Monday Reads: Where the Wild Things Are after Pandemic Shut Downs

A pair of Blue Herons are nesting in the Neutral Ground in front of my home. This is the first time I’ve ever seen these birds outside of Barataria National Wildlife Preserve.

Good Day Sky Dancers!

One of the things that is happening right now as a result of social distancing is that Mother Nature appears to be reclaiming that distance.  Maybe she’s fighting a virus of sorts too.

The Economist has this story: “Covid-19 has emboldened Italy’s fauna.”

A wolf slinks out of a park in Sesto Fiorentino, an industrial centre near Florence. Goslings waddle behind their mothers along deserted thoroughfares in Treviso. Fallow deer invade a golf course on Sardinia and take a dip in the clubhouse swimming pool. As Italians entered the sixth week of Europe’s longest covid-19 lockdown on April 13th, one thing they had to cheer them up was the sight of animals in spaces that humankind had temporarily abandoned.

At Cagliari on Sardinia, bottlenose dolphins have long been known to wait at the mouth of the port to play in the wake of departing motor vessels. But since the lockdown some have entered right into the port, where they have been filmed swimming up and down under a quay, looking at the humans above. A similar phenomenon has been observed morat Triesste. “A non-scientist might speculate that the dolphins are thinking: ‘Why aren’t you moving around in your boats any longer?’” says Giuseppe Bogliani, formerly a University of Pavia professor.

Mr Bogliani cautions against assuming that nature is reclaiming its own. Some mammals, like foxes, may have been in the cities already, prowling undetected at night. A golden eagle spotted gliding above a main road in Milan posed a different question: “Is it there because of the lockdown, or did we just see it because of the lockdown?”

 

Venice canals run clear, dolphins appear in Italy’s waterways amid coronavirus lockdown. Picture: Getty/Twitter

CNN reports on the clearer canals in Venice.

The canals in Venice are clearer than they have been for a long time, due to lockdown measures taken in the face of coronavirus.

As countries and their governments are urging their populations more and more to ‘self-isolate’ and stop all non-essential travel abroad, tourist “honey traps” including Venice are seeing hardly any visitors.

And so, in Venice’s case, there is less need for transportation of any kind to be running, and the canals with less boats are coming up clean, clear and beautiful.

“The water now looks clearer because there is less traffic on the canals, allowing the sediment to stay at the bottom,” a spokesperson for the Venice mayoral office told CNN.

A black bear inspects a grill near Seattle, one of many photos compiled by the Urban Carnivore Project, which is collecting data on the animals that make their home in the Emerald City and its suburbs. Cities are taking a closer look at their animal residents to help them thrive peacefully alongside humans.

The Guardian reports that “Covid-19 – a blessing for pangolins? Pangolins are the world’s most trafficked mammals, but there is evidence that they were the source of the new coronavirus – which could end the trade”.  Great News for Pangolins!

Pangolins look like scaly anteaters. Uniquely among mammals, their bodies are covered in hard protective scales made of keratin: the same material as our nails. They feed on insects such as ants and termites, and are often nocturnal and shy. While they look like anteaters, they are not closely related to them, and their closest living relatives are actually carnivores: the group that includes wolves and cats.

There are eight species of pangolin. Four live in Africa and four in Asia. All are at risk of extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Two of the African species are considered vulnerable and two are endangered. Of the Asian species, one is endangered while the other three are critically endangered.

Pangolins are illegally hunted and traded for two main reasons. First, their meat is considered a delicacy in several south-east Asian countries, especially China and Vietnam. And second, their scales are used in Chinese traditional medicine. As a result, they are the world’s most trafficked mammals.

The idea that pangolins gave us Covid-19 emerged at a press conference given by the South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou on 7 February. Two scientists there, Yongyi Shen and Lihua Xiao, were said to have compared coronaviruses from pangolins and from humans infected in the outbreak. The viruses’ genetic sequences were said to be 99% similar. One co-author, Wu Chen of Guangzhou Zoo, had previously helped show that Sunda pangolins carry coronaviruses.

