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Human Behavior

Where Psychologists Should Fear to Tread on Covid-19, They Don’t – Undark Magazine

Consider the following brain teaser: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? A researcher devised the question 15 years ago as a measure of our ability to move past intuitive responses to deeper, reflective thinking a concept Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and Nobel Prize winner in economics, would go on to explore in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Its been popularized to the point you may already know the answer. (Hint: Its not 10 cents, the response that springs to mind for most people. If you ponder a bit youre more likely to arrive at the correct answer, which Ill get to later.)

So, what does the answer to the bat-and-ball question have to do with how you size up the threat posed by Covid-19? According to psychologist Mark Travers, intuitive thinkers the 10 centers may be (in his view) irrationally concerned about the virus. In an April 5 article for Forbes, he uses that concept to explain survey results showing that men are more cavalier than women about Covid-19 risks. Based on a study finding that men outscored women on the bat-and-ball question and two similar brainteasers, he posits that males are more rational. The difference could be due to genetics or the environment, he writes, but to Travers, it ultimately suggests that men might be better equipped to size up the Covid-19 risk for what it is: a threat that, in most cases, is still exceptionally remote.

Travers is one of a slew of psychological and behavioral experts weighing in to tell us how we should think, feel, and act in the face of Covid-19 and some of it can be useful. Its a stressful time, after all. Anxieties are running high, and there are, to date, very few firm answers regarding how long the pandemic might last.

But while psychologists can be essential to helping the public deal with the mental health fallout of Covid-19, not everyone thinks analyses like Travers are improving matters. Indeed, according to Stuart Ritchie, a psychology lecturer at Kings College London who wrote a recent analysis of the issue for the British website UnHerd, some behavioral researchers are disgracing themselves by using psychological research to downplay the severity of the pandemic. We shouldnt be trying to draw conclusions from our research, especially small-scale lab studies, he told me, for something as serious, unprecedented, and rare as this.

The stakes are too high to get it wrong. In March, for example, psychologist David Halpern, head of the Behavioral Insights Team (aka the Nudge Unit) that consulted on the U.K.s response to the pandemic, offered advice that now seems dangerously misguided: He spoke of achieving herd immunity by cocooning older people and otherwise deliberately allowing the virus to spread. He also recommended delaying social distancing, arguing that people would quickly tire of it and not comply.

While Halperns influence on official decision making is unclear, the U.K. did not act swiftly, and it is now among the hardest-hit countries in Europe.

The social sciences have spent the last decade coming to grips with the realization that some widely touted results could not be reproduced in independent experiments. For example, researchers failed to replicate results from one-third of experimental studies in the social sciences published in Science and Nature between 2010 and 2015, according to a 2018 report in Nature and findings they could reproduce were often weaker than those reported in the original papers. But in a recent review (in preprint and not yet peer-reviewed), Tal Yarkoni, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, argues that the focus on the so-called replication crisis has distracted researchers from a more pressing and consequential problem: generalizability.

Yarkoni explains the concept using a thought experiment. Lets say a scientific paper publishes a surprising finding: Pizza is disgusting! The evidence appears to be sound researchers concluded people dont like pizza after averaging responses from a large sample of people who rated different foods. But it turns out the study tested an unappetizing broccoli pizza. The results are reproducible, but its not valid to generalize them to claim that people dislike all pizza.

Of course, the narrower claim this particular broccoli pizza is disgusting is uninteresting and would be impossible to get published, said Yarkoni. Social and behavioral scientists have a habit of wanting to make a broad, lively statement, he said. They make an unjustified leap from what happens in a narrow, controlled context to how people think and act in the real world.

According to Ritchie, risk perception is one such area that is too-often vulnerable to over-generalization. Yes, he says, risk perception research is highly replicable but its inappropriate to generalize it to the wholly new context of the pandemic. All that risk perception stuff works in the context of the sorts of threats they were talking about in the lab, he said, but when a real genuinely massive threat comes along, it falls to pieces.

They make an unjustified leap from what happens in a narrow, controlled context to how people think and act in the real world.

One of the psychologists Ritchie calls out in his analysis is Northeastern University professor David DeSteno. In a February 11 op-ed for The New York Times, DeSteno started with the assumption that the seasonal flu presents a much greater threat than does the coronavirus. He then drew on psychological experiments, including his own, to explain why he thought people were overreacting by buying face masks, avoiding crowds, and being suspicious of Asians. Such findings show that our emotions can bias our decisions in ways that dont accurately reflect the dangers around us, he wrote.

In his article, Ritchie characterized opinion pieces by DeSteno and others as dreadful misfires for minimizing the threat of Covid-19 not long before governments began imploring their citizens to stay home. He told me that the social scientists themselves are guilty of another replicable behavioral quirk: confirmation bias, the tendency to favor information consistent with your own point of view. You could just as easily compose a just so story using psychological principles to explain why people like the men in Travers article underestimated the threat.

Its completely speculative, said Ritchie. People rarely consider these biases in concert with each other. They just focus on one and say this must be the explanation for all our behavior.

DeSteno told me that Ritchie completely mischaracterized his views by not accounting for what was going on at the time. When DeStenos op-ed was first published, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had reported only 13 cases of Covid-19 in the U.S., and many American officials were still ignoring or downplaying the likely impact of the virus. At the same time, by early February it was clear that Covid-19 was spreading globally and quickly. Public health experts were warning that something very bad was coming and, in fact, was likely already here, although we were not yet widely testing for it.

Should DeSteno have known better, based on this? Its a fair question but he was far from alone in issuing ostensibly research-based psychological and behavioral nostrums and prognostications early on. In a February 28 piece in Bloomberg Opinion, for example, Cass Sunstein, a behavioral economist at Harvard University, expressed concern that people would take unnecessary precautions such as canceling trips, refusing to fly, or avoiding certain countries due to the virus. (A month later he wrote that expensive precautions were justified.) And in a March 12 opinion piece for Project Syndicate, the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer looked to the psychological research and responses to past viral epidemics to predict that people will react to Covid-19 based on fear rather than evidence.

For my part, by the end of February, I was rethinking spring travel, talking contingencies with two of my children who were in other countries, and considering steps to protect my mother.

However, it is true that fear can compel people to act in irrational and harmful ways. Both Gigerenzer and DeSteno decried discrimination against Asians after the outbreak began in Wuhan, China, for example. The idea is not to justify panic or bad behavior, its to question the premise at the center of these pieces that Covid-19 posed less of a threat than everyday dangers we take in stride such as car accidents or other illnesses.

To Simine Vazire, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, such predictions were wildly premature. I would be very cautious to say people are overreacting and I know this because I understand the human mind, she said. Even if we did, youd still need the other half of the equation, which is What would be the appropriate reaction?

Yarkoni chalks up most of the opinions to harmless psychological storytelling. The stories could potentially be true, but we usually have no idea, and very little basis for determining that, he said.

But Ritchie disagrees. A bunch of articles by experts floating around in prominent places could easily influence people and governments, he said. Thats what people hope for when they write articles.

Instead, Vazire suggests that behavioral scientists should leave risk assessment to the virologists and epidemiologists. I can sympathize a lot with why they believe these things, she said of experts publishing their speculations in the press. But I feel very little sympathy for why they went and printed it in a very high-circulation newspaper with their credentials attached to it, because I knew better than to do that.

For his part, DeSteno stands by his New York Times piece. While fear may have been rational for health experts who understood what might be coming and needed to prepare, it wasnt yet for everyday citizens who were not at risk at the time, he told me. Most people dont have the knowledge to think like a virologist or an epidemiologist. And, so, fear fills in the blanks in ways that are problematic. In our conversation, he cited more extreme versions of the examples of irrational behavior in his op-ed attacking Asians and causing face-mask shortages by hoarding.

And while behavioral scientists may not the best source of information on how a pandemic will unfold, their insights can be valuable for understanding our connections to each other and to the larger world. A lot of the problems were facing right now and even in resilience to disasters in general arent only a function of the physical and life sciences, said DeSteno. A lot of what matters are decision sciences what matters is resilience and how people behave.

DeSteno points to research showing that after Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012, areas where neighbors cooperated and trusted each other were up and running faster than other neighborhoods with similar damage. Human decisions, human behavior is as related to surviving epidemics as is trying to figure out the medical science and everything else, he said. Its all interweaved.

He also pointed out that as with information on the medications used to treat Covid-19, advice in any scientific field will change as the situation evolves. In both his op-ed and in our conversation, he recommended heeding the latest advice of public health authorities as did everyone I talked to for that matter. Never anywhere did I say that Covid-19 wouldnt become a big concern for us, he told me.

For what its worth, I correctly answered the bat-and-ball question. (The ball costs 5 cents.) Research shows that people like me, with a background in math, are more apt to get the question right, regardless of gender. Or maybe as a journalist, Im just skeptical of first impressions and the easy answer.

And while Im not panicked, Im also skeptical of advice telling me to calm down. With all due respect to Travers who declined to comment for this story a degree of fear seems justified. My dad is 79 and I spend loads of time worrying about him, said Ritchie. The worries multiply when you think about the risk to yourself, friends, family, and others in your community he said. I think it becomes quite rational to be quite scared.

My city of Austin, Texas is not a hotspot at the moment, but nonetheless I have friends recovering from severe cases of Covid-19. My nephew is a respiratory therapist assigned to an intensive care unit for Covid-19 patients. My stepmother is hospitalized with a broken hip confused and alone because visitors could carry the virus. Im not sure when Ill get to give her or my own mother, whos also isolated a hug again. What does the cost of a ball have to do with how I feel about that? Not a damn thing.

