My brother-in-law is not a small man, and to see someone that you love be as sick as he is and not be able to talk, to move, to communicate for over three weeks is terrifying and gut-wrenching,” Barker said.
Joe Casey. / Credit: Family Photo
Casey and his wife Kim have four children. They believe he will have a long road to recovery ahead of him. His family has set up an online fundraising page and they’ve received an outpouring of support from the community.
“It could happen to anybody”
“Joe is going to have to go a long-term care and patient rehabilitation, that’s going to be 24-hour care, and really want to get the word out to help this incredible family,” Barker said. “He just got bit by a mosquito and it could happen to anybody.”
The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services said Kensington has had at least one mosquito pool test positive for EEE. The town has sent out postcards notifying residents and the threat level has been raised to high.
Casey’s family wants people to be careful.
“Be safe, cover up, wear bug spray. It can happen to anybody, and that’s the scariest thing. Be careful and take proper precautions,” Barker said.
How long do we have until sea level rise swallows coastal cities? This fleet of ocean robots will help find out
Laura Paddison, CNN – September 3, 2024
A team of NASA rocket scientists is developing autonomous underwater robots able to go where humans cannot, deep beneath Antarctica’s giant ice shelves. The robots’ task is to better understand how rapidly ice is melting — and how quickly that could cause catastrophic sea level rise.
In March, scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory lowered a cylindrical robot into the icy waters of the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska to gather data at 100 feet deep. It was the first step in the “IceNode” project.
The ultimate aim is to release a fleet of these robots in Antarctica, which will latch on to the ice and capture data over long periods in one of the most inaccessible places on Earth.
There is an urgent need to better understand this remote, isolated continent; what happens here has global implications.
A slew of recent research suggests Antarctica’s ice may be melting in alarming new ways, meaning the sea level rise forecast might be vastly underestimated. If Antarctica’s ice sheet were to melt entirely, it would cause global sea level rise of around 200 feet — spelling complete catastrophe for coastal communities.
Scientists are particularly keen to understand what’s happening to Antarctica’s ice shelves, huge slabs of floating ice which jut out into the ocean and are an important defense against sea level rise, acting as a cork to hold back glaciers on land.
The “grounding line” — the point at which the glacier rises from the seabed and becomes an ice shelf — is where the most rapid melting may be happening, as warm ocean water eats away at the ice from underneath.
But getting a detailed look at the grounding line in the treacherous Antarctic landscape has been exceptionally difficult.
“We’ve been pondering how to surmount these technological and logistical challenges for years, and we think we’ve found a way,” said Ian Fenty, a climate scientist at JPL and IceNode’s science lead.
NASA’s plan to release around 10 IceNode robots, each around 8 feet long and 10 inches in diameter, into the water from a borehole in the ice or a ship off the coast. They have no propulsion but will ride ocean currents, directed by special software, to their Antarctic destination where they will activate their “landing gear” — three legs which spring out and attach to the ice.
Once in place, their sensors will monitor how fast the warmer, salty ocean water is melting the ice, as well as how quickly the cold meltwater is sinking.
The fleet could operate for up to a year, capturing data across the seasons, NASA said.
Once they have finished monitoring, the robots will detach themselves from the ice, drift to the surface of the ocean and transmit data by satellite. This data can then be fed into computer models to improve the accuracy of sea level rise projections.
“These robots are a platform to bring science instruments to the hardest-to-reach locations on Earth,” said Paul Glick, JPL robotics mechanical engineer and IceNode principal investigator.
The team is currently focused on developing the robots’ technical capabilities and there are more tests planned. There is currently no exact timeline for when they will be deployed in Antarctica, Glick told CNN, “but we’d ideally like it to be as soon as possible.”
An IceNode prototype beneath the frozen surface of Lake Superior, off Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, during a field test in 2022. – NASA
Robots have been used to look beneath Antarctica’s ice before. A recent research project used a torpedo-like robot called Icefin, a remotely operated vehicle which recorded information about ocean heat, saltiness and currents.
But where Icefin included a propulsion system and remained attached to a tether, through which it was controlled and could send back data, the IceNodes will be entirely autonomous.
Both systems complement each other, said Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey, which was part of the research project using Icefin.
Where Icefin can release data in real time, deployments are limited by how long a borehole can be kept open before freezing over, usually a matter of days. IceNodes will be able to collect data over much longer periods but won’t transmit until its mission is over.
Deployment of both machines is challenging and involves substantial risk to sophisticated equipment, Larter told CNN, “but such innovative approaches and risk taking are necessary to find out more about the critical hidden world beneath ice shelves.”
How California Became a New Center of Political Corruption
Ralph Vartabedian – August 29, 2024
Over the last 10 years, 576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois. (Getty Images)More
LOS ANGELES — Jose Huizar’s downfall at Los Angeles City Hall was as stunning as his rise to success, a political tragedy that, like many in the land of dreams, has become a familiar one.
Born to a large family in rural Mexico and raised in poverty near the towering high-rises of downtown Los Angeles, he overcame enormous odds to graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University and UCLA law school.