However, the results had not been published at that stage, so other scientists could not examine them in detail. Meanwhile, there were many other possibilities. The virus could have come from an animal and seafood market in Wuhan, where many species were held. Animals in such markets are often kept in closely packed, unsanitary conditions, with many people nearby: a perfect opportunity for a virus to jump species. Many pointed the finger at bats: the virus is genetically similar to those in bats, and it would not be the first time a disease passed from bats to humans. There was also a study linking the virus to one found in snakes, but this is now considered unlikely.

A civet cat has been spotted roaming on the streets of Kozhikode in the State of Kerala, India on 27 March, 2020

China is looking to permanently ban eating wild animals. 

Over four months after the first cases of COVID-19 surfaced in China, the world remains in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, with nearly 1.5 million confirmed cases and almost 89,000 deaths as of April 9. The novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is believed to have originated in bats and jumped to humans, most likely at a wet market in China’s Hubei province where wild animals were being sold. A move to amend wildlife laws to prevent future outbreaks is now gaining momentum in the country.

The Chinese ban on consumption of wild animals is likely to become permanent in the coming months, according to Aili Kang,  Executive Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Asia Program. This means it would be enshrined in the country’s wildlife legislation. A decision taken by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on Feb. 24 will serve as the basis for amendments to existing wildlife laws.

NYT reports that “Animals Are Rewilding Our Cities. On YouTube, at Least.”

But the truth of these videos seems less interesting to me than the reasons behind their popularity. What is it that we are desperate to see in the natural world right now, and why? Anyone who has had a bird or a bat fly into her home knows how disturbing it can be when animals appear in spaces you assumed were your own, as if they were heralds of luck or future disaster. This sudden, unusual visitation of animals to our streets and cities feels similarly portentous, their presence newly freighted with human significance.

And because in times of dislocation and crisis we search for familiarity to ground ourselves, many of these videos work for us because they show scenes straight out of the cinematic imagination, in which the still, empty streets of postapocalyptic cities are often accompanied by a flourishing of vegetation and wildlife — most famously in the movie “I Am Legend,” in which herds of white-tailed deer bound among abandoned cars in the overgrown streets of Manhattan. We know these places. We have seen them before, and that knowledge carries with it a promise of survival.

Researchers at the University of Adelaide in Austraila suggest that rewilding can improve public health in cities.

In a new paper, published in Frontiers in Microbiology, researchers from the University of Adelaide found that humans in urban populations are in dire need of more natural habitat to address chronic disease rates.

This could be achieved through the restoration of urban microbial biodiversity through rewilding.

Lead author Jacob Mills, from The Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide, said evidence pointed towards humans needing healthy, natural, and microbially-rich environments to properly develop as healthy holobionts – a symbiosis of host and microorganisms reliant on ecosystem health and biodiversity for optimal health outcomes.

He said a decrease in biodiversity, including microbial diversity, of human habitat through urbanization was thought to be a cause of the rapid increase of non-communicable diseases in urban populations.

“We are more than human, cell-for-cell we are 57 per cent microbial, we’re walking ecosystems,” Mills said.

“Our symbiotic microbial partners, or our ‘Old Friends’ as they’re known, come from our mother and wider habitat when we’re young. These microorganisms play vital roles in our health, particularly our immune training and regulation.

“As it stands with current urban designs, people are poorly exposed to their ‘Old Friends’ and partially because of this we have decreased our health status through improper immune training and regulation. Most microbes are actually beneficial or neutral, only rarely do they cause disease.”

The researchers say the modern urban habitat is low in macro and microbial biodiversity and discourages contact with beneficial environmental microbiota.

They also claim these habitat factors, alongside diet, antibiotics, and others, are associated with the epidemic of non-communicable diseases in these societies.

You’ll recognize this as some of the co-morbidities increasing Covid 19 deaths.

Loans supposedly granted to help struggling small businesses have been gobbled up by huge ones in the world of Trumpist corruption and greed.  From today’s WAPO: “White House, GOP face heat after hotel and restaurant chains helped run small business program dry. With program out of money, backlash prompts executives at Shake Shack to return $10 million loan.”

The federal government gave national hotel and restaurant chains millions of dollars in grants before the $349 billion program ran out of money Thursday, leading to a backlash that prompted one company to give the money back and a Republican senator to say that “millions of dollars are being wasted.”

