The United States’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic is haphazard, uncoordinated and sorely missing the guidance of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that agency’s former director told USA TODAY on Tuesday.
And the “extraordinary” absence of the nation’s lead public health agency at the forefront of the coronavirus fight makes Tom Frieden feel “less safe.”
Now president of the nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives, Frieden advises other nations on how to organize against epidemics. He said global best practice is to designate one incident manager reporting to a health department official who then communicates to the head of state.
That’s not how it’s working in the U.S.
“We’ve heard that FEMA’s in charge. We’ve heard that the vice president’s in charge. We’ve heard that (U.S. Ambassador-at-Large) Dr. (Deborah) Birx is the coordinator. We’ve heard that (Health and Human Services Secretary Alex) Azar is in charge of the task force. Who’s on first here?” Frieden told USA TODAY’s Editorial Board on a video call.
Despite widespread rumors, social media reports and President Donald Trump’s own optimism surrounding the effectiveness of several existing drugs, so far there are no proven treatments for COVID-19, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“There’s no magic drug out there right now,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at a news conference Thursday.
When COVID-19 treatments do arrive, they will likely fall into two categories, experts say. The first will be aimed at slowing down replication of the virus in patients early in the disease. The second will help stop the deadly autoinflammatory response in the lungs in its critical stage.
The drugs touted by the president include the malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir and azithromycin, a bacterial antibiotic. They remain, however, classed as “investigational therapeutics” because there isn’t enough data to show they are a safe and effective treatment for the illness.
For Elizabeth Schneider, her bout with the coronavirus began with a scratchy throat, exhaustion and a headache. Then came fever, chills and nausea. But she never had shortness of breath or coughing.
Charlie Campbell’s 89-year-old dad had a cough and irregular heart rate and was briefly on oxygen before he recovered.
Amy Driscoll first experienced shortness of breath and her chest felt constricted.
For Bill Houser, a Superior Court judge in Kitsap County, Washington, the symptoms came on overnight.
People who contract COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus sweeping the globe, can experience a broad range of symptoms and have very different experiences. Some have no symptoms at all. By far the largest group present with fever and other symptoms. Most will get better on their own. About 15% of those infected go on to have severe illness and must be hospitalized. Another 5% become so ill they must be treated in an intensive care unit.
As illness and death linked to the new coronavirus accelerate across the U.S., federal officials are looking to existing and new treatments to battle the disease.
It marked the start of an all-out effort by thousands of scientists worldwide working to create vaccines against the new coronavirus, in what in research terms is a blindingly fast response to the global threat. As of last week, the World Health Organization had posted a list of 41 possible vaccine candidates on its site.
Still, no one will be lining up this summer for vaccinations. It will be at least a year to 18 months before any vaccine is ready for large-scale use, according to most estimates. Before being deployed, vaccines must go through multiple rounds of testing to make sure they are safe, effective and don’t have unintended consequences.
SEATTLE — As the coronavirus epidemic threatens Seattle, warnings to remain inside are starting to echo the city’s 1918 crisis, when the Spanish flu forced many into lockdown.
My great-aunt Violet Harris was 15 when it hit. Partly out of boredom, she began keeping a diary. Her family and friends eventually emerged unscathed, if a little stir-crazy, from the tedium of having schools closed, mandates that masks be worn outside at all times and restrictions on group events.
At least 16 people have died in Washington state because of coronavirus, with most of the fatalities occurring in the greater Seattle area. The city’s major employers, including Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, have told employees to stay home for at least three weeks. Local universities have called shifted to online classes for the rest of the quarter, including the University of Washington’s 47,000 students.
The city faced a much different health crisis a century ago. Many people mistakenly believe that Seattle was an epicenter of the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, which killed as many as 50 million people as it raged around the globe. That’s partly because one of the iconic photos of the global pandemic shows a line of Seattle policemen all wearing masks.
PALISADES, NEW YORK — Peter Kelemen spends time in Oman looking for ways to pull carbon out of the air and put it back underground. His colleague, David Goldberg, looks at ways to store it far below the sea floor off the Oregon coast. Chemical engineer Alissa Park is working with steel mills in China to turn slag and waste carbon dioxide into reusable material.
The goal of all three Columbia University researchers — and thousands of other scientists and engineers globally — is to find ways to pull some of the carbon dioxide that’s causing global warming out of the atmosphere and store it away. It’s called carbon capture and storage, and experts increasingly say it’s going to be essential to saving the planet.
Carbon capture and storage might sound like the plot of a crazy science-fiction movie, one where an intrepid band of risk-takers swoops in to save the Earth from certain destruction with engineering, grit and (in some scenarios) good old American know-how.
Except it’s no Hollywood film. Humanity is facing catastrophe as climate change causes the Earth to warm. Modeling by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests to keep it from wreaking climate havoc, we can add no more than 800 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2100. We’re adding 37 gigatons a year now, meaning that at this rate, we’ll have used up our entire carbon budget for the century in just under 22 years.
