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Human Behavior

The coronavirus is mutating. How worried should you be? – The Daily Briefing

British officials on Saturday announced scientists have discovered a new, potentially far-more-contagious strain of the novel coronavirus in the United Kingdom (U.K.)but they emphasized that the new variant is not more deadly than other strains of the virus and should not be resistant against vaccines.

Just released: The global Covid-19 vaccination scenario planning guide

During a news conference Saturday, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and England's CMO Chris Whitty said scientists identified the new strainlabeled B 1.1.7through Public Health England's genomic surveillance. According to the New York Times, the variant has about 20 mutations, including several that affect how the virus attaches to and infects cells in the body.

Johnson during the conference announced stricter lockdown measures across the country, in the wake of a significant surge in Covid-19 cases over the past two weeks. And to limit the spread of the new variant, several other nations across Europe have in turn imposed or are considering bans on arrivals from the U.K. In addition, at least one countryGermanyis drawing up language for a travel ban on people coming from South Africa, where a variant similar to the one identified in the U.K.

Johnson said scientists believe the new variant is more infectious than the original version of the novel coronavirus. "There's no evidence that it causes more severe illness or higher mortality, but it does appear to be passed on significantly more easily," Johnson said. "Although there's considerable uncertainty, it may be up to 70% more transmissible than the original version of the" virus.

However, Johnson noted this estimate is based on early data and "subject to review."

Muge Cevik, an infectious disease expert at the University of St. Andrews, said the estimate is based on modeling and has not been confirmed through laboratory experiments. "Overall, I think we need to have a little bit more experimental data," Cevik said. "We can't entirely rule out the fact that some of this transmissibility data might be related to human behavior."

Patrick Vallance, Britain's chief scientific adviser, said preliminary data shows the new variant is becoming the dominant strain circulating in some portions of England, including London and the south east and east of England.

Scientists say they're concerned about the new variants of the coronavirus, but they're not shocked by the recent discoveries. Since the novel coronavirus has spread across the world, scientists have identified thousands of small modifications in the virus's genetic material.

"This thing's transmitting, it's acquiring, it's adapting all the time," said Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge. "But people don't want to hear what we say, which is: This virus will mutate."

Experts also say some strains of a virus may become more dominant in a population by chance and not because they've become supercharged versions of the virus, the Times reports. As a pathogen's survival becomes more difficult because of vaccinations or increasing immunity in human populations, experts anticipate a virus will gradually develop mutations to help it spread more easily or avoid the immune system's detection, according to the Times.

As a result, many experts say people shouldn't be too alarmed by the new variants of the novel coronavirus, because it would take yearsrather than monthsfor the virus to mutate to a point where people's antibodies against the virus or currently authorized vaccines would become ineffective, the Times reports.

Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said, "No one should worry that there is going to be a single catastrophic mutation that suddenly renders all immunity and antibodies useless."

Noting that even the influenza virus needs between five and seven years to gather all the mutations necessary to evade immune recognition entirely, Bloom continued, "It is going to be a process that occurs over the time scale of multiple years and requires the accumulation of multiple viral mutations. It's not going to be like an on-off switch."

Still, Bloom and other experts said the new variants should be closely watched. "It's a real warning that we need to pay closer attention," Bloom said. "Certainly, these mutations are going to spread, and, definitely, the scientific communitywe need to monitor these mutations and we need to characterize which ones have effects."

Separately, Vivek Murthy, a former U.S. surgeon general and President-elect Joe Biden's likely general nominee for the role, said the identification of a new strain of the coronavirus doesn't alter longstanding public health recommendations to wash hands, wear masks, and continue practicing social distancing (Mandavilli, New York Times, 12/20; Holden et al., Reuters, 12/19; Kupferschmidt, Science, 12/20; Associated Press/Modern Healthcare, 12/20).

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The coronavirus is mutating. How worried should you be? - The Daily Briefing

Human Behavior

Talk is cheap: Why we make healthy claims but indulge in unhealthy behaviors – Purdue News Service

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. The time period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is characterized by overindulgence. While we tell others that we are eating and drinking in moderation, controlling our spending, and exercising more, in reality, we do the exact opposite. So where does this disconnect come from?

Often when responding to questions about sensitive behaviors (for example, weight gain, over-eating, alcohol consumption), people want to appear socially correct while downplaying bad behaviors. Psychologists call this subconscious response social desirability bias (SDB), and for researchers who are trying to understand a persons actual behavior, these biased responses are a problem.

Were human. We want others to like us and think of us as good people, says Nicole Olynk Widmar, professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University. However, health care providers and researchers need accurate self-reported data. Understanding SDB is imperative to being able to collect good data about human behaviors, especially self-reported data about sensitive topics, such as weight gain and eating over the holiday season.

Widmar and Courtney Bir, assistant professor at Oklahoma State, recently published a study on recognizing and mitigating SDB in responses to questions about holiday health-related behaviors, in the Springer Nature journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

We asked survey respondents to report their holiday health-related behaviors and their beliefs on the behaviors of the average American, Bir says. We then compared the responses to determine what percentage of respondents rated themselves better than they rated the average American. That difference is where we find evidence of the bias.

The largest proportion of respondents showing evidence of SDB was found in response to two statements: I will consume more alcohol during the holiday season than at other times of the year (66% of respondents displayed evidence of SDB), and I make it a New Years Resolution to lose weight (62% of respondents displayed evidence of SDB).These responses suggest respondents will drink less alcohol and be more likely to make a resolution to lose weight, compared with the average American.

However, while Bir and Widmar set out to recognize SDB, they also wanted to find ways to combat it. Their method? Add cheap talk statements.