Thousands of traditional small businesses were unable to get funding from the program before it ran dry. As Congress and the White House near a deal to add an additional $310 billion to the program, some are calling for additional oversight and rule changes to prevent bigger chains from accepting any more money.

Ruth’s Chris Steak House, a chain that has 150 locations and is valued at $250 million, reported receiving $20 million in funding from the small business portion of the economic stimulus legislation called the Paycheck Protection Program. The Potbelly chain of sandwich shops, which has more than 400 locations and a value of $89 million, reported receiving $10 million last week.

Shake Shack, a $1.6 billion burger-and-fries chain based in New York City, received $10 million. After complaints from small business advocates after the fund went dry, company founder Danny Meyer and chief executive Randy Garutti announced Sunday evening that they would return the money.

They said they had no idea that the program would run out of money so quickly and that they understood the uproar.

“Late last week, when it was announced that funding for the PPP had been exhausted, businesses across the country were understandably up in arms,” the two wrote in a letter posted online. “If this act were written for small businesses, how is it possible that so many independent restaurants whose employees needed just as much help were unable to receive funding?”

A white-bellied pangolin. (Memphis Zoo)

Politico reports that: “A watchdog out of Trump’s grasp unleashes wave of coronavirus audits. The Government Accountability Office is moving quickly to conduct oversight — and it’s got more protection than other Trump targets.”

Lawmakers handed President Donald Trump $2 trillion in coronavirus relief — and then left town without activating any of the powerful new oversight tools meant to hold his administration accountable.

But with little fanfare, Congress’ independent, in-house watchdog is preparing a blizzard of audits that will become the first wide-ranging check on Trump’s handling of the sprawling national rescue effort.

And even as Trump has gone to war against internal watchdogs in his administration, the Government Accountability Office remains largely out of the president’s grasp because of its home in the legislative branch.

The GAO has quickly taken advantage of its perch, exploring the early missteps inherent in launching a multitrillion-dollar law that touches every facet of American life. By the end of April, at least 30 CARES Act reviews and audits — “engagements,” per GAO lingo — are expected to be underway, according to interviews with senior investigators.

Topics will range from the government’s handling of coronavirus testing to its distribution of medical equipment, and from the nation’s food supply to nursing home infections and any missteps in distributing the emergency cash payments that began landing in millions of Americans’ bank accounts this week. The office’s top fraud investigator said it’s already received a complaint about a check landing in the account of a deceased person.

“We’re moving forward very quickly,” said Angela Nicole Clowers, chief of the GAO’s health care unit. “We’re an existing institution and have a lot of institutional knowledge about all these programs. It gives us sort of a leg up.”

At a time when Trump has sought to undermine nearly every independent review of his administration’s conduct, the GAO is likely to dispatch most of its 3,000 investigators, experts and analysts into an arena that could make it a target for the president’s fury. And its quiet early work could soon become very loud: The office is required under the new law to brief Congress every month and issue a bimonthly public report on its findings.

At a Colombus Ohio rally, Trumpists continue to shine a light on just how horrible humans can be

Meanwhile, it will be another day of crazy Trump Pressers,  crazy Trumpist supporters marching around with guns decrying public health initiatives because they want haircuts, and DEATH.

Be safe.  Stay Home.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today? 

Monday Reads: Plagues, Isolation, Willful Incompetence

Bubonic plague Doctor

Good Day Sky Dancers!

Trump spent a lot of time troll tweeting Dr Fauci yesterday.  Every one is fearful enough without him suggesting he wants to fire one of the few people in that administration any one believes!  He’ll likely get an itchier tweeter finger given the incredible amount of news print today and yesterday about how exactly incompetent he’s been at tackling this pandemic.

What started this discussion is this very long, very well vetted, very well written NYT article: “He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus. An examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response.”

Like any one couldn’t have seen this coming given Trump couldn’t even make a casino profitable.

The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials. It was a problem, he said, that had come out of nowhere and could not have been foreseen.

What follows is a long, detailed list of inactions and actions basically motivated by nothing but Trump’s “great I am”.  The story is also a character study of a terrifically flawed man.

The shortcomings of Mr. Trump’s performance have played out with remarkable transparency as part of his daily effort to dominate television screens and the national conversation.

