EIGHT PLAYERS FOUND the target for Galway as they continued their perfect start to their Division Two campaign with a fifth win in succession at a wet Tuam Stadium.
The scoring was low but it was an intriguing first half where it was level 1-2 to 1-2 at the break, with Cillian Rouine and Robert Finnerty trading goals.
The swirling breeze favoured Clare but they failed to make full use of it and then in the second-half Galway opened up with Damien Comer pouncing for a crucial goal seven minutes after the restart.
Worryingly for Galway manager Pádraic Joyce, Shane Walsh limped off in the third quarter but his team had enough in the tank to keep up their perfect form.
Clare got a dream start and it was the unlikely figure of Rouine who popped up to shoot to the net after less than three minutes.
Aaron Griffin linked with Keelan Sexton and he set up the roaming corner-back, who finished off the post and into the Galway net.
That was the only score for the opening ten minutes, Galway were pegged back deep in their own territory but on one of the rare occasions when they did get a chance to venture forward Johnny Heaney finally got their first score in the tenth minute.
That was cancelled out by a fantastic Eoin Cleary effort from distance moments later.
Galway were unlucky not to have a goal of their own in the 13th minute when Comer rose high to fist a Dylan McHugh long delivery just over the bar. If that showed a glimpse of what Galway were capable of the next score was pure class.
Shane Walsh won possession and drove forward down the right wing, he spotted Finnerty’s smart movement inside and gave a pinpoint pass, with the Salthill/Knocknacarra clubman finishing into the bottom corner past Tristan O Callaghan.
Finnerty shot Galway’s first wide in the 19th minute and four minutes later he was shown a black card after being penalised for a trip on Manus Doherty.
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Clare, who shot five wides to Galway’s four in the opening half, only managed one point with the extra man with Cleary pointing a free five minutes from the break to send them in level at 1-2 apiece at the interval.
David Tubridy scored from a mark on the resumption but Kieran Molloy responded in style for Galway. Jack Glynn took a quick mark to set up McHugh for Galway’s next point and then from the resumption Johnny Heaney got a hand to a short kickout from goalkeeper Tristan O’Callaghan to set Comer up for a goal which set Galway on their way to victory.
Heaney, Paul Conroy and Matthew Tierney made it 1-5 without reply and it wasn’t until the 59th minute when Sexton finally hit back from a Clare free.
Dessie Conneely and Jamie Malone exchanged points as Galway continued their drive to get back to the top flight at the first time of asking.
Scorers for Galway: Damien Comer 1-1, Robert Finnerty 1-0, Johnny Heaney 0-2, Kieran Molloy 0-1, Dylan McHugh 0-1, Paul Conroy 0-1, Matthew Tierney 0-1, Dessie Connelly 0-1.
22. Finnian Ó Laoí (An Spidéal) for Gallagher (46)
26. Eoin Finnerty (Mountbellew/Moylough) for Walsh (48)
24. Dessie Conneely (Moycullen) for R Finnerty (54)
23. Dylan Canney (Corofin) for Comer (63)
21. Niall Daly (Kilconly) for Kelly (67).
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23. Emmet McMahon (St Breckan’s) for P Collins (7)
22. Joe McGann (St Breckan’s) for Sweeney (34)
17. Gavin Cooney (Éire Óg) for Tubridy (62)
19. Conor Jordan (Austin Stacks) for Rouine (62)
26. Daniel Walsh (Kilmurry Ibrickane) for Griffin (62).
THE TYRONE LADIES football squad are without a management team three weeks out from their Division Two relegation play-off.
Kevin McCrystal and his management team stepped down ahead of next month’s showdown with Clare following a mixed start to the 2022 season.
“The players have decided they want to go down a different path and I have informed the executive of my decision to step aside,” McCrystal told Gaelic Life yesterday evening.
“I’ve been involved with the senior ladies and development squads over the last five years and I would like to put on the record my thanks to Tyrone LGFA chairperson Donna McCrory and secretary Rita Hannigan.”
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Tyrone county board released a statement late last night.
“Tyrone LGFA can confirm that senior team manager Kevin McCrystal and his management team have stepped down from their roles with immediate affect [sic].
“Tyrone chairperson Donna McCrory and her executive wish Kevin and his backroom team the very best with their future activities and thanked them all for their time and dedication to the Tyrone senior ladies.
🗞 Late breaking news from @TyroneLGFA
Senior team manager Kevin McCrystal and his backroom team have stepped down with immediate effect #LGFA @UlsterLadies pic.twitter.com/04vStfeTtZ
— Ladies Football (@LadiesFootball) March 12, 2022
“Tyrone senior ladies and executive will be working hard together in preparation for the relegation playoff on 3 April 2022.
“No further comment will be made at this time.”
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Carrickmore native McCrystal was in his second year in charge in his second spell, having previously managed the team for a period during the noughties.
The Red Hand were defeated by Cavan and Armagh, and drew with Monaghan in this campaign under McCrystal’s watch.
The Breffni county – with former Tyrone boss Gerry Moane at the helm – consigned them to the relegation play-off after a crunch 3-11 to 1-12 win last weekend.
1. Davy Russell was never not coming back. Not when he broke his neck. Not when the shock from his fall in the 2020 Munster National shot down his arm and out through his finger and thumb with such a bang that it felt like a firework had gone off in his hand. Not when he was in traction, which is the fancy name given to lying on the flat of his back with bolts drilled into his head and bags of water hanging off them.
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If he was ever going to consider retirement, it would have been then. When the hours would pass and all he could do was stare at the ceiling and wait for the nurse to come and add more water to the bags, elongating his spine that extra bit more. Or, as he puts it: “Like the last scene in Braveheart where they have William Wallace tied up and they’re stretching him away.”
But no. Even then, it never occurred to him to end his riding career. Not even when the surgeon explained to him how fortunate he had been, how 90 per cent of people with his injury end up paralysed for life. How, when he was speared head-first into the ground, it was only a matter of millimetres that saved him.
Malachy Clerkin of the Irish Times discusses the retirement question with Davy Russell two years after his horrifying injury
2. Roy didn’t fake it. He didn’t confect imaginary adrenaline. He said that United’s players basically gave up, and not much more. And by the end it felt like a moment to ask: are the great days of people saying Manchester United are bad already gone? People saying that Manchester United are bad was a glorious thing. We will always have those sunlit memories, back when people saying Manchester United are bad was fresh and new. But you have to say, we expect a bare minimum of effort, of cinematic rage and tweetable clips. Perhaps we need to dig deep and look at the whole structure of people saying Manchester United are bad.
Because by this stage we have surely reached a tipping point in this fascination with the everyday decline of a poorly managed football club. Zoom out and United’s season is unremarkable. Fifth in the league, with a couple of minor cup runs: this looks about right given the squad and the coaching resources. Exactly which combination of Ole Gunnar Solskjær, Ralf Rangnick, Fred, Aaron Wan-Bissaka and an aged celebrity striker is supposed to guarantee elite-tier success?
The Guardian’s Barney Ronay says even pundits are struggling to stay fascinated by Man Utd’s perpetual non-success
Tottenham Hotspur’s Matt Doherty.
Source: PA
3. Since arriving from Wolves in the summer of 2020, Doherty has felt like a byword for the club’s muddled recruitment and the rapid decline of their right-back options since the glory days of Kyle Walker and Kieran Trippier throughout the previous decade. At points, he has looked shaky defensively and nervous on the ball, not looking himself under Jose Mourinho — who was the manager when he signed — and not impressing Nuno Espirito Santo or Antonio Conte either.
Until, that is, the last few weeks.
Doherty has started consecutive league games for the first time since Mourinho was in charge. Spurs have won them both, scoring nine goals without reply, of which the Republic of Ireland international has scored one and set up three.
For The Athletic, Jack Pitt-Brooke writes about Matt Doherty’s renaissance at Spurs
4. Her résumé is glittering: She won an NCAA national championship for Baylor in 2012, the same year she captured college basketball’s Player of the Year Award. She then won a WNBA championship in 2014 and was selected as one of the best 25 players in league history in 2021. She has two Olympic gold medals to her name. In the gold-medal game against Japan in Tokyo last summer, she dominated, scoring 30 points to clinch an easy victory. She is the apex of her sport. She is the best of the best. She is a legend.