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Where Psychologists Should Fear to Tread on Covid-19, They Don't - Undark Magazine

Human Behavior

Growth Teams Have the Tools to Be Coronavirus Anti-Growth Teams – WIRED

While platforms like Facebook offer 21st-century advertising tools that harness advanced computation to target ads and change behavior, they are only using 20th-century PSAs against coronavirus.

Given the exponential challenge were up against, passive links to information and videos from the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization are woefully insufficient to keep the curve flattened. Too many people are still uninformed, not fully appraising, or unmotivated to action by the threat we faceand it will result in millions of lives being lost around the world, their last days without breath and in isolation from loved ones. As summer nears and social distancing extends, our collective will may wane. Technology has the power to change that.

WIRED OPINION

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Aza Raskin (@aza) is a cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology.

Consider that on April 9, nearly a month into the pandemic, 25 percent of the US population misunderstood whether they were subject to a shelter-in-place order. And in some states, more than 50 percent didnt know or incorrectly answered the question Do you live in an area that is currently under a stay-at-home order due to the pandemic? On May 4, the city of Miami Beach had to close a park where over 7,300 people showed up without masks. Its been over a month since the CDC officially adopted mask use as necessary to halt the spread of the disease. Similarly, only 60 percent of Americans knew that you cant actually kill the coronavirus by drinking water to flush it into your stomach acid; only 44 percent had worn a mask in public. One report found that 100 pieces of false Covid-19 content were shared on Facebook 1.7 million times and had 117 million views.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 was doubling infections every few days. In New York City, a steady flow of refrigerator trucks docked at hospitals to carry away the dead bodies. The number of Americans killed is now more than 25 times the number of people killed in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Seventy thousand Americans are dead, 20 percent more than were killed in the Vietnam war. That horror will soon overwhelm the limited health care systems in Lagos and Mexico City and New Delhi, where millions more reside.

We technologists have a responsibility. Our products are uniquely capable of leaping past the exponential curve to reach 3 billion peopleeveryone on the social platformsbefore the virus can.

Inside every major social media platform there are groups known as growth teams, whose sole purpose is to virally grow user numbers. Theyve pioneered the features and techniques that have fueled the exponential growth of Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and every other social platform. They understand and play to fundamental human psychology that works across language, country, and culture.

What if every growth team became a Covid-19 anti-growth team?

Using these kinds of techniques pose all sorts of ethical considerations. Crises pit dearly held values against other dearly held values. That ethical complexity, however, is no different than the ethics of previous design choices and automated ranking algorithms for news feeds. In addition, they require no new mass surveillance.

To change behavior at scale goes a step beyond mere information.

Recently, WhatsApp launched a WHO chatbot to its 2 billion users. While thats great, to get it to work, a user has to save the number +41 79 893 1892 to their phone contacts, then text "Hi" in a WhatsApp message. Few will use it if they must text hi to an obscure number to initiate the bot.

Moreover, waiting for users to send a message to a bot on their own simply wont save millions of lives. Poor design has real-world consequences.

Instead, WhatsApp should proactively send a message to users in the highest-risk and most dense urban areas and cities to reach them before the virus does. This is especially important for reaching the 2 billion people in the Global South, whose fragile health care systems are more vulnerable to surges, and whom WhatsApp is uniquely positioned to reach.

Originally posted here:
Growth Teams Have the Tools to Be Coronavirus Anti-Growth Teams - WIRED

Human Behavior

Newt Gingrich: Coronavirus modeling how our hysterical culture led to this reaction to pandemic – Home – WSFX

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Claire Berlinski writes an amazingblogcalled Claires Invariably Interesting Thoughts.

She recently wrote a series headlined The Years of Living Hysterically: Reflections on Joe Biden, Tara Reade, #MeToo, and our Hysterical Culture.

The concept of the hysterical culture explains much of what I have been wrestling with living in Rome during the pandemic. I have had the opportunity (requirement) to avoid meetings and travel and have had the time to watch and reflect.

NIKKI HALEY: CORONAVIRUS STIMULUS HELP THOSE TRULY IN NEED, BUT STOP WASTING BILLIONS ON OTHERS

Two generations of over-protecting our children, seeking safe places, announcing trigger warnings, hyperventilating on social media, and having radio and TV starving for things to fill continuous 24/7 cycles have all built up to a crescendo of noise.

If it bleeds it leads is an old rule of local news. You can add to that the need to create suspense and to hype each event as big, bigger, the biggest ever (just think of weather reports during hurricane season).

The bigger the threat the better.

The larger the number the better.

When the Imperial College of London reported in mid-March that its model predicted the COVID-19 virus could kill as many as 2.2 million Americans and more than 500,000 Britons if governments did nothing to control the spread of the virus, it became the benchmark for radical policies that were unbelievably destructive to society.

What might have been a more dangerous but manageable pandemic (which would be the fourth since 1975) suddenly became the species threatening, Spanish Flu-Black Death-end-of-times threat that required the most radical, draconian public health restrictions and economically suicidal behavior in modern history.

Consider the human cost of the last three pandemics. These are the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preventions figures:

Keep in mind that our population was about 40 percent smaller in the late 1950s and 60s, so the numbers from those pandemics look smaller than they are relative to what we are experiencing today. In fact, their impacts were felt widely. Yet, these three pandemics were dealt with as medical events, and economic and social life proceeded with minimal disruption.

The combination of news media desperation for something about which to be hysterical, the Chinese Communist Partys role in hiding and then lying about the new virus, and absurdly overstated claims of supposedly scientific modelers has led to the greatest self-inflicted economic disaster in history.

Today, the combination of news media desperation for something about which to be hysterical, the Chinese Communist Partys role in hiding and then lying about the new virus, and absurdly overstated claims of supposedly scientific modelers has led to the greatest self-inflicted economic disaster in history.

The Chinese Communist dictatorships deception is the first great scandal of the COVID-19 virus. We should have thorough congressional hearings into the dictatorships role from November 2019 through February 2020.

But, the extraordinary influence of supposedly expert modelers is the second great scandal. We should also have congressional hearings into their destructive impact. In some cases, modelers completely misinformed government leaders, the news mediaand ultimately the public about the scale of the threat.

The most influential model was the one created by the Imperial College in London, which estimated more than 500,000 Britons would die and more than 2.2 million Americans would die if governments did nothing. The model projected that in both countries the hospitals, intensive care unitsand ventilators would be overwhelmed.

Faced with a projection that five times as many Americans could die this year as were killed in all of World War II, President Trump had no choice but to close the country. To tie the comparison to a more recent event, the Imperial College model predicted almost 1,000 times as many Americans would die from the virus as died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Estimates of imminent death on this scale can make almost any radical response seem rational.

Unfortunately, too few people examined the assumptions behind the Imperial College model. First, it assumed an infection rate of over 80 percent of the population of the United States. By comparison, the deadliest pandemic in modern history was the Spanish Flu (also H1N1) of 1918-1919. It onlyinfected 28 percentof the U.S. population.

Second, the Imperial College predictions were based on a model of taking zero precautions. Of course, this is an entirely irrational assumption based on basic human behavior. Just because the government is not forcing you to stay inside your house, limit contact with peopleand wash your hands doesnt mean that human beings will not take the precautions. All our experience from past pandemics shows this.

So, projections that were disconnected from common sense and reality were able to guide public policy. The truth is, we should have immediately expected these dire predictions to be complete bunk. It turns out the chief author, Neil Ferguson, has become famous for making wildly absurd predictions about public health issues. As the Committee To Unleash Prosperity reported inits newsletter, citing reporting by the British newspaperThe Telegraph:

Ferguson has been wrong so often that some of his fellow modelers call him The Master of Disaster.

Ferguson was behind the disputed research that sparked the mass culling of 11 million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. He also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die.

In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. In the U.K., there were only 177 deaths from BSE.

In 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.

In 2009, a government estimate, based on Fergusons advice, said a reasonable worst-case scenario was that the swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths. In the end, swine flu killed 457 people in the U.K.

Ill add that Dr. Ferguson has since resigned because he was caught breaking the draconian lockdown rules he championed in order to carry out an affair.

This deserves a serious congressional investigation. We were being guided in national policy by people who had no realistic scientific basis for or demonstrable faith in their claims. In effect, much of our pandemic public policy was being driven by fake science (which exists as a partner with the fake news and enthusiastically creates hysteria whenever it can).

For perspective, nearly two weeks after the Imperial Colleges March 16 report and despite the medias rabid embrace of it National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Faucis initial top-end prediction for American fatalities was 10 percent of the Imperial Colleges ludicrous 2.2 million figure. By April 9, after reviewing more real data, Fauci downgraded his prediction to roughly 60,000. As of this writing, the latest CDC numbers are at 68,279. This is much closer to Faucis prediction.

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The whole role of hyping supposedly scientific, dire modeling predictions on issues like climate change is a key to understanding the bad policies left-wing scientists are trying to browbeat us into endorsing. As I write in my upcoming book Trump and the American Future, I first encountered this phenomenon of fake science in modeling when I taught environmental studies at West Georgia College in the early 1970s. We used a fascinating book called The Limits to Growth.

The Limits to Growth was published in 1972 by a group called the Club of Rome. It used computer simulations to project when the earth would run out of various raw materials. Through this computer modeling, it projected a gloomy future of limits thatwould require radical left-wing policies to avoid.

After a couple of years, I began to realize the entire book was an absurdity. It ignored that innovations in resource management and efficiency would profoundly decrease our resource consumption.