If you’re concerned about climate change, the next car you buy really should be electric.
Why? Because the average car, SUV or light truck in the United States is on the road for 11.8 years. So vehicles bought this coming year will be part of the shift away from fossil fuels that climate scientists say needs to be well underway within 10 years.
“By 2030 we need to be really well into this transition. Which means people need to be buying these cars now,” said Lewis Fulton, director of the Sustainable Transportation Energy Pathways program at the University of California, Davis.
The message is getting out there. In May, 16% of Americans said they were likely to buy an electric vehicle the next time they were in the market for a new or used car. Their leading reasons were concern for the environment and lower long-term costs of EVs, according to a AAA survey.
The good news, say owners, is that today’s electric cars are cost-effective, reliable, fun to drive and get upward of 200 miles to the charge so it’s not a hardship.
ROSCOE, Texas — The sprawling Roscoe Wind Complex stretches across four counties and 84,000 acres in West Texas — bigger than five Manhattan islands. Located about three hours west of Fort Worth, it’s comprised of 627 turbines that could generate up to 782 megawatts of electricity an hour, or enough to power 234,000 homes for a full year.
Nearing the wind complex, first one enormous turbine emerges from the cotton and wheat fields, then another, then a row of them — then hundreds, their gigantic blades spinning steadily in the blustery Texas wind. Each turbine is more than 200 feet tall, the size of a 20-story building, with blades that point 95 feet into the air.
For a state tied both economically and in the American imagination to oil, gas and coal, Texas has in recent years become the biggest generator of wind power in the U.S. By next year, Texas is poised to get more of its electricity from wind than coal.
All that wind adds up. Texas now produces one-quarter of all U.S. electricity from wind. If Texas were a country, it would rank fifth in the world for wind power capacity.
“There was a bunch of demand, there was a bunch of wind and there was policy that supported competition,” said Susan Sloan, vice president for state affairs with the American Wind Energy Association in Washington, D.C. “It has just really blossomed.”
Texas’ robust use of its wind could also serve as a map for other U.S. states with substantial wind resources at a time when climate change scientists are warning that governments must embrace clean energy or the Earth could become uninhabitable.
Texas isn’t oil country, or coal country, or even fracking country, said Sarah Mills, an engineer and development expert who studies wind energy in rural areas at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“Texas is simply energy country,” she said.
Why Texas is such great wind country
There are several reasons why Texas has become the nation’s largest producer of electricity from wind.
First off, it’s gusty as all get out. “Texas has a boatload of wind,” said Chrissy Mann of the Sierra Club’s Lone Star chapter.
Texas sits right in the wind belt, a swath of land blessed with an excellent wind resource. The wind resource continues straight up the middle of the country to Canada and includes Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas. There’s alsosignificant wind in portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wyoming and Montana.
Most have been building out their wind energy installations. Iowa gets 34% of its energy from wind power and in Michigan some townships are using taxes from wind turbines to pay down their pension liabilities, said Mills.
But the Lone Star state has it all: less restrictive zoning, taxation systems that encourage building and robust transmission lines that together have allowed it to jump ahead of the rest.
“Texas is unique. It’s got a range of policies that all play well together,” said Mills.
Texas crucially decided in 2005 to invest in 464 miles of power transmission lines stretching from the northern and western parts of the state, where the wind blows, to the eastern part of the state, home to most of its cities and industry.
“It’s really the expansion of Texas’ transmission lines that explain Texas’ success,” said Mills.
The state’s wind revolution began under then-Gov. George W. Bush, who oversaw the deregulation of the state’s electricity market beginning in 1999. It boomed under his successor, Rick Perry, a Republican governor who’s now the U.S. Secretary of Energy and a strong proponent of fossil fuels.
“They were interested in economic development for the state. It wasn’t a matter of climate change or ideology, it was purely economics. This has always received bipartisan support in Texas,” said Robert Stavins, a professor of energy and economic development at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Texas’ wind industry also benefits from the state having large rural areas with few zoning restrictions and a strong ethos of limited government intervention into what landowners can do on their own property.
“There aren’t a ton of rules about where things get put. And there are lots of landowners with large swaths of land who can place multiple turbines,” said Mills.
Texas has its own energy transmission system, ERCOT. Because the state controls its energy and because the system doesn’t cross state lines, it’s not subject to the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which would give the federal government the power to regulate it, said Stavins.
“It doesn’t have to receive federal permits, so it’s able to move more quickly on infrastructure,” he said.
Building out everywhere
Roscoe is just one of multiple enormous wind power installations in the state. There’s also smaller wind farms.
The Roscoe complex is owned and run by German energy firm RWE Renewables, which recently acquired it from E.ON, also based in Germany.
As long as the wind blows, the turbines spin, generating power that travels to Dallas, Houston and other urban centers in Texas, as well as much of the surrounding area, said Rich Hudson, the complex’s regional operations manager. On a recent day, he drove through the blacktop roads dissecting the wind complex, past switchyards and substations that send the energy to ERCOT.
