Summer Weather Is Unlikely To Slow The Pandemic, Let Alone End It

As we frequently do, we spent Christmas and New Years in southeast Asia. Deciding between Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand, we picked Thailand. We didn't know about it at the time, but coronavirus was just kicking in. within a couple weeks of our departure in mid-January, the country started failing apart. We got the idea that coronavirus was rampant. By March they were closing down their entire tourist industry, a mainstay of the economy. And yet the reported confirmed cases in Thailand-- as well as Vietnam and Indonesia-- are insignificant. Our friends in Thailand say the numbers are complete bullshit and don't reflect how the pandemic has swept through the country. Virtually everyone I know in Bangkok who could has fled the city for the towns in the countryside where their families live.

• Indonesia- 6,575 (24 per million)
• Thailand- 2,765 cases (40 per million)
• Vietnam- 268 cases (3 per million)

Bali, the Indonesian island we go to-- and where tourism wasn't banned until Match 31-- doesn't have much of a COVID-19 problem, just a couple of tourist deaths, no locals. The island is more troubled by dengue fever and the social distancing rules are very lax. But Bali is pretty rural and without big air-conditioned buildings. Air-conditioned buildings are one of the environments coronavirus seems to thrive in best.

The average temperatures in Indonesia are generally in the 80s and 90s-- in the winter; same in Thailand. In Vietnam, the winters in the northern part of the country can sometimes fall into the 70s. When Trump-- and some more reputable voices-- began saying the coronavirus would disappear during the hot summers, it made no sense to me because of the growing cases in Thailand, even if they weren't being reported. The whole thing was confusing and the lack of transparency was making it impossible to figure out.

The last week, the Wall Street Journal published a piece by Jon Emont, Will Warmer Temperatures Bring a Coronavirus Reprieve? It’s Complicated, that tried dealing with the conundrum. The question, of courses whether not warmer temperatures stop or even slow the spread. "If they do," wrote Emont, "hard-hit countries like the U.S., Spain and Germany could get a reprieve come summer. Countries that are generally hotter, such as Indonesia and India, might avoid outbreaks on the scale of northern Italy and New York." He concluded "it isn't a yes-or-no question," even if the "coronavirus comes from a family that can’t take the heat. Coronaviruses in general are enveloped in a coat of fat and protein that tends to lose its shape at high temperatures, a process likened to melting that effectively disables the virus. They also tend to survive longest in conditions of low humidity."

And yet, two of the hardest hit states in the U.S.-- Louisiana and Florida and both hot and humid. Florida, where social distancing rules are a joke and the state's governor is daring the pandemic to kill more Floridians, had 25,492 cases by Saturday and 748 deaths-- 1,238 cases per million. Louisiana had 23,580 cases by Saturday and 1,267 deaths-- 5,056 cases per million, the 4th highest nationally behind cold states New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

A team of researchers at the University of Hong Kong who studied the virus in a laboratory found it was stable in cool temperatures of around 40 degrees Fahrenheit. But it deteriorated over time when stored at 72 degrees Fahrenheit. That implies the virus would perish quicker on surfaces like door handles when it is hot out.

The virus spreads in other ways, too, such as sneezing, when it moves through the air quickly enough that it is less likely to be affected by air temperature. It isn’t known what percentage of cases come from people touching infected surfaces compared with coughs and sneezes.

Many scientists predict reduced spread in warmer temperatures, but can’t say by how much.

Leo Poon, head of public health laboratory sciences at the University of Hong Kong, who helped conduct the study, said he doesn’t expect the virus to disappear in the summer. Social distancing would need to continue to prevent the disease’s spread, he said.

“I think we will see slightly less transmission during the warmer months, but not enough less to make a big difference,” said Linsey Marr, a professor in civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech who has researched why the spread of influenza shows seasonal variation. She said people spend much of their time indoors in air-conditioned settings in the summer, so the virus will continue to have cool environments in which to spread.

Influenza viruses, which aren’t coronaviruses, also have fatty outer layers vulnerable to high temperatures. They appear susceptible to humidity, too, with research showing high humidity levels reduce their infectivity. In temperate regions, infections caused by them generally peak in the winter and decline in spring. Still, it isn’t fully understood why these outbreaks are seasonal.

