The Verge - Healths |
| We have bigger problems than COVID-19’s origins Posted: 28 May 2021 06:12 AM PDT  As the COVID-19 pandemic scales down in the United States, debates around the origins of the virus — and speculations that it came from a lab in China, not an animal — rumbled back to life. And they're diverting attention to the wrong places. Focusing on where the virus came from is a distraction from the rest of the urgent work governments and health agencies around the world need to do in order to end this pandemic and prepare for the next one. We don't need a consensus on the origins of COVID-19 in order to take steps to strengthen global public health. That doesn't mean finding out where the coronavirus came from isn't important. It's one of the pieces of information that could give us tools to prevent a similar situation from happening again. Saying that the coronavirus came from a lab rather than an animal is an extraordinary claim; it would require extraordinary evidence to be proven true. Both scenarios are still technically possible, even if a lab leak is far less likely. And there are serious scientists who are calling for a serious investigation. After renewed attention — though, notably, little new data — on the theory that the outbreak started after the virus was accidentally leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he's asking United States intelligence agencies to redouble efforts to figure out the origins of the coronavirus. In 90 days, he wants to see a report "that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion" on how the virus jumped to humans, sparking the COVID-19 pandemic. Taking a methodical, dispassionate approach to tracking the origins of the coronavirus could take many times longer than Biden's proposed 90 days, assuming there's ever conclusive proof at all. It took around 14 years to figure out where the SARS virus came from. Tracing the origins of the 1918 flu pandemic took decades. Scientists still don't know where Ebola outbreaks come from. There are other things we could focus on that might not take quite as long and can provide sure results. Countries like the US could double down on efforts to distribute life-saving COVID-19 vaccines to poorer countries. Wealthy countries snapped up the lion's share of the doses —and so far, 85 percent of vaccinations have been given there. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, called it a "moral failure." The pandemic is still an urgent threat in places without enough shots for healthcare workers. If the virus is still spreading in those countries, the pandemic isn't over. As long as it spreads, it can mutate and be a threat everywhere — even in places with high rates of immunization. The US could also turn inward, and take a full account of the ways in which our public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic went horribly wrong. We could focus on shoring up our public health infrastructure and improving our hospital systems so they'll hold up under a surge of sick people. We could even use the time to take a look at lab safety practices. "Let's stipulate that pandemics can result from natural spillovers or from laboratory accidents—and then let's move along to implications," Daniel Engber wrote in The Atlantic. Lab screw-ups happen, and they're scary. People are particularly spooked by research that alters viruses to make them deadlier or more transmissible, which is done in some US labs. Well before the pandemic, experts questioned if there was enough oversight of those experiments. Even if a lab leak wasn't involved in this particular pandemic, it might be worth strengthening policies around dangerous pathogens anyhow. Finding the source of COVID-19 pandemic won't bring back the nearly 600,000 people in the US who died from the disease. The virus itself isn't the only reason why they're gone — they died because the pandemic was bungled through a combination of bad leadership, poor communication, and decades of cuts to the country's public health infrastructure. A viral outbreak is hazardous, but it only became such a magnificent disaster because of how people responded to it. Figuring out how to prevent a future viral outbreak from turning into this scale of a disaster is a better use of our limited time and energy. That so many people are quick to assume intentional wrongdoing or neglect led to the initial outbreaks of the virus, though, shows how much trust in public institutions eroded over the past year. It's for a good reason: China did attempt to downplay the pandemic and is working to paint its COVID-19 response as a victory. There were mistakes from groups like the World Health Organization, which was slow to recognize the importance of ventilation, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which screwed up messaging around masks. The terrifying mistakes made by public health officials, researchers, and politicians are things we should be honest about. We can take the fears that make people want to investigate the lab leak idea seriously. But we don't need to know where the virus came from to deal with those issues — and they'll be key to rebuilding trust, which we need for the next pandemic. Once the world is vaccinated, we should. But first, let's try to keep as many people alive as possible.  |
| Go read this investigation into the real death toll from the Texas freeze Posted: 27 May 2021 10:12 AM PDT  Hundreds more people died in Texas during the February deep freeze and blackouts than the state's official count shows, according to an investigation by BuzzFeed News. The outages left millions of people without power as indoor temperatures dropped to deadly lows. Texas has so far acknowledged 151 winter storm-related deaths. BuzzFeed News, on the other hand, found that an estimated 700 people lost their lives from the combined catastrophes of the storm and power outages. The news outlet conducted a thorough analysis of data that showed how many more people died around that time than would normally be expected. It's the most recent analysis to show that the way authorities typically count death tolls from disasters tends to drastically low-ball the actual losses. According to BuzzFeed News, the Texas Department of State Health Services counted mostly deaths from hypothermia, accidents involving ice, and carbon monoxide poisoning (people turned on cars and grills inside their homes in desperate attempts to stay warm). But hypothermia is "notoriously difficult to diagnose," Hannah Jarvis, assistant medical examiner at the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, tells BuzzFeed News. And the deaths of people who were already vulnerable to extreme cold and stress because of underlying medical conditions flew under the radar of Texas officials, BuzzFeed News reports. Many of their death records point to those conditions, like cardiovascular disease or diabetes, as the cause of death. But family members and roommates who were there for their loved ones' last, shivering moments say the freezing cold was to blame. "I still believe the cold made him to where his heart just gave out," one grieving widow, Mary Gonzales, tells BuzzFeed News. BuzzFeed News modeled how many deaths are expected in a given week, using long-term and seasonal trends. Then it compared that to actual deaths recorded by the CDC to find out how many more people likely died because of the storm and blackouts (and subtracted deaths from COVID-19). Similar studies revealed how many people really died during Hurricane Maria and the blackouts that followed. Puerto Rico changed its official death count from 64 to 2,975 following public outrage over its initial underestimate and after a more in-depth report by George Washington University arrived at the higher number. "We now know that the Texas government's repeated failure to modernize our energy systems killed over 700 Texans in February's winter storm," former Texas representative Beto O'Rourke tweeted, calling for more action from lawmakers to harden the state's energy system from climate change and more extreme weather. Many energy companies chose not to steel the state's energy infrastructure against bouts of cold weather, even after a similarly brutal 2011 cold snap. In the end, this story is about more than numbers. BuzzFeed News talked to families who are still fighting for justice after losing those they loved. Many were unable to qualify for support from FEMA because their death certificates didn't mention the winter storm. Failing to officially acknowledge their deaths also puts lives at risk in future disasters, because public health officials aren't able to see all the vulnerabilities that played out during the storm. BuzzFeed News shows what the state missed; read the full story here.  |
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