Open and take casualties OR stay closed and die.... the unpleasant and difficult choice facing the city of Torrance and the TUSD
The Orange County decision to open schools and then to not open schools because of the reported death of one student is typical of what will happen. Right now much of the thinking is that Covid-19 will go on for years and that the US strain of the virus is much more contagious than is the Asian strain.
Further, the most current CDC theory of how the virus spreads [in the air -- long-lasting aerosols carried for long distances by the winds] would make the current "control doctrine” [wear a mask; maintain social distance] obsolete. ( I previously sent you a New York Times article, one of nine in the series, detailing the acrimony, backbiting and conflicts between WHO and CDC and among the CDC and the various US research institutions, medical schools and provider organizations. Thus,you should realize that the reason there are so many conflicting guidelines is that decisions which are claimed to be scientifically based are actually based on conflicting assumptions of the various individual scientists.
The bottom line is that current economic and society shutdown cannot go on much longer without creating a greater catastrophe than any that would occur from the spread of the virus and we are wasting time and our limited resources by not developing the techniques that will enable us to live with the virus while minimizing both the casualties and the collateral damage caused by the continuing, overhanging infectious threat.
I included you in a distribution of technical status information. This document makes you as well informed as any one in the field. As you can see, the standard CDC approach stretches out forever and the specific goals that they specify, based on their prior performance in other epidemics, may never be achieved. What is missing is an aggressive survival battle plan similar to the plan at was in force when the United States was actually threatened with a nuclear disaster from a Soviet attack.
Both the Torrance City Council and the Torrance unified school district can make the choice EITHER to hunker down and commit economic and social suicide OR to take the path of analysis and operational decision-making [which is well-established in public health teaching, as enunciated by Eli Ginsberg, Herb Klarman, etc. and in US military planning as it has evolved over the last 100 plus years ] and identify and integrate the multitude of considerations that would then allow Torrance to derive the best composite long time operational “solution”.
Four articles follow
1. Let them learn - The risks of keeping schools closed far outweigh the benefits | Leaders
Jul 18th 2020 The Economist
ALL AROUND the world, children’s minds are going to waste. As covid-19 surged in early April, more than 90% of pupils were shut out of school. Since then the number has fallen by one-third, as many classrooms in Europe and East Asia have reopened. But elsewhere progress is slow. Some American school districts, including Los Angeles and San Diego, plan to offer only remote learning when their new school year begins. Kenya’s government has scrapped the whole year, leaving its children idle until January. In the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte says he may not let any children return to the classroom until a vaccine is found. South Africa has reopened casinos, but only a fraction of classrooms.
Many parents are understandably scared. Covid-19 is new, and poorly understood. Schools are big and crowded. Small children will not observe social distancing. Caution is appropriate, especially when cases are rising. But as we have argued before, the benefits of reopening schools usually outweigh the costs.
The new coronavirus poses a low risk to children. Studies suggest that under-18s are a third to a half less likely to catch the disease. Those under ten, according to British figures, are a thousand times less likely to die than someone aged between 70 and 79. The evidence suggests they are not especially likely to infect others. In Sweden staff at nurseries and primary schools, which never closed, were no more likely to catch the virus than those in other jobs. A new study of 1,500 teenage pupils and 500 teachers who had gone back to school in Germany in May found that only 0.6% had antibodies to the virus, less than half the national rate found in other studies. Granted, an outbreak at a secondary school in Israel infected over 150 pupils and staff. But with precautions, the risk can be minimised.
However, the costs of missing school are huge. Children learn less, and lose the habit of learning. Zoom is a lousy substitute for classrooms. Poor children, who are less likely to have good Wi-Fi and educated parents, fall further behind their better-off peers. Parents who have nowhere to drop their children struggle to return to work. Mothers bear the heavier burden, and so suffer a bigger career setback. Children out of school are more likely to suffer abuse, malnutrition and poor mental health.
School closures are bad enough in rich countries. The harm they do in poor ones is much worse (see article). Perhaps 465m children being offered online classes cannot easily make use of them because they lack an internet connection. In parts of Africa and South Asia, families are in such dire straits that many parents are urging their children to give up their studies and start work or get married. The longer school is shut, the more will make this woeful choice. Save the Children, a charity, guesses that nearly 10m could drop out. Most will be girls.