And for more than a month now, she has been in the custody of the Russian government. Yet until Russian officials released a statement over the weekend saying they had detained Griner after finding hashish oil in her airport bag, it seemed that nobody had noticed. And the reaction since the arrest has been stunningly quiet. One of the greatest athletes in American sports — a gold-medal winner, a superstar, a champion — was arrested in a dangerous and volatile country that has suddenly become a pariah on the world stage. Making equivalences between sports only takes you so far here, but seriously: Imagine if Tom Brady were being held by Russian officials right now.
For NY Magazine, Will Leitsch asks why Brittney Griner’s detainment in Russia is not the the biggest sports story in America
5.Since 2019 he has been Everton’s captain too, one who does the job with the same selfless concern for the greater good and his teammates’ welfare as with his country. Coleman is reportedly a friendly conduit for new signings, helping them with houses and schools and having them over for dinner. Stories of his charity are legion: he seems to be constantly tossing unsolicited thousands here and there towards GoFundMe appeals for sick kids or local good causes.
But too often it feels like Coleman’s role for club and country has been to front up and defend the failings of others. At the bitter end of Martin O’Neill’s Ireland days he would insist the lads had full faith in management and that it was up to the players to do the job on the field. Ever the brave sergeant, drawing fire so others can escape.
Tommy Martin describes for the Irish Examiner how Seamus Coleman has spent too long fronting up for the failings of others
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The US military’s official report on UFOs is here, and its conclusion is scintillating: There’s some stuff in the sky, the government isn’t sure what it is, there’s no evidence that it’s aliens, but also no one’s ruling out aliens. So in conclusion, the UFOs are part of life’s rich pageant and anything is possible.
The nine-page report released by the Director of National Intelligence’s (DNI) office last week, formally titled “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” says a little bit more than “we know nothing.” But that is the main takeaway. “Limited Data Leaves Most UAP Unexplained” reads the report’s first subject heading.
That takeaway comes as something of an anticlimax capping off a period of frenzied speculation over UAPs (the new preferred term for “UFO”). The current mania was kicked off by a 2017 New York Times A1 article revealing the existence of a quiet Pentagon program analyzing strange aerial sightings by pilots. Since then, a steady stream of mainstream news coverage and Pentagon disclosures have kept UAPs in the public eye, complete with details about their allegedly fantastical, above-human capabilities.
In the immediate wake of the DNI report, no minds have been changed. The skeptics are still skeptical. Believers in the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” (ETH) still believe.
Which is about right. This report simply doesn’t contain enough new information to move anyone’s assessments much in one direction or another. It was mostly meant to summarize the UFO sightings the Pentagon has looked at, rather than explain those sightings. It was reportedly written in half a year by two people working part-time; it is not a large-scale evidence review like the 9/11 Report.
So the UFO-curious public is left more or less where it started before this latest round of UFO stories: not knowing what these objects in the sky are or where they’re from or what if anything they tell us about the universe.
Let me lay my cards on the table here: I’ve long been on the skeptics’ side. I don’t think we have any evidence that these UAPs are a sign of intelligent life on a different planet. But I also know that it’s a question we have to get to the bottom of, and to do that the government needs to allocate a bit more in the way of research funding.
We have to get to the bottom of this question because the truth about UFOs — particularly if the extraterrestrial hypothesis happens to be somehow true — could clarify humans’ role in the universe.
Physicists, astronomers, philosophers, and other smart people have been trying to suss out what the existence or nonexistence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe could mean. It could be we’re all alone in the universe, which leads to certain mind-breaking implications — one of which is perhaps humanity has a moral duty to preserve civilization because it exists nowhere else in the vast expanse of space. Or it could be that we do have cosmic neighbors, but that those neighbors haven’t reached out because they face difficult challenges — challenges that could be waiting for us in our own future and that could inform how we act today.
In other words, the UFO question is a subquestion of a much broader, more profound inquiry into the future of humanity.
Fermi’s paradox and the puzzle of intelligent life elsewhere
A finding that UFOs represent an alien civilization visiting Earth would be crucially important, first and foremost because it would answer a question scientists have been asking for at least the last century: Where is everybody?
The universe is almost incomprehensibly vast: In the Milky Way galaxy alone, there are hundreds of billions of stars, and as many as 6 billion of them could be Sun-like stars with rocky Earth-like planets orbiting them. There are hundreds of billions if not trillions of galaxies alongside the Milky Way.
It would be strange for humans to be the only intelligent life (or, at least, the only life of above-chimpanzee intelligence) in all that vastness. And, intuitively, it seems like some of our peers should have surpassed us and developed the ability to send probes thousands of light-years away to observe us.
This puzzle is commonly known as Fermi’s paradox, after its articulation by the 20th-century physicist Enrico Fermi, and it has fascinated astronomers, physicists, and science fiction fans for decades. As Liv Boeree explained for Vox, much of the literature on the Fermi paradox relies on a model known as the Drake equation, devised by physicist Frank Drake to estimate the number of “active, communicative, extra-terrestrial civilizations” in our galaxy.
The equation includes some variables astronomers are able to estimate (like the rate of star formation in the Milky Way and the fraction of stars with planets) and some inherently speculative ones, like the fraction of planets that develop intelligent life. The Drake equation is thus quite imprecise, and it requires plugging in numbers where researchers have tremendous uncertainty.
In 2017, Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, and Toby Ord of the Future of Humanity Institute attempted rough estimates of the odds that human civilization is alone in the galaxy and universe by giving uniform odds to a number of different parameters. For instance, they estimated that the share of planets with life that will ever develop intelligent life could be anywhere from 0.1 percent to 100 percent, and gave equal odds to every number in that range.
They then incorporated the fact that we haven’t observed other intelligent civilizations, which should lower our estimated odds of their existence. The paper concluded that there’s a 53 percent to 99.6 percent chance of humans being the only intelligent civilization in the Milky Way, and a 39 percent to 85 percent chance of being alone in the observable universe.
The threat of the Great Filter
The optimistic read, as outlined by Sandberg elsewhere, is that this finding should reduce our fear that humans face a huge extinction event in our future.
How does that follow? Well, one common explanation for humans’ apparent loneliness in the universe is that intelligent life is actually incredibly common — but almost always destroys itself at some point. Either a civilization’s own technology grows so advanced and dangerous that it wipes itself out, or natural phenomena like meteors or supervolcanoes strike before the civilization has the chance to send probes to look at us.
This theory is known as the Great Filter, and it has a certain terrifying plausibility to it. Humanity has already developed tools capable of wiping itself out, or else shrinking itself to a size so small that it cannot endure and sustain itself: nuclear weapons, engineered pathogens, possibly greenhouse gas emissions.
Oxford’s Ord, in last year’s book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, roughly estimates the odds of a human-caused extinction or extinction-level event in the next century at about one in six.
There’s a lot of uncertainty around those estimates. But one in six is a very significant risk. Most election forecasters gave lower odds to a Donald Trump victory in 2016.
And if our loneliness in the universe is evidence that every other civilization has destroyed itself in a fashion like this, then one in six might be an overly optimistic estimate. If, on the other hand, the difficult-to-pass “filter” is in our past (say, at the stage in which lifeless molecules combined to create viruses and bacteria), as the Sandberg/Drexler/Ord research suggests, then our loneliness need not imply a grave threat in our future.
Researchers interested in the potential risk posed by the Great Filter tend to focus on searching for “biosignatures” or “technosignatures”: observable attributes of planets elsewhere in the galaxy that might give evidence of life or human-level technology.
Generally, the hope is to not find these signatures. If we see evidence that there are lots of planets with life up to or equal to human levels of sophistication, but not at levels of sophistication that exceed humans, that strengthens the argument that the filter is in the future, that humans will (like all technologically advanced civilizations) find a way to destroy ourselves.
“If the search for biosignatures reveals that life is everywhere while technology is not, then our challenge is even greater to secure a sustainable future,” researchers Jacob Haqq-Misra, Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, and Edward Schwieterman recently concluded in an article for the journal Astrobiology.
If (and I must stress that this is a quite unlikely “if”) UFO sightings on earth are actually evidence that an advanced alien civilization has developed a system of long-distance probes that it is using to monitor or contact humanity, then that would be an immensely hopeful sign in Great FIlter terms.