Cheap talk is often used in surveys to explicitly inform respondents of different biases that can arise related to the question being asked, Bir says. In the study, we tested a statement that simply informed people that sometimes human inclination moves us to answer in a way that deviates from our own true behavior because we want to be socially correct. The idea is that the person may be more likely to provide an accurate response because the potential for bias has been explicitly brought to their attention.

The study included two participant groups. One group received a cheap talk statement prior to rating their level of agreement to the holiday health behaviors, while the other did not. By comparing the two groups, the researchers were able to determine if evidence of SDB was lessened for the respondents receiving the cheap talk statement.

Widmar and Bir noted that cheap talk was effective in reducing SDB for some questions and in some respondents but not all of them. As Widmar says, For some people or some statements studied, SDB is so engrained that the cheap talk statement did not have a measurable impact.

Writer: Kami Goodwin, kami@purdue.edu

Sources: Nicole Olynk Widmar, nwidmar@purdue.edu, and Courtney Bir, courtney.bir@okstate.edu

Agricultural Communications:765-494-8415;

Maureen Manier, Department Head,mmanier@purdue.edu

Agriculture News Page

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Talk is cheap: Why we make healthy claims but indulge in unhealthy behaviors - Purdue News Service

Human Behavior

Coronavirus Briefing: What Happened Today – The New York Times

A new variant: What we know

This weekend, Britain imposed a wholesale lockdown on London and most of the countrys southeast, citing fears about a new strain of the coronavirus, which officials say is more contagious..

Countries in the European Union, the Middle East and Asia raced to bar travelers from the United Kingdom, suspending flights and cutting off trade routes. People crowded into train stations and airports, trying to flee the city before the restrictions went into effect.

But from a contagion perspective, scientists and experts say, the travel bans may be an overreaction. Heres what we know so far.

Viral variants are not a shock. As our colleague Apoorva Mandavilli has reported, the new variant has worried scientists, but not surprised them. Researchers have recorded thousands of tiny modifications in the genetic material of the coronavirus as it has hopscotched across the world.

Natural selection tends to make viruses more contagious. As immunity and vaccinations make it harder for the coronavirus to spread, random mutations occur. Those changes can enable the virus to spread more easily or to escape detection by the bodys immune system.

Were still learning about the mutations. Scientists estimate the variant is 50 percent to 70 percent more transmissible than the original virus. But that number is based on modeling and has not been confirmed in lab experiments, experts told Apoorva.

The vaccines should still work. Experts say it would take years, not months, for the virus to evolve enough to render the current vaccines impotent. No one should worry that there is going to be a single catastrophic mutation that suddenly renders all immunity and antibodies useless, said Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Its not going to be like an on-off switch.

The travel bans might be too late. A similar version of the virus has emerged in South Africa, which shares one of the mutations seen in the British variant, according to scientists who detected it. It is possible that the variant has already spread beyond those countries.

Human behavior drives transmission. Even without the new variant, the biggest variable driving contagion is human behavior. Wherever you are in the world, it is sensible to limit your exposure to other people. And, of course, wear a mask.

With distribution of a coronavirus vaccine beginning in the U.S., here are answers to some questions you may be wondering about:

In early December, the Mexican government knew that Mexico City had reached a critical level of contagion that, according to its own standards, would have required shutting down the citys economy.

But Mexico did not share the true numbers with the public or sufficiently restrict movement in the capital, in an apparent attempt to help the economy during the busy holiday shopping season, reports Natalie Kitroeff, a foreign correspondent for The Times based in Mexico.

Instead, the federal government misled the public about the severity of the outbreak and allowed Mexico City to remain open for another two weeks.

Specifically, when the government was computing its lockdown formula in early December, it used lower numbers in two critical areas the percentage of occupied hospital beds with ventilators, and the percentage of positive coronavirus test results than were publicly stated in its official databases. Officials refused to explain where that data came from.

On Friday, the government finally moved to shut the city down. But it was too late: More than 85 percent of hospital beds in the capital were occupied on Sunday, up from 66 percent when the government decided to delay the lockdown.

Now, doctors say they are running out of crucial medicines. Outside medical supply stores, relatives of patients lined up for hours to buy oxygen.

They have deliberately tried to hide the emergency, said Xavier Tello, a health policy analyst based in Mexico City. Every day they delayed the decision, more people were exposed.

South Korea will ban gatherings of more than five people in and around Seoul, the capital, in an attempt to suppress what the authorities have called an explosive infection surge.

As case numbers were rising in Kenya, doctors across the country went on strike Monday, protesting poor pay, lack of medical insurance and inadequate protective equipment.

Dozens of people protesting virus restrictions many with weapons, body armor or flags supporting President Trump tried to force their way into Oregons State Capitol building in Salem.

Sweeping restrictions will come into effect Saturday in Ontario, the most populous province in Canada. That is also Boxing Day, a major shopping holiday.

Heres a roundup of restrictions in all 50 states.

A panel advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines voted to prioritize people 75 and older and 30 million essential workers, including emergency responders, teachers and grocery store employees.

The pandemic has forced China to confront mental health, a taboo subject there. At the height of its outbreak, more than a third of people experienced symptoms of depression, anxiety, insomnia or acute stress, according to a nationwide survey.

Many Americans arent postponing holiday travel, even during the worst period of the pandemic. On each of the last three days, more than a million travelers passed through airport security checkpoints in the United States.

Pediatricians are concerned that families are skipping visits, and their children are missing out on routine immunizations, flu shots and essential in-person visits and screenings.

Life wont immediately return to normal after you get a vaccine. Our colleagues looked at what you can and cant do after receiving your shot.

Even as they receive inoculations, American health care workers face daunting shortages of personal protective equipment, which will do more to keep them safe in the short term.

A nurse who came out of retirement to fight the virus. A postmaster who laid the bricks of the building he managed. The Timess Opinion section asked five people to tell the story of someone they lost to the pandemic.