In warm, tropical countries, influenza spreads year-round, signaling high temperatures and humidity are not necessarily a death sentence for the virus. Researchers posit various theories for influenza’s seasonal behavior in some parts of the world, including that people spend more time together indoors when it is cold outside, making it easier for the virus to spread.

Covid-19 data over the past three months provides another clue about how the novel coronavirus reacts to heat, but it also paints a complex picture. Official case counts from around the world show most infections are occurring outside tropical climate zones, suggesting the disease spreads more slowly in hot and humid environments.

But a number of warm-weather countries have done only limited coronavirus testing. That makes it difficult to draw definitive conclusions about whether the lower numbers of cases result from low testing or high temperatures. While ascertaining the true scale of the spread is a problem in all countries, it is much worse for many of these countries.

Indonesia, a country of 270 million people-- roughly the population of the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Spain combined-- has conducted around 27,000 tests. Experts believe the number of infections is higher than the 4,600 reported so far. Mexico and Ecuador’s limited testing has raised questions about whether the confirmed caseload captures the full extent of the problem. In coastal Ecuador, patients are dying at home after being turned away from overwhelmed hospitals, and the country’s president has said official statistics undercount the actual caseload.

As the pandemic spreads, infections are trending upward even in some low-testing countries with generally warmer temperatures, like Mexico and the Philippines.

Still, not all warm places have a testing problem. Places like Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, where temperatures are high, as well as Australia, which saw its first cases during the summer, have tested widely for the coronavirus. They have fewer confirmed cases per capita than many other high-testing countries in Europe and Asia, suggesting warm weather could be playing a role.

In the U.S., more than half of reported cases are in the frigid Northeast, though warmer states like Louisiana, Georgia and Florida have seen a sharp rise in infections.

In a pandemic, testing and temperature aren’t the only factors to consider.

Experts say any impact high temperatures have may be countered by a transmission-aiding feature in play: low immunity levels in the population. The novel coronavirus has just begun to spread among humans in recent months, and experts believe it is likely that only a small portion of people have immunity at this point. Even if warming weather slows its spread by reducing the amount of time the virus survives on surfaces, the disease could still transmit quickly to large numbers of people through coughs and sneezes without encountering the barrier of immunity.

“It’s likely we’ll see decreases in transmission,” as the weather heats up, said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. “But it may not have as pronounced seasonality in its first appearance because there also isn’t any kind of herd immunity to stave it off.”

Meanwhile Harvard researchers working on COVID-19 are discouraging policy makers from expecting warm weather to solve any transmission problems. They conclude that social distancing will stop COVID-19 infections, not summer weather.

And last week the National Academy of Sciences sent Señor Trumpanzee a letter contradicting Trump's idiotic statement that "when it gets a little warmer [COVID] miraculously goes away." Trump's a fool and the scientists concluded that "There is some evidence to suggest that [coronavirus] may transmit less efficiently in environments with higher ambient temperature and humidity; however, given the lack of host immunity globally, this reduction in transmission efficiency may not lead to a significant reduction in disease spread without the concomitant adoption of major public health interventions."

Trump doesn't want to even try to understand anything like that. As Anita Kumar explained last night in Politico, Trump's main concern is his reelection campaign, not rates of infection. He is convinced that an early restart of the economy-- likely to intensify the pandemic-- will help him politically. "It’s a high-wire act for the president," wrote Kumar, as though she were writing about a sane, rational person and not a deranged sociopathic narcissist. "If the economy begins to recover with minimal additional infections, the president will take credit. But if infections spread or a second shut down is needed, he could be blamed. As a result, at least one person who speaks to Trump has urged him to not consider politics when it comes to lifting economic restrictions."