Education is the surest path out of poverty. Depriving children of it will doom them to poorer, shorter, less fulfilling lives. The World Bank estimates that five months of school closures would cut lifetime earnings for the children who are affected by $10trn in today’s money, equivalent to 7% of current annual GDP.
With such catastrophic potential losses, governments should be working out how to reopen schools as soon as it is safe. This should not be a partisan issue, as it has sadly become in America, where some people assume it is a bad idea simply because President Donald Trump proposes it. In some countries teachers’ unions have been obstructive, partly out of justified concern for public health as cases climb, but also because teachers’ interests are not the same as children’s—especially if they are being paid whether they work or not. The main union in Los Angeles urges that schools remain closed until a long wishlist of demands has been met, including the elusive dream of universal health care in America. Children cannot wait that long.
Places that have restarted schooling, such as France, Denmark, China and New Zealand, offer tips for minimising the risks. They let the most vulnerable teachers stay at home. They commonly reduced class sizes, even though that meant many children could spend only part of the week with their teachers. They staggered timetables to prevent crowding in corridors, at school gates and in dinner halls. They required or encouraged masks. They boosted school-based testing and tracing. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has used these to draw up sober guidelines, which include measures such as separating desks by six feet (though the vice-president this week said that schools should feel free to ignore them).
European countries waited on average about 30 days after infections had peaked before they resumed some presence at school. Having started this way, many have since relaxed the rules to let most pupils return to school at the same time. There is no known experience of schools reopening in places where the virus was as prevalent as it is now in Arizona, Florida or Texas. Such places will have to bring the virus under control before the new term begins. This probably means that not all children will be able to go back full-time even then. But a few days a week with a teacher are better than none. And, as in Europe, schools can open up more as covid-19 recedes.
The trade-offs in the global South are even harder. Only a quarter of schools in the poorest countries have soap and running water for handwashing. However, schools in such places are also where pupils are often fed and vaccinated. Closing them makes children more vulnerable to hunger and measles, and this risk almost certainly outweighs that of covid-19. The prudent course for poor-country governments is therefore to act boldly. Face down unions and reopen schools. Conduct loud re-enrolment campaigns, aimed especially at girls. Offer small cash transfers or gifts (such as masks or pens) to ease parents’ worries about the costs of getting their offspring back to class.
Reopening the world’s schools safely will not be cheap. Besides billions of bottles of hand sanitiser, it will require careful organisation, flexible schedules and assistance for those who have fallen behind to catch up. It will cost taxpayers money, but taxpayers are often parents, too. Rich countries should help poor ones with some of the costs. Steep as these will be, they are nothing like the costs of letting the largest generation in human history grow up in ignorance.
******
Jul 18th 2020 The Economist
ALL AROUND the world, children’s minds are going to waste. As covid-19 surged in early April, more than 90% of pupils were shut out of school. Since then the number has fallen by one-third, as many classrooms in Europe and East Asia have reopened. But elsewhere progress is slow. Some American school districts, including Los Angeles and San Diego, plan to offer only remote learning when their new school year begins. Kenya’s government has scrapped the whole year, leaving its children idle until January. In the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte says he may not let any children return to the classroom until a vaccine is found. South Africa has reopened casinos, but only a fraction of classrooms.
Many parents are understandably scared. Covid-19 is new, and poorly understood. Schools are big and crowded. Small children will not observe social distancing. Caution is appropriate, especially when cases are rising. But as we have argued before, the benefits of reopening schools usually outweigh the costs.
The new coronavirus poses a low risk to children. Studies suggest that under-18s are a third to a half less likely to catch the disease. Those under ten, according to British figures, are a thousand times less likely to die than someone aged between 70 and 79. The evidence suggests they are not especially likely to infect others. In Sweden staff at nurseries and primary schools, which never closed, were no more likely to catch the virus than those in other jobs. A new study of 1,500 teenage pupils and 500 teachers who had gone back to school in Germany in May found that only 0.6% had antibodies to the virus, less than half the national rate found in other studies. Granted, an outbreak at a secondary school in Israel infected over 150 pupils and staff. But with precautions, the risk can be minimised.