There is a rule in computing: Garbage in, garbage out. If you enter the wrong assumptions, you will get the wrong answers. The idea that using a computer suddenly makes some projection scientific or valid is ridiculous. Garbage data leads to garbage answers. (In fact, Fergusons COVID-19 model used 13-year-old code that was written for influenza not a coronavirus.)

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If we look at all the different models of the COVID-19 viruses and their impacts on government policies, we will discover an extraordinary range of mistakes, which led to extraordinary damage to society.

Congress should investigate the entire modeling-advising process just as it should investigate the Chinese Communist dictatorships role in spreading the virus in the first place.

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Newt Gingrich: Coronavirus modeling how our hysterical culture led to this reaction to pandemic - Home - WSFX

Human Behavior

Responding to the Spike in Domestic Violence Across Oceania – The Diplomat

Oceania|Society|Oceania

Societies need to move beyond reacting to the consequences of violence to changing norms of behavior that allow violence to occur.

One of the innumerable awful side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a rise around the world in reported cases of domestic violence. Across the Oceania region there have been reports that violence against women and children has spiked, from Australia and New Zealand to Fiji and Samoa. While governments have a long list of competing interests they will have to prioritize due to the pandemic, it is of critical importance that domestic violence is not ignored. It is an issue of basic human security, with immeasurable negative consequences.

It has long been acknowledged that women are most likely to be victims of violence from within their own home, either by a partner or another family member. It is also incredibly difficult to measure the true scale of violence against women, as most incidences of both domestic violence and sexual assault remain unreported either due to a fear of repercussions or a distrust of justice systems.

Yet even with just the reported cases of violence against women the statistics are brutal. The Australian governments Institute of Health and Welfare states that in Australia one woman is killed every nine days by a partner, and that one in six women have experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or former cohabiting partner. Globally the rate of violence rises to 35 percent of women, according to the United Nations.

Reasonable people read these statistics and nod along, recognizing their blunt reality, but it is important to take a step back and ask ourselves a fundamental question: If relationships and families are meant to be bonds of mutual love and care, then how does this violence exist within them?

The fact of violence is so normalized that I dont think we quite comprehend just how extraordinary it actually is that the core purpose of a relationship has been inverted in an astonishing number of cases. It is not something we should be comfortable with.

Part of this normalization stems from our societal approach to this issue. In early April, the Australian government announced that it was providing an additional $20.8 million to the states and territories to immediately reinforce frontline services that seek to assist victims of domestic violence. This was a welcome acknowledgment that the pandemic is creating an increase in instances of domestic violence, yet it remains a reactive measure: The provision of services after the fact.

At the core of this kind of response is a collective, whole of society, expectation that men will continue to commit violence against women, and the best we can do is to try to clean up afterward. We remain at a complete loss about how to reform masculinity away from this instinctive use of violence as an instrument of human interaction. Yet if we continue to expect this kind of behavior from men we will maintain its insidious and destructive presence in our societies. Social values that tolerate these abuses and justice systems that downplay them perpetuate the violence.

There are obviously limited actions that governments can take toward getting in front of this issue, but it remains a matter that they should take incredibly seriously. If providing basic human security is the primary function of states, then millions of female citizens are currently existing in insecure conditions, demonstrating a failure of the states duty. These millions of individual cases of insecurity also have the ability to compound into wider security dilemmas, as is the case with the related issue of cross-border human trafficking. In this way, states should consider the continued prevalence of domestic violence as an internal security threat.

The financial burden that countries carry from these abuses should also be a considerable concern for governments. It is estimated that domestic violence costs Australia $14 billion a year, alongside the far greater costs in the destruction of peoples lives. In regards to the new environment created by the COVID-19 pandemic it should also be acknowledged that many women may now have their personal financial resources diminished, affecting their ability to leave abusive relationships. Governments can provide resources to assist these women as Canberra did in early April but often the realities of peoples lives make accessing such resources difficult.

It is important that we recognize that the current insecurities created by the COVID-19 pandemic are not just related to personal health and finances. For many women, their personal safety has also been negatively affected. Women already live with violence either directly or the threat of it as an everyday facet of their existence; it should be unacceptable that this current global crisis has accentuated that reality.

If COVID-19 is prompting us to question our assumptions about how states should be organized, then the increase in domestic violence due to the virus should also prompt us to question persistent harmful norms of human behavior. Collectively, we need to question whether we will continue to accept violence against women as an issue that we can only respond to after the fact, or whether we have the will to wholeheartedly reject such violence, and seek to find ways to evolve masculinity away from these destructive traits.

If you are in need of help in Australia a list of resources is available here; resources for those in New Zealand are available here.

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Responding to the Spike in Domestic Violence Across Oceania - The Diplomat

Human Behavior

Destruction of habitat and loss of biodiversity are creating the perfect conditions for diseases like COVID-19 to emerge – MinnPost

This articleoriginally appeared onEnsia.Ensiais powered by the University of MinnesotasInstitute on the Environmentand is a member of theInstitute for Nonprofit Newsand theSolutions Journalism Network.

As habitat and biodiversity loss increase globally, the novel coronavirus outbreak may be just the beginning of mass pandemics

March 17, 2020 Mayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness. Mostly they shrug them off.

But in January 1996, Ebola, a deadly virus then barely known to humans, unexpectedly spilled out of the forest in a wave of small epidemics. The disease killed 21 of 37 villagers who were reported to have been infected, including a number who had carried, skinned, chopped or eaten a chimpanzee from the nearby forest.

I traveled to Mayibout 2 in 2004 to investigate why deadly diseases new to humans were emerging from biodiversity hot spots like tropical rainforests and bushmeat markets in African and Asian cities.

It took a day by canoe and then many hours down degraded forest logging roads passing Baka villages and a small gold mine to reach the village. There, I found traumatized people still fearful that the deadly virus, which kills up to 90% of the people it infects, would return.

Villagers told me how children had gone into the forest with dogs that had killed a chimp. They said that everyone who cooked or ate it got a terrible fever within a few hours. Some died immediately, while others were taken down the river to hospital. A few, like Nesto Bematsick, recovered. We used to love the forest, now we fear it, he told me. Many of Bematsicks family members died.

Only a decade or two ago it was widely thought that tropical forests and intact natural environments teeming with exotic wildlife threatened humans by harboring the viruses and pathogens that lead to new diseases in humans like Ebola, HIV and dengue.

But a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanitys destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases like COVID-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike. In fact, a new discipline, planetary health, is emerging that focuses on the increasingly visible connections among the well-being of humans, other living things and entire ecosystems.

Is it possible, then, that it was human activity, such as road building, mining, hunting and logging, that triggered the Ebola epidemics in Mayibout 2 and elsewhere in the 1990s and that is unleashing new terrors today?

We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbor so many species of animals and plants and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses, David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic, recently wrote in the New York Times. We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.

Research suggests that outbreaks of animal-borne and other infectious diseases like Ebola, SARS, bird flu and now COVID-19, caused by a novel coronavirus, are on the rise. Pathogens are crossing from animals to humans, and many are now able to spread quickly to new places. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that three-quarters of new or emerging diseases that infect humans originate in nonhuman animals.

Some, like rabies and plague, crossed from animals centuries ago. Others, like Marburg, which is thought to be transmitted by bats, are still rare. A few, like COVID-19, which emerged last year in Wuhan, China, and MERS, which is linked to camels in the Middle East, are new to humans and spreading globally.

Other diseases that have crossed into humans include Lassa fever, which was first identified in 1969 in Nigeria; Nipah from Malaysia; and SARS from China, which killed more than 700 people and traveled to 30 countries in 200203. Some, like Zika and West Nile virus, which emerged in Africa, have mutated and become established on other continents.

Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at UCL, calls emerging animal-borne infectious diseases an increasing and very significant threat to global health, security and economies.

In 2008, Jones and a team of researchers identified 335 diseases that emerged between 1960 and 2004, at least 60% of which came from non-human animals.

Increasingly, says Jones, these zoonotic diseases are linked to environmental change and human behavior. The disruption of pristine forests driven by logging, mining, road building through remote places, rapid urbanization and population growth is bringing people into closer contact with animal species they may never have been near before, she says.

The resulting transmission of disease from wildlife to humans, she says, is now a hidden cost of human economic development. There are just so many more of us, in every environment. We are going into largely undisturbed places and being exposed more and more. We are creating habitats where viruses are transmitted more easily, and then we are surprised that we have new ones.

Jones studies how land use change contributes to the risk. We are researching how species in degraded habitats are likely to carry more viruses which can infect humans, she says. Simpler systems get an amplification effect. Destroy landscapes, and the species you are left with are the ones humans get the diseases from.

There are countless pathogens out there continuing to evolve which at some point could pose a threat to humans, says Eric Fevre, chair of veterinary infectious diseases at the University of LiverpoolsInstitute of Infection and Global Health. The risk [of pathogens jumping from animals to humans] has always been there.

The difference between now and a few decades ago, Fevre says, is that diseases are likely to spring up in both urban and natural environments. We have created densely packed populations where alongside us are bats and rodents and birds, pets and other living things. That creates intense interaction and opportunities for things to move from species to species, he says.

Pathogens do not respect species boundaries, says disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor in Emory UniversitysDepartment of Environmental Sciences who studies how shrinking natural habitats and changing behavior add to the risks of diseases spilling over from animals to humans.

I am not at all surprised about the coronavirus outbreak, he says. The majority of pathogens are still to be discovered. We are at the very tip of the iceberg.

Humans, says Gillespie, are creating the conditions for the spread of diseases by reducing the natural barriers between virus host animals in which the virus is naturally circulating and themselves. We fully expect the arrival of pandemic influenza; we can expect large-scale human mortalities; we can expect other pathogens with other impacts. A disease like Ebola is not easily spread. But something with a mortality rate of Ebola spread by something like measles would be catastrophic, Gillespie says.