But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:

• The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.

• Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.

• The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.

The original PPE of the Plague Doctors

The article continues like this. It’s  long list of point by hapless point.  More articles are following in that spirit like this one from The Rolling Stone and Andy Kroll: “‘Absolute Clusterf–k’: Inside the Denial and Dysfunction of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force. Missed warnings, conflicting messages, and broken promises — how the White House fumbled its response to the worst pandemic in a century.”

If you were to write a playbook for how not to prevent a public-health crisis, you would study the work of the Trump administration in the first three months of 2020. The Trump White House, through some combination of ignorance, arrogance, and incompetence, failed to heed the warnings of its own experts. It failed to listen to the projections of one of its own economic advisers. It failed to take seriously what has become the worst pandemic since the 1918 flu and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And when the White House finally awoke to the seriousness of COVID-19, the response it mustered managed to contain all the worst traits of this presidency. Trump and his closest aides have ignored scientists, enlisted family members and TV personalities and corporate profiteers for help, and disregarded every protocol for how to communicate during a pandemic while spewing misinformation and lies.

There was confusion in the response from the start. In January, Trump picked HHS Secretary Alex Azar II, the former president of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, to lead his new Coronavirus Task Force. The problem was, there was already a senior official at HHS whose job was coordinating the federal government’s response to a nationwide pandemic, Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec.

In late February, after it was clear that the virus had spread widely throughout the U.S., Trump reshuffled his task force. He replaced Azar with Vice President Mike Pence as the leader of the task force, and added Dr. Deborah Birx, the State Department’s global AIDS director and an infectious-disease expert, who joined Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as the group’s scientific experts. But Trump also appointed administration loyalists like right-wing extremist Ken Cuccinelli and Seema Verma, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and a vocal critic of the Affordable Care Act.

Like so many things in Trumpland, the work of the task force has gotten mired in petty politics and internal turf wars. A “shadow” task force emerged, led by Jared Kushner. Officially, Kushner’s team of McKinsey consultants, financiers, and old buddies from his New York business days was meant to coordinate collaboration between the government and the private sector. But it soon devolved into a typical Trump boondoggle. A company Kushner had once invested in, Oscar Health, was tapped to build a government website that would speed up testing (the site was later scrapped). Kushner turned to his brother Josh’s father-in-law, Kurt Kloss, who was a doctor, for recommendations on how to deal with the crisis. That led to Kloss — the father of supermodel Karlie Kloss, Josh’s wife — posting on a Facebook group for emergency-room doctors that he was looking for smart ideas and had a “direct channel to [the] person now in charge at [the] White House.”

Federal agencies that normally play a central role in disaster-response efforts have found themselves left out of the action. Pete Gaynor, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told Congress that his agency wasn’t invited to join the president’s Coronavirus Task Force until the week of March 16th — six weeks after the task force was created.

Other federal employees involved in the response effort have had to respond to different and sometimes competing requests and directives from Pence’s task force and Kushner’s task force. “All of those roles and responsibilities should be relatively well-established,” says one public-health official who’s dealt with the White House. “I’ve heard that people in HHS will get direction from Kushner’s team that directly contradicts what they’re getting from the White House task force, and then trying to deconflict those becomes a huge problem.”

This is from  Tim Mak of  WBUR:  A Month After Emergency Declaration, Trump’s Promises Largely Unfulfilled04:32

“We’ve been working very hard on this. We’ve made tremendous progress,” Trump said. “When you compare what we’ve done to other areas of the world, it’s pretty incredible.”

But few of the promises made that day have come to pass.

NPR’s Investigations Team dug into each of the claims made from the podium that day. And rather than a sweeping national campaign of screening, drive-through sample collection and lab testing, it found a smattering of small pilot projects and aborted efforts.

In some cases, no action was taken at all.

Target did not formally partner with the federal government, for example.

And a lauded Google project turned out not to be led by Google at all, and then once launched was limited to a smattering of counties in California.

The remarks in the Rose Garden highlighted the Trump administration’s strategic approach: a preference for public-private partnerships. But as the White House defined what those private companies were going to do, in many cases it promised more than they could pull off.

“What became clear in the days and weeks or even in some cases the hours following that event was that they had significantly over-promised what the private sector was ready to do,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development.