He returned to his old neighborhood in East Los Angeles to run for the school board and eventually the City Council, where he gained control of the influential committee that approves multimillion-dollar commercial development projects across the city.
His spectacular fall — after FBI agents caught him accepting $1.8 million worth of casino chips, luxury hotel stays, a liquor box full of cash and prostitutes from Chinese developers — was cast by federal prosecutors as an epic Hollywood tale. They persuaded a judge in January to sentence him to 13 years in prison on charges of tax evasion and racketeering.
“He was the King Kong of LA City Hall for many, many years,” Mack E. Jenkins, chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, told the court. “And with his fall, a lot of devastation was left in his wake.”
This week, when Huizar is scheduled to report to prison, he will become the third recent Los Angeles City Council member to go down on charges of corruption, part of a much larger circle of staff aides, fundraisers, political consultants and real estate developers who have been charged in what federal authorities called an “extraordinary” recent wave of bribery and influence-peddling across California.
Two other members of the City Council, Mitchell Englander and Mark Ridley-Thomas, were convicted earlier on various corruption charges, as was the former head of the city’s Department of Water and Power. A fourth City Council member, Curren Price, is facing charges of embezzlement, perjury and conflict of interest.
Over the last 10 years, 576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois.
California has a larger population than those states, but the recent wave of cases is attributable to much more than that, federal prosecutors say.
A heavy concentration of power at Los Angeles City Hall, the receding presence of local news media, a population that often tunes out local politics and a growing Democratic supermajority in state government have all helped insulate officeholders from damage, political analysts said.
In Los Angeles, Huizar’s influence was even greater than that of most other council members: Not only did his district include downtown Los Angeles, where billions of dollars of foreign investment was transforming the skyline, but he also controlled the Planning and Land Use Management Committee that approves major developments all over the city.
“When you have that kind of power, pay-to play schemes run amok,” said U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada, whose office has led many of the recent prosecutions in Los Angeles. “I wouldn’t call it ordinary what these folks did. It is extraordinary.”
Huizar, 55, pleaded guilty to racketeering, a charge often used in prosecuting organized crime or street-gang cases. The $1.8 million in bribes he received was twice the amount that recently convicted Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey was charged with accepting.
In March, a jury convicted Raymond Chan, a former Los Angeles deputy mayor whom prosecutors called the “architect” of the Huizar conspiracy, also on racketeering charges. In all, more than 50 key political figures and executives in Los Angeles and San Francisco have been convicted since 2019. Many more were investigated or resigned after allegations surfaced.
California also had cases of corruption in the days, now in the distant past, when Republicans held statewide office.
But political analysts say the Democrats’ present lock on political power leaves little opportunity for Republicans to effectively raise the issue of corruption as a campaign issue.
“When a political party enjoys that much uncontested power, there’s no penalty for stepping over ethical or legal lines,” said Dan Schnur, a former head of the state Fair Political Practices Commission and a former Republican who is now an independent.
A two-year-old reform effort to curb some of the extraordinary power conferred to individual council members in Los Angeles has foundered.
“When you talk about reducing individual council member discretion over land use, there is real pushback,” said Nithya Raman, a council member who sits on the city’s charter reform committee.
What happened in Los Angeles had been playing out on a smaller scale for years in the small industrial cities of Los Angeles County that have been described as a “corridor of corruption”: South Gate, Bell, Lynwood and Vernon, among others, where civic leaders were prosecuted for taking bribes or tapping into city funds.
“You have large immigrant populations, largely marginalized communities that do not have the resources to watch their politicians closely,” said Estrada, whose parents emigrated from Guatemala. “I think you have a pretty unique cauldron of factors in Los Angeles and the greater Los Angeles area that allow for these things to happen.”
The arrival of large-scale investments from China starting in 2011 heightened the risks.
Over the next half-dozen years, about $26 billion of direct investment from Chinese firms and their billionaire owners arrived in the state.
Downtown Los Angeles underwent a dramatic revival. New high-rise condos and hotels went up, abandoned warehouses were converted into loft apartments and galleries and expensive restaurants opened.
The 40-year-old Grand Hotel, a rundown eyesore used until recently by the city as a homeless shelter, was at the center of one investor’s grandiose plan.
The investor, Wei Huang, a billionaire owner of the development company Shen Zhen New World, bought the hotel in 2010 with plans to convert it into a 77-story tower, the highest in the western United States.
What he needed was help managing the byzantine political approval process. He found it, federal prosecutors said, with Huizar, who had been elected to the council in 2005.
Starting in 2013, federal prosecutors said, Huizar took the first of 20 all-expenses paid trips to Las Vegas with Huang, during which he was supplied with about $10,000 worth of casino chips each time.
Their involvement deepened just before a 2015 election, when Huizar faced allegations from his deputy chief of staff that he had sexually harassed her. Huang, prosecutors said, provided him with $600,000 of collateral for a loan to settle out of court.
But it was the free casino chips in Las Vegas that would ultimately unravel the arrangement. During one trip to the Cosmopolitan casino in 2016, its security chief, a former FBI agent, spotted Huizar playing a $16,000 pile of chips at a card table. When he asked his identity, he became flustered and walked away, leaving the chips.