Even West Texas’s powerful lightning storms don’t stop the turbines, Hudson said. The turbines are equipped with “lightning arrest systems” that send a bolt of lightning to the ground if they’re hit, Hudson said. They’re also designed to stop turning if the winds get too strong, he said.
“They’re pretty robust,” Hudson said.
During Hurricane Harvey two years ago, a RWE wind farm near Corpus Christi was put to the test as the Category 4 storm took aim at the Texas coast.
Operators there shut down the turbines as the massive storm neared and “feathered” the blades – or angled them for the least amount of wind resistance, said Matt Tulis, an Austin-based spokesman for RWE. A substation and another facility flooded but the turbines were unscathed.
“When the guys got back on site, they were surprised at how little damage there was,” he said.
Despite the high number of turbines in the state, national data shows that in general residents who live by wind turbines don’t seem perturbed by them.
“The majority of people we surveyed were within half a mile of an existing turbine, so they were people who know all about them, they’ve heard them and seen them day and night,” said Ben Hoen, a research scientist with the Electricity Markets and Policy Group at the federal Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Wind produces a substantial number of jobs in the state. More than 25,000 Texans work in the industry. To maintain the turbines, teams of technicians constantly visit the structures, inspecting gears or conducting pre-planned maintenance.
Wind dollars pay for local services
For rural communities that have been hollowed out by declines in agriculture and manufacturing, wind energy is a win, said the American Wind Energy Association’s Sloan.
“The farmers and ranchers get the income from the land, the communities get a bigger tax base and the cities get a cheap, stable energy source,” she said.
All this makes wind an increasingly valuable resource that’s allowing rural areas to remain vibrant, said Cyrus Reed, conservation director for the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, one of the oldest environmental groups in the nation.
“You don’t have to choose,” said Reed. “You can have turbines and a cotton field and a pumpjack [oil well] all on the same acre.”
KC Hope, a technician at the RWE complex in Roscoe, agrees. He’s seen how the wind farm has transformed his small hometown, with its population of 1,293. Landowners are earning steady royalties from turbines on their farms and the local county has been bolstered by a surge in tax revenue, he said.
The turbine leasing money went into transforming the local high school, Roscoe Collegiate High –“Home of the Plowboys and Plowgirls”– into a top-tier, state-of-the-art STEM school that draws transfer students from other counties, said Hope, who is also a city councilman.
“We’ve transformed in a way we wouldn’t have without them,” he said of the turbines.
ROSCOE, Texas — The sprawling Roscoe Wind Complex stretches across four counties and 84,000 acres in West Texas — bigger than five Manhattan islands. Located about three hours west of Fort Worth, it’s comprised of 627 turbines that could generate up to 782 megawatts of electricity an hour, or enough to power 234,000 homes for a full year.
Nearing the wind complex, first one enormous turbine emerges from the cotton and wheat fields, then another, then a row of them — then hundreds, their gigantic blades spinning steadily in the blustery Texas wind. Each turbine is more than 200 feet tall, the size of a 20-story building, with blades that point 95 feet into the air.
For a state tied both economically and in the American imagination to oil, gas and coal, Texas has in recent years become the biggest generator of wind power in the U.S. By next year, Texas is poised to get more of its electricity from wind than coal.
All that wind adds up. Texas now produces one-quarter of all U.S. electricity from wind. If Texas were a country, it would rank fifth in the world for wind power capacity.
“There was a bunch of demand, there was a bunch of wind and there was policy that supported competition,” said Susan Sloan, vice president for state affairs with the American Wind Energy Association in Washington, D.C. “It has just really blossomed.”
The codes, most of them passed since June, are meant to keep builders from running natural gas lines to new homes and apartments, with an eye toward creating fewer legacy gas hookups as the nation shifts to carbon-neutral energy sources.
For proponents, it’s a change that must be made to fight climate change. For natural gas companies, it’s a threat to their existence. And for some cooks who love to prepare food with flame, it’s an unthinkable loss.
Natural gas is a fossil fuel, mostly methane, and produces 33% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas causing climate change.
‘How could I bring a child into the world?’: More women say climate change means they won’t have kids
Elizabeth Weise
USA TODAY
March 26, 2019
Though Laura Formisano says she never felt a huge desire to have children, she used to presume that would change.
But climate change could make the planet so uninhabitable, she says, she’s not sure she can ever bring herself to become a parent.
“It almost feels like a con, to bring a child into the world when it’s probably not going to be a place we’re really going to want to live,” says Formisano, 30, who manages a co-working space in Los Angeles and has been married for seven months.
Is the future simply too horrific to bring children into? Some couples, frightened by the prospect of droughts, wars, famines and extinctions brought on by climate change, are making that decision.
A Facebook group for women to discuss the idea launched this month, and it’s winning over supporters in Europe and the USA. Conceivable Future, a U.S.-based group, has held more than 50 house parties in 16 states in recent years where women worried about global warming discuss forgoing motherhood.