Both I and my wife are in our 70s. Im approaching 80. We miss church members and meetings, but church members bring the meetings to us. But we now have our meetings with individuals or pairs. They stand on the walk and we on the porch. At times treats are left on the porch table. Its not so much what we are doing, but what others are doing for us.

Walter Beecher, Gig Harbor, Wash.

Let us know how youre dealing with the pandemic. Send us a response here, and we may feature it in an upcoming newsletter.

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Coronavirus Briefing: What Happened Today - The New York Times

Human Behavior

Earth Networks Take Interdisciplinary Work to the Next Level – State of the Planet

by Sydney Williams|December 21, 2020

The Earth Institute, through its Earth Networks program, is providing a framework of support for interdisciplinary collaboration across Columbia University, to promote fresh approaches to research, education and impact on themes related to climate, sustainability and the future of the planet. Earth Networks are three-year working groups formed around any interdisciplinary topic that relates to the Earth Institutes mission.

On December 9, the Earth Institute hosted a town hall to introduce its newly funded networks to the community. These are the Healthy and Sustainable Food Network, the Climate Mobility Network, the Environmental Justice and Climate Just Cities Network and the Habitable Planet Network.

Missed the town hall? Watch the recording here, or read on for a brief introduction to each network below.

Top, left to right: Caleb Scharf, Alexander Halliday, Jacqueline Klopp. Bottom, left to right: Alex de Sherbinin, Ama Francis and Walter Baethgen

The Healthy and Sustainable Food Network

The Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems Network, co-led by Jennifer Woo Baidal (Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeonsat Columbia University Irving Medical Center) and Walter Baethgen (International Research Institute for Climate and Society) is focused on combating the main challenges of agriculture and food systems.

One of their main goals is engaging faculty, researchers, and students from across Columbia in order to bring areas like nutrition and health, climate, economics, human behavior, policy, equity and vulnerability together. The work is expected to contribute to the establishment and development of the food-related themes of the Columbia Climate School, as well as support the universitys goal to bring knowledge and experts to the world and solve real world problems.

The network will achieve these goals by developing collaborations across Columbia and beyond in education, collaborative research and practice, and engagement and outreach. For example, the group will create a resource to identify all existing classes on food systems at Columbia; develop new courses, capstone projects and executive education material; and design a food systems curriculum for the Climate School. The network will also engage with stakeholders in New York City such as community-based organizations, food banks, local government and private companies, designing a process to support investment strategies in food systems in NYC.

The network aims to reach across the university, and its steering committee spans a number of schools and centers, including several centers of the Earth Institute as well as Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Mailman School of Public Health, the School of International and Public Affairs, the School of Social Work, the School of Dental Medicine, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Teachers College, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. In addition, the network leverages support from external programs, such as the CGIAR Research Program for the Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security and the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project.

Healthy and Sustainable Food Networks team structure and levels of involvement.

If you would like to learn more about the network or get involved, please contact Alison Rose at arose@iri.columbia.edu.

The Climate Mobility Network

Co-led by Ama Francis, a climate law fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, and Alex de Sherbinin, a geographer and associate director at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), the Climate Mobility Network aims to catalyze research insights and data in order to guide the development of program and policy responses to climate mobility. The network will build capacity to teach, think, and develop policy about climate mobility, informed by an understanding of the complex interactions among social, political, economic and environmental drivers. Alex de Sherbinin and Ama Francis explain that the reason they used the term climate mobility is because it captures voluntary and forced migration that are influenced by climate variability and change, including internal displacement, refugee flows, managed retreat and planned relocation.

The group will develop a network of migration researchers, education, and law and policy practitioners across the social, physical and health sciences. The network is building on work with the World Bank, United Nations Development Programme, the Platform for Disaster Displacement, The UN Refugee Agency, and International Organization of Migration, as well as the Columbia Global Centers Committee on Forced Migration.

The network has aligned its outputs with the four purposes of Columbia University and the Climate School. The network plans to develop a trans-disciplinary course, teaching aids and tools to help build curriculum and pedagogy on climate mobility. This spring, the network will launch an interdisciplinary reading group to take advantage of network members science and policy expertise on climate mobility, and will facilitate working groups leading to journal articles. In addition, the network will produce an array of content on the topic through blog posts and opinion pieces in major media outlets, while engaging with national, regional and international organizations with the ultimate goal of guiding policy development.

If you are interested in joining, please contact Ama Francis at afrancis@law.columbia.edu, Alex de Sherbinin at amd155@columbia.edu, or Carlos Romero, the networks intern, at cfr2123@columbia.edu.

The Environmental Justice and Climate Just Cities Network

The Environmental Justice and Climate Just Cities Network is led by Christian Braneon (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) and Jacqueline Klopp (Center for Sustainable Urban Development), Kate Orff, Thaddeus Pawlowski, Johanna Lovecchio (Center For Resilient Cities And Landscapes Columbia GSAPP) and Natalie Greaves-Peters (Teachers College). The network is rooted in the concept that no community should take on an unfair share of environmental burden, and that environmental benefits are shared in an equitable way regardless of race, class, gender or other axes of exclusion. The Climate Just Cities Network brings these principles to life in regards to how climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, plans and actions are conceptualized, implemented, managed, and governed.

Like other networks, they have a comprehensive work plan for the next three years which is outlined here:

The Environmental Justice and Climate Just Cities Networks three-year work plan.

To get involved, they invite you to attend future meetings and events, let them know about your environmental justice work, add contacts to their environmental justice directory and help with curriculum development. They especially welcome students who are interested in environmental justice. Please contact Natalie Greaves-Peters at nhg2114@tc.columbia.edu for details.