Wildlife everywhere is being put under more stress, he says. Major landscape changes are causing animals to lose habitats, which means species become crowded together and also come into greater contact with humans. Species that survive change are now moving and mixing with different animals and with humans.

Gillespie sees this in the U.S., where suburbs fragmenting forests raise the risk of humans contracting Lyme disease. Altering the ecosystem affects the complex cycle of the Lyme pathogen. People living close by are more likely to get bitten by a tick carrying Lyme bacteria, he says.

Yet human health research seldom considers the surrounding natural ecosystems, says Richard Ostfeld, distinguished senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. He and others are developing the emerging discipline of planetary health, which looks at the links between human and ecosystem health.

Theres misapprehension among scientists and the public that natural ecosystems are the source of threats to ourselves. Its a mistake. Nature poses threats, it is true, but its human activities that do the real damage. The health risks in a natural environment can be made much worse when we interfere with it, he says.

Ostfeld points to rats and bats, which are strongly linked with the direct and indirect spread of zoonotic diseases. Rodents and some bats thrive when we disrupt natural habitats. They are the most likely to promote transmissions [of pathogens]. The more we disturb the forests and habitats the more danger we are in, he says.

Felicia Keesing, professor of biology at Bard College, New York, studies how environmental changes influence the probability that humans will be exposed to infectious diseases. When we erode biodiversity, we see a proliferation of the species most likely to transmit new diseases to us, but theres also good evidence that those same species are the best hosts for existing diseases, she wrote in an email to Ensia.

Disease ecologists argue that viruses and other pathogens are also likely to move from animals to humans in the many informal markets that have sprung up to provide fresh meat to fast-growing urban populations around the world. Here animals are slaughtered, cut up and sold on the spot.

The wet market (one that sells fresh produce and meat) in Wuhan, thought by the Chinese government to be the starting point of the current COVID-19 pandemic, was known to sell numerous wild animals, including live wolf pups, salamanders, crocodiles, scorpions, rats, squirrels, foxes, civets and turtles.

Equally, urban markets in west and central Africa see monkeys, bats, rats and dozens of species of bird, mammal, insect and rodent slaughtered and sold close to open refuse dumps and with no drainage.

Wet markets make a perfect storm for cross-species transmission of pathogens, says Gillespie. Whenever you have novel interactions with a range of species in one place, whether that is in a natural environment like a forest or a wet market, you can have a spillover event.

The Wuhan market, along with others that sell live animals, has been shut by the Chinese authorities, and the government in February outlawed trading and eating wild animals except for fish and seafood. But bans on live animals being sold in urban areas or informal markets are not the answer, say some scientists.

The wet market in Lagos is notorious. Its like a nuclear bomb waiting to happen. But its not fair to demonize places which do not have fridges. These traditional markets provide much of the food for Africa and Asia, says Jones.

These markets are essential sources of food for hundreds of millions of poor people, and getting rid of them is impossible, says Delia Grace, a senior epidemiologist and veterinarian with the International Livestock Research Institute, which is based in Nairobi, Kenya. She argues that bans force traders underground, where they may pay less attention to hygiene.

Fevre and Cecilia Tacoli, principal researcher in the human settlements research group at the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED), argue in a blog post that rather than pointing the finger at wet markets, we should look at the burgeoning trade in wild animals.[I]t is wild animals rather than farmed animals that are the natural hosts of many viruses, they write. Wet markets are considered part of the informal food trade that is often blamed for contributing to spreading disease. But evidence shows the link between informal markets and disease is not always so clear cut.

So what, if anything, can we do about all of this?

Jones says that change must come from both rich and poor societies. Demand for wood, minerals and resources from the Global North leads to the degraded landscapes and ecological disruption that drives disease, she says. We must think about global biosecurity, find the weak points and bolster the provision of health care in developing countries. Otherwise we can expect more of the same, she says.

The risks are greater now. They were always present and have been there for generations. It is our interactions with that risk which must be changed, says Brian Bird, a research virologist at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine One Health Institute, where he leads Ebola-related surveillance activities in Sierra Leone and elsewhere.

We are in an era now of chronic emergency, Bird says. Diseases are more likely to travel further and faster than before, which means we must be faster in our responses. It needs investments, change in human behavior, and it means we must listen to people at community levels.

Getting the message about pathogens and disease to hunters, loggers, market traders and consumers is key, Bird says. These spillovers start with one or two people. The solutions start with education and awareness. We must make people aware things are different now. I have learned from working in Sierra Leone with Ebola-affected people that local communities have the hunger and desire to have information, he says. They want to know what to do. They want to learn.

Fevre and Tacoli advocate rethinking urban infrastructure, particularly within low-income and informal settlements. Short-term efforts are focused on containing the spread of infection, they write. The longer term given that new infectious diseases will likely continue to spread rapidly into and within cities calls for an overhaul of current approaches to urban planning and development.

The bottom line, Bird says, is to be prepared. We cant predict where the next pandemic will come from, so we need mitigation plans to take into account the worst possible scenarios, he says. The only certain thing is that the next one will certainly come.

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Destruction of habitat and loss of biodiversity are creating the perfect conditions for diseases like COVID-19 to emerge - MinnPost

Human Behavior

Experts: Even without symptoms, many can spread the coronavirus – San Antonio Express-News

Local health officials made a startling discovery when they tested people in packed coronavirus hot spots.

Most of those who were positive had no symptoms at all.

On Wednesday, no fewer than 222 of 259 inmates at Bexar County Jail who were positive and presumably contagious did not feel sick. At the Southeast Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, where at least 18 residents have been killed by the virus, 56 of 74 residents who tested positive showed no signs of illness.

The tests indicate the dangerous and sometimes deadly virus is even more infectious than previously understood, potentially spreading rapidly on the streets from symptom-free carriers as Texas slowly reopens its smothered economy.

The ongoing risk poses profound public health implications as people begin to venture from their homes to resume their lives and reclaim their livelihoods.

To hold the epidemic at bay, experts say social distancing must be maintained.

In some ways, the jail is very much a mirror of the rest of the community, so what were seeing there is very much reflected in our community here in San Antonio, said Dr. Bryan Alsip, University Health Systems chief medical officer and a member of the city and countys health transition team.

Nationally, the data around asymptomatic COVID infections range anywhere from 20 to more than 60 percent, Alsip continued. And so what weve seen in the jail, weve seen asymptomatic positives at a percentage as high as 70 percent. If we were to test all of our individuals here in San Antonio, we may see similar percentages. We just dont know yet.

To better understand the spread, Metro Health has launched widespread testing at six other nursing homes with positive cases and Thursday opened two sites where for the first time those with no symptoms could get tested. Soon, the department will conduct a study of randomly selected households to determine just how pervasive the virus could be.

Dr. Juan Gutierrez, chairman of UTSAs math department, has a strong suspicion.

As Gutierrez watched the coronavirus blanket the globe earlier this year, he suspected that symptom-free carriers of the virus were driving its exponential spread.

Last month, Gutierrez produced a model of the local epidemic that relied on his understanding of the diseases R0 pronounced R-naught meaning the average number of new infections thought to arise from a single case. The variable, known as the basic reproduction number, can fluctuate from place to place and over time as human behavior changes.

Gutierrezs model accurately projected a peak here in early May. He estimated the R0 of the virus at about 13, much higher than generally believed. Now, as health officials realize that symptom-free carriers of the virus are more abundant than previously thought, Gutierrez believes his analysis has been justified.

My group was the first group to report that R0 was extremely high for COVID-19, Gutierrez said. It was received with disbelief. And it was received with disbelief because there was a poor understanding of the role of asymptomatic carriers. Now, as time passes, the months pass and more evidence is accumulated, I have been proven right. I was right when I said R0 is very high.

He pointed to a recent analysis of data in China that suggested about four in five coronavirus infections cause no symptoms.

Eighty percent is what seems to be the level that evidence suggests, said Gutierrez, who has spent a decade researching symptom-free carriers of infectious disease.

At this level, we have tremendous challenges controlling the disease, he continued. The progression of the disease is accelerated by the number of asymptomatic people. There are many people in the community who dont know theyre sick and are passing it to others. Thats probably where we are, and that is the only possible explanation for the very fast spread of this disease.

Bexar County is an outlier among major cities in Texas because it has managed to keep infection rates low, Gutierrez said. As the state begins to reopen, its critical for residents to maintain strong hygiene and social distancing measures wear a mask in public, stay 6 feet away from others and constantly wash your hands, he said.

I think that we might have a chance to keep this disease at a low level, Gutierrez said.

The uncertainty is what drove Leticia Garcia to get tested Thursday.

Garcia was feeling just fine. The 53-year-old cancer survivor lined up anyway with about 50 others in the parking lot of the Las Palmas Branch Library to receive a free test the first time anyone in Bexar County could get tested for the virus regardless of whether they had any symptoms.

The walk-up testing is available from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. today and Saturday at the library branch and Woodlawn Lake Park, with results available within 48 hours. Garcia was there in part because shed heard how many inmates at the jail had tested positive despite showing no symptoms.

So you dont know if youre carrying (the virus) and youre walking around, Garcia said. You can never tell who has it. So many people have tested positive and theyre asymptomatic. Why are we opening up the city, the state?

Metro Health Director Dawn Emerick said last week that the county would continue to limit tests in the general population to those with symptoms at least until a study is completed showing how many residents with no symptoms are infected and unwittingly spreading the virus.

In the next few weeks, researchers will pick 385 households at random and test them for the virus.