The temple in the water, coffee made from mongoose crap, and more from Bali -- all on Howie's "Around the World" blog

Speaking of updates, don't forget to keep up to date on Howie's adventures on Bali via his Around the World blog. You don't want to miss his report -- second-hand, alas -- on the coffee made from mongoose crap, do you? -- Ken

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CAN WE EXPECT DEMOCRATS TO REDEEM OUR COUNTRY'S ENVIRONMENTAL DISGRACE? DON'T BET ON IT

After completely alienating public opinion in every country in the world and after threats from America's closest allies in Europe, the Bush Regime-- blaming, of all things, election year sentiment in the U.S.-- has forced the international community to drastically tamp down cooperative efforts to make greenhouse gas emissions/global warming a top international priority. The conference that just ended in Bali a couple of hours ago-- the #1 story everywhere in the world except in the U.S., where corporate media has drastically downplayed its importance-- was merely a baby-step, a road map to move from "discussions to negotiations," but the Bush Regime dug in its reactionary heels and adamantly refused to allow specific targets into the draft agreement that just lays out future negotiations.

At the last minute, with barely an hour to go before the end of the conference, a compromise, of sorts, was reached, one that serves the best interests of no one except GOP big corporate campaign contributors. Pure Beltway obfuscation and old fashioned sabotage is how the Bush Regime approached the world community; the draft agreement doesn't mention specific targets but includes a footnote referring to a separate paper which does include the target numbers Bush so opposes.

Every interview I've seen on Asian and European TV mentions that in a year Bush will be out of office and it will be possible for mankind to move forward in a serious manner against the greatest threat to our well-being. A Bush Regime apologist actually claimed on the BBC today that it's impossible to move forward aggressively this year because it's an election year, implying, falsely, that American voters don't want serious movement in the area of global warming. American voters do want action-- but Republican corporate campaign contributors don't. They won.

But let's look forward-- as the whole world does-- to the end of Bush's reactionary tyranny and even to across the board defeats for Republicans running not just for the presidency-- and let's face it, Huckabee, once voters get to see what he's really all about, will not find him to be a viable alternative to None of the Above-- but for the Senate and House as well. The Democratic candidates are, by and large, supporters, at least on paper, of many of the issues involved in climate change. But there is a wide gap between theory and solid action and when it comes to making the painful decisions, the ones that will make corporations (and even some labor unions) scream, Democrats may well prove to be nearly as reactionary and problematic as Republicans.

Yesterday I got into an argument with my friend Jamil, a huge Obama enthusiast, about Obama's fitness to lead America. Jamil and I both agree that Hillary would be scant improvement over any of the pathetic pygmies seeking to personify a third Bush term. But before getting to Obama, let me quote Glenn Hurowitz's book, Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party, about Hillary and environmentalism and what happens when push really comes to shove in the mind of an Inside the Beltway hack.

You could see the deadly consequences of Clinton's Politics of Fear at work on November 15, 2006, when workers at the Ticonderoga, New York plant of International Paper started feeding old shredded tires into their massive incinerator-- sending an acrid cloud loaded with deadly chemicals and heavy metals like mercury and cadmium into the air. It was the culmination of a three year battle between timber executive and Vermonters downwind from the plant worried about the health and environmental impacts of the toxic brew (the International Paper facility lies just a few miles across Lake Champlain from Burlington, Vermont), a battle in which Clinton weighed in decisively for the timber company. Tires are just about the most poisonous fuel known to man. They're particularly dangerous for children whose developing brains and immune systems are hypersensitive to pollutants like mercury and benzene. Exposure to burning tires can cut years off a child's life, according to the American Lung Association. But IP wanted to cut costs for running its mill (which already produced more pollution than the entire state of Vermont-- including Vermonters vehicles) and came up with the idea of saving money by cutting up old tires and burning them for energy.

Of course it was immediately controversial-- more than 5 million people would be downwind of the burning tires. Even Vermont's Republican governor was working to stop the tire burn. But IP had an ace up its sleeve with Hillary Clinton. Although Clinton had been chairman of the Children's Defense Fund and had made a huge issue out of the Bush administration falsely claiming that the Ground Zero site was safe enough for workers, she wanted to do anything she could to boost her margin of victory in upstate New York. The facts that she was pretty much guaranteed a landslide, outspending her opponent $41 million to $5 million in the most expensive Senate race in the country, and that burning tires would seriously jeopardize children's health, were secondary to the few hundred votes she might pick up from factory workers and others willing to do anything to keep IP's profits high. And so she lobbied to allow the tire burning. Given the choice between a few hundred additional votes and children's health, Clinton chose the votes... In the event, the burning tires turned out to be so polluting that the emissions exceeded even IP's extremely lax permit. IP was forced to suspend its test just three days after it had started the burning. They didn't go out of business, but Hillary Clinton had racked up another example of the Politics of Fear-- putting political expedience ahead of what was supposed to be her most cherished value-- children's welfare.