It would mean that at least one civilization has far surpassed humanity without encountering any insurmountable hurdles preventing its survival. It would also mean Earth need not be the universe’s sole protector of intelligent life and civilization, meaning that if we do destroy ourselves, all is not lost, cosmically speaking.
What if we’re all alone?
Getting to the bottom of the UAPs and investigating whether there’s intelligent life elsewhere is important, and it’s probably worth devoting government resources toward solving the mystery.
But I also worry that belief in the extraterrestrial hypothesis is a kind of wishful thinking. If it’s wrong, and a Great Filter is in our future, that suggests our species is in immense danger. It would mean there are many, perhaps millions or billions, of civilizations like ours around the universe, but that they without fail destroy themselves at some point after they reach a certain level of technological sophistication. If that happened to them, it’ll almost certainly happen to us too.
If the extraterrestrial hypothesis is wrong simply because we’re the only species that has even gotten this far, that’s alarming for a different reason. It implies that if we screw up, that’s it: The universe would be left as a desolate compilation of stars and planets without any thinking creatures on them. Nothing capable of empathizing or acting morally would exist anymore.
Skeptic though I am, there is a part of me that wants the objects in the sky to be aliens because the alternative is so dismal. I want to know what these objects really are because the stakes are high enough that we need to get this right. But in a way, our current state of relative ignorance can be a bit of a silver lining — there’s comfort in the thought that we don’t know the answer yet, and that we can’t quite close the door on the possibility of life beyond Earth.
I had asked Stephen Emlen, a Cornell emeritus professor of neurobiology and behavior, what seemed to me an obvious question: When he brought birds into planetariums in the 1960s and 70s, did they ever, um, make a mess in there?
“No poops in the planetarium,” Emlen assures me.
I had called Emlen to talk not about poops, but a series of experiments that have captured my imagination. He brought migratory birds into a planetarium at night and turned the stars on and off, as though erasing them from the universe of a bird’s brain.
Through these experiments, Emlen pieced together what was then a mystery: how birds know which way is which, even flying in the dark of night without the sun for guidance.
We still know incredibly little about animal migration — where they go, why they go, and how they use their brains to get there. Storks migrate from Europe to Africa, and they not only know the route, but can discover locust swarms to feed upon in the desert (long before humans detect the swarm). Whales, in their journeys across the ocean, seem to be influenced by solar storms — but no one knows which part of whale physiology allows them to sense magnetic fields.
How these animals get from point A to point B can be mysterious — and grows even more so as we uncover each new navigational feat. “We just don’t know, really, the fundamentals of animal movement,” science writer Sonia Shah says on the latest episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast about unanswered questions in science.
The scant information we do have from ingenious experiments like Emlen’s show just how much animal brains can understand and learn about the natural world.
That information should give us pause as we continue to change our planet. As humans artificially brighten the sky, and as we launch more satellites into orbit that outshine even stars, we may be messing with the cognitive compasses of untold numbers of creatures.
Birds … in a planetarium?
Emlen’s experiments read like something out of a scientifically curious little kid’s dreams. When he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Emlen was given the keys to the Longway Planetarium in Flint, Michigan, where he could reign free at night.
“The director closed the planetarium at 10:30, and they gave me the key,” Emlen recalls. “I became nocturnal.” Between experiments conducted there, and later at Cornell University, he pieced together a theory for how the birds navigate.
When Emlen started his work, some things were already known. A husband-and-wife duo from Germany, Edgar Gustav Franz Sauer and Eleonore Sauer, had worked out in the decade prior that migratory birds — which sometimes fly thousands of miles in a single season — look to the stars to get a sense of direction.
The Sauers put birds in outdoor arenas where the only thing they could see was the night sky. And with just the sky as their guide, the birds attempted to fly in their expected migratory direction. They wouldn’t do so on a cloudy night. The Sauers repeated the experiment in a German planetarium, and it worked there, too. Which was amazing: Birds could use information they found in the sky — even man-made replicas of the night sky — to navigate.
But there were still unanswered questions. What were the birds looking at in the night sky, and how were they figuring out the right way?
There were several hypotheses. Some argued that the birds were using an internal clock of sorts to orient themselves to the stars. Stars change their positions over the course of the night, and when viewed from the northern hemisphere, they appear to rotate around Polaris, the static North Star. Perhaps they’re born with an innate sense of time and learn where the stars should be at a given moment. (Similarly, humans know that around sunset, they can find the sun by looking to the west.)
Emlen wasn’t sure that was true. So he decided to find out — with the help of the planetarium, North American indigo buntings, and a special cage he invented with the help of his father (who was also a biologist).
The cage was in the shape of a funnel, and the buntings — a beautiful, sparrow-sized songbird that migrate at night — were placed in the narrow bottom of the funnel. This design, illustrated below, ensured that the birds could only look at what was above them (i.e, the “sky”).
The upper part of these funnels was covered in paper, and the bases of the cages — “just aluminum pudding pans,” Emlen says — featured an ink pad that turned the birds’ feet into stamps. Little avian footprints would appear on whatever side of the funnel the bird attempted to fly toward. The top of the funnel was covered with plexiglass or a wire screen, so the bird wouldn’t get out — hence, no poops in the planetarium.
In the planetarium, Emlen could tinker with the cosmos. He started by setting the stars to a different time of night than it actually was, throwing off the birds’ biological clocks. Yet the birds would still orient themselves in the right direction of their migration. “They were not using a clock,” Emlen says.
So the birds could orient themselves regardless of the time of night. It meant they were focusing on some other aspect of the night sky. But what?
Emlen started on a painstaking process of elimination. As he describes, he “attacked” the expensive planetarium projector, blacking out certain stars systematically. “Let me block the Big Dipper,” he remembers thinking. “Let me block Cassiopeia.” No matter the constellations omitted from the cosmos, the birds could still orient themselves.
“I couldn’t link it to any particular star pattern,” he says. “I had to block out pretty much everything within about 35 degrees of the North Star. And when that happened, the birds acted as though they were clueless.”
The clueless birds were a big clue for Emlen. He knew then that the orientation had somethingto do with the area around the North Star — but didn’t rely on any of the particular stars around it.
Maybe it was the spot in the sky that doesn’t rotate at all.
A further, ambitious experiment would prove this hypothesis correct. This time, Emlen didn’t just bring birds to a planetarium — he raised some of them inside one. Again, he altered the planetarium projector, not by blocking out stars but by changing the axis of the Earth. He chose a new stationary “North Star” — Betelgeuse — for his chicks to observe.
Remarkably, the birds raised under this altered sky would orient themselves toward Betelgeuse, as it was the fixed point, when they were ready to migrate.
The experiment showed that the birds are primed for nighttime navigation not by an inborn star map, Emlen says, but by paying “close attention to the movement of the sky. They’re hardwired to pay attention to something, which then takes on meaning.”
Emlen is still not sure if the birds look for some sort of constellation to point their way north, once they’ve learned where it is from the motion of the stars. We humans often use the Big Dipper to find north.
“Different birds might use different star configurations,” says Roswitha Wiltschko, a German behavioral ecologist who has conducted similar experiments on bird navigation. “And apparently there is some individual difference in it. This is a part of orientation where we do not know the details yet.”
How many animals look to the stars?
In the decades since these experiments, ornithologists have learned a lot more about how birds navigate. They don’t just use a star compass — they also have a magnetic compass, a sun compass, and even a smell compass. It’s incredibly complex. “All these things intermingle,” Emlen says, and scientists still aren’t sure precisely how these different navigational systems all work together. (They’re especially unsure about how animals use these inputs to inform their mental map of where they are going.)
Scientists don’t have a precise accounting of how many different species of bird navigate by starlight, but experts suspect it is a huge number. More broadly, biologists don’t know how many other species look at starlight. Based on discoveries in the past several years, this ability has already shown up in surprising places.
Consider the dung beetle, which takes its name from its favorite food, namely, um, excrement.
These critters have a very limited visual field, but can actually see the Milky Way in a dark night sky. One particular type of dung beetle lives in South Africa, scavenges for dung, and rolls it into balls away from the source, to protect its food.
This sounds simple. “But for one thing, you have to bear in mind that this ball is usually bigger than the beetle itself,” says James Foster, who studies dung beetles at the Universität Würzburg. “So it’s quite challenging to keep that on course.”