Habitable Planet Network

The Habitable Planet Network was formed in response to our planetary challenges in an age of discovery. It is co-led by Caleb Scharf, senior lecturer at the Department of Astronomy and director at the Columbia Astrobiology Center, and Linda Sohl, planet-systems scientist at the Center for Climate Systems Research and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Presently a 14-person group with members from Lamont, GISS, Astronomy, Biological Sciences, Applied Physics and Earth and Environmental Sciences, the network seeks to draw together Columbias strengths in planetary science and geoscience, exoplanetary science, astrobiology, and solar system science, together with biological systems and ecological science, to develop a set of interdisciplinary research themes centered around the concept of planetary habitability.

A slide from the Habitable Planets Network presentation.

By doing this, they hope to bring it all home by understanding and contextualizing Earths evolution and present condition as a complex integration of living systems, planetary systems, and human agency. For the future pedagogy and contribution to the Climate School, they would like to develop a strategic roadmap for guiding a national habitable planet program. They want to build a student-led community to facilitate access to habitable planet research opportunities and teaching resources across departments to create pathways for interdisciplinary work and training.

To get involved please contact info-hab-planet@columbia.edu.

These Earth Networks are building on knowledge and experience from across the university, and developing activity purposefully aligned with improving education, research, community and outreach, and social goals. If you would like to get involved, please do not hesitate to reach out to these networks.

Sydney Williams is an undergraduate student in the sustainable development program, and an intern with the Directors Office at the Earth Institute.

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Earth Networks Take Interdisciplinary Work to the Next Level - State of the Planet

Human Behavior

Southeast Texas bars must close, businesses rolling back to 50% capacity after week of high COVID-19 hospitalizations – 12newsnow.com KBMT-KJAC

The state considers the high hospitalization rate to be over 15% of patients with the coronavirus.

BEAUMONT, Texas Southeast Texans can expect shorter lines at the grocery stores and less people in restaurants as both are scaling back to 50% capacity. Bars that haven't reclassified as a restaurant will have to close.

This is all because of an increase in our hospitalizations.

Bars are having to close for the third time this year only a few months after re-opening.

Other businesses will have to go back to operating at 50% starting Tuesday.

The Texas Department of State Health Services sent a letter to county judges in Southeast Texas Monday saying COVID-19 hospitalization rates have been over 15% for the last seven days.

That means it's time to scale back.

A Beaumont doctor says he's disappointed that we got to this point.

With all the information we've had over the past several months in terms of how to flatten the curve, we should know better and it's disappointing that we're sliding backwards, says Dr. Msonthi Levine

In the past week our lowest hospitalization rate of COPVID-19 patients was 17.88% with the highest hitting nearly 40% according to data from the states online dashboard.

Beaumonts Dr. Levine and other health officials warned of winter surge especially with gatherings that come with the holidays.

We expected the cases to go up. It's hard to fight human behavior and it's disappointing because it's almost like we're starting over to a certain degree, Dr. Levine said on Monday.

In order for the area to return to where they were at (allowing elective surgeries and businesses operating at 75%) they'll need to log seven consecutive days with less than 15% of their hospital capacity being COVID-19 patients.

The region, TSA-R, includes Brazoria, Chambers, Galveston, Hardin, Jasper, Jefferson, Liberty, Newton and Orange Counties.

The letter informed officials that based on the criteria of Governor Greg Abbotts executive order GA-32, issued on October 7, 2020, areas of high hospitalization are defined as

Any Trauma Service Area (TSA) that has had seven consecutive days in which the number of COVID-19 hospitalized patients as a percentage of total hospital capacity exceeds 15 percent, until such time as the Trauma Service Area has seven consecutive days in which the number of COVID-19 hospitalized patients as a percentage of total hospital capacity is 15 percent or less.

Here's what's next beginning Tuesday at 8 a.m.

Hospitals must cancel elective surgeries and bars will have to shut down and return to to-go only.

Other businesses must scale back to 50 percent capacity.

This excludes hair and nail salons. They can continue operating at 75 percent capacity, but must follow social distancing guidelines.

No one wants businesses to suffer but Southeast Texas leaders say health and safety will always be a priority. In the meantime, officials ask that we stay vigilant.

We'll be in this into deep next year until we see a big, big downturn of these cases especially if we don't wear our masks, so I'm disappointed, Dr. Levine told 12News.

Counties can ask for an exemption and, of granted, continue to operate at 75% if the county has fewer than 30 cases reported over the last 14 days.

Hardin county judge Wayne McDaniel says he'll be requesting a waiver from the state to exclude Hardin county businesses from the rollbacks. He says contact tracing investigations do no support the need to reduce their capacities.

Currently only Newton County has reported less than 30 cases in the last 14 days according to data from the state.

Also on 12NewsNow.com...

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Southeast Texas bars must close, businesses rolling back to 50% capacity after week of high COVID-19 hospitalizations - 12newsnow.com KBMT-KJAC

Human Behavior

Explained: With the coronavirus mutating, what does this mean for us? – The Indian Express

By: New York Times | Updated: December 23, 2020 7:29:29 amPeople wait on the concourse at Paddington Station in London, after the announcement that London will move into Tier 4 Covid-19 restrictions from midnight, Saturday Dec. 19, 2020. (Stefan Rousseau, PA via AP)

Written by Apoorva Mandavilli

Just as vaccines begin to offer hope for a path out of the pandemic, officials in Britain this past weekend sounded an urgent alarm about what they called a highly contagious new variant of the coronavirus circulating in England.

Citing the rapid spread of the virus through London and surrounding areas, Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposed the countrys most stringent lockdown since March.

When the virus changes its method of attack, we must change our method of defense, he said.

Train stations in London filled with crowds of people scrambling to leave the city as the restrictions went into effect. On Sunday, European countries began closing their borders to travelers from the United Kingdom, hoping to shut out the new iteration of the pathogen.