“Who walks away from $16,000 of casino chips?” said Carlos Narro, who was then the chief of the FBI’s public corruption section in Los Angeles, who got a call from the security chief.
In short order, Narro had the casino’s video of the scene at the card table and flight records. With those, the FBI got court approval for wire taps and searches of Huizar’s text messages and emails.
Ultimately, the investigation found that Huang had paid roughly $1.8 million to Huizar, but that was only part of a much wider network of corruption, investigators found. The wide-ranging racketeering indictment to which Huizar pleaded guilty also targeted a City Hall aide, a deputy mayor, a lobbyist and a political fundraiser, all of whom were also convicted.
Huang was also indicted and is now a fugitive, believed to be in China. His company was fined $4 million.
Also included in the indictment were three other large development projects whose backers, prosecutors said, obtained Huizar’s help in exchange for bribes.
The scandal was almost inevitable, said Miguel Santana, the former top administrative officer of Los Angeles.
“The depth of power that a council member has around development in their own districts almost facilitates the level of corruption that took place,” Santana, now president of the California Community Foundation. “That level of power still exists today.”
San Francisco has had its own round of corruption cases, many of the recent ones surrounding the former Department of Public Works chief, Mohammed Nuru, who pleaded guilty in 2021 to accepting gifts, including a tractor for his ranch outside the city, a Rolex watch and millions of dollars, from various people with business before the city.
Florence Kong, the owner of a recycling company, pleaded guilty to offering some of the bribes in exchange for city contracts. Zhang Li, a Chinese developer also accused of offering bribes, signed a deferred prosecution agreement.
Now scheduled to surrender to prison by Saturday, Huizar made a public apology at his sentencing hearing, saying he had long been dedicated to his community. “Shiny things were dangled in front of me, and I could not resist the temptation,” he said in a letter to the judge asking for leniency. “The money, the fancy dinners, luxury flights. It was there for the taking, and I could not say no.”
Estrada, the U.S. attorney, said that Huizar’s corruption offended him as a Latino.
“It feels like a real betrayal,” Estrada said. “Because for those of us whose families came from Latin America, and know that system, there’s just rampant corruption there. You come to this country, you have more opportunities, you are offered to be part of a system that is theoretically supposed to operate cleanly.”
Where Does Biden’s Student Loan Debt Plan Stand? Here’s What to Know.
Zach Montague – August 29, 2024
President Joe Biden discusses his administration’s actions to cancel or reduce student loan debts, at the Julian Dixon Library in Culver City, Calif., Feb. 21, 2024. (Al Drago/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s latest effort to wipe out student loan debt for millions of Americans is in jeopardy.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to allow a key component of the policy, known as the SAVE plan, to move forward after an emergency application by the Biden administration.
Until Republican-led states sued to block the plan over the summer, SAVE had been the main way for borrowers to apply for loan forgiveness. The program allowed people to make payments based on income and family size; some borrowers ended up having their remaining debt canceled altogether.
Other elements of Biden’s loan forgiveness plan remain in effect for now. And over the course of Biden’s presidency, his administration has canceled about $167 billion in loans for 4.75 million people, or roughly 1 in 10 federal loan holders.National & World NewsLatest U.S. and global stories
But Wednesday’s decision leaves millions of Americans in limbo.
Here is a look at what the ruling means for borrowers and what happens next:
Who was eligible for SAVE?
Most people with federal undergraduate or graduate loans could apply for forgiveness under SAVE, which stands for Saving on a Valuable Education.
But the amount of relief it provided varied depending on factors such as income and family size. More than 8 million people enrolled in the program during the roughly 10 months that it was available, and about 400,000 of them got some amount of debt canceled.
The plan has been on hold since July, when a federal appellate court issued a ruling temporarily blocking the program. The Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a request by the Biden administration to lift that injunction.
What happens next?
SAVE is on hold and interest on loans will not accrue while lower courts consider the merits of the legal challenges.
If those challenges succeed, millions of students will most likely be forced to revert to other plans with significantly higher monthly payments.
The Supreme Court said it expected a lower court to move quickly on the case and “render its decision with appropriate dispatch.” The Education Department has said it will provide regular updates for borrowers on its website.
Who can still apply for debt relief?
There are still pathways for people who want to apply for debt relief, including those who borrowed money to attend schools that misled or took advantage of them financially.
Another program is aimed at people working in public service — including teachers, firefighters and members of the military — who had been paying down loans for at least 10 years.
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program was established in 2007, but it had been plagued by years of bureaucratic delays and other problems.
A report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2017 found that federal loan servicers routinely failed to inform borrowers about their eligibility for the program and systematically miscounted payments that could count toward forgiveness.
The Biden administration revived the program, which has led to debt relief for nearly 1 million people.
The administration has also approved $14.1 billion in forgiveness for about 548,000 borrowers with a total and permanent disability that prevents them from working, a group that includes many military veterans.
Why is this issue tangled up in the courts?