Here’s the amazing part: “They really don’t get lost unless you build them a tiny hat and put that over their head,” Foster says. “They can’t just look around at the ground and work out where they’re going. They really need to be able to see the sky.”
Like Emlen, Foster’s colleagues brought beetles into a planetarium and started switching stars on and off, systematically. They found that on nights where there is a moon, the beetles use it to orient themselves. But if there is no moon, “if you switch off everything else and turn the Milky Way on, then they’re oriented again. So that was what led us to think that they’re using the Milky Way.”
That’s pretty astounding stuff. Starlight from tens of thousands of light-years away, still has enough power to excite the nervous system in the limited eyes of the lowly dung beetle, helping it know where to go.
But this ancient navigation system is also threatened by city lights. “Artificial light … can completely obscure the kind of things that the animals are looking for,” Foster says. “If you put dung beetles on the roof of a building in the middle of Johannesburg, then they become completely lost. It’s just far too bright for them to be able to see the Milky Way, which is the thing they need.”
Foster isn’t sure how many animals on Earth can orient themselves with the stars — no one is — but he suspects it might be more common than currently appreciated. Seals, moths, and of course humans have been shown to use stars. But it stands to reason that changing the night sky — with electric lights and bright, near-Earth satellites that outshine the stars — could continue to mess up the navigation of untold numbers of creatures.
Recently, Emlen saw something astonishing in the night sky. “It was a whole stream of these major bubbles that passed through the sky,” he says. “Every one of those blobs was more intense than the brightest planet in the sky.”
He says the blobs were SpaceX satellites, recently launched to deliver Internet to remote areas from low-Earth orbit. In the future, there could be tens of thousands of these bright objects launched into the night. “I do think that will completely screw up birds that are up there at night,” he says.
We do know that there are some things that birds can adapt to. The Earth’s axis actually wobbles slightly, which means Polaris won’t be the North Star forever. In fact, in around 13,000 years, the star Vega will take the position. We know from the buntings in the planetarium that birds will learn to spot it. They’ll pay attention to changes in the stars, Emlen says, “and lock into whatever works.”
The Pacific Northwest is sweltering under a record-breaking heat wave. Portland reached 116 degrees Fahrenheit this week. Seattle reached 108 degrees. Vancouver reached 89 degrees. The searing heat has buckled roads, melted power cables, and led to a spike in deaths. It’s especially concerning in a region like the Pacific Northwest, where few buildings have air conditioners.
This follows weeks of extremely high temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere and an early-season heat wave in North America that triggered heat warnings for 50 million people. Scientists say these record highs align with their expectations for climate change, and warn that more scorchers are coming.
There’s more to heat waves like this than high temperatures. The forces behind them are complex and changing. They’re a deadly public health threat that can exacerbate inequality, cause infrastructure to collapse, and amplify other problems of global warming. Even more worrying is that in the context of the hot century ahead, 2021 may go down in history as a relatively cool year.
Heat waves, explained
Extreme heat might not seem as dramatic as hurricanes or floods, but the National Weather Service has deemed it the deadliest weather phenomenon in the US over the past 30 years, on average.
What counts as a heat wave is typically defined relative to local weather conditions, with sustained temperatures in the 90th to 95th percentile of the average in a given area. So the threshold for a heat wave in Tucson is higher than the threshold in Seattle.
During the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, the northern half of the planet is tilted toward the sun, which increases daylight hours and warms the hemisphere. The impact of this additional exposure to solar radiation is cumulative, which is why temperatures generally peak weeks after the longest day of the year.
Amid the general increase in temperatures in the summer, meteorology can push those numbers to extremes.
Heat waves begin with a high-pressure system (also known as an anticyclone), where atmospheric pressure above an area builds up. That creates a sinking column of air that compresses, heats up, and oftentimes dries out. The sinking air acts as a cap or heat dome, trapping the latent heat already absorbed by the landscape. The high-pressure system also pushes out cooler, fast-moving air currents and squeezes clouds away, which gives the sun an unobstructed line of sight to the ground.
The ground — soil, sand, concrete, and asphalt — then bakes in the sunlight, and in the long days and short nights of summer, heat energy quickly accumulates and temperatures rise.
Heat waves are especially common in areas that are already arid, like the desert Southwest, and at high altitudes where high-pressure systems readily form. Moisture in the ground can blunt the effects of heat, the way evaporating sweat can cool the body. But with so little water in the ground, in waterways, and in vegetation, there isn’t as much to soak up the heat besides the air itself.
“It compounds on itself,” said Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “When you’re dry, you get warm. When you’re excessively warm, you tend to build and strengthen the anticyclone, which encourages continuation of clear skies, which in turn encourages a lack of precipitation, which makes it drier, which makes the incoming solar radiation more able to heat the ground.”
But extreme heat can also build up in places that have a lot of moisture. In fact, for every degree Celsius the air warms (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), it can absorb about 7 percent more water, which can create a dangerous combination of heat and humidity (more on that below).
Urban areas further exacerbate this warming. As roads, parking lots, and buildings cover natural landscapes, cities like Los Angeles and Dallas end up absorbing more heat than their surroundings and can become as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. This is a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect.
Heat waves typically last around five days, but can linger longer if the high-pressure system is blocked in place. “In some cases you actually can get these kinds of patterns getting stuck, and that can lead to heat waves lasting much longer,” said Karen McKinnon, an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University of California Los Angeles.
Eventually the high-pressure system will start to weaken, allowing in cooler air and precipitation that can bring the heat wave to an end. However, as the warm season continues, more high-pressure systems can settle in and restart the heating process.
How climate change worsens heat waves
It can be tricky to tease out how a specific weather event was influenced by climate change, but scientists in recent years have been developing models and experiments to figure out just how much humanity’s hunger for fossil fuels is making individual disasters worse. It’s part of a subfield of climatology known as attribution science, and extreme heat is the classical example.
“Heat waves were actually the extreme events that attribution science were pioneered around,” said Jane W. Baldwin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. “Almost any kind of metric related to heat waves you can imagine is getting worse and is projected to get worse.”
Climate change caused by greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is poised to make heat waves longer, more intense, and more frequent. It takes time for the dust to settle on the heat waves of a given moment, to allow scientists to evaluate just how much humans have contributed to the problem.
But researchers looking at past events and other parts of the world have already found that humans share a huge portion of the blame. After a summer 2019 heat wave was blamed for 2,500 deaths in Western Europe, a study found that climate change made the heat five times as likely as it would have been in a world that hadn’t warmed. Heat waves in the ocean have become 20 times as likely as average temperatures have risen. And researchers reported that the 2020 heat wave in Siberia was 600 times as likely due to climate change than not.
The mechanism is simple: The burning of fossil fuels adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which traps more heat energy and pushes up average temperatures — which, in turn, also pushes up extreme temperatures.
That heat isn’t distributed evenly, however. Nighttime temperatures are rising faster than daytime temperatures. “In general, since records began in 1895, summer overnight low temperatures are warming at a rate nearly twice as fast as afternoon high temperatures for the U.S. and the 10 warmest summer minimum temperatures have all occurred since 2002,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This can seriously impair how people cope with high heat.
The effects of warming can vary by latitude, too. Polar regions are warming up to three times as fast as the planetary average, fueling heat waves in the Arctic. In fact, cooler parts of the planet are heating up faster than places closer to the equator, so people living in temperate climates may experience some of the biggest increases in extreme heat events. Already hot parts of the world also get hotter, pushing them beyond the realm of habitability at certain times of the year.
And as human-generated greenhouse gas emissions continue to flood the atmosphere — atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations recently peaked at 420 parts per million — heat waves are projected to become more frequent and more extreme.
Heat wave impacts vary based on a person’s location, health, and even income
While there is some debate about whether extreme heat or extreme cold has a larger public health impact overall, it’s clear that high temperatures exact a huge toll in terms of health and the economy. Here’s how the impacts of scalding temperatures ripple throughout the world, and how they’re shifting as the planet warms.
Heat waves have major direct and indirect health effects: Extreme heat caused an average of 138 deaths per year in the US between 1991 and 2020, according to the National Weather Service. High temperatures increase the likelihood of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. They can raise blood pressure, make certain medications less effective, and worsen neurological conditions like multiple sclerosis.