Until we know what the positivity rate is of asymptomatics, all were doing is throwing strategy on the wall to see what sticks, Emerick said then. And I think thats bad practice. Theres no local evidence right now that is indicating we should be redirecting our resources in that manner. Our focus should be on those with symptoms and high-risk, congregant settings.

But new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week prompted the revised rules at the walk-up sites, said Jennifer Herriott, assistant director at Metro Health.

Just within the last 24 hours, the CDC revised their guidelines in terms of who should get tested, Herriott said Thursday at the Las Palmas site. They identified specifically that communities of color and high risk areas should be included regardless of their symptoms. The South Side, the West Side and the East Side of San Antonio have large pockets in which we have both communities of color and a lot of poverty.

Teresa Gonzalez, 65, arrived early for the free nasal swab test.

I have a scratchy throat and a cough, she said. I think its allergies. I dont know.

Her 68-year-old husband, Joel, felt fine. But he regularly cares for his mother and father, who are 93 and 94, he said, and he doesnt want to infect them unwittingly.

The older they are, the more vulnerable to get sick, Joel said.

Nearby, a woman with a cane who only would give her name as Adriana M. also had come for a test because she regularly cares for her elderly parents.

Hey, thats what us Mexicans do, said Adriana, 53, who said she suffers from diabetes, asthma and high-blood pressure. Our parents showed us. We follow the chain of command. So now my boys are doing that with me.

Metro Health will track those with no symptoms who test positive at the new sites, Herriott said.

I will absolutely be including that as a question, she said, because I think its going to be very important for us to determine whether people who were asymptomatic when they came to get tested today are actually positive.

Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff suggested this week at a news briefing that the number could be quite high.

I believe that what were seeing here is that you and I or anybody in this room couldve had COVID, Wolff said. We didnt know we had it. We never got sick. But its out there, and I think the jail is an indication that a pretty good percent of people out there do have it.

He added, Thats why we keep saying over and over again, I dont care if you think youre healthy or not, wear the mask, stay 6 feet away, wash your hands, sanitize.

bchasnoff@express-news.net

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Experts: Even without symptoms, many can spread the coronavirus - San Antonio Express-News

Human Behavior

Together Apart – Orion Magazine

Together Apart is a new Orion web series of letters from isolation. Every week under lockdown, we eavesdrop on curious pairs of authors, scientists, and artists, listening in on their emails, texts, and phone calls as they redefine their relationships from afar.

This weeks conversation is a phone call between the author Meera Subramanian, left, president of the Society of Environmental Journalists and visiting professor of Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University, and Elizabeth Rush, right, Pulitzer Prize finalist author and professor of English at Brown University.

Meera: How are you sleeping? Are you sleeping well?

Elizabeth: They say in the third trimester its harder to sleep because the baby wakes up and then there is anxiety and the hormones of late pregnancy.

Meera: I find that all I want to do is sleep. Its been super gray and rainy and cold here on the Cape. Gray on top of gray. Were doing so much yardwork and getting the garden going, and its my salvation right now.

Elizabeth: How long has it been since you spent that much time in your garden?

Meera: Years, because Ive been gone so much traveling. Last summer I was in Sewanee, Tennessee, from June until mid-July, then left for Princeton in September. It seems like every year Im traveling somewhere during peak time, or I leave once I get it planted, or I leave right when everything starts being ready to eat.

Im really good at leaving, so this is new, this staying put. It is troubling, the bifurcation of this experience. The pandemic is devastating, and were losing so many people, and the news is a river of horror. And then theres the flipside that Im so thankful to be able to just be home, without the eternal movement, in a place where I can dig in the yard. A place that iswonderfully, right nowkind of desolate, with not a whole lot of humans.

Elizabeth: Many of the changes and vulnerabilities that are being revealed right now do make me think that the coronavirus is sort of like climate change, except on steroids.

Meera: Yes, definitely. I was trying to figure out how to rejig my class, which is about climate change as a threat and opportunity multiplier. Each class has been on one aspect: agriculture, water, womens issues, environmental, social justice, one by one. For the next class were going to focus on the comparison of coronavirus and climate change. How much do we trust science? How much can we listen to experts who tell us to change our ways now, in order to avoid something terrible down the road?

Elizabeth: For most people, who maybe arent as deep in the climate movement as you are, the initial reaction, as they wake up to the reality of the climate crisis, is, What the fuck do I do?

This threat is so overwhelming and all-encompassing and its really hard to know what the right action is. I think the initial feeling is one of being very overwhelmed. So in a weird way, COVID has moved me to remember how I felt, say, eight years ago, as climate change was coming home to me, and to recognize that theres a lot of people for whom that awakening and feeling of being overwhelmed has happened more recently, or is happening now.

But COVID is happening so quickly, and thats where I think this thing is different.

Meera: One of the things around climate action is just how much community has built up around it. And how difficult that is when you realize that, now, we can only do this through these fucking computers. There are all these great talks and connections happening online now, but its not the same without that social part of the equation.

Elizabeth: Here in Rhode Island there is this budding relationship between climate activism and a longstanding movement to end utility shutoffs for low-income people. COVID intersects with that in interesting and important ways. The governor ended utility shutoffs through the end of April. Thats a start.

Now theres this push to treat utilities as a basic human right, that there shouldnt be Rhode Islanders who dont have access to electricity and heat right now. That idea is suddenly in the public conversation in a way that it wasnt three weeks ago, when you sounded like a radical socialist for saying that people shouldnt get, you know, the lights shut off or whatever. It feels like theres this opportunity presenting itself.

Meera: Yeah, the reset button has been pressed. We just dont know what its going to look like when it pops back up. Its not going to pop back up in the same way. Did you read my piece from In These Times last year? It was a letter from 2049, and Ive been thinking about it a lot lately.

Elizabeth: Yeah. You were like, I used to fly and now I dont. I havent seen my cousin in India in years. You wrote the piece, if I remember correctly, as an open letter to him.

Meera: Yes, and I wrote about a time called the Tumult, a period in the 2030s, where a lot of people died.

Elizabeth: Does it feel like were there?

Meera: Feels weirdly like were there. Its the universality of everybody experiencing something life-altering this is not just one place experiencing a catastrophe.

Elizabeth: But our experience is so radically different depending on what sector of society you belong to. I had this moment where I was on the phone with my midwife, and it was an appointment that I had to advocate to have on the phone and not in person. Because as I told them it felt insane for me to come to the office when I literally havent seen anyone other than my husband for twenty-one days Ive had a healthy pregnancy, why would I go to your office where there are hundreds of people coming in and out every day just so you can tell me that I gained three pounds. I mean I can get on a scale at my house. I had to fight to have this appointment at home. And thats because the practice that I belong to couldnt make small adjustments to their rules quickly because they exist under the big umbrella of this unwieldy healthcare system. (There is also an important lesson in here about climate change adaptation and how smaller systems are more flexible and can withstand climate shocks, but I digress.)

So, Im having this tele-appointment phone call that I had to fight for. And Im asking all these really intense questions like, Whats the process through which you admit women into the labor unit? Do you get funneled through triage? And Im trying to make a decision about where to give birth and what safety means right now and how thats really different from what safety meant a month ago.

Im doing that information-gathering and the doorbell rings. I jump. No one has been at our door for weeks. Then I think, Okay, Im not going to answer that right now. Im going to stay focused on this phone call with my doctor. And two minutes pass and the doorbell rings again. And I was like, Fuck, I have to go answer the door. I open my door and its an Amazon Prime delivery person whos like sixty-eight years old, with a car seat in his hands that my godmother has had sent to us. He tried to hand it to me. He said, I just dont want anyone to steal it. I was like, Just leave it. Because I didnt want to reach out and touch him. I wanted him to leave the box on the porch. I stay on the phone with my doctor because that also feels important. And I call out, Thank you, over my shoulder and close the door, and I was back in my house thinking it all feels wrong, all wrong. He belongs to a vulnerable group of people. He shouldnt be out there doing that, delivering a car seat to protect my child from some future risk, and if he is, then I should still be able to treat him in a humane way. But instead I was fearful of him. I could just see all of these relationships breaking down and our sense of safety breaking down. And for what? All along, I am having to make difficult decisions about where to give birth to this child, even as the landscape changes daily.

Meera: What do you know about whats going to happen?

Elizabeth: Hard to say. Weve since left that practice and have switched to a tiny family practice in Woonsocket. They do have that flexibility, and they have started to tell all their patients, if its nonessential, dont come in. So theyre seeing like three to five people a day. And Ill give birth at the tiny county hospital there that has the closest thing to a birth center that Rhode Island has. Its like a separate part of the hospital, you dont go in through the emergency room.

One of the main things Ive learned from my birth doula is, when your body feels safe, it releases the chemicals necessary to, like, keep the labor moving along. And if you dont feel safe, it will stop doing that, which is why a lot of women stall or have a hard time moving from their home to the hospital, because that transition feels sort of like, I went from the safety of my home to an institution. And youre chemically sending a signal to the baby: Hold on a second.

Meera: Stay put just a little longer.

Elizabeth: I feel like Ive become a mother overnight even though I havent given birth yet. Back in early March I had to make a bunch of decisions about whether or not I was going to cancel events slated in Oregon. In particular I had one booked in Lake Oswego, where the first cases were reported, and I remember calling my speaking agent and being like, I think we have to cancel. I dont want to go to one of the only school districts in the country thats reported cases of coronavirus. I was suddenly making decisions for two. I had no practice and nothing to draw on in terms of, like, what was an overreaction or an under-reaction. It felt awful, like, I dont know how to do this. It was overwhelming.