In South Africa, a similar version of the virus has emerged, shares one of the mutations seen in the British variant, according to scientists who detected it. That virus has been found in up to 90% of the samples whose genetic sequences have been analyzed in South Africa since mid-November.

Scientists are worried about these variants but not surprised by them. Researchers have recorded thousands of tiny modifications in the genetic material of the coronavirus as it has hopscotched across the world.

Some variants become more common in a population simply by luck, not because the changes somehow supercharge the virus. But as it becomes more difficult for the pathogen to survive because of vaccinations and growing immunity in human populations researchers also expect the virus to gain useful mutations enabling it to spread more easily or to escape detection by the immune system.

Its a real warning that we need to pay closer attention, said Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Certainly, these mutations are going to spread, and definitely, the scientific community, we need to monitor these mutations, and we need to characterize which ones have effects.

The British variant has about 20 mutations, including several that affect how the virus locks onto human cells and infects them. These mutations may allow the variant to replicate and transmit more efficiently, said Muge Cevik, an infectious disease expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a scientific adviser to the British government.

But the estimate of greater transmissibility British officials said the variant was as much as 70% more transmissible is based on modeling and has not been confirmed in lab experiments, Cevik added.

Overall, I think we need to have a little bit more experimental data, she said. We cant entirely rule out the fact that some of this transmissibility data might be related to human behavior.

In South Africa, too, scientists were quick to note that human behavior was driving the epidemic, not necessarily new mutations whose effect on transmissibility had yet to be quantified.

The British announcement also prompted concern that the virus might evolve to become resistant to the vaccines just now rolling out. The worries are focused on a pair of alterations in the viral genetic code that may make it less vulnerable to certain antibodies.

But several experts urged caution, saying it would take years not months for the virus to evolve enough to render the current vaccines impotent.

No one should worry that there is going to be a single catastrophic mutation that suddenly renders all immunity and antibodies useless, Bloom said. It is going to be a process that occurs over the time scale of multiple years and requires the accumulation of multiple viral mutations. Its not going to be like an on-off switch.

The scientific nuance mattered little to Britains neighbors. Worried by the potential influx of travelers carrying the variant, the Netherlands said it would suspend flights from Britain from Sunday until Jan. 1.

Italy also suspended air travel, and Belgian officials Sunday enacted a 24-hour ban on arrivals from the United Kingdom by air or train. Germany is drawing up regulations limiting travelers from Britain as well as from South Africa.

Other countries are also considering bans, among them France, Austria and Ireland, according to local media. Spain has asked the European Union for a coordinated response to banning flights. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York asked the Trump administration to consider banning flights from Britain.

In England, transport officials said that they would increase the number of police officers monitoring hubs like railway stations to ensure only essential journeys were being taken. The countrys health secretary, Matt Hancock, on Sunday called those who were packing trains clearly irresponsible.

He also said that the restrictions Johnson imposed could be in place for months.

Like all viruses, the coronavirus is a shape-shifter. Some genetic changes are inconsequential, but some may give it an edge.

Scientists fear the latter possibility especially. The vaccination of millions of people may force the virus to new adaptations, mutations that help it evade or resist the immune response. Already, there are small changes in the virus that have arisen independently multiple times across the world, suggesting the mutations are helpful to the pathogen.

The mutation affecting antibody susceptibility technically called the 69-70 deletion, meaning there are missing letters in the genetic code has been seen at least three times: in Danish minks, in people in Britain and in an immune-suppressed patient who became much less sensitive to convalescent plasma.

This things transmitting. Its acquiring. Its adapting all the time, said Dr. Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge who last week detailed the deletions recurrent emergence and spread. But people dont want to hear what we say, which is, this virus will mutate.

The new genetic deletion changes the spike protein on the surface of the coronavirus, which it needs to infect human cells. Variants of the virus with this deletion arose independently in Thailand and Germany in early 2020 and became prevalent in Denmark and England in August.

Several recent papers have shown that the coronavirus can evolve to avoid recognition by a single monoclonal antibody, a mixture of two antibodies or even convalescent serum given to a specific individual.

Fortunately, the bodys entire immune system is a much more formidable adversary.

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines induce an immune response only to the spike protein carried by the coronavirus on its surface. But each infected person produces a large, unique and complex repertoire of antibodies to this protein.

The fact is that you have a thousand big guns pointed at the virus, said Kartik Chandran, a virus expert at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. No matter how the virus twists and weaves, its not that easy to find a genetic solution that can really combat all these different antibody specificities, not to mention the other arms of the immune response.

In short: It will be very hard for the coronavirus to escape the bodys defenses, despite the many variations it may adopt.

Escape from immunity requires that a virus accumulate a series of mutations, each allowing the pathogen to erode the effectiveness of the bodys defenses. Some viruses, like influenza, amass those changes relatively quickly. But others, like the measles virus, collect hardly any of the alterations.

Even the influenza virus needs five to seven years to collect enough mutations to escape immune recognition entirely, Bloom noted. His lab Friday published a new report showing that common cold coronaviruses also evolve to escape immune detection but over many years.

The scale of the infections in this pandemic may be quickly generating diversity in the new coronavirus. Still, a vast majority of people worldwide have yet to be infected, and that has made scientists hopeful.

It would be a little surprising to me if we were seeing active selection for immune escape, said Emma Hodcroft, a molecular public health researcher at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

In a population thats still mostly naive, the virus just doesnt need to do that yet, she said. But its something we want to watch out for in the long term, especially as we start getting more people vaccinated.

Immunizing about 60% of a population within about a year and keeping the number of cases down while that happens will help minimize the chances of the virus mutating significantly, Hodcroft said.

Still, scientists will need to closely track the evolving virus to spot mutations that may give it an edge over vaccines.