Air pollution also gets worse as rising temperatures increase the rate of formation of hazards like ozone. Such pollutants in turn exacerbate heart and lung problems.
The rise in nighttime temperatures is particularly worrisome for public health. Without much overnight cooling, people living through a heat wave experience higher cumulative heat stress, increasing risks of problems like dehydration and disrupting sleep, which can further worsen exhaustion and stress from high temperatures.
Alongside the heat, another important factor to consider for human health is humidity. The amount of moisture in the air affects how well sweat can evaporate off the body and cool it off. In some parts of the world, like the southwestern US, heat waves have become drier. But in other regions like the Persian Gulf and South Asia, higher temperatures are instead increasing humidity.
The key metric here is known as the wet-bulb temperature, where a thermometer is wrapped in a damp cloth, revealing the lowest temperature achievable by evaporative cooling (i.e., sweating) under a given set of heat and humidity conditions. The upper limit wet-bulb temperature for human survival is 95°F (35°C), during which even standing in the shade with unlimited water can be life-threatening.
Since 1979, these dangerous conditions have become twice as common in several regions of the world, including South Asia and the Persian Gulf, researchers found in 2020. They warned that further warming this century could render many of the most densely populated parts of the world uninhabitable during the hottest times of year.
The timing of heat waves is changing: Periods of extreme heat that occur early in the season tend to have greater public health impacts. That’s because people are less acclimated to heat in the spring and early summer. Cooling infrastructure may not be in place, and people may not be taking heat precautions like staying hydrated and avoiding the sun. That’s why early-season heat waves in the US, as we have seen across the country this year, are so troubling. As climate change makes heat waves more common, it also increases the frequency of early- and late-season extreme temperatures, lengthening the hot season.
The worst effects of heat aren’t always in the hottest places: While absolute temperatures may rise higher in already warm areas like the southwestern US, heat waves can have their deadliest impacts in cooler regions, where high temperatures are less common. Warmer areas often already have air conditioning in homes and offices, while regions that usually don’t get as warm have less cooling infrastructure and fewer places to find relief. The people in these regions are also less acclimated to high temperatures and may not recognize warning signs of heat-induced health problems.
Some people are far more vulnerable to extreme heat: Elderly people and very young children face some of the highest risks from extreme heat. People with certain health conditions, like high blood pressure and breathing difficulties, also face greater harm. But even otherwise healthy people can suffer from heat waves if they are exposed for long durations, such as those working outdoors in agriculture and construction.
Heat waves exacerbate structural inequalities: While cities can warm up faster than their surroundings, poorer neighborhoods — which are disproportionately home to people of color — tend to get hotter. These neighborhoods often have less tree cover and green spaces, and more paved surfaces that soak up heat. At the same time, lower-income residents may have a harder time affording crucial cooling. The pattern of heat inequality plays out on an international scale, too, with lower-income countries already facing higher health and economic costs from heat waves.
The tools used to cope with heat are also stressed by it: Power plants, which provide electricity for everything from fridges to air conditioners, themselves need to be cooled, and they become less efficient as the weather warms. Power lines have lower capacities under extreme heat, and hardware like transformers experience more failures. If enough stress builds up, the power grid can collapse just when people need cooling the most. Power disruptions then ripple through other infrastructure, like water sanitation, fuel pumps, and public transit.
We’re running out of time to act: All this means that heat waves are going to become an increasingly impactful and costly fact of life across the world — from the direct impacts on health to stresses on infrastructure.
But since humans share a significant portion of the blame for extreme heat waves, there are also actions people can take to mitigate them. Increasing energy efficiency can relieve stress on the power grid while adding power sources that don’t require active cooling like wind and solar can boost capacity without adding greenhouse gas emissions.
Improving public health outreach and providing more cooling resources and education, particularly in the most vulnerable neighborhoods, could reduce some of the worst human effects. “Basically all of the damages from heat waves, at least on the health side, are preventable if we warn people effectively and just help our neighbors during an event like this,” Baldwin said.
Humanity must curb its output of heat-trapping gases to limit just how hot the planet will get. It may take years or decades for these reductions to show up in the climate system, but they have to begin now.
OFFALY KEPT THEIR Division 2 survival hopes alive today with a massive comeback win on the road against Down.
The Faithful county were 0-15 to 0-14 winners after a dramatic finish in Páirc Esler, Newry.
Corner back Lee Pearson fisted over the decisive point in the 72nd minute, as the Faithful county came from three points down with 66 minutes on the clock to score the last four points of the basement battle.
Niall McNamee (one free) and Bernard Allen both scored 0-3 for Offaly, while Barry O’Hagan was Down’s top-scorer with four points from play.
This was Offaly’s first win of the league, while the Mourne county hit rock-bottom of the second-tier with the drop — and in turn, Tailteann Cup involvement — looming.
They’re away to Cork next week and face Clare on the final day, while Offaly play Roscommon next week and then host Cork.
Tomorrow’s meeting of the Rebels and Meath is another big clash in the relegation battle.
RESULT. Allianz Football League Div 2@Offaly_GAA 0-15@OfficialDownGAA 0-14
What an unbelievable win! Three points down and we score four in a row against all the odds.
This Offaly team is giving it everything to stay in Division 2. Two home games to come – SUPPORT
— Official Offaly GAA (@Offaly_GAA) March 12, 2022
Earlier today, Antrim impressed in a convincing 1-19 to 0-12 win over Longford at Corrigan Park, which moved them to the top of Division 3 and boosted their promotion hopes.
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Tomas McCann scored the Saffron’s goal through a penalty within the first minute, and they built on their dream start to lead 1-11 to 0-3 at half time.
McCann finished with 1-3 – his three points coming from play – while Conor Murray chipped in with 0-6, including two marks and a free, for Enda McGinley’s side.
Longford, who struggled through a difficult afternoon, finished with 14 men after Eoghan McCormack was shown his second yellow card.
The defeat puts them back in danger of relegation to the basement division.
Luke Loughlin was the Westmeath hero as they came from three points down at half-time to outscore Limerick by nine points in the second half and record a 1-12 to 1-6 win.
Downs forward Loughlin scored 1-3, Adrian Enright having scored Limerick’s goal in the first half. The Munster side led 1-5 to 0-5 at half-time but managed just one point in the second half, the wind playing a significant factor in the pattern of the game. After losing to Longford last week, this win was needed for Westmeath who retain a chance of winning promotion.
After learning that the venom of a Gila monster lizard contained hormones that can regulate blood sugar, Daniel Drucker started wondering why. And could the venom somehow help treat diabetes?
Drucker is a scientist and endocrinologist at the University of Toronto who has dedicated his career to understanding the universe of hormones in the body, which do everything from regulating appetite to helping with digestion. His curiosity about the Gila monster led to a call with a zoo in Utah. In 1995, Drucker had a lizard shipped from Utah to his lab and began experiments on the deadly venom.
Ten years later, a synthetic version of a hormone in the venom became the first medicine of its kind approved to treat type 2 diabetes. Known as a GLP-1 (for glucagon-like peptide-1) receptor agonist, the medicine set off a cascade of additional venom-inspired discoveries.
After doctors noticed mice and humans on the drug for diabetes appeared to lose weight, they began to consider its use in obesity science. In June 2021, another effective treatment, this one for obesity, got Food and Drug Administration approval. Called semaglutide and marketed as Wegovy, it also takes its structure from the lizard’s venom.
If this origin story sounds outlandish, consider the history of obesity treatments. Over the years, people have turned to extreme and unlikely interventions to try to lose weight, from jaw wiring, laxatives, and vagotomies to lap band operations and fen-phen, a “miracle” diet drug that was ultimately recalled.
The new treatment — a once-weekly injectable from Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical company that has hired many leading diabetes and obesity scientists as consultants — is poised to safely help many people with health-threatening obesity, physicians and researchers say. It may even illuminate some of the mysteries around how appetite works in the first place.
“It’s phenomenal,” says Michael Krashes, a diabetes and obesity investigator at the National Institutes of Health. Semaglutide is “a big step forward — we finally have something that’s reliable and able to produce sustained effects over time,” adds Ivan de Araujo, a neuroscientist who studies brain-gut interactions at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. Neither scientist is affiliated with Novo Nordisk.