Sounds horrible, right? It should; it is. Instead of contemplating voting Hillary into the presidency, New York voters should be working to remove her from office. But Obama isn't much better. A consistent and craven compromiser on almost every progressive value or principle he's had to confront since being elected to the Senate (from Republican "tort reform" to legalizing credit card usury), Obama's environmental record has clearly been "one of accommodation to big corporate interests" and "his 'new kind of politics'" is nothing more than a charismatically delivered sham: "the old kind of influence peddling, caution, and smallness that most Democrats [at the grassroots level] reject." His environmental record is nothing Bush Republicans need to fear.

He is the Senate's leading Democratic supporter of "coal to liquid," a technology that can make gasoline out of coal. Only problem: it produces double the global warming pollution that regular old dirty oil does. As if that wasn't bad enough, Obama actually voted for George Bush's energy bill despite more than $27 billion in subsidies for the oil, nuclear and coal industries, its weakening of clean air and water laws, and the fact that it gave electric companies the power to charge consumers high rates while doing almost nothing to tackle global warming or increase consumer protections.

Why is Obama so willing to "trim his sails" so often-- despite the consequences to working and middle class Americans and the environment? It's not just that he apparently believes accommodation-- even of right-wing extremists-- can be both right and politically useful. It's something deeper. In his autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, Obama admits he has a hard time feeling a truly pressing sense of urgency about the great issues of the day.

He's not the leader America so desperately needs to clean up after the worst presidential regime in history, no more than Hillary Clinton is. It's not enough to drive Republicans out of government, even if that is a well-deserved and worthwhile first step. It's just as important to find BETTER Democrats. Substituting horrible, compromised Republicans with horrible compromised Democrats, symbolised by Insider hacks like Rahm Emanuel and Steny Hoyer, who control the Democratic House caucus, will solve little if anything. Electing courageous and independent fighters like John Laesch, Andrew Rice, Darcy Burner, Donna Edwards, Ron Shepston and Dennis Shulman is worth the time, effort and resources. We need real leaders, not just hacks who aren't as bad as Bush and Cheney.

IT'S GEORGE W. BUSH AGAINST HUMANITY

Since the beginning of the month I've been in India and Thailand, reading local newspapers, talking with people and watching local TV (in India, where it's in English), as well as the BBC World Report. I'm not sure how U.S. mass media is covering the Bali conference on global warming that is seeking an international blueprint for a post-Kyoto way forward. Remember, Kyoto was the first, though no no means the last, treaty unilaterally trashed by the illegitimate Bush Regime as soon as it was installed by the partisan Supreme Court. Relative to the rest of the world, coverage of global warming as a crisis has been very, very muted in the U.S. Corporately-owned media has gone right along with the Bush Regime and the Republican Party in playing it down and deluding Americans into thinking everything was still being debated by scientists. I suspect-- and I would wager-- that coverage is extremely modest-- at best. If India, Thailand and the BBC are any indication, however, it is far and away the #1 story of the month in the rest of the world-- bigger than Iraq, Afghanistan, Islamic terrorism, the subprime mortgage meltdown, impending recession, rising inflation or American sports figures on dope. And the subtext is bad... for America.

A simple version of the story is that the rest of the world realizes mankind is nearing an existential tipping point and that if really serious measures aren't taken to combat man made global warming, humanity itself will be in jeopardy-- facing the most difficult challenges it's faced since Adam and Eve first encountered Dick Cheney in the Garden of Eden.

