Biden’s Covid Plan Will Define His Presidency
It’s not just about the pandemic. How the new administration handles Covid-19 will be a test of every one of its policies—and its values.
PHOTOGRAPH: ALEX EDELMAN/GETTY IMAGES
ON DAY ZERO of the presidential administration of Joe Biden, the single priority of the federal government must be Covid-19. Without torquing the numbers of deaths and infections downward, no other policy—economic improvement, immigration reform, even a serious approach to stopping climate change—can happen. And that sentence works in reverse too; dealing with Covid-19 is dealing with all that other stuff.
Like any big machine, the federal government’s public health system takes time and energy to come up to speed. It hasn’t functioned at its peak efficiency during the administration of Donald Trump. So nothing will change at first. And then something will. And then everything will.
© SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES
Assuming all goes as planned. For the last year, nothing has gone as planned, when there was a plan at all.So, the new plan: Last week, Biden laid out a new, more aggressive approach, part of a promise to let science lead policy during his term. The US public health system, broken and underfunded, hasn’t been able to cope with the pandemic, leaving vaccines as the best and only hope, for now, of controlling it. But for all the blazing speed of their development and testing, vaccine rollout has been, in Biden’s (and everyone else’s) words, “a dismal failure.” Biden has now set a goal of giving 100 million shots of vaccine in the first 100 days of the administration. (As of January 19, the number in the US was 14.7 million, according to Bloomberg’s tracker.)
That won’t be easy, but it is possible. Biden proposed opening up who’s allowed to get vaccinated—sidestepping the tier system recommended to states by various government panels in an attempt to ensure equity along with speedy shot-giving. The Federal Emergency Management Agency will build 100 mass vaccination centers in places like stadiums and convention centers, and the feds will deploy
mobile vaccination clinics as well—run, Biden said, by FEMA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and staffed by the public health corps, retired medical professionals, even the military.
Of course, to make all that work, the government will need to increase vaccine production and improve distribution. Last week, outgoing Health and Human Services secretary Alexander Azar also proposed releasing doses that had been “held back” to guarantee the second shots required by both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and opening up vaccinations to everyone over 65 years old. That was just before The Washington Post reported that there wasn’t enough vaccine to go around. “Our plan is as clear as it is bold: Get more people vaccinated for free. Create more places for them to get vaccinated. Mobilize more medical teams to get shots into people’s arms. Increase supply and get it out the door as soon as possible,” Biden said on Friday. “This is going to be one of the most challenging efforts ever undertaken by our country, but you have my word, we will manage the hell out of this operation.”
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Giant predatory worms lurked beneath the ancient seafloor, fossils reveal
Preserved burrows found in ancient rocks suggest that trap-jaw worms have burst from the sand to snatch fish for millions of years.
Wikipédia
Burrows left in the rock
Modern sand strikers are polychaete worms, belonging to the same group of animals as the sand worms that make little bubbles as the tide ebbs at the beach. But sand strikers can get much bigger than anything you’re likely to see at the shore.
HIDDEN BENEATH THE seafloor around coral reefs, giant worms wait until an unlucky fish swims close enough for them to nab with their jagged, agile jaws and pull back into their sandy burrows. These rapid, deadly attacks have earned the worms the name sand strikers.
Now, newly discovered fossilized burrows detailed in the journal Scientific Reports indicate that versions of these voracious sea worms were likely snacking on unsuspecting fish about 20 million years ago in what is now northern Taiwan.
Discovered in the Yehliu Geopark and Badouzi promontory of the island, the burrows are what are known as trace fossils—preserved imprints left behind by the activities of ancient animals. Trace fossils are valuable because they can preserve clues about a creature’s behavior. In this case, the prehistoric tubes, each over six feet long and about an inch wide, are trace fossils likely left behind by creatures that lived in the Cenozoic era, when this part of the world was underneath the ocean.
Although modern sand strikers have been known to scientists since the late 18th century, researchers have only recently studied them in detail. The newfound fossils indicate that these vicious sea worms have likely been a part of ocean ecosystems through time immemorial, reinforcing the evolutionary advantages of their devious hunting technique.
America’s Salad Bowl Becomes Fertile Ground for Covid-19
The hospital in Arizona’s Yuma County, on the border, is so overwhelmed it’s had to fly Covid-19 patients to other cities. No other region has had a higher case rate during the pandemic.
source:Adriana Zehbrauskas
YUMA, Ariz. — The Rev. Emilio Chapa was delivering a homily on a recent Sunday when he paused to lament a sight that had shaken him as he entered the sacristy before Mass.
The board where his staff posted requests for funeral services was covered with names. “I had never seen it so full before,” he told his parishioners at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in central Yuma.
Over the course of the pandemic, the Yuma area has identified coronavirus cases at a higher rate than any other U.S. region. One out of every six residents has come down with the virus.
Each winter, the county’s population swells by 100,000 people, to more than 300,000, as field workers descend on the farms and snowbirds from the Midwest pull into R.V. parks. This seasonal ritual brings jobs, local spending and high tax revenue. But this year, the influx has turned deadly.
“Some families have buried multiple relatives,” Father Chapa said. “It’s a dire situation.”
Father Chapa’s parish is weathering the full spectrum of the pandemic’s surge. In Spanish and English, he ministers to Mexican-American families who have been rooted here for generations as well as the seasonal residents, all of them afflicted. The church is handling three times the number of funerals it usually does.
While coronavirus cases are starting to flatten across the country, the virus is still raging in many border communities. Three of the six metro areas with the highest rates of known cases since the outbreak began are small cities straddling Mexico: Yuma; Eagle Pass, Texas; and El Centro, Calif. And Laredo, Texas, is adding cases at a per capita rate more than three times what is being seen in hard-hit Los Angeles and Phoenix.
Seasonal migration, the daily flow of people back and forth and lax measures to contain the virus’s spread have created a combustible constellation. Arizona has seen among the highest increases in newly reported deaths of any state over the past two weeks — and it is not clear when this troubling trend will abate.
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