However, the costs of missing school are huge. Children learn less, and lose the habit of learning. Zoom is a lousy substitute for classrooms. Poor children, who are less likely to have good Wi-Fi and educated parents, fall further behind their better-off peers. Parents who have nowhere to drop their children struggle to return to work. Mothers bear the heavier burden, and so suffer a bigger career setback. Children out of school are more likely to suffer abuse, malnutrition and poor mental health.
School closures are bad enough in rich countries. The harm they do in poor ones is much worse (see article). Perhaps 465m children being offered online classes cannot easily make use of them because they lack an internet connection. In parts of Africa and South Asia, families are in such dire straits that many parents are urging their children to give up their studies and start work or get married. The longer school is shut, the more will make this woeful choice. Save the Children, a charity, guesses that nearly 10m could drop out. Most will be girls.
Education is the surest path out of poverty. Depriving children of it will doom them to poorer, shorter, less fulfilling lives. The World Bank estimates that five months of school closures would cut lifetime earnings for the children who are affected by $10trn in today’s money, equivalent to 7% of current annual GDP.
With such catastrophic potential losses, governments should be working out how to reopen schools as soon as it is safe. This should not be a partisan issue, as it has sadly become in America, where some people assume it is a bad idea simply because President Donald Trump proposes it. In some countries teachers’ unions have been obstructive, partly out of justified concern for public health as cases climb, but also because teachers’ interests are not the same as children’s—especially if they are being paid whether they work or not. The main union in Los Angeles urges that schools remain closed until a long wishlist of demands has been met, including the elusive dream of universal health care in America. Children cannot wait that long.
Places that have restarted schooling, such as France, Denmark, China and New Zealand, offer tips for minimising the risks. They let the most vulnerable teachers stay at home. They commonly reduced class sizes, even though that meant many children could spend only part of the week with their teachers. They staggered timetables to prevent crowding in corridors, at school gates and in dinner halls. They required or encouraged masks. They boosted school-based testing and tracing. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has used these to draw up sober guidelines, which include measures such as separating desks by six feet (though the vice-president this week said that schools should feel free to ignore them).
European countries waited on average about 30 days after infections had peaked before they resumed some presence at school. Having started this way, many have since relaxed the rules to let most pupils return to school at the same time. There is no known experience of schools reopening in places where the virus was as prevalent as it is now in Arizona, Florida or Texas. Such places will have to bring the virus under control before the new term begins. This probably means that not all children will be able to go back full-time even then. But a few days a week with a teacher are better than none. And, as in Europe, schools can open up more as covid-19 recedes.
The trade-offs in the global South are even harder. Only a quarter of schools in the poorest countries have soap and running water for handwashing. However, schools in such places are also where pupils are often fed and vaccinated. Closing them makes children more vulnerable to hunger and measles, and this risk almost certainly outweighs that of covid-19. The prudent course for poor-country governments is therefore to act boldly. Face down unions and reopen schools. Conduct loud re-enrolment campaigns, aimed especially at girls. Offer small cash transfers or gifts (such as masks or pens) to ease parents’ worries about the costs of getting their offspring back to class.
Reopening the world’s schools safely will not be cheap. Besides billions of bottles of hand sanitiser, it will require careful organisation, flexible schedules and assistance for those who have fallen behind to catch up. It will cost taxpayers money, but taxpayers are often parents, too. Rich countries should help poor ones with some of the costs. Steep as these will be, they are nothing like the costs of letting the largest generation in human history grow up in ignorance.
******
2. German Study Shows Low Coronavirus Infection Rate in Schools
BERLIN — Very few of 2,000 school children and teachers tested in the German state of Saxony showed antibodies to COVID-19, a study found on Monday, suggesting schools may not play as big a role in spreading the virus as some had feared.
Germany began reopening schools in May, though debate continues as to the role children may play in spreading the virus to vulnerable adults at home as well as to older teachers and school staff.
The study by the University Hospital in Dresden analysed blood samples from almost 1,500 children aged between 14 and 18 and 500 teachers from 13 schools in Dresden and the districts of Bautzen and Goerlitz in May and June.
The largest study conducted in Germany on school children and teachers included testing in schools where there were coronavirus outbreaks.
Of the almost 2,000 samples, only 12 had antibodies, said Reinhard Berner from the University Hospital of Dresden, adding the first results gave no evidence that school children play a role in spreading the virus particularly quickly.