Meanwhile, other countries have been taking all this far more seriously than the U.S. While American students and a handful of environmentalists and hipsters on the American East and West coasts buy more (over-priced) hybrids and try to remember to use energy-saving light-bulbs, I noticed, somewhat shockingly, that New Delhi has gone from a nearly uninhabitable stinking hellhole of filthy, cancerous pollution to a city with virtually none of the noxious black emissions that used to make we want to wear a gas mask there-- and this despite massive growth in traffic volume since my last visit. No more black emissions belching out of vehicles. Even the buses, taxis and tuk-tuks us clean-burning gas and although noise pollution is still deafening, everyone has a CNG sticker on his vehicle indicating that they are using clean-burning gas. While this was happening in India, toxic emissions in the U.S. have risen by 20%! The news out of Bali reads like this: the whole world has come together to collectively try to solve mankind's biggest looming problem while the most selfish, greedy power on the globe, the U.S., sabotages every effort. The hatred being generated towards America is unlike anything I have ever seen in my travels, which started in 1969 and have included 4 filled-up passports, almost 100 countries, and over 6 years of living abroad. I'm actually meeting people in India and Thailand who know who James Inhofe is and who identify him as an enemy of mankind's survival! I bet that outside of Oklahoma and the Beltway, there are very few Americans who have ever heard of him!

Today's Bangkok Post highlights the absolute fury Europeans are expressing towards the Bush Regime's foot dragging and sabotage. The E.U. has declared that if Bush and his lackeys don't shape up on climate issues immediately, they will boycott the face-saving environmental Bush is convening in Honolulu in January. Portugal holds the rotating E.U. presidency right now and Humberto Rosa, Portugal's chief environmental negotiator, spoke for all of Europe when he said, "If we would have a failure in Bali it would be meaningless to have a major economies' meeting [Bush's MEM] in the U.S... We're not blackmailing. If no Bali, no MEM."

The Bush Regime, which has been on the defensive all week and is severely alienated from the rest of the world, reacted predictably. A White House flack: "We don't feel that comments like that are very constructive when we are working so hard to find common ground on a way forward."

Anyone who has followed the Bush Regime's policies and tactics in the past 7 years well knows that "working so hard to find common ground" means threatening and bribing everyone else to accept its reactionary positions. The biggest applause at the Bali conference came when Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore stood up and said aloud what everyone has been whispering: that Bush is intentionally wrecking the conference's goals of capping greenhouse gas emissions.

The pompous, even contemptuous, Bush Regime response to the criticism leveled against it is nothing short of galling to the rest of the world. "We will lead," Bush's delegate blustered, "we will continue to lead. But leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow." But following a self-proclaimed "leader" more concerned with the ideological imperative of massive profits for its campaign donors isn't something anyone else is buying right now.

In his new book, Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party, Glenn Hurowitz touches, if only tangentially, on how Bush and the GOP have led America down the wrong path on global warming and how the Democratic Party has by and large failed-- especially when it comes to fear-based opportunists like Clinton and Obama-- to take strong and courageous stands against the Republican agenda of greed, blind selfishness and death.

A study by Mark Lubell, Sammy Zahran, and Arnold Vedlitz in the September issue of the journal Political Behavior found that people's perception of how great a risk global warming is, was the second biggest determinant whether they would support pro-environmental policies and take political action in support of those policies... Their risk perception, or to put it in emotional terms, their fear trumped all other factors measured in the study, like their level of knowledge about the issue, how much they thought they could influence the problem (their hope), or their level of education.

Although Republicans routinely and brazenly (and effectively) uis fear as their #1 tool in winning elections at every level, most Democrats are afraid to go anywhere near that tool. That's one of the reasons they keep losing elections. I've watched some of the Blue America-endorsed candidates (and, now, officeholders) use fear of environmental catastrophe successfully in their appeals to voters, including Hilda Solis (CA), John Hall (NY), Jerry McNerney (CA), and, this year, Andrew Rice. It cane be done and it can be done to clobber reactionaries. If Andrew Rice unseats James Inhofe (R-OK), America's #1 anti-environment politic extremist, the message will reverberate across the country-- a message that not a single Republican elected official will fail to understand. All the worst Inside the Beltway pundits are writing Oklahoma off as a lost cause. They're wrong. And climate change could make the difference... yes, even in Oklahoma, where the dust bowl isn't just something from dusty history books.