Surveys have consistently found that a majority of Americans support some form of debt relief. But Republican attorneys general and conservative groups have tried to block Biden’s plans in court, saying he is overstepping his authority.
Critics of the debt relief plan characterize it as a taxpayer-funded giveaway.
The legal challenges have steadily chipped away at Biden’s ambitions.
At the beginning of his presidency, Biden promised to wipe out more than $400 billion in student debt for more than 40 million borrowers. The Supreme Court struck that down in June 2023, ruling that his administration did not have the authority to do so.
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Aug. 22, 2024 in Chicago. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
The situation at the southern border looks very different these days.
Gone are the headlines about surging border crossings crushing border communities and cities like New York struggling to fund housing for migrants who recently came to the country.
The reality is that the numbers at the southern border have dropped to levels not seen before in the Biden administration — and lower than they were during parts of the Trump administration.
The dramatic drop in border crossings came after a Biden administration policy seen by White House officials as a major success for an administration that has spent three years fighting Republican attacks over its handling of surging border crossings.
Vice President Kamala Harris, however, has not focused on the dramatic change at the southern border in her presidential campaign. I’ll explain what’s happening at the border, and offer some theories about why Harris isn’t talking it up.
A Border Shutdown That Worked
The border had seen a steady drop in crossings all year, but things took a dramatic turn in June. That’s when the Biden administration took a hallmark of the failed immigration bill from February — a measure allowing border officials to turn back migrants quickly when crossings exceed a certain level — and put a version of it into place via presidential proclamation.
Since then, the results have been clear: Border arrests are down, asylum claims are plummeting and fewer newly arrived people are being released into U.S. communities.
Crossings have gotten so low that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has stopped busing migrants to Democratic-run cities, a political tactic he wielded to force the public to pay attention to the border. There are simply no longer people to send.
Harris Steers Clear
During her speech in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, Harris discussed immigration — but focused on blaming Republicans for the collapse of bipartisan legislation this year. It would have increased resources by providing more money for detention, border agents and asylum officers.
“Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades,” she said to the crowd in Chicago. “The Border Patrol endorsed it. But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign, so he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal.”
That deal would have allowed the president to shut off asylum access at the southern border if the crossings reached a certain level — but Harris did not mention the fact that the administration went ahead and did something similar anyway.
So why isn’t Harris talking about it more in her run for the presidency?
There could be several reasons.
1. The number of arrests at the border often fluctuates and could spike at any moment.
Last summer, the Biden administration cautiously hailed a brief dip in crossings after a different asylum restriction took effect. By the end of the year, record numbers of people were crossing into the country, and the administration needed to send top officials to Mexico to figure out a solution. Migration experts have also said that smugglers can adapt to new policies in the United States, and that could happen with President Joe Biden’s asylum limit as well.
2. Democrats don’t want to revive ‘border czar’ attacks.
Focusing on border policy could also draw renewed attention to a Republican talking point that has dogged Harris’ vice presidency and presidential campaign: Is she in charge of the southern border or not?
Harris was asked by Biden early in her vice presidency to focus on “root causes” of migration, and Republicans seized on that assignment to describe her misleadingly as responsible for crossings overall. Taking credit for border policy successes now could leave Harris more open to criticisms if crossings rise; it could also give Republicans an opportunity to point to the record number of arrivals before 2024.
3. The border still divides Democrats.
Discussing a restrictive policy could inflame progressives who have seemed energized by Harris’ run for the presidency, and dampen the overall vibes of joy and unity that have given the campaign a burst of momentum.
Immigration advocates have already sued over Biden’s policy and denounced the administration for turning back migrants who they believe have rightful claims to protection in the United States.
Harris’ presidential campaign is just over a month old, and a pair of high-stakes moments are approaching when the border may come into focus: Harris’ first major interview as a presidential candidate Thursday on CNN, as well as the planned debate between Harris and Trump on Sept. 10.
The campaign has found places to mention the dip in crossings, including in emails to the press. But it has not become a standard part of her speeches, which is notable given how closely she is associated with the topic of border control, fairly or not.
“The VP is proud that their administration’s actions have led to significant reductions in border crossings, and the campaign has and will continue to talk about that,” Kevin Munoz, a campaign spokesperson, said in a statement. “But she also knows we need to go even further, which is why you hear her talk about the urgent need to get the bipartisan border bill passed and her commitment to doing that as president.”
On the COVID ‘Off-Ramp’: No Tests, Isolation or Masks
Emily Baumgaertner – August 27, 2024
Visitors on the Coney Island boardwalk on the Friday ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, May 24, 2024. (Karsten Moran/The New York Times)
Jason Moyer was days away from a family road trip to visit his parents when his 10-year-old son woke up with a fever and cough.
COVID-19?
The prospect threatened to upend the family’s plans.
“Six months ago, we would have tested for COVID,” said Moyer, 41, of Ohio. This time they did not.
Instead, they checked to make sure the boy’s cough was improving and his fever was gone — and then set off for New Jersey, not bothering to tell the grandparents about the incident.