Doctors who treat obesity patients told Vox they wished they had a treatment option like semaglutide years ago, and patients described the drug as life-altering.
Yet many people with obesity may not seek out semaglutide, and doctors may not prescribe it to them — not only because of the dangerous history of weight loss medications, but also because of a persistent bias and stigma around a disease that now afflicts nearly half of Americans. Obesity is still widely viewed as a personal responsibility problem, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. And history has shown that the most effective medical interventions, such as bariatric surgery — currently the gold standard for treating obesity — often go unused in favor of dieting and exercise, which for many don’t work.
There’s also a practical challenge: Health insurers don’t typically cover obesity medications, says Scott Kahan, an obesity doctor and professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the George Washington University School of Medicine. “Medicare explicitly excludes weight medications,” Kahan, who consults with Novo Nordisk, says. “And most insurers follow what Medicare does.”
The new drug certainly won’t be a cure-all for obesity, Krashes adds. “You are not taking a 280-pound person and making them 130,” he points out, though reductions that are enough to improve health outcomes are typical. Drucker, who began consulting with Novo Nordisk and other drug companies after his reptilian discovery, agrees that it’s a starting point for obesity: “It will only scratch the surface of the problem in the population that needs to be healthier.”
But semaglutide is the most powerful obesity drug ever approved, he adds. “Drugs that will produce 15 percent body weight loss — we did not have that before in the medical therapy of obesity.” With additional, potentially more effective GLP-1 receptor agonists coming online in the future, we’re at the beginning of a promising new chapter of obesity therapeutics. A look at the fascinating science of how the medication works could also go a long way to changing how Americans think about this disease.
“We have to thank the lizard for that,” Drucker says.
What semaglutide reveals about weight problems
To understand how semaglutide causes some people to eat less, it’s helpful to understand what hormones do. They’re the body’s traveling messengers: Manufactured in one area, they move to another to deliver messages through receptors — molecules that bind to specific hormones — in distant organs and cells.
The gut makes dozens of hormones, and many of them travel to the brain receptors that either curb appetite or stimulate it, Drucker explains. GLP-1 is one such gut hormone. It’s unleashed in the gut in response to food and stimulates the pancreas to make more insulin after a meal, which lowers blood sugar. (GLP-1 is also made in the brain stem, where it may modify appetite.)
“It sends a signal to our brain that says, ‘You know, we’ve had enough to eat,’” says Drucker.
Enter semaglutide, one of a class of medicines — the GLP-1-receptor agonists — that imitate GLP-1, helping the body lower glucose (in the case of people with diabetes) and, researchers suspect, curb appetite (in the case of people living with obesity who may also have diabetes).
The precise way the drug works on obesity is still unknown, in part because scientists don’t understand exactly how appetite works. But researchers generally agree that the drug harnesses the brain’s GLP-1 receptors to curb food intake. When researchers delete the GLP-1 receptors from the brains of mice, the drug loses its appetite-suppressing effects, says Krashes.
Obesity is “primarily an issue of our brain biology, and the way it’s processing info about the environment we live in,” says Randy Seeley, a University of Michigan researcher focused on obesity treatments, who also consults with Novo Nordisk.
With semaglutide, the idea is that “we’re changing your brain chemistry for your brain to believe you should be at a lower weight,” Seeley added.
This brain-based pharmacological approach is likely to be more successful than diet and exercise alone, Seeley says, because “the most important underlying part of somebody’s weight has to do with how their brain operates,” not a lack of willpower.
Not quite a “game changer”
Some people with a higher body mass index are perfectly healthy and don’t require any treatment. Semaglutide was only indicated by the FDA for patients who classify as clinically obese — with a body mass index of 30 or greater — or those who are overweight and have at least one weight-related health problem.
For the many people who have used it, it has proved safe and effective, according to the FDA. In weight loss clinical trials, semaglutide helped people lose about 15 percent of their body weight on average — significantly more than the currently available obesity drugs and more than enough to improve health outcomes.
The drug’s most common side effects — nausea, diarrhea, constipation, and vomiting — were mostly short-lived. De Araujo is finding that adverse reactions might be caused by how the drug differs from the naturally occurring peptide hormone: The hormone acts mostly locally and degrades quickly, while the medicine works mainly on the brain and is designed to stick around in the body. “That’s where the nausea, vomiting probably derive from,” De Araujo argues.
Patients who have tried semaglutide told Vox that it helped them manage their weight and relationship to food, and that their side effects were manageable and quickly resolved.
Jim Eggeman, a 911 operator in Ohio, said that before taking semaglutide, “I could sit down and eat a large pizza, and now it’s one to two pieces at the most.” He started on the drug for diabetes after a heart attack in December 2019 and lost 35 pounds, bringing his weight to 220.
Paula Morris-Kaufman, of Cheshire, UK, used the drug to address weight gain following cancer treatments. It helped her bring her weight back to a normal range, she says, and curb her habit of compulsive eating. “If you give me a plate of food, I just eat a small portion of it — and feel full really quickly.”
It’s possible that some of the benefits of treatment come in part from lifestyle changes, which were encouraged by the clinical trials. In many cases, patients on semaglutide also switched to a healthier diet when they started on the drug and added exercise to their routines. But study participants taking the drug still lost significantly more weight than those under the same conditions who received a placebo.
The need for additional interventions — like diet and exercise — is one reason why Kahan stops short of calling this drug a game changer. “It’s an incremental improvement” over existing drugs, he says, and it’s still out of reach for many of the individuals who could benefit from it. “The ‘game changer’ description is not appropriate, because many people don’t have access to these medicines.”
Only about 1 percent of eligible patients were using FDA-approved medications for obesity in 2019, a study showed. The same is true for bariatric surgery, currently the most effective intervention for obesity, which can also drive type 2 diabetes into remission.
“If someone walks into your office with heart disease and you as a physician don’t try to treat it, that’s malpractice,” Seeley says. “If somebody comes in with a BMI over 30 and you don’t treat it, that’s Tuesday.” He thinks some of the hesitancy for treating patients with obesity medications comes from the history of dangerous weight loss drugs.
Ingrained biases about obesity have also made it harder for patients to get access, Kahan says. “Obesity tends to be categorized as a cosmetic issue in health insurance policies,” he says. “In order to get coverage, employers have to explicitly decide to buy a rider and sign a contract to add weight management services and products to their insurance plans.” He’d like to see obesity treatments covered by insurers in the same way diabetes and hypertension drugs are.
That will require a shift in mindset, Drucker says. “We would never blame other individuals for developing high blood pressure or cardiovascular disease or cancer,” he says. It’s widely known that those conditions are driven by complex biological determinants, including genes, as well as environmental factors. “Obesity is no different.”
When Drucker started in endocrinology in the 1980s, he didn’t have many tools to help patients. With the addition of semaglutide, there are multiple surgical options and drugs for obesity and diabetes. The challenge now is helping those who would benefit gain access.
“I would be delighted if no one needed GLP-1 for diabetes and obesity,” Drucker says. That might be possible in a food landscape that didn’t nudge people toward the overeating and poor diet that leads to these chronic conditions. But for now, “we have new options that are safe, appear to reduce complications, and are very effective. … We shouldn’t just throw up our hands and say there’s nothing we can do.”
The Covid-19 epidemic in the United States risks becoming a tale of “two Americas,” as Anthony Fauci warned in June: a nation where regions with higher vaccination rates are able to beat back the coronavirus, while those with lower vaccination rates continue to see cases and deaths.
At face value, it’s a division between those who are vaccinated and those who are unvaccinated. But, increasingly, it’s also a division between Democrats and Republicans — as vaccination has ended up on one of the biggest dividing lines in the US, political polarization.
Polarization, of course, is not a new force in American life. Growing polarization doesn’t just mean a Congress more starkly dividing between left and right; it means people’s political views now closely hew with views on seemingly unrelated issues, like which movies should win Oscars. But throughout the pandemic, polarization has manifested as stark differences in how Democrats and Republicans each approach Covid-19, from hand-washing to social distancing to masking.
That polarization has now opened political rifts in vaccination rates, with people’s decision to get a shot or not today a better predictor of states’ electoral outcomes than their votes in prior elections. It’s led the US’s vaccination campaign to hit a wall, missing President Joe Biden’s July 4 goal. Meanwhile, the more infectious delta variant is spreading, raising the risk of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in unvaccinated — and often heavily Republican — areas.