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Explained: With the coronavirus mutating, what does this mean for us? - The Indian Express

Human Behavior

Hero and Monster of 2020: Gerald the Turkey – Mother Jones

Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.

When people sheltered in place this spring, coyotes patrolled the streets of San Francisco. A herd of goats reclaimed a town in Wales. Endangered Thai turtles set a 20-year nest-building record. Los Angeles, which invented smog, had three straight weeks of clean air.

Yet in the Morcom Rose Garden in Oakland, California, nature was not healing.

Gerald, a roughly 20-pound wild male turkey missing a tail feather on his left side, had been a longtime fixture of the tranquil, volunteer-tended park, tolerating the joggers, birdwatchers, and picnickers who passed through his home and sometimes fed him snacks. He liked to spend his mornings waiting in a nearby carpool line with commuters.

But 2020 changed us, and it also changed Gerald. This spring, reports of turkey attacks in the rose garden flooded Facebook and Nextdoor. Local news reports told stories of Gerald kicking and pecking visitors, even jumping on their backs and chasing people into trees. One fleeing woman ended up in the hospital. His favorite targets included older people and baby carriages. In late May the citys parks department took the extraordinary step of closing the garden to provide some time and space to work to prevent human-wildlife conflicts.

Human-human conflict followed as neighbors retreated to social media to stake out pro- and anti-turkey stances. Some called for Gerald to be cooked. The parks department got a permit to execute him June 22, then granted clemency when over 10,000 people (myself included) signed a petition to save Gerald from being euthanized.

You see, if Gerald is a monster, were his Dr. Frankenstein. Wild turkeys wouldnt even be in California without us: Humans forced them here from other states to be hunted. Human behavior also could explain Geralds transformation. The director of Oakland Animal Services believes that being fed may have caused him to lose his fear of people; locals think the recent influx of visitors to the rose garden agitated him. I would point you to his heroic qualities: Some have posited that Gerald was simply protecting his chicks.

In any case, Gerald, provided the single most entertaining local news cycle of this godforsaken year. Consider his escapades as officials attempted to neutralize him without harming him. According to Oaklandsides definitive account:

First, they tried to reinstill a sense of fear in Gerald so that he might avoid humans on his own. They hazed him by charging him and opening umbrellas in his face, though they avoided the most extreme ideathrowing rocks at him.

When the hazing didnt work, California Fish and Wildlife agreed to relocate Gerald. But first, they had to capture him. They initially tried luring him with food in hopes of caging him, but one park visitor continued to feed Gerald on a daily basis, rendering the bait ineffective. They tried tossing loose nets over him, but he ran away. Oakland Animal Services stepped in, laying netting on the ground, hoping to scoop Gerald up in a snare, but he escaped. Benjamin Winkleblack, assistant director of Oakland Animal Services, baited Gerald with robotic turkey calls, several decoy hens, and an umbrella painted with the likeness of a male turkey. All told, the entire staff at Oakland Animal Services, a number of employees from California Fish and Wildlife, and a team of twenty volunteers failed to capture Gerald.

Gerald evaded apprehension until an expert animal trapper, Rebecca Dmytryk, finally ended his reign of terror. One day in mid-October, after staking out the garden, she tried luring him in with blueberries and sunflower seeds, but then her net gun failed. So, thinking fast, Dmytryk hunched over like one of Geralds older victims and pretended to be afraid. When the turkey closed in, she grabbed him by his neck.

Gerald was relocated to the nearby hills, but within a week he found his way to a playground. A spokesperson for the California department of fish and wildlife told the Guardian that its law enforcement officers went and picked him up again and took him to another location. Stay free, Gerald.

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Hero and Monster of 2020: Gerald the Turkey - Mother Jones

Human Behavior

Coronavirus to take years to evolve and render Covid-19 vaccines impotent: Scientists – Mint

New York: As the new variant has been surfaced that causes COVID-19, experts urged caution, saying it would take years, not months, for the virus to evolve enough to render the current vaccines impotent.

They added that no one should worry that there is going to be a single catastrophic mutation that suddenly renders all immunity useless.

According to The New York Times (NYT), scientists are worried about these variants but are not surprised by them. Researchers have recorded thousands of modifications in the genetic material of the coronavirus as it has "hopscotched across the world."

Also Read | Inside the rumble in Indias coding jungle

"Some variants become more common in a population simply by luck, not because the changes somehow supercharge the virus. But as it becomes more difficult for the pathogen to survive -- because of vaccinations and growing immunity in human populations -- researchers also expect the virus to gain useful mutations enabling it to spread more easily or to escape detection by the immune system," NYT reported.

"It's a real warning that we need to pay closer attention,"said Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and added, "Certainly these mutations are going to spread, and, definitely, the scientific community -- we need to monitor these mutations and we need to characterize which ones have effects."

The American daily further reported that The British variant has about 20 mutations, including several that affect how the virus locks onto human cells and infects them. Muge Cevik, an infectious disease expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland said that these mutations may allow the variant to replicate and transmit ore efficiently.

She added that the estimate of greater transmissibility is based on modeling and has not been confirmed in lab experiments. "Over all, I think we need to have a little bit more experimental data... We can't entirely rule out the fact that some of this transmissibility data might be related to human behavior," she said.

Scientists in South Africa said that human behavior was driving the epidemic, not necessarily new mutations whose effect on transmissibility had yet to be quantified.

"No one should worry that there is going to be a single catastrophic mutation that suddenly renders all immunity and antibodies useless," Dr. Bloom said and added, "It is going to be a process that occurs over the time scale of multiple years and requires the accumulation of multiple viral mutations... It's not going to be like an on-off switch."

While many countries have suspended air travel from the UK, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo urged the Trump administration to ban travel from the UK in the US.