Im not necessarily risk-averse. I think you and I share that. But I lack the experience around making decisions for two. That is more the place where pregnancy and coronavirus collide for me, just trying to see a couple weeks out and figure out a little bit of this new identity. But that doesnt make me feel like I dont want to have a kid or that its wrong to bring a child into this world.

I do see my friends who have kids. And Im also like, Thank God I dont have one yet, homeschooling looks really hard.

Im not necessarily risk-averse. I think you and I share that. But I lack the experience around making decisions for two. That is more the place where pregnancy and coronavirus collide for me.

Meera: At least you have a yard.

Elizabeth: Does it make you glad you dont have kids?

Meera: Yes, but I was feeling that already. This happened at such an interesting moment for me. I turned fifty last month actually, I didnt turn fifty because I postponed my birthday because I had to teach and there was, like, nothing to do. And it was a Wednesday and it was rainy and it was miserable and there was a pandemic. So it hasnt happened yet. I get to pretend Im still forty-nine until I celebrate!

So, yes. Ive already been in that mode of thinking. My bodys telling me I am so officially done with this question of motherhood, but Id made the decision a long time ago. And it feels right and good. I continue to feel parenting energy from students, from cultivating a garden, from having stepdaughters I do have half-kids, which is important. I dont know how you quantify it all. But Ive felt very content with that decision I made, which is reassuring, because for a long time, I was just like, When am I gonna regret this? This thing that has always felt so clear to me not wanting children but also knowing we change our minds on many things. I might look back and be like, That was really dumb and short-sighted. I have never felt that, which feels really fortunate.

Elizabeth: Did you make the decision with climate change in mind?

Meera: I wasnt thinking specifically about climate change until much more recently. Thirty years ago I definitely made it with environmental issues in mind. I was really focused on doing work in that realm, a clear sense that that was where my time was supposed to go, that there was this other purpose I wanted to put my energy toward. I really dont know what that thing is that makes it such a deep, deep desire for some women. I have never experienced that. The best way I could describe it was by joking that my biological clock was just broken!

Elizabeth: It reminds me of something that Naomi Klein writes about toward the end of This Changes Everything. She has a child, and she, if Im remembering it correctly, goes through in vitro. She says something along the lines of, To have a kid or not doesnt really change your moral stance in relationship to climate change. Like, it doesnt make you a better climate warrior, but it does change the amount of time you have to give to that fight. Shes calling into question this idea that a single individuals carbon footprint is going to be the thing that tips the scales, but having a child does change the time that you can give to any one thing. Which is something that Ive been thinking about a ton. Writing Rising, that book was my activism for a long time. But what happens if I give 20 percent of the time that I usually devote to writing to something else? Is that better than writing or is it a more useful lever?

Meera: The conversation often does become judgmental around the question, which I find ridiculous. There are some people for whom the desire to parent is a deep drive. We are biological creatures. We should all fundamentally want to procreate. Thats why I feel like a little bit more broken on that level as a biological creature, I should want it. So it feels like an anomaly in that way.

So it makes sense that we have this drive, because we are animals. But you should want it. If you do it, you should want it and be in it fully, and I never did. Ive seen so many people who do it because they think its what they are supposed to do. And those situations dont always look as great as you want them to.

Elizabeth: Theres this deep well, like, you can be a woman writer or a mother, but you cant be both. Sheila Hetis Motherhood, is really about a writer dwelling in this difficulty. Toward the end she says something like, Whenever I see your friends kids, I dont wish I had brought one of those into the world, but sometimes I read my friends book and I wish that was mine. And shes decided to not have kids and to continue being a writer. But I dont buy that you can only do one or the other. I have women friends who say having a kid just makes them stricter with how they use their time.

Meera: And youll write about different things, from a new vantage, and thats good! Thats where the coronavirus is having an impact on how Im thinking about that. The slowing down and staying home should mean theres more time to write, but its reporting that so often gives me fodder to write! I have been doing more essays, but its a different writing process, just writing from the head without the vital energy that comes from reporting where just immersing yourself in a new place forces you to pay attention to things in a totally new way and asking questions and constantly learning. Its a very different process. By going out into the world you experience something completely new.

In some ways, I think that also is what parenthood is a travel experience.

Elizabeth: Im working on an Antarctica-pregnancy-birthing new worlds-glacial collapse book and thinking, Im going to read this in five years, and be like, Was I wrong? Whatever I think parenting or motherhood is going to be, its not going to be what I imagine.

Meera: Yeah, but good for you for doing it. I have thought about wanting to write about not wanting kids for so long. And Ive been afraid to because I dont want to put it on paper. Youve got more chutzpah than I did.

Elizabeth: I read a piece by Meehan Crist about having kids.

Meera: The London Review of Books piece.

Elizabeth: Yes. And I learned through that piece that BP was really behind the popularization of carbon footprint and carbon calculus and that whole subtle movement to blame-shift onto individuals. Definitely clarified a lot of rage that I feel, especially with my students and with women who are twenty to twenty-five, saying, Im not going to have a kid because its the easiest way to shrink my carbon footprint. Theres part of me thats just like

Meera: Dont take on that burden.

Elizabeth: Dont take on that burden. Understand the depth to which you have been taught to think that youre individually responsible for the thing. There are other ways to think about having a net positive, or less net negative, impact. If you got together with twenty other people and you shut down a coal power plant for a day, youd also keep that same amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere. But we havent been taught to think like that. Theres some part of me thats filled with great anger that this conversation has shifted onto individual women and their relationship to that thing that we have a hard time describing, that desire, if you want to call it that, to bring forth life.

Meera: But there are two sides of this question. No one should make you feel guilty for wanting to have a child; if that is a drive that you have, then that is something you should listen to. But also you might love children so much but are scared for the world that youre going to give them. Its so complicated.

When I was twenty-three years old and fighting for old growth forests in Oregon, I was thinking, I dont want a kid thats going to not be able to wrap their arms around a tree because its too big. I dont want to introduce the kid to that world without big trees. And then climate change makes that look like a fucking joke. Youre worried about a tree? I worry now more about system collapse than timber sales.

Elizabeth: Theres part of me that worries about the access to nature that my future child will have, but I also dont think that its a pressing concern the way that it is for a lot of other people. Felipe, my husband, and I joke: we get two countries to choose from. If its really bad here, well go to Colombia. I take that into consideration and I add that to the list of advantages this kid is going to have. Which is really fucked up to say. But I dont think that my child will live on, like, the front line of the changes that are coming down the pike.

Maybe thats wrong. Do you think thats wrong? Do you think thats insane, knowing what you know?

Meera: Youre definitely right to some degree, but there is going to be again going back to the coronavirus a leveling aspect to it. Some things you can get yourself out of, some things you cant. This gets to the fundamental question of whether humans are good creatures or bad creatures. Do we head toward the place where disaster hits and respond in solidarity and with compassion? Or do we respond like Mad Max? Rebecca Solnit has written about this, about the community that can emerge from emergency, and you do see that. But it always seems like it lasts about six months. Happy solidarity! and then the raw side of human behavior emerges.

Thinking again about that threat multiplier class at Princeton this spring, and thinking about this in terms of climate change and coronavirus this pandemic is not making the wildfire season go away! Its not making the hurricane season go away! Imagine Hurricane Sandy or Hurricane Katrina right now hitting either of those cities, when theyre already completely at max. Evacuate now, shelter in place now. Where do you go? How do you deal with that? Thats the part that scares me. Thats the part that makes me think this is going to be more leveling than we can imagine. I hope its not true, with so much of the world population already so incredibly vulnerable, but you can see how quickly those things could change.

Elizabeth: I have a good friend whos in Spain, and there are reports of break-ins, because people are hungry, living in an apartment with four people and no one has a paycheck anymore and they need food. Does this mean we start locking the garage? Thats not the person I want to be.

Meera: Or the world that you want to live in, right? That gets back to the question: Can we envision something new? Its really hard right now, given our leadership. You have Colombia, my other country is India, and I am deeply troubled by whats happening in India, before the virus hit.

Elizabeth: Whats happening in India?

Meera: The deep nationalism that is showing itself there, revoking citizenships for Muslims and becoming more racist and xenophobic than they have been before. And its with widespread support for the direction that its going.

In terms of coronavirus, theyve shut down the entire country. If America is letting all the states decide what to do willy-nilly, Modi just locked down the entire country. What that means for people who live in slums is unclear. On Tuesday morning, Princeton had a Zoom lecture on air quality in India, so theyre monitoring whats going on with the air quality, given this lockdown, and theyre finding that its gone down in the cities, where theres actual enforcement of that. But in the rural areas, everybody is going about their business. Which makes complete sense, but it shows the chasm between what is supposed to be happening and what is actually happening.

We are adaptable. We adapt to the craziest shit. Can we now that weve been snapped out of the daydream of ordinary life imagine something completely new? Or better?

Elizabeth: You see people on the street and automatically step six feet away from them. You and I have both spent the past several summers not tending gardens, and yet here we are, reorienting. That change literally happened in the last three weeks.

Meera: It shows that we can change. It will be so interesting to see what people realize is irrelevant. Im very curious to see where that falls.

We are adaptable. We adapt to the craziest shit. Can we now that weve been snapped out of the daydream of ordinary life imagine something completely new? Or better?

Elizabeth: I asked Felipe, What do you miss? And he was like, Eating with friends at a restaurant. My family. Which I totally get. I miss walking to the bakery and buying a loaf of bread. Theres something about that ritualized participation in my little community.

How about you guys? What do you miss?