"Children may even act as a brake on infection," Berner told a news conference, saying infections in schools had not led to an outbreak, while the spread of the virus within households was also less dynamic than previously thought.
Saxony's Education Minister Christian Piwarz said the study showed schools in the state can re-open as normal following the summer vacation at the end of August with some conditions, such as mask-wearing and social distancing where possible.
Berner said the study was representative for the state of Saxony, which has a relatively low rate of infection compared to other parts of Germany.
For other states with low infection rates, the study suggests schools could be re-opened without causing widespread outbreaks of the virus, he said.
A separate study on antibodies against COVID-19 among blood donors showed that antibodies were found in only 1.3 percent of 12,000 blood samples, the head of the Robert Koch Institute for public health, Lothar Wieler, said on Monday.
(Reporting by Caroline Copley and Markus Wacker, editing by Ed Osmond)
********
3. July 13, 2020 Some innovative people are moving activities outdoors.
BERLIN — Very few of 2,000 school children and teachers tested in the German state of Saxony showed antibodies to COVID-19, a study found on Monday, suggesting schools may not play as big a role in spreading the virus as some had feared.
Germany began reopening schools in May, though debate continues as to the role children may play in spreading the virus to vulnerable adults at home as well as to older teachers and school staff.
The study by the University Hospital in Dresden analysed blood samples from almost 1,500 children aged between 14 and 18 and 500 teachers from 13 schools in Dresden and the districts of Bautzen and Goerlitz in May and June.
The largest study conducted in Germany on school children and teachers included testing in schools where there were coronavirus outbreaks.
Of the almost 2,000 samples, only 12 had antibodies, said Reinhard Berner from the University Hospital of Dresden, adding the first results gave no evidence that school children play a role in spreading the virus particularly quickly.
"Children may even act as a brake on infection," Berner told a news conference, saying infections in schools had not led to an outbreak, while the spread of the virus within households was also less dynamic than previously thought.
Saxony's Education Minister Christian Piwarz said the study showed schools in the state can re-open as normal following the summer vacation at the end of August with some conditions, such as mask-wearing and social distancing where possible.
Berner said the study was representative for the state of Saxony, which has a relatively low rate of infection compared to other parts of Germany.
For other states with low infection rates, the study suggests schools could be re-opened without causing widespread outbreaks of the virus, he said.
A separate study on antibodies against COVID-19 among blood donors showed that antibodies were found in only 1.3 percent of 12,000 blood samples, the head of the Robert Koch Institute for public health, Lothar Wieler, said on Monday.
(Reporting by Caroline Copley and Markus Wacker, editing by Ed Osmond)
********
3. July 13, 2020 Some innovative people are moving activities outdoors.
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Rice University, in Houston, is building nine big new classrooms this summer, all of them outdoors.
Five are open-sided circus tents that the university is buying, and another four are semi-permanent structures that workers are building in an open field near dorms, Kevin Kirby, Rice’s vice president for administration, told me. Students and professors will decorate the spaces with murals and video projections.
In the fall, the structures will host classes and student activities, while reducing health risks — since the coronavirus spreads less easily outdoors. Kirby describes the construction project as “a statement to the community.” The statement: “We’re creative. We’re resilient. And what we do matters.”
Across the country, many indoor activities are going to be problematic for the foreseeable future: school, religious services, work meetings, cultural events, restaurant meals, haircuts and more. Mask-wearing reduces the risks, but being outdoors can reduce it even more. (Tara Parker-Pope explains the science and offers tips in this recent Well column.)
As Megan McArdle, a Washington Post columnist, has written: “Move everything outdoors — as much as possible and much more than has been done already.” Yes, the weather will sometimes be a problem. But “we’re long past searching for ideal solutions,” McArdle notes. “We’re now hunting for adequate.”
Some creative ideas :
- “In Denmark, schools held spring classes on playgrounds, in public parks and even in the stands of the national soccer stadium,” The Times editorial board writes. (The same editorial urges cities to close streets and use them to hold outdoor classes.)
- Several towns have held meetings outdoors, including Southwick, Mass., which spaced out folding chairs in a parking lot.