'Scientists fear the latter possibility, especially: The vaccination of millions of people may force the virus to new adaptations, mutations that help it evade or resist the immune response. Already, there are small changes in the virus that have arisen independently multiple times across the world, suggesting these mutations are helpful to the pathogen," the NYT reported.

"The mutation affecting antibody susceptibility -- technically called the 69-70 deletion, meaning there are missing letters in the genetic code -- has been seen at least three times: in Danish minks, in people in Britain and in an immune-suppressed patient who became much less sensitive to convalescent plasma," it added.

It was reported that scientists initially thought the new coronavirus was stable and unlikely to escape vaccine-induced immune response, said Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London.

"But it's become very clear over the last several months that mutations can occur," she said. "As selection pressure increases with mass vaccination, I think these mutants will become more common."

The new strain of Covid-19 is "out of control", said UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock on Sunday. Chief Medical Officer for England Chris Whitty on Saturday called on the nation to remain vigilant as a recently discovered variant of coronavirus was rapidly spreading.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.

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Coronavirus to take years to evolve and render Covid-19 vaccines impotent: Scientists - Mint

Human Behavior

Chino Hills State Park Battered From Recent Flames in Blue Ridge Fire This Year – Voice of OC

By Hosam Elattar | 19 hours ago

Chino Hills State Park keeps burning.

Again and again.

The park, located at the intersection of several counties, including the County of Orange was severely burned this year in the Blue Ridge fire.

Editors Note: This three-day series takes a look at the ongoing risks for many Orange County residents who are living near wildfire zones that are burning more often with each passing year. This is the second story inthe series. In the first story, Noah Biesiada looks into the challenges of evacuation communications in the last three wildfires.

The fire burned 8,770 acres in Chino Hills State Park so that amounts to just over 60% of Chino Hills State Park total acreage, Ken Kietzer, Senior Environmental Scientist for California State Parks Inland Empire district told the Voice of OC.

The fire itself took 11 days to contain and dealt damage to 10 structures and destroyed one.

We believe that it may have been the result of a house fire, but the cause of the house fire is undetermined, said Capt. Thanh Nguyen, a public information officer for the Orange County Fire Authority.

At the same time, firefighters were responding to the Silverado Canyon Fire that broke out earlier in the day, forcing thousands of Orange County residents to evacuate their home.

From my experience living in fire country most of my life, Its really hard to stop a wind driven fire because usually theres other fires burning and so the resources are stretched thin, and firefighting resources are depleted and so youve got the double whammy of it, youre more vulnerable and you have less resources to fight with, said Claire Schlotterbeck, the executive director for the Hills for Everyone organization.

The group formed in 1977 with the goal to preserve and protect the Puente-Chino Hills.

It was founded in the mid 1970s by a guy named Dave Myers, who grew up hiking in the hills, and just kind of ran into one too many bulldozers one day and decided somebody needed to do something about the hills that he loved, Schlotterbeck said.

Schlotterbeck said she joined the group in 1980 and worked with Myers and legislators to turn the area into a state park, which her organization acquired the land for. Since the first land acquisition in 1981, there has been over 30 acquisitions of land to expand the park.

There is still land the organization is looking to acquire for the park something they have not been able to do for years now.

Meanwhile, wildfires at Chino Hills State Park are becoming a common occurrence.

Sometimes well have one or two fires in a year and sometimes well be able to manage for two or three or four years without a fire and then something like this tends to happen, Kietzer said Unfortunately, this is not the largest fire weve had in Chino Hills State Park. In November of 2008, the Freeway Complex Fire burned 95% of the park and an area much larger than that outside the park.

The park in many ways was still in recovery from that fire.

Over the years, there have been efforts to develop homes on that very land in Yorba Linda that burnt in 2008. The Orange County Board of Supervisors approved the Esperanza Hills project that would build over 340 homes in unincorporated territory.

They only have one road in, one road out and that site burned almost in its entirety, again in this fire and it burned in 2008. Its burned 2 other times, Schlotterbeck said.

Pushback and lawsuits filed against the county and the city of Yorba Linda have fought to stop the project from seeing the light of day with residents voicing concerns about fire mitigation and evacuation plans.

An appeals court dismissed one of the lawsuits in June of this year.

JOSE HERNANDEZ, Voice of OC

Parts of Chino Hills State Park have burned numerous times before the fire burned over 60% of the parkland this year.

For over a 100 years, wildfires have burned through the area where the state park now encompasses, according to a study done by the Hills for Everyone organization.

Though fires are a natural part of the ecosystem, there is nothing natural about the size and frequency of the fires destroying our wild lands year after year, reads the study.

Following the fire in 2008, the group ventured out to research the history of the fires in the area and provide recommendations on how fires can be avoided in the future. The study came out in 2012 and an updated version was published online last year.

Ive lived here 42 years and it just didnt seem like people were paying attention to where fires were starting and what was causing them so we embarked on a fire study, Schlotterbeck said. Basically portions of the park are burning just about every year.

The study encompasses fires in the area dating back to 1914 all the way to 2018 and found that during this period there have been around 150 fires. Most of the fires were caused by unknown sources.

We identified three hotspots where fires, more commonly start and the most common place is where the Blue Ridge fire started, Schlotterbeck said. Its a wind tunnel, thats where the winds funnel through and they consolidate through the forest and the hills and so they become fiercer going through that Canyon.

She added that a lot of fires start there because of its proximity to the 91 freeway as well, caused by the vehicles passing by and sometimes roadwork.

The Canyon Fire in 2017 that that went down into Orange and burned 80 homes there and part of the park, that was started by a road flare put out by Caltrans on a Santa Ana wind day, Schlotterbeck said.

Its frustrating when you watch something that costs a lot of money to protect, burn down over and over and over again.

The park is home to a lot of wildlife and native plants to California. Kietzer said that a good portion of the damage by the fire was of low severity and that many of the trees and vegetation living along the streams should recover well.