In the fifth summer of COVID, cases are surging, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported “high” or “very high” levels of the virus in wastewater in almost every state. The rate of hospitalizations with COVID is nearly twice what it was at this time last summer, and deaths — despite being down almost 75% from what they were at the worst of the pandemic — are still double what they were this spring.
As children return to schools and Labor Day weekend travel swells, the potential for further spread abounds. But for many like Moyer, COVID has become so normalized that they no longer see it as a reason to disrupt social, work or travel routines. Test kit sales have plummeted. Isolation after an exposure is increasingly rare. Masks — once a ubiquitous symbol of a COVID surge — are sparse, even in crowded airports, train stations and subways.
Human behavior is, of course, the reason that infections are soaring. But at some point, many reason, we need to live.
“I no longer even know what the rules and recommendations are,” said Andrew Hoffman, 68, of Mission Viejo, California, who came down with respiratory symptoms a few weeks ago after his wife had tested positive for COVID. He skipped synagogue, but still went to the grocery store.
“And since I don’t test, I can’t follow them,” he said.
Epidemiologists said in interviews that they do not endorse a lackadaisical approach, particularly for those spending time around older people and those who are immunocompromised. They still recommend staying home for a couple of days after an exposure and getting the newly authorized boosters soon to become available (despite the poor turnout during last year’s round).
But they said that some elements of this newfound laissez faire attitude were warranted. While COVID cases are high, fewer hospitalizations and deaths during the surges are signs of increasing immunity — evidence that a combination of mild infections and vaccine boosters are ushering in a new era: not a post-COVID world, but a postcrisis one.
Epidemiologists have long predicted that COVID would eventually become an endemic disease, rather than a pandemic. “If you ask six epidemiologists what ‘endemic’ means, exactly, you’ll probably get about 12 answers,” said Bill Hanage, associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But it certainly has a sort of social definition — a virus that’s around us all the time — and if you want to take that one, then we’re definitely there.”
Certain threats remain clear. For vulnerable groups, the coronavirus will always present a heightened risk of serious infection and even death. Long COVID, a multifaceted syndrome, has afflicted at least 400 million people worldwide, researchers recently estimated, and most of those who have suffered from it have said they still have not recovered.
But the CDC director, Dr. Mandy Cohen, called the disease endemic last week, and the agency decided this year to retire its five-day COVID isolation guidelines and instead include COVID in its guidance for other respiratory infections, instructing people with symptoms of COVID, RSV or the flu to stay home for 24 hours after their fever lifts. The updated guidelines were an indicator that, for most people, the landscape had changed.
Hanage defended the hard-line mandates from the early years of the pandemic as “not just appropriate, but absolutely necessary.”
“But,” he said, “it is just as important to help people onto an off-ramp — to be clear when we are no longer tied to the train tracks, staring at the headlights barreling down.”
The absence of stringent guidelines has left people to manage their own risks.
“I don’t bother testing myself or our kids for COVID,” said Sarah Bernath, 46, a librarian on Prince Edward Island in Canada. “My husband doesn’t test himself either. Knowing if it’s COVID wouldn’t change whether I stay home or not.”
In some social circles, diverging choices can make for uncomfortable dynamics.
Debra Cornelius, 73, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, stayed home from a recent indoor party because she learned that several other guests — a family of five — had returned from vacation and tested positive for COVID three days before the gathering, but still planned to attend.
“They said, ‘Oh, it’s like a bad cold, we wouldn’t stay home for a cold,’” she said. “I think people’s attitudes have changed considerably.”
But for countless others, attitudes haven’t changed at all. Diane Deacon, 71, of Saginaw, Michigan, said she tested positive for COVID three days into a trip to Portugal with her two adult daughters. She isolated herself for five days before flying home wearing a mask.
“A number of people asked me, ‘Why did you test? You could have carried on with your vacation,’” she said.
For Deacon, it was about remembering the refrigerated morgue trucks of 2020 and anticipating the vulnerable people she might see on her flight home — people in wheelchairs, or people on oxygen, she said.
“I’m trying to avoid a moral judgment of people who make other choices,” she said. “To me, it was inconvenient and it was unfortunate, but it was not a tragedy.”
In a Gallup poll this spring, about 59% of respondents said they believed the pandemic was “over” in the United States, and the proportion of people who said they felt concerned about catching COVID has been generally declining for two years. Among people who rated their own health positively, almost 9 in 10 said they were not worried about getting infected.
That could be, at least partly, a result of personal experience: About 70% of people said they had been through a COVID infection already, suggesting that they believed they had some immunity or at least that they could muscle through it again if need be.
If the Olympics were any barometer, the rest of the world seems to have exhaled as well. In Tokyo in 2021, there were daily saliva samples, plexiglass dividers between cafeteria seats and absolutely no live spectators; the arenas were so empty that coaches’ voices echoed. In Beijing in 2022, under China’s zero-tolerance policy, conditions were much the same.
But in Paris last month, the organizing committee for the 2024 Olympics offered no testing requirements or processes for reporting infections, and so few countries issued rules to their athletes that the ones that did made news.
There were high-fives, group hugs, throngs of crowds and plenty of transmission to show for it. At least 40 athletes tested positive for the virus, including several who earned medals despite it — as well as an unknowable number of spectators, since French health officials (who had once enforced an eight-month-long nightly COVID curfew) did not even count.