- At a Baptist church in Westerville, Ohio, the pastor recently climbed into a scissor lift and conducted a drive-in service while he was 25 feet off the ground, Time magazine reports. And San Diego County has lifted some restrictions on outdoor religious services.
- Many cities have loosened restrictions on outdoor dining. In New York, restaurants — like Melba’s, in Harlem — have responded creatively, building new outdoors spaces that “have temporarily transformed the city,” the Times restaurant critic Pete Wells writes.
- *****
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Rice University, in Houston, is building nine big new classrooms this summer, all of them outdoors.
|
Five are open-sided circus tents that the university is buying, and another four are semi-permanent structures that workers are building in an open field near dorms, Kevin Kirby, Rice’s vice president for administration, told me. Students and professors will decorate the spaces with murals and video projections.
|
In the fall, the structures will host classes and student activities, while reducing health risks — since the coronavirus spreads less easily outdoors. Kirby describes the construction project as “a statement to the community.” The statement: “We’re creative. We’re resilient. And what we do matters.”
|
Across the country, many indoor activities are going to be problematic for the foreseeable future: school, religious services, work meetings, cultural events, restaurant meals, haircuts and more. Mask-wearing reduces the risks, but being outdoors can reduce it even more. (Tara Parker-Pope explains the science and offers tips in this recent Well column.)
|
As Megan McArdle, a Washington Post columnist, has written: “Move everything outdoors — as much as possible and much more than has been done already.” Yes, the weather will sometimes be a problem. But “we’re long past searching for ideal solutions,” McArdle notes. “We’re now hunting for adequate.”
|
Some creative ideas :
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4. Four Assumptions about the Coronavirus
National Review Jim Geraghty
Where do we stand in our fight against the coronavirus? Here are three safe — but not entirely certain — assumptions about this pandemic, and a fourth that follows from the first three.
1. The most common strain of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States right now is extremely contagious and will prove difficult to contain even with wider and more consistent adoption of best practices.
A study released last month by the Scripps Research Institute concluded that the strains of the virus spreading so quickly in Europe and the U.S. have a mutated S “spike” protein that makes them about ten times as infectious as the strain that was initially identified in Asia. If it seems like the United States is having a tougher time controlling the spread of the coronavirus than Asian countries did in winter and early spring, that’s partially because this version of the virus is tougher to stop from spreading.
More and more researchers are contending that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, meaning that it is not merely being dispersed by the bodily fluids of those who have it, but also floating about in aerosolized form. It is also possible that the virus is not truly aerosolized, but that it is floating in tiny droplets which are so small and so light that they can easily be carried long distances by air currents. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and World Health Organization are now taking the former possibility seriously, and with good reason: An aerosolized virus would mean that most of our current pandemic-control practices, such as remaining six feet apart, were not enough by themselves to prevent contraction of the virus.
The scale and complexity of the problem should not be understated. The country enacted unprecedented, sweeping lockdowns that kept most Americans at home, at great cost to the economy. These lockdowns slowed the spread of the virus, but did not stop it. Preventing more infections is not just a matter of convincing the president to wear a mask consistently, or shutting down beaches or subways, or requiring quarantines for those who travel between states. At every level of government, the response to the virus has met with mixed success. But it’s important to recognize that no one is ignoring any simple or easy solutions, because such solutions don’t exist. At this point, there is no known method of completely halting the virus’s spread.
2. The death rate for those who catch the virus is extremely low, but with millions upon millions of Americans infected, a low death rate will still add up to a horrific loss of life.
Early on in the pandemic, people argued about whether the death rate associated with the virus was worse than that associated with the flu (roughly .01 percent, though even the accuracy of that oft-cited figure can be debated.) So far, everything we’ve learned through our study of SARS-CoV-2 suggests that it’s been more deadly than the typical seasonal flu. The CDC currently estimates the death rate at between .6 and .7 percent, while a new study puts it between .5 and .8 percent. As of this writing, Worldometers has the United States at 3,642,907 confirmed cases and 140,460 deaths, for a death rate of just under 4 percent.
Some observers will look at the above figures and note that because some infected with coronavirus are asymptomatic, and are less likely to be tested, many more people should be in the sum of total cases, bringing the case-fatality percentage down even further. But even if the “true” fatality rate is as low as 0.2 percent, the highly contagious nature of SARS-CoV-2 means that it represents serious danger for a country with 328 million people. According to the Census Bureau, roughly 252 million Americans are over age 18. If half of those adults — 126 million people — catch the virus before herd immunity kicks in or a vaccine becomes widely available, a 0.2 percent fatality rate would still mean 252,000 deaths.