To put it bluntly: Polarization is killing people.
“That’s a perfectly accurate interpretation,” Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver, told me. “We’re at the point where people are choosing riskier personal behavior due to following the lead of people in their party.”
It didn’t have to be this way. Perceptions about Covid-19 weren’t too divided by political party very early on in the pandemic. And while America’s peers around the world certainly saw political debates and conflicts over Covid-19, they by and large managed to avoid the level of polarization that the US has seen, with other nations working across political lines to take the virus seriously and suppress it.
But the US began to walk a different path once then-President Donald Trump downplayed the coronavirus — deliberately, as he later revealed — and Republican leaders and the rank and file followed his lead. Whether you took the pandemic seriously very quickly became another way to affiliate with red or blue teams, leading some to do things more dangerous for their own well-being just because of their political party affiliation.
“Partisanship is now the strongest and most consistent divider in health behaviors,” Shana Gadarian, a political scientist at Syracuse University, told me.
Overcoming this will require confronting an all-encompassing trend in American political life. And while experts have some ideas about the best way to reach Republicans, it may be too late; with a year and a half of Trump and other Republicans downplaying the risk of the virus, there’s a chance that views around Covid-19 — and the vaccine as a result — are just too baked in now.
It’s one of the major reasons experts worry that Southern states, which are heavily Republican and have among the lowest vaccination rates in the US, will soon see outbreaks of Covid-19. Indeed, several Southern states, from Arkansas to Missouri to Texas, have reported some of the highest increases in cases in recent weeks. Covid-19 deaths in the US are still hovering around 200 a day — more than the number of murders or car crash deaths in recent years.
Still, it’s worth trying to, at the very least, heed the lessons of Covid-19 — if not for the current pandemic, then for future public health crises. Politics will always play a role in the response to any public health crisis, but it doesn’t have to be this bad — certainly not to the point where one side is denying the dangers of a virus killing millions around the globe.
Americans have already seen how badly this can play out, as hundreds of thousands have died and much of the country remains vulnerable to resurgences of Covid-19. The country can take steps to prevent that from happening again.
Covid-19 has been extremely polarized in the US
There is nothing inherent to Republicanism or conservatism that made polarization around Covid-19 inevitable. Around the world, countries led by those on the right, like Australia’s Scott Morrison or Germany’s Angela Merkel, have taken the virus seriously and embraced stringent precautions. From Canada to South Korea, countries that are at times roiled by serious political conflict by and large avoided it around Covid-19 as all sides of the aisle confronted the real threat it presented.
“It didn’t have to be this way,” Gadarian said. “There’s really nothing about the nature of being a right-wing party that would require undercutting the threat of Covid from the very beginning.”
It’s not hard to imagine a timeline in which Trump took the coronavirus very seriously in a way that aligned with his rhetoric and policy goals: tightly locking the country’s borders, for example, and rallying Americans to embrace their patriotic duty to mask up and social distance to protect the nation from a virus originating in China.
Obviously, that’s not what happened.
At first, in February, there actually wasn’t a big split between Democrats and Republicans over whether the virus was a “real threat.” It wasn’t until Trump and others in his party spoke out more about the virus that Republicans became more likely to say the virus isn’t a danger. Elite cues fostered different American reactions to Covid-19.
Trump actively downplayed the virus, claiming in February 2020 that the virus would quickly disappear “like a miracle” from America and comparing it to the flu. Republican politicians and media followed suit, with blue-red fissures soon forming between states that were sticking to tighter precautions and which weren’t.
Public attitudes quickly took form. In March 2020, 33 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of Democrats said Covid-19 was a major threat to the health of the US, according to the Pew Research Center — a hint of early polarization. By July 2020, the gap had widened: 46 percent of Republicans saw Covid-19 as a threat to US health, versus 85 percent of Democrats.
That translated to reported behaviors. In a Gallup survey conducted in June and July of 2020, 94 percent of Democrats said they “always” or “very often” wore a mask outside their home, while just 46 percent of Republicans said the same.
“We saw it very early on,” Gadarian said. “The gaps in health behavior and all sorts of other attitudes are pretty steady over time. It got locked in and affected how people take in new information.”
Fast-forward to today, and this polarization remains in place with the vaccines. According to Civiqs’s polling, 95 percent of Democrats are already vaccinated or want to get vaccinated, while just 50 percent of Republicans report the same. The share of Republicans who reject the vaccine hasn’t significantly budged all year, remaining in the range of 41 to 46 percent.
Measuring the correlation between a state’s vaccination rate and 2020 election results, Masket found a coefficient of 0.85, with 1 meaning a one-to-one correlation and 0 representing no correlation. As Masket noted, “We almost never see this high a correlation between variables in the social sciences.” In fact, he added, “vaccination rates are a better predictor of the 2020 election than the 2000 election is. That is, if you want to know how a state voted in 2020, you can get more information from knowing its current vaccination rate than from knowing how it voted 20 years ago.”
Yet Republicans can take public health crises seriously, as many have with the opioid epidemic and did with the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak. Some research also suggests that Republican governors who took on Covid-19 earnestly, such as Maryland’s Larry Hogan and Ohio’s Mike DeWine, managed to sway more of their constituents to embrace precautions.
Given that evidence, some experts speculated that, in an alternate reality, a President Mitt Romney or President Jeb Bush would have taken the Covid-19 threat much more seriously — and perhaps avoided polarizing the issue much, if at all. “Almost any other president would have recognized the severity of it, largely being in sync with the FDA and CDC,” Masket said.
Covid-19 has made polarization much more lethal
The consequences of polarization around Covid-19 are now clear. As David Leonhardt explained in the New York Times, there’s now a close correlation between vaccination rates and coronavirus cases. Over one week in June, counties where between 0 and 30 percent of people were vaccinated had nearly triple the number of new cases as counties with 60-plus percent vaccination rates.
These low-vaccine areas are often Republican bastions. Based on polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation, one of the major drivers of vaccine hesitancy among Republicans is the view that the threat of Covid-19 has been exaggerated. That early polarization driven by Trump’s downplaying of the virus, dating back to February 2020, explains why Republicans are much less likely to get vaccinated today.
The best hope of reversing this now, as a study by Stanford’s Polarization and Social Change Lab indicated earlier this year, seems, logically, for Republicans to forcefully and consistently argue that the coronavirus is a real threat and that the vaccine is safe and effective at preventing infection. While there have been some attempts by Republicans at this, with Trump briefly speaking favorably of the vaccines at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference, these messages have been few and far between. Some Republicans, such as Sens. Rand Paul (KY) and Ron Johnson (WI), have also continued to cast doubt on the vaccines’ safety and effectiveness.
It’s a bit baffling, because Trump has a great opportunity to take credit for the vaccines. While many experts doubted that a vaccine could come out in the first year of a pandemic caused by a novel virus, Trump promised to get a vaccine done in 2020, poured money into the task, and ultimately was right. Just about any president likely would have put resources toward a vaccine, but part of being a politician is taking credit for good things that happen while you’re in office — even if your unique ability to lead isn’t really responsible for them.
“A lot of people, including me, were dismissive or skeptical [the vaccine] could happen so quickly, but it did,” Masket said. “This is something Trump could really be crowing about.”
In other words: Trump and the Republican Party have a chance to take credit for saving the US from the coronavirus — and, by doing so, help actually save the US from the coronavirus by getting more people vaccinated. So far, they have completely whiffed the opportunity.
Then again, it now may be too late. After a year and a half, Americans’ beliefs about the coronavirus have solidified. So if Republican leaders were to suddenly change their tune, they could risk a revolt from the rank and file more than they would change people’s minds. “If you’ve had many months to think about this, you’re going to start to settle into a more permanent view,” Robb Willer, director of Stanford’s Polarization and Social Change Lab, told me.
To that end, the best thing would have been — and would be for future public health crises — for Republican leaders never to politicize the pandemic at all.
Experts told me both sides could have worked together, as some did in other nations, to develop consistent messaging on the virus. Instead of press conferences led by political actors like Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence, they could have been primarily presented by less political actors like Fauci and other leaders from federal public health agencies. Trump and Pence could have ensured the message remained depolarized by not publicly clashing with these officials.