Meera: I feel very fortunate. Ive been saying that its way more important to like the person youre living with than to love them. Im feeling for all the people that are in a tiny apartment with, like, two young kids who they now have to teach, or people who are just quarantined alone. I was actually wondering how vibrator sales are doing. I wonder if theyre out of stock, like toilet paper. They probably are!

Elizabeth: I saw someone recently complaining, like, Are sex toys essential in the quarantine? It was an Amazon worker being like, I dont think you should be putting my life at risk for your sex toy. But I also think desperate times call for desperate measures. Maybe try using commonly found items in the home?

Meera: Yeah. Id be inventive and safe at the same time. But human touch you know, I remember feeling, when I went to New York, I moved from this place where people hugged each other all the time, to New York, where people give, like, air kisses. I used to think, Does anybody touch anybody in this town? And I remember feeling touch-starved. People now who are not with anybody, in an apartment by themselves for weeks with no end in sight. That is really, really hard.

And that is the other climate connection, that lag period. Its okay, its okay, its okay holy shit, its not fucking okay. How difficult it is for our brains to do that? Were struggling with it right now, but with climate, its seemingly decades of delay. Were just not good at thinking in those timeframes.

Elizabeth: Makes you realize how hard it is to keep track of all the things that pass in and out of your life. Our governor is asking kids to keep journals of who they make contact with every day, as a way to potentially track the spread of coronavirus.

Meera: Just kids?

Elizabeth: She wants adults to do it too, but shes like, Im going to give kids homework. She told them also that the Easter Bunny was an essential worker who had not been laid off.

Meera: The parents were like, Great, how the fuck do I get chocolate? O

About the Authors:

Meera Subramanian is an award-winning freelance journalist. Her first book is A River Runs Again: Indias Natural World in Crisis from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka, published in 2015 by PublicAffairs. Her writing has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing and multiple editions of Best Womens Travel Writing. She was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT (2016-17) and a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research fellow in India (2013-14), and she earned her graduate degree in journalism from New York University. She is currently serving as the president of the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University.

Elizabeth Rushis the author ofRising: Dispatches from the New American ShoreandStill Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared in theNew York Times, theWashington Post, Harpers, Guernica, Granta, and theNew Republic, among others. In 2019 she deployed to the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica as the National Science Foundations Artist and Writer in Residence. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Southern New Hampshire University, and teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.

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Together Apart - Orion Magazine

Human Behavior

Tiffany Stewart: 2020 Influential Women in Business – Greater Baton Rouge Business Report

Dudley & Beverly Coates Endowed Professor,Pennington Biomedical Research CenterDirector, PBRC Behavior Technology Laboratory

Hometown: Born in Lake Charles, raised in FloridaAge: 45Family: Married to spouse Devin LemoineYears with company: 18

Tiffany Stewart admits to having two favorite words, both of which say a lot about this respected clinical psychologist and research scientists secret to success. The first is resiliencea trait Stewart is driven to understand in human beings. Discovering what makes people physically and mentally resilient, or why they struggle to adapt, has been an underlying focus of her research for more than two decades.

Stewarts other favorite word, equanimity, reveals something about how she has personally achieved resiliency. Equanimity, she says, is a psychological state in which one manages to find composure and calm even in the eye of the storm. Aiming for equanimity means its OK that things dont always go the way you had expected. And sometimes, they can turn out better, not worse.

Fueled by those guiding principles, Stewart has spent her career pioneering translational research programs, or programs that push scientific research from labs and journals into the hands of everyday people who need it. As director of Penningtons Behavior Technology Laboratory, Stewart finds ways of improving health through behavioral change strategies, notably technology. Stewart spent years developing and testing e-health technologies that were ahead of their time, including programs that help keep Army troops and NCAA athletes functioning at their optimum, both physically and mentally.

Earlier this year, Stewart led the launch of the Pennington Diabetes Clinic, the research centers first treatment clinic for patients struggling with obesity and Type 2 diabetes in Louisiana. Using 30 years of research science conducted at Pennington, the clinic, which works with Medicaid patients, is a model for treatment of obesity and diabetes, costly conditions that affect communities across the globe. If successful, Stewart and her team aim to scale the clinics approach and expand its application beyond Louisiana.

Originally from Lake Charles, Stewarts interest in science, psychology and understanding what drives human behavior was cultivated in her youth. She recalls winning top honors for a science project on Type 2 diabetes in sixth grade, an award she still keeps in her office. Later, as a competitive gymnast, Stewart also learned how demoralizing a career-ending injury could be when she suffered one herselfand what such an experience could teach serious athletes about bouncing back. Both experiences were bellwethers for her professional pursuits.

After earning an undergraduate degree in psychology from Florida State University, Stewart chose to pursue her doctorate at LSU in large part because of Penningtons worldwide reputation. She became a faculty member at the research center the same day her dissertation was accepted, embarking on a professional journey that has seen her secure nearly $20 million in funding to pursue groundbreaking work. She has worked with the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense to execute large, multisite projects that have included the development and deployment of new behavior change technologies, including a program she created for Army soldiers and their families that tracks nutrition, fitness and sleep. These factors greatly influence how people can bounce back after physically and mentally taxing situations. Stewart has also developed programs that support nutrition, fitness and sleep in children and in the ability of NCAA female athletes to endure abrupt changes, including injuries and transitioning to life after competition.

Stewart loves the endless exploration that science affords, but she approaches her work with a keen sense of business.

Ultimately, there are people out there who can use the science, she says. Thinking about them as actual customers and receivers of this information is a very important part of it.

2002: Graduates from LSU with doctorate in clinical psychology; joins the faculty at Pennington Biomedical; becomes assistant director of OLOL hospital inpatient unit for eating disorder treatment.

2004: $4.5 million grant awarded by the Department of Defense kicks off the first Army study examining the use of an internet-based program, Army H.E.A.L.T.H., for nutrition and fitness for the U.S. Army at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

2009: $8.2 million grant secured from the Department of Defense builds on prior success and the first smartphone app-based program is developed for use with the Louisiana National Guard to tackle behavioral nutrition, fitness, sleep, and mental resilience.

2012: $2.3 million grant awarded from the National Institutes of Health to prevent eating disorders and boost mental health in NCAA female athletes; receives Patriotic Employer Award from Office of the Secretary of Defense.

2015: Named the Dudley & Beverly Coates Endowed Professor; receives Louisiana Legislative Caucus Women of Excellence Award for Health & Medicine; Army app program is scaled and used Army-wide.

2016-2017: Develops the Athlete S.C.O.R.E. program to target physical and mental health and resilience in athletes transitioning from competitive sports; TEDxLSU speaker.

2019-2020: Launches program at the Knock-Knock Museum for kids targeting nutrition, fitness, body appreciation and mental resilience in partnership with Mayor Broomes Healthy Baton Rouge initiative; receives LSUs Esprit de Femme Award; establishes the Diabetes Clinic at Pennington Biomedical.

Best adviceShow up no matter what. You miss 100% of opportunities if you are not present. That includes physical and/or mental presence.

Necessary workplace changeEqual regard and equal pay. This community has women visionaries that have made significant and impactful contributions. Despite progress, we still need more representation at the leadership table in most of our organizations.

Advice for young womenAt the end of the day, this journey is a balance of grit and gracedont think you cant be what you cant see. The numbers we chase (that may define traditional versions of success) often dont measure what we are actually capable of in our work. Summon your courage and forge the path.

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Tiffany Stewart: 2020 Influential Women in Business - Greater Baton Rouge Business Report

Anatomy

The Full-Color Voxel Woman: 3D Printing the Complexity of Human Anatomy – 3DPrint.com

Creating anatomical 3D models with cutting edge technology can forever change the way anatomy and medicine are illustrated. At Victoria University of Wellington (Victoria), in New Zealand, students are quickly learning new ways to give life to clinical data. Moving data from the 2D world to a tangible, highly detailed, and precise 3D printed anatomical model could significantly change the clinical field; revamping everything, from medical education to clinical practice.

Focused on bringing her creative designs to life, Ana Morris, a post-graduate student at the School of Design Innovation at Victoria, managed to 3D print a full-color, anatomically accurate, and high fidelity voxel human using the Visible Female dataset and a bitmap-based additive manufacturing workflow.

The result of the work, part of Morris masters thesis, is visually astounding and the woman replicated within this new kind of anatomical model is almost palpable. It was created using serially sectioned cryosection images of a female cadaver produced by researchers working on the National Library of Medicines Visible Human Project (VHP).

Ana Morris (Credit: Victoria University of Wellington)

Using a Stratasys J750 3D printer, Morris was able to replicate in an entirely novel way the body of a woman who, as a result of morbid obesity, died of heart disease. Victorias School of Design Innovation has been working with Stratasys printers since 2004, and this J750 machine used to create lifelike anatomical models with standard or complex pathologies for device testing, surgical training, and patient-specific simulation, provides the color, flexibility, and transparency in 14-micron droplets.

The VHP project realized as a full-color exploratory model (Credit: Ana Morris/Victoria University of Wellington)

Working alongside lecturers Bernard Guy and Ross Stevens of the School of Design Innovation, Morris was granted free access to use the sophisticated Stratasys machine. Just like all her classmates, she was encouraged to learn at the edge and exploit her creative thinking, as Guy described during an interview with 3DPrint.com.

This particular piece is a component of a larger project by Ana [Morris] that works with data that doctors use all the time like MRI and CT scans. It provides an example of how industrial designers at Victoria take data and convert it into a physical object, and also how to advance scientific thinking, serving as a catalyst that can transform research, said Guy.