For a while, optimists could point to a steady decline in the number of Americans dying from the virus. In mid April, the U.S. was seeing 2,500 new deaths per day. By mid June, that had declined to under 1,000 per day. Thereafter, it kept declining until roughly Independence Day weekend, falling as low as 500 to 600 deaths per day. Now, has started to creep up toward 1,000 again.
In theory, more cases of infection do not necessarily mean more deaths, if the newly infected are young and healthy enough and treatment methods continue to improve. But realistically, those young and healthy infected patients will sooner or later interact with older and less healthy people and spread the virus to them, causing the death toll to creep back up. Doctors and medical experts have been warning about this for weeks, and the daily data are now proving them right.
The elderly and those with preexisting health conditions remain at greatest risk of succumbing to SARS-CoV-2, but we will also continue to see tragic and troubling cases of seemingly healthy, not-so-old people dying from the virus. In addition to age and health, the ability of the infected to fight off the virus is likely influenced by genetic factors that will take much more research to identify. There is, for example, a striking, odd disparity in the blood types of those infected.
3. A vaccine is coming as fast as anyone could hope for, but still probably won’t arrive until late 2020 or early 2021.
We continue to hear good news from the hunt for a vaccine. The University of Oxford vaccine candidate might be done with human trials by September, and “AstraZeneca has agreed to sell the vaccine on a not-for-profit basis during the crisis if it proves effective and has lined up deals with multiple manufacturers to produce more than 2 billion doses.” A candidate vaccine developed by the federal government and Moderna appears to be safe and to trigger an immune response, and is entering the final stage of testing trials. The Food and Drug Administration has also fast-tracked two experimental vaccines jointly developed by German biotech firm BioNTech and Pfizer, according to CNBC.
What does this all mean for the timing of a vaccine? An unidentified “senior administration official” told CNBC that U.S. health officials and pharmaceutical companies expect to start producing potential vaccine doses by the end of the summer, and that drug-makers are buying equipment, securing the manufacturing sites and, in some cases, acquiring the raw materials.
Of course, there are reasons to temper our optimism. Once a reliable vaccine is identified, it still will need to be produced and distributed on a truly massive scale. CNBC’s “senior administration official” said the aim is to “deliver 300 million doses of a vaccine for Covid-19 by early 2021.” Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar said recently that the country could have “tens of millions, even 100 million doses of vaccine, this fall, and many hundreds of millions of doses by early next year.” Even if the administration’s wildest dreams come true, though, that timeline suggests that when 2020 ends and 2021 begins, most Americans will still not be vaccinated.
What’s more, the development and distribution of a vaccine are only half the battle. Almost all of the vaccine candidates require two doses administered separately, probably a month or two apart, and the immunity to SARS-CoV-2 may not last, because viruses mutate. Coronavirus vaccinations might turn into something akin to annual flu shots, or they might need to be administered every two to three years. Plus which, there will of course be Americans who refuse to be vaccinated.
4. Our battle with the coronavirus will almost certainly last until at least the end of the year, and could very well last for several more years.
All indications are that Americans should hunker down, because this fight is far from over. If we’re lucky, something resembling normal life will return sometime in early-to-mid 2021. But even after we’ve all been vaccinated, we’ll still be living with the lingering economic, geopolitical, social, educational, and psychological consequences of the virus. Certain industries — tourism, air travel, cruise lines — may never return to their pre-pandemic levels; certain others — casinos, movie theaters, amusement parks, and less popular spectator sports — may be slow to recover.
Once the world is on its way to recovery, one final problem will remain: figuring out how to prevent a similar crisis from happening in the future. We must be aware that the conditions that facilitated the virus’s migration from a bat to the still-unidentified Patient Zero in Wuhan will be almost entirely unchanged when the pandemic ends. We don’t know exactly how that migration happened, but illegal animal poaching and smuggling will continue around the globe, the so-called wet markets in China will remain open, and we will still have to take it on faith that most countries conduct their biological research into contagious diseases safely.
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