Democrats, too, would have needed to avoid falling into the trap of opposing things solely because the Trump administration was proposing them. This reverse polarization played out during the school reopening debate, as some Democrats reflexively criticized Trump’s push to reopen schools, and it now looks like it likely was safe to reopen with some precautions.
It’s a world where everyone is a lot more responsible about a serious public health crisis. And the fact that it’s hard to imagine, especially in the middle of a contentious election year, speaks to just how difficult it will be to overcome a political trend that’s now killing people.
Take a long enough lens — say, 25 years — and it seems as though health care in America is inarguably getting better.
People are living longer than they did a quarter century ago. The burden of disease, a metric that includes premature deaths and disability, has dropped. The number of avoidable hospitalizations and hospital errors is lower.
But below those rosy numbers is the truth: American health care has been falling behind other countries in the developed world for decades.
Life expectancy has increased, but by less in the US than in the wealthy nations of Europe and Asia. The improvement in disease burden has likewise been less impressive than that of comparable countries. Meanwhile, to achieve those mediocre results, the United States continues to spend more money on medical care than any other country in the world; while health spending in the US isn’t going up faster than in other countries, it was higher to begin with and continues to increase. We’ve maintained a sizable lead in health care spending while getting outcomes that are worse than countries that spend less.
And all of that was true even before the United States experienced one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the world.
Kaiser Family Foundation researchers recently warned of a “further widening of the gap” between the US and other countries as a result of the pandemic. Life expectancy in the US had already stagnated in the last few years, driven by a rise in drug overdoses and suicides; now Covid-19 will shorten it further. Disease burden had been trending upward in the US while dropping elsewhere; the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to widen that disparity too.
“This pandemic has been a fast pandemic, fueled by a slower pandemic of chronic illness,” Howard Koh, a Harvard public health professor who worked in the Obama administration, told me. “All those streams have converged to cause the public health catastrophe we’ve endured.”
You could say the trajectory of American health care before, during, and after the pandemic is like that of an individual vulnerable patient: It was sicker to begin with, hit hard by Covid-19, and will be dealing with the lingering effects for a long time.
The US was already falling behind the rest of the world on health care
When it comes to getting value for money in health care, America slowly but perceptibly fell behind other developed countries over the last 25 years.
It starts with life expectancy, the bluntest measure of how well people are served by their health system. Life expectancy in the developed world has steadily improved over the past few decades, driven primarily by major breakthroughs in the treatment of heart disease and other cardiovascular problems, which rank near the top among causes of deaths in wealthy nations.
But not as much in the United States as in other countries. According to a KFF analysis of health care trends from 1991 to 2016, Americans saw their life expectancy rise by 3.1 years during that period — a meaningful improvement, to be sure, but substantially less than the 5.2 years gained in comparable countries.
And in the US specifically, that progress has stagnated in recent years. With tens of thousands of people dying of opioid overdoses every year and a sustained increase in the number of suicides, American life expectancy actually started tailing off in 2014, according to a 2019 analysis published in JAMA. The gap between the US and other wealthy countries was already growing before Covid-19 struck.
Likewise, disease burden had steadily improved until a recent downturn separated the US from other countries. The reasons for the improvement were the same: better medical treatment for chronic diseases. But once again, America did not improve to the degree that comparable countries did, seeing a 12 percent improvement versus an average of 22 percent elsewhere. In the United States, the burdens from disease of the heart, lung, kidney, and liver — as well as from diabetes — remain stubbornly high compared with the rest of the developed world.
And the reasons for America’s recent stagnation are the same, too: Suicides and drug overdoses, plus a rise in the number of young people with chronic health conditions, are robbing people of years of healthy living.
The same pattern holds for medical errors. They have been declining in the US over the last 25 years but are still more common in America than in comparable countries. Avoidable hospitalizations and adverse drug events are down, but not as much as in wealthy European or Asian nations. Americans are roughly twice as likely to experience an error in their medical care as their counterparts the world over.
One metric — known as mortality amenable to health care — combines all of these characteristics and grades a country’s health system on how well it prevents deaths from conditions that should be treatable with timely access to health care. The US ranked behind the biggest countries in Europe, as well as Japan, as of 2016.
A country like Taiwan, which performed much worse than the US on the same metric 30 years ago, is now nearly its equal.
And for those middling outcomes, the US still spends more on health care than other countries: nearly 18 percent of its GDP versus about 11 percent, on average, in comparable nations. Health spending has been rising at the same rate in the US and its peers over the last few decades, and yet those other countries have seen more improvement in their health outcomes.
They are, in other words, getting more value out of their health systems than the US.
“One could conclude that the comparable … countries’ value improvement was greater,” the KFF researchers wrote in 2018, “even though they started at a higher threshold in terms of better outcomes and a lower percentage of GDP consumed to achieve it.”
One possible explanation for America’s poor performance: We underinvest in social spending and overspend on medical care compared with other developed countries. If you combine social services spending and health spending, the US and its peers actually spend about the same amount of money, a little more than 30 percent of their GDPs. But spending in those other countries is more slanted toward social services, while America spends more on medical care.
America’s underinvestment exacerbates disparities between haves and have-nots: 18 percent of Americans live in poverty versus 10 percent in other wealthy countries. We know that people with lower incomes have structural challenges — access to healthy food, clean water, and fresh air, for starters — that lead to worse health outcomes. When they get sick, they have a harder time finding a doctor and affording their medical care.
“Economic inequality is increasingly linked to disparities in life expectancy across the income distribution, and these disparities seem to be growing over time,” wrote the authors of a 2018 review of relevant research in Health Affairs. Poor health also tends to lead to lower incomes, creating a feedback loop known as the “health-poverty trap.”
And those disparities — between rich and poor, white and Black — only worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Covid-19 will have long-term consequences for American health
The gap between the US and other wealthy nations is expected to grow because of the pandemic. America has lost more than 600,000 people to Covid-19, the highest confirmed death toll in the world. Adjusting for population, the US has lost more people on a per-capita basis than most of the European and Asian countries to which it is compared.
Official death counts can be somewhat arbitrary because they depend on testing to identify cases. Excess deaths — the number of deaths from all causes above what would be expected in an ordinary year — are considered by experts to be a more reliable gauge. On that metric, too, and adjusting for population, the United States is one of the worst performers among wealthy nations.
“The outsized effect of the pandemic on the U.S. will likely widen the existing gap in mortality rates between the U.S. and peer countries,” wrote the authors of an October 2020 analysis on Covid-19 death rates and life expectancy.
America is also likely to experience a higher disease burden (that’s the years of quality life lost to premature death and disability) as a result of its pandemic failures. People under 65 in the US have died from Covid-19 at higher rates than their peers elsewhere.
A prolonged mental health crisis may linger after a year of disrupted social lives and isolation. More than 4 in 10 Americans reported experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression in 2020, according to US census surveys.
Health spending actually slowed down in 2020, a historic aberration, as people postponed medical care during the pandemic. But medical spending did not slow down as much as the rest of the economy: As of October 2020, it had fallen 0.5 percent versus a 1.8 percent contraction overall. So even as spending dropped, health care likely consumed an even greater share of America’s GDP than in years prior.
And the short-term drop in spending could have long-term consequences. Last year, 24 percent of Americans said in a census survey that they did not get needed medical care during the pandemic, with 33 percent saying they delayed care. To give one example, cervical cancer screenings dropped about 80 percent from normal levels in spring 2020, and while they rebounded later in the year, they were still 25 percent down by the end of September.
While patient volume generally has recovered, we still don’t know what the long-term effects of people missing care or receiving belated diagnoses will be. And there are tens of millions of people recovering from a Covid-19 infection; as many as 15 million of them may struggle with “long Covid” for the foreseeable future, according to a new analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine that called long Covid-19 “our next public health disaster in the making.” Those direct health aftershocks from the pandemic will be yet another burden on the US health system long after the coronavirus itself starts to subside.
Long-term spending trends were already prompting health plans to push more of the cost of health care onto patients. Deductibles and worker premiums have been increasing for years.
Post-Covid-19, at least as a relative share of the economy, health care is eating up even more of the country’s resources. America’s health outcomes have been set back by the pandemic, and the spending crunch is intensifying.