We have the advantage of talking to anesthesiologists and surgeons all the time, who have recently suggested that this voxel human piece would be a fantastic exemplar as a visual aid for patients, to show them whats inside the body and what can happen during a procedure, without being scary or too scientific.

The full data set from the VHP is now publicly available, allowing Morris the opportunity to volumetrically reconstruct the dataset in a new way. Originally conducted in the 1990s by the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center to obtain serially sectioned images of human cadavers for medical research advancements, the VHP became a common reference point for the study of human anatomy.

Anatomical medical modeling using traditional mesh-based workflows can be time-consuming. Data loss and segmentation artifacts, due to multiple post-processing steps, can cause anatomically inaccurate 3D prints. Morris stated that, when using current segmentation workflows, each mesh (STL file) is restricted to one color and density. However, her study takes advantage of a high-resolution multi-material 3D printer that allows for control over every material droplet (also referred to as a voxel).

Guy and Stevens believe that 3D printing with voxels is a little bit like looking at tiny dust particles in the sun; its that sort of detail that we are working with, tiny little particles. Our big question is now, what do people want to see in a physical object with this level of detail? We dont want to keep printing more superfluous products.

The natomically accurate 3D printed model of the Visible Female, a woman who died of heart disease caused by obesity (Credit: Ana Morris/Victoria University of Wellington)

There are plenty of virtual reconstructions, but I dont think the human anatomy has ever been printed like this before, Morris suggested to 3DPrint.com. Moreover, a model like this highlights the potential of what could come next and will hopefully spark ideas of what could be done. For example, the model could serve as a visual communication tool used in a setting between a doctor and patient, removing all the clinical jargon, helping patients have a more comprehensive understanding of the human body.

Morriss workflow can bypass the conversion steps of traditional segmentation workflows, resulting in the preservation of cadaveric anatomy in its true color. Furthermore, because of the time saved using a bitmap-based 3D printing approach, Morris workflow has the potential to save money when compared to traditional medical modeling workflows. The highly accurate model was produced with gradated color including details at 14-micron resolution which, according to Morris, is impossible to achieve using STL file formats.

The four-step process starts with data acquisition. In this case, the Visible Female dataset, which is then volumetrically reconstructed to create a virtual model. From here, the data is scaled-down and resliced at the printers native printer zresolution. It is finally 3D printed and post-processed.

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The detail that can be seen in the 3D printed Visible Female shown in this research is unprecedented. A total of 5,102 images were processed and sent for printing on the Stratasys J750 to complete the Visible Female 3D print, resulting in 24 individual 3D prints stacked on top of each other to form the full 3D printed Visible Female.

Morris claimed that all the print parts vary in slice thickness, as they wanted to show that bitmap-based printing can produce both thin slices and thick blocks. For demonstration purposes, thick blocks were used to show more detailed areas of anatomy such as the hand and chest regions, and thinner slices were used to show detail through areas such as the thigh.

Model of the Visible Female (Credit: Ana Morris/Victoria University of Wellington)

Guy recalls that unlike anything previously seen in 3D printed anatomical models, this project shows the body of a person in extreme detail. With 3D printing, we see a lot of stereotypical body forms; while here, we are witnessing a person who has grown up, lived their life, and passed away, so it is a very real cadaver, almost as a synthetic cadaver, or synthetic mummification. It shows a very real shape and form, and thats the part of the study we wanted to focus on.

Morris described that when images are deposited sequentially on top of each other using the Stratasys J750 3D printer, it can construct a tangible 3D model. Inspired by Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) research where a bitmap-based 3D printing workflow allows the ability to engineer different material combinations at a 14-micron resolution by fusing different material droplets. Advantages recorded around bitmap-based 3D printing have acknowledged that in its strength lies its accuracy, limitless manufacturing possibilities, and the production of complex material combinations at a microscale.

Students at Victoria are aiming to mimic anatomy using synthetic materials, described Guy. This is part of their ability to craft and shape voxels with medical data. The challenge that many professors and students at the School of Design Innovation are undertaking is to show another level of detail, gradients, density, color, and heterogeneous material combinations to fulfill growing demand from the medical field.

We are at a time when healthcare professionals are not sure what is achievable, but they also dont know what question to ask and our job is to show them what we can do, suggested Guy.

For Morris, the aim of this project was to explore the bitmap-based 3D printing technique and the capabilities of the Stratasys J750 3D printer.

After this, we could expand into densities and biomechanics, which are more complicated areas, she said.

According to Morris, having control over every 14-micron material droplet means that materials can be engineered to produce models with varying colors and densities, and even more interesting is how this manufacturing workflow could be used for a variety of different medical applications where bioimaging datasets are needed to create tangible anatomical models.

Finding a balance between science, creativity, and art is one of Morriss strong points and what led her to carry out this endeavor, something she described as a way to humanize and democratize information about our anatomy and clinical vocabulary through design. Indeed, her bitmap-based additive manufacturing model has helped to show the Visible Female in an unprecedented way.

Display of sections of the Visible Human (Credit: Ana Morris/Victoria University of Wellington)

After presenting this research at the 3D Technologies in Medicine 2019 Conference in Melbourne last year, Morris and Guy expect that future research will involve looking at medical datasets to print models that are soft and hard altogether. They expect to work on the complexity of 3D color and movement to display the dynamics of the body using the sophisticated and new Stratasys 750 Digital Anatomy Printer (DAP).

Anatomical models today are a weird snapshot in time, so I want models that mimic the complexity of a body in movement, such as tissue movement in breathing. The desire is to get as close as we can to anatomy, by mimicking the reaction of the different parts of the body when it moves, as opposed to static anatomical models that are falsely imitating reality, explained Guy. And now thanks to Anas method, we can move forward, knowing that if we are really sharp, we can make a difference.

Full-color serially sectioned images of the Visible Female (Credit: Ana Morris/Victoria University of Wellington)

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Anatomy

The Anatomy of a Failing University – CounterPunch

American universities are failing. They are private or public schools. They could be religiously-affiliated or not. They could be in the east, west, north, or south of the United States. They traditionally emphasized liberal arts. They are facing an enrollment and budget crunch for several years, seeing that the declining number of eighteen-year-olds in the coming years poses an existential threat. It has a modest endowment. It is not an elite school. It is a school like the one that many professors teach at. It was failing before Covid-19. It may not be around in five years. With COVID-19, it may be around even less than that.

Years ago, I argued that higher education had afailed business plan, one that planted the seeds of its own destruction. It was a plan following thefailures of K-12. Now the reality of the failed business plan is imminent .

The reasons for failing are many.

For years it relied on the same demographic of white students to recruit, except that demographic is disappearing.

For years it raised tuition at percentages that far outstripped the cost of living and increases in median household incomes, and now many students cannot afford to go to college.

For years it raised tuition to convince people that the more expensive it was the better a school it was. Except the school did not invest the money in academic programs.

For years it played theU.S. News & World Reportcollege rankings game. Except all the other schools played too and all it accomplished was elegant dorms and rising tuition.

For years it spent increasing amounts of money on lavish meals and events to recruit students. Except all the other schools did the same.

For years it encouraged students to borrow, except now with student loan debt at nearly $2 trillion they are tapped out.

For years it chased adult Baby Boomer learners who wanted additional credentials or thought they had a novel in them. But this demographic is gone.

For years it jumped on the bandwagon to create pricey graduate programs such as MBAs to subsidize the liberal arts school. Except this balloon busted.

It adopted a corporate, private-sector orientated model for governance, creating high-salaried vice-presidents for every task or problem it encountered. Except when the financial crunch hit it opted to lay off or reduce faculty and cut back on programs that generated revenue instead of trimming back middle and senior management. It also then hired a new vice-president or a consultant to manage the finances.

When enrollment and retention dipped it hired a new vice-president instead of new recruiters or admissions staff.

It reduced the percentage of tenured or tenure-track faculty and replaced them with part time contingents. Except it found that the latter, no matter how well meaning, do not have the same time to provide all the advising and other services full time faculty do.

It expanded sports programs as a way to attract attention and recruit students. Except few sports programs provide a positive return on investment.

It experimented with on-line degree completion programs. Except it did so at the same time everyone else did across the country and therefore it faced a new group of schools competing for the same students.

It lowered admissions standards to maintain enrollment but could not then figure out why the retention rates went down.

It cut requirements such as foreign languages, music, or the arts to make it easier for students to get in and graduate into jobs. Except in doing so it undermined its mission as a liberal arts institution and the reason why students should go to it and not a community college.

It made it easier for high school students to enter with advanced placement credits. Except it then realized that these students could graduate early and therefore did not pay as much in tuition.

As its competitors added certain programs it duplicated them as opposed to defining what it was good at and focusing on it.

As the job market changed it developed new programs to chase the trends. Except the new trend was always one step ahead of the school.

It jumped on buzz words and slogans such as high impact learning or stackable to sell itself, yet it did little to really change course offerings or programs.

It invested heavily in learning technology letting it drive pedagogy, instead of vice versa.

It talked about the reality of a coming new student demographics, but it did little to change its marketing strategy or services to support them.

Its administrators and university presidents froze faculty salaries or cut their benefits to make money, trustees gave them bonuses for doing that and then wondered why professors were dispirited and disillusioned.

It hired presidents who promised big change but kicked the real tough choices down the road to avoid taking responsibility for what might happen.

It said that we have to be more career-focused like community colleges, except it forgot that an expensive four-year school cannot price compete with a two-year school.

With Covid-19, it is facing an existential threat that has accelerated the problems it has faced for years.

Now the trustees, administrators, and faculty sit around in meetings and wonder why the university is failing. Perhaps they need to hire an expensive consultant to figure it out.

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The Anatomy of a Failing University - CounterPunch