He’s not learning anything or improving. That’s certain truth.

Indeed, this criticism may be part of why he’s “lashing out” at Fauci via NYT and Peter Baker. “The president retweeted a post calling for the government’s top infectious disease specialist to be fired after the doctor acknowledged that shutting down the country earlier could have saved lives.”

By the third week of February, advisers had drafted a list of measures they believed would soon be necessary, like school closures, sports and concert cancellations and stay-at-home orders, but the president did not embrace them until mid-March.

Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, said on Sunday that earlier imposition of such policies would have made a difference.

“I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives,” he said on “State of the Union” on CNN. “Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. Obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down.”

Dr. Fauci’s comments, and the president’s pushback, come at a critical time as Mr. Trump wrestles with how fast to begin reopening the country. Public health experts like Dr. Fauci have urged caution about resuming normal life too soon for fear of instigating another wave of illness and death, while the president’s economic advisers and others are anxious to restart businesses at a time when more than 16 million Americans have been put out of work.

Dr. Fauci and the president have publicly disagreed on several issues, including how long it will take to develop a vaccine and the president’s aggressive promotion of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, whose effects are unproven against the coronavirus. At a coronavirus task force briefing last week, Mr. Trump stopped Dr. Fauci from answering a question on the drug.

Dr. Fauci has become a celebrated figure among much of the public, which trusts him far more than Mr. Trump, according to polls. A Quinnipiac University survey last week found that 78 percent of Americans approved of Dr. Fauci’s handling of the crisis compared with 46 percent who approved of the president’s response. That has prompted resentment among other government officials, some of whom have privately criticized Dr. Fauci for playing to the media and not always sending consistent messages.

Mr. Trump spent much of Easter Sunday deflecting criticism and finding other targets. “If the Fake News Opposition Party is pushing, with all their might, the fact that President Trump ‘ignored early warnings about the threat,’ then why did Media & Dems viciously criticize me when I instituted a Travel Ban on China?” he wrote. “They said ‘early & not necessary.’ Corrupt Media!”

Didn’t he tell us that Easter was very special to him?  Why wasn’t he coloring eggs with Barron or admiring Melania’s Easter Bonnet while dutifully watching all those TV sermons an schlocky passion movies?

One of the more interesting reads today is at the New Yorker and penned by Jane Mayer: ” How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief. The Senate Majority Leader’s refusal to rein in the President is looking riskier than ever.”

Bill Kristol, a formerly stalwart conservative who has become a leading Trump critic, describes McConnell as “a pretty conventional Republican who just decided to go along and get what he could out of Trump.” Under McConnell’s leadership, the Senate, far from providing a check on the executive branch, has acted as an accelerant. “Demagogues like Trump, if they can get elected, can’t really govern unless they have people like McConnell,” Kristol said. McConnell has stayed largely silent about the President’s lies and inflammatory public remarks, and has propped up the Administration with legislative and judicial victories. McConnell has also brought along the Party’s financial backers. “There’s been too much focus on the base, and not enough on business leaders, big donors, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page,” Kristol said, adding, “The Trump base would be there anyway, but the élites might have rebelled if not for McConnell. He could have fundamentally disrupted Trump’s control, but instead McConnell has kept the trains running.”

McConnell and the President are not a natural pair. A former Trump Administration official, who has also worked in the Senate, observed, “It would be hard to find two people less alike in temperament in the political arena. With Trump, there’s rarely an unspoken thought. McConnell is the opposite—he’s constantly thinking but says as little as possible.” The former Administration official went on, “Trump is about winning the day, or even the hour. McConnell plays the long game. He’s sensitive to the political realities. His North Star is continuing as Majority Leader—it’s really the only thing for him. He’s patient, sly, and will obfuscate to make less apparent the ways he’s moving toward a goal.” The two men also have different political orientations: “Trump is a populist—he’s not just anti-élitist, he’s anti-institutionalist.” As for McConnell, “no one with a straight face would ever call him a populist—Trump came to drain the swamp, and now he’s working with the biggest swamp creature of them all.”

And, the hits just keep on coming from this deluded, incompetent, and intellectually weak administration.

Take Care!  Be safe!!!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?