In the United States, about 57% of people said their lives had not returned to prepandemic “normal” — and the majority said they believed it never would. But the current backdrop of American life tells a different story.
The years-old social-distancing signage is faded and peeling from the floors of an indoor market in Los Angeles. Hand-sanitizer dispensers at amusement parks have dried up. The summer camp hosted by Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo requires children to bring a face covering — not to protect other children, but the animals.
Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the newfound complacency can as much be attributed to confusion as to fatigue. The virus remains remarkably unpredictable: COVID variants are still evolving much faster than influenza variants, and officials who want to “pigeonhole” COVID into having a well-defined seasonality will be unnerved to discover that the 10 surges in the United States so far have been evenly distributed throughout all four seasons, he said.
Those factors, combined with waning immunity, point to a virus that still evades our collective understanding — in the context of a collective psychology that is ready to move on. Even at a meeting of 200 infectious disease experts in Washington this month — a number of whom were older than 65 and had not been vaccinated in four to six months — hardly anybody donned a mask.
“We’ve decided, ‘Well, the risk is OK.’ But nobody has defined ‘risk,’ and nobody has defined ‘OK,’” Osterholm said. “You can’t get much more informed than this group.”
Asked about how the perception of risk has evolved over time, Osterholm laughed.
The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the portion where Trump spoke was built under the Obama administration, the Post added.
The newspaper said a nearby extension was started under the Trump administration ― at a cost of $35 million a mile ― but didn’t get very far, with much of the construction material left in piles at the site.
Trump in 2016 repeatedly vowed to build a “big beautiful wall” across the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border if elected.
He has claimed that he completed the task.
“I did finish the wall,” he said on CNN earlier this year. “I built a wall.”
A 2022 report found the wall built under Trump was breached thousand of times using “inexpensive power tools.” Others reported the wall could be breached with a primitive ladder made from about $5 in material.
Trump border event at wall that Obama built highlighted an unfulfilled promise
Isaac Arnsdorf, Marianne LeVine and Erin Patrick O’Connor,
The Washington Post – August 26, 2024
MONTEZUMA PASS, Ariz. – A brown ribbon carved a straight gash across a vast, flat desert basin, the only mark of human civilization visible on this wilderness. The partition charged up a steep hill in Montezuma Canyon, then suddenly stopped. Extra pieces lay in piles nearby, rusting monuments to an unfinished campaign promise.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump came here on Thursday to heap praise on the structure standing to his right – “the Rolls-Royce of walls,” he called it – and lament the unused segments lying to his left. Joining him there, Border Patrol union leader Paul A. Perez called the standing fence “Trump wall” and the idle parts “Kamala wall,” after his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Those labels were inaccurate. This section of 20-foot steel slats was actually built during the administration of President Barack Obama. Trump added the unfinished extension up the hillside, an engineering challenge that cost at least $35 million a mile. The unused panels of 30-foot beams were procured during the Trump administration and never erected.
“Where you were, that was kind of a joke today,” John Ladd, a Trump supporter whose ranch extends along the border, said while driving the dirt road along the barrier, the gapped panels making a flipbook out of the shrubby trees and grass on the other side. “Had to be in front of Trump’s wall, but you went to Montezuma, and that’s Obama’s wall.”
The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the barrier next to Thursday’s campaign stop was built during the Obama administration. The Trump campaign and Perez did not respond to questions about the discrepancy.
“If Kamala truly wanted to close the border and continue building President Trump’s wall, she could go to the White House and do it today,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Only President Trump will get it done.”
This spot along the U.S.-Mexico border, quickly accessible from nearby Sierra Vista, has often served as the backdrop for Republican photo ops. The scenery here did not attest to the fearsome migrant caravans or invasions of military-age foreign men that Trump often describes. There was no evidence here of Trump’s depiction of vicious criminals and terrorists, cannibals and infectious hordes, or people sent directly from prisons and mental institutions pouring over the border. There was no sign of foot traffic over such hostile shadeless wilderness, other than a small patrol of Mexican authorities on the other side.
Nor did this site show the very real conditions that exist in other parts of the border: Towns teeming with displaced people, cars backed up at legal crossings and swept for smuggling, bodies recovered from the Rio Grande.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event in front of the US-Mexico border, Thursday, Aug 22, 2024, in Sierra Vista, Arizona. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri)
For Trump, a campaign stop here on Thursday had larger meaning. It was an attempt to recapture the storyline of this presidential race from Vice President Kamala Harris, who wrapped up an ebullient Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Thursday evening. For Trump, visiting the border was also something of a spiritual homecoming to the place that has animated his candidacy and movement since 2015.
But the reality on the ground was not as straightforward as the “Build the Wall” chant that electrified his campaign eight years ago suggested. His vow to finish the wall, now formalized in the Republican Party platform, highlights the uncomfortable fact that he did not finish it in his first term, and Mexico did not pay for it, as he once promised it would.