We had some acreage of the park that was in very good condition, and supported some of the endangered species and much of that will recover naturally and some of it will have been degraded by the fire and well look to work on recovery of that and some of it was already in a degraded condition from previous land uses, he said.

Kietzer said the biggest impacts to the habitats that live in the park will be seen in the coastal sage scrub habitat home to the California gnatcatcher, an endangered species of birds dependent on the sage scrub for foraging, nesting and shelter. The cactus habitat will also be impacted.

A coastal sage scrub habitat can run from $30,000 to $60,000 per acre, its not inexpensive, it requires a fair amount of site preparation and it can require irrigation systems and plant propagation and then maintenance, he said.

Kietzer said the park may look for funding opportunities like grants to help with restoration efforts but expects the restoration will not happen all at once.

We are concerned about those habitats recovering and the impact from the fire to them and well be assessing the recovery, those habitats and the needs to do post fire restoration work as we start to get precipitation and as we start to see what recovers next year, he said.

JOSE HERNANDEZ, Voice of OC

The Blue Ridge Fire that started in late October burned over 8,700 acres of Chino Hills State Park.

Schlotterbeck said the best way to predict where a fire will break out next is where its already burned and that they have made suggestions to Caltrans mitigate fire risks.

We have to have better human behavior if we want to stop these fires basically and more cautious behavior by agencies, she said.

Kietzer said the park works with regional organizations like the Orange County Fire Authority to prepare a coordinated response for when there is a fire.

Its working with the fire authorities to make sure that were coordinated and have as best a plan leading into the next fire so that the response is effective and we can keep future fires to a minimum, either in size or in number, frequency, he said.

The fewer fires we can have the better.

Nguyen said people should be careful when out in dry vegetation.

We havent had a worthwhile amount of rain in over 200 days, Nguyen said. Anything that can cause a spark has a chance of starting the fire.

Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC Reporting Fellow. Contact him at [emailprotected] or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.

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Chino Hills State Park Battered From Recent Flames in Blue Ridge Fire This Year - Voice of OC

Human Behavior

Farmer of the Year – Successful Farming

With a wintertime pandemic raging outside our windows, many of us have opted to hunker down. Watching a movie in the comfort and the safety of your living room has gone from being an unhealthy way to avoid exercise to a good way to stay healthy.

A series of random connections recently brought to my attention a movie that was shot in the nearby small town of Tyler, Minnesota, and in my home state of South Dakota.

Farmer of The Yearwas released in 2018 by Yellow House Films. The movies stars include Mackinlee Waddell, Terry Kiser, and Barry Corbin along with a cast of various local folks. Over the course of his lengthy acting career, Corbin has worked with the likes of Clint Eastwood, John Travolta, and Sam Elliott.

After watching the flick on a streaming service, I wanted to learn how the movie came to be, so I got in touch with filmmaker Kathy Swanson. Kathy and her husband, Vince OConnell, wrote, produced and directed Farmer of the Year.

Is it true, I began, That you were once a dairy princess? I always ask the toughest questions first.

That was a long time ago, Kathy replied with a chuckle. Yes, I was Lincoln County Dairy Princess in 1974. But I doubt if anyone remembers that.

I asked Kathy to tell me about the genesis of the film.

Ive always liked stories, she said. When I was about 15, I began to take notes about things that I observed and the things that my dad said. The idea for the movie sprang from some of those stories and observations.

How does one assemble the myriad resources that are needed to produce a feature-length movie?

Vince and I had made about 20 shorts and decided that we wanted to do a feature film. Once the script was finished, we knew that it made sense to shoot it in Tyler. I have a lot of background in Tyler and a solid infrastructure of friends and family.

Vince and I sold our house to help finance the film. A grant from the state of Minnesota covered 25% of the production costs. About five months before we began shooting, Vince and I moved in with my dad, who lives in Tyler. We shot at Dads house, around Tyler, and on the dairy farm where I grew up, which is now operated by my brother, Dale.

So, you saved a bunch of money on location rentals. How did you get Barry Corbin involved?

Barrys name was on the list for the lead role of Hap Anderson, but we thought there was no way we could get him. We offered the role to Terry, but it didnt fit his schedule. Terrys agent then told us that Barry was interested. It turned out that Barry, Terry, and Mackinlee all have the same agent.

What was it like to work with Barry Corbin?

Barry was awesome. We hadnt worked with an actor of that caliber before and didnt know what to expect. He was really approachable and was just like part of the crew. Vince and I had a very clear vision of what we wanted, but we would always discuss the next scene with Barry.

Courtesy Yellow House Films

This flick is a humorous yet touching road movie about the misadventures of a cantankerous old dairy farmer and his granddaughter. Are there parallels between Haps and Ashleys stories?

Hap and his granddaughter, Ashley, are both trying to grapple with changes in their lives and are both trying to figure out their next chapters. With a movie, you get to tell your story with more than just words. A lot of the films humor is contained in the human behavior that everyone can relate to.

Why is Tyler named as Sleepy Eye in the film?

Sleepy Eye had an iconic water tower that I had wanted to use in the movie. Plus, I really like the name Sleepy Eye. Its unique.

How many people are involved in a typical day of shooting?

There would be up to 30 people on the set during a shoot. A good number of our crew were film students. They were young and enthusiastic and a joy to work with.

How has your movie been received?

We have gotten a lot of positive feedback from across the nation. We sent a DVD to Barry and he wrote a letter saying that he loved it and was very pleased with the result. But the praise that I value the most came from the folks in the area where I grew up.

You can learn more about Farmer of the Year.

Jerrys book,Dear County Agent Guy, is available atworkman.com/products/dear-county-agent-guy.

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Farmer of the Year - Successful Farming