“I’d hear people say, ‘Oh, he didn’t build the wall’ – we built the wall,” Trump said defensively on Thursday in front of the unfinished barrier. “We built much more than I was anticipated to build.”
The day before, at a rally in North Carolina, Trump responded to a supporter who shouted “Build the Wall” by saying, “Well, the wall was largely built. We were adding space onto the wall.”
As president, Trump spent more than $11 billion to finish more than 450 miles of wall along the almost 2,000-mile southern border, one of the most expensive federal infrastructure projects in history. During the primary, some GOP rivals experimented with attacking Trump for failing to finish the wall, but Republican voters largely shrugged or scoffed.
He references the wall in a smaller percentage of his social media posts and speeches than he did eight years ago, according to a Washington Post analysis. Instead, he has emphasized plans for large-scale, militarized roundups and deportations of undocumented immigrants throughout the United States. To justify such drastic measures, he has frequently used dehumanizing language to vilify undocumented immigrants as violent and dangerous. The overwhelming majority of people in removal proceedings do not have criminal charges, according to an analysis of Department of Homeland Security records by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee.
Even as Trump has made immigration central to his bid to take back the White House, border apprehensions have declined dramatically this summer amid the Biden administration’s new asylum restrictions and stepped-up enforcement in Mexico. In July, illegal border crossings, which rose to record levels during the Biden administration, declined to the lowest levels in almost four years, after the Biden administration enacted sweeping measures to limit asylum access.
A short walk from the spot where Trump spoke on Thursday, the barrier crosses a dry stream bed, and the uniform bollards give way to storm gates. The gates were wide open, to accommodate the sudden floods of the summer monsoon season, spanned only by a few strands of barbed wire. The base of some of the nearby slats show the scars of erosion that have sometimes left the fence dangling above the ground.
Smugglers have breached the barrier thousands of times, including while Trump was in office. The wall has been tunneled under and climbed over. It has been walked around and sawed through. It has not stopped migration any more that it has stopped drug and human smuggling, most of which happens at ports of entry.
The wall’s defenders argue that, as part of broader border enforcement, it helps slow down crossings and free up Border Patrol resources. The border wall “completely changed the operational environment and allowed Border Patrol to secure those areas with significantly fewer agents,” said Rodney Scott, who was chief of the U.S. Border Patrol under Trump and under Biden until August 2021.
But some policy experts say the barrier simply shifts where and how migrants cross the border. And many experts argue that U.S. immigration policy and conditions in migrants’ home countries are what drive migration, regardless of the obstacles placed in their path to reaching the United States.
“It’s really hard to measure the effectiveness of the wall because it’s one piece of a larger puzzle in U.S. policy on immigration, and even though it is a physical barrier, there are so many other reasons why migrants end up where they end up trying to cross into U.S. territory,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
In his first term, Trump used executive power to bypass congressional opposition to the wall. In late 2018, his fight with Congress over funding led to the longest government shutdown in American history. When Congress refused to budge, Trump declared a national emergency in order to divert money from the military budget.
Former administration officials and the Trump campaign said he would be determined to use every available power to complete the wall in a second term.
“There’s no doubt in my mind … he will, I hope on day one, declare a national emergency,” said Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection under Trump. “On day one, that will give him the ability then to tap into those [Department of Defense] funds … while at the same time working with Congress … You’re going to see the same approach that he used during the first administration.”
The former president “will utilize any and all appropriate authorities necessary to continue construction of the border wall and protect America’s homeland,” Leavitt said in an emailed statement.
If Trump were to declare a national emergency again in a second term, outside groups would likely sue to stop him. But the legal process could take a long time, said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Trump might be able to complete large sections of wall in the meantime, she said.
“The appeals would run the entire course of the Trump presidency and even though there might be, and I think there are, meritorious legal challenges … it’s still quite possible that the Trump administration could continue to rely on that power while this process played out, if the lower courts stayed their rulings,” Goitein said.
A changed political environment might also make it easier for Trump to complete the wall. The Republican Party has become more Trump-aligned, and should Trump become president and Republicans control the House and the Senate with significant margins, border wall funding is likely to increase in the annual appropriations process.
The border wall has also become more popular with the public than it was during the Trump administration. A Monmouth University poll found that 53 percent of Americans favored the border wall in February 2024, the highest share since Monmouth began asking the question in September 2015, when support for the wall was at 48 percent. Support for the wall hit a low in September 2017, with 35 percent of Americans in favor.
Mexico has opposed the construction of the border wall and has pursued more aggressive enforcement along the border, helping the Biden administration reach its lowest level of illegal border crossings in almost four years.
But as long as construction takes place on the U.S. side of the border, Mexico can’t do much to stop it, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior adviser for immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Even if he gets the funding, Trump might face obstacles obtaining the land he needs for construction. Much of the land along the border in Texas is privately owned, and some landowners are reluctant to sell.
Trump might also face environmental opposition to renewed wall construction. The incomplete border wall has already affected the migration patterns of many northern American wildlife species, said Myles Traphagen, borderlands program coordinator at the Wildlands Network, a nonprofit conservation organization focused on sustaining biodiversity. The current barrier will also require constant, expensive maintenance, Traphagen noted.
“There’s going to be this big albatross hanging around America’s neck to continually maintain this beast,” he said.
For many Americans, though, the border wall has become a symbol. Traphagen added: “The border wall reinforces that, okay, this guy is doing something.”
Nick Miroff, Clara Ence Morse, Emily Guskin, Scott Clement and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.
Opinion: The ideas in Project 2025? Reagan tried them, and the nation suffered
Joel Edward Goza – August 25, 2024
President Reagan, shown in 1981, based many of his policies on ideas from the Heritage Foundation publication “The Mandate for Leadership.” Project 2025 makes up a majority of the latest edition of this title and recommends many of the same extreme policies. (Ron Edmonds / Associated Press)More
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative playbook that would overhaul much of the federal government under a second Trump administration, has sparked fear and concern from voters despite the former president’s attempt to distance his campaign from the plan. But while Project 2025 might seem radical, most of it is not new. Instead, the now-famous document seeks to reanimate many of the worst racial, economic and political instincts of the Reagan Revolution.
Project 2025 begins with its authors (one of whom stepped down last month) boasting of the Heritage Foundation’s 1981 publication “The Mandate for Leadership,” which helped shape the Reagan administration’s policy framework. It hit its mark: Reagan wrote 60% of its recommendations into public policy in his first year in office, according to the Heritage Foundation. Yet the 900-plus-page Project 2025, itself a major component of a new edition of “The Mandate for Leadership,” does not contain any analysis of the economic and social price Americans paid for the revolution the Heritage Foundation and Reagan inspired.
If today’s economic inequality, racial unrest and environmental degradation represent some of our greatest political challenges, we would do well to remember that Reagan and the Heritage Foundation were the preeminent engineers of these catastrophes. Perhaps no day in Reagan’s presidency better embodied his policy transformations or the political ambitions of the Heritage Foundation than Aug. 13, 1981, when Reagan signed his first budget.
This budget dramatically transformed governmental priorities and hollowed out the nation’s 50-year pursuit of government for the common good that began during the New Deal. Once passed, it stripped 400,000 poor working families of their welfare benefits, while removing significant provisions from another 300,000. Radical cuts in education affected 26 million students. The number of poor Americans increased by 2.2 million, and the percentage of Black Americans living in poverty rose to a staggering 34.2%.
Of course, this was just the beginning of Reagan’s war on the poor, the environment and education. Following a Heritage Foundation plan, the Environmental Protection Agency’s operating budget would fall by 27%, and its science budget decreased by more than 50%. Funding for programs by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that provided housing assistance would be cut by 70%, according to Matthew Desmond’s “Poverty, By America.” Homelessness skyrocketed. And, as Project 2025 proposes, Reagan attempted to eliminate the Department of Education but settled for gutting its funding in a manner that set public education, in the words of author Jonathan Kozol, “back almost 100 years.” As funding for these issues nosedived under Reagan, financial support for the “war on drugs” skyrocketed and the prison population nearly doubled.
All the while, protections provided to the wealthy ballooned. Tax rates on personal income, corporate revenue and capital gains plummeted. For example, the highest income tax rate when Reagan took office was 70%. He would eventually lower it to 33%.
To ensure that wealth would be a long-lived family entitlement, Reagan instituted a 300% increase in inheritance tax protections through estate tax exemptions in his first budget. In 1980, the exemption stood at $161,000. By the time Reagan left office in 1989 it was $600,000. Today it is $13,610,000. This means that today nearly all wealthy children enjoy tax-free access to generational wealth.
And beginning during Reagan’s presidency, the number of millionaires and billionaires multiplied, increasing 225% and 400%, respectively, while the poverty of Americans across racial lines intensified. Even white males were more likely to be poor following Reagan’s presidency. Today poverty is the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S., even though this is the wealthiest nation in the world.
If we feel like we live in a country that isn’t working for anyone who isn’t wealthy, these are some of the core reasons why. Looking back at the Reagan era and the Heritage Foundation’s original “Mandate for Leadership,” we must remember that our domestic wounds are largely self-inflicted, results of buying into racial, economic and environmental lies that continue to be sold. It is precisely the types of policies that devastated the nation during the Reagan administration that Project 2025 now seeks to resuscitate. Perhaps the only truly new thing Project 2025 suggests is using more authoritarian means to enact its agenda.
History has hinges, moments that change the trajectory of nations. The greatest progress in our country has almost always emerged during turbulent times. It is up to the United States’ most committed believers to close the door on terror and trauma and open one that leads to new democratic possibilities.
Our current moment represents more than an election. It is a turning point that has the potential to transform the United States for generations to come. We don’t need the version of the past that Project 2025 is trying to sell us. It didn’t work for most Americans then, and it won’t work for most of us now. But perhaps Project 2025 is the push the Democratic Party needed. While the Republican Party veers further into authoritarianism, Democrats must be equally determined to develop a truly equitable democracy and bind the wounds of a deeply divided nation.
Joel Edward Goza, a professor of ethics at Simmons College of Kentucky, is the author of the forthcoming book “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America.”
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