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Tag: individual level

  • American Families Have a Massive Food-Waste Problem

    American Families Have a Massive Food-Waste Problem

    If you have children, you probably already understand them to be very adorable food-waste machines. If you do not have children, I have five, so let me paint you a picture. On a recent Tuesday night, the post-dinner wreckage in my house was devastating. Peas were welded to the floor; my 5-year-old had decided that he was allergic to chicken and left a pile of it untouched on his plate. After working all day, making the meal in the first place, and then spending dinnertime convincing five irrational, tiny people to try their vegetables, I didn’t even have the energy to convince them to take their plates into the kitchen, let alone box up their leftovers for tomorrow. So I did exactly what I’m not supposed to do, according to the planet’s future: I threw it all out, washed the dishes, and flopped into bed, exhausted.

    Tens of millions of tons of food that leaves farms in the United States is wasted. Much of that waste happens at the industrial level, during harvesting, handling, storage, and processing, but a staggering amount of food gets wasted at home, scraped into the garbage can at the end of a meal or tossed after too long in the crisper drawer. According to a 2020 Penn State University study, almost a third of the food that American households buy is wasted.

    On the individual level, all of this waste is expensive, annoying, and gross. In the aggregate, it’s unfortunate, given that about a fifth of American families reported not having enough to eat last year. But it’s also bad for the planet. Every step of the modern food-production process generates greenhouse gases. Before they ended up in the trash, all of those slimy vegetables and uneaten hunks of chicken were grown using water and farmland and pesticides and fertilizer. They were most likely packed in plastic and paper, and then stored and transported using fossil fuels and electricity. Throwing away food means throwing away all of the resources it requires, but the problems don’t end there: As food rots in landfills and open dumps, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide. According to the United Nations, food loss and waste accounts for about 8 to 10 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

    Read: Your diet is cooking the planet

    Some amount of food waste is probably inevitable, especially with young kids. “The very youngest children … are still kind of understanding what they like, with novel foods and healthy foods. We want to give them that opportunity,” Brian Roe, a farm-management professor and the director of the Food Waste Collaborative at Ohio State University, told me. “You need to waste a little bit of food while they develop palates.”

    More saliently, Roe’s research indicates that food waste is often inversely proportional to spare time: We get busy, we eat out, and our well-intended groceries head to the trash. His data show a 280 percent increase in food waste from February 2021 to February 2022, right as pandemic restrictions were loosening and people with the income to do so started eating out more. In other words, as soon as people had the option to eat without cooking, they did. “When you’ve got more kids and more craziness and a time crunch, all of a sudden, what you thought was going to be 40 minutes to prep dinners is out the window,” he told me. Thus, “those ingredients are more likely to go to waste.”

    Wasting less food starts at the grocery store: Most financially secure families simply need less food than they buy. The sustainability consultant Ashlee Piper told me that she likes to take a picture of her fridge and pantry before heading to the store, in order to avoid buying duplicates. She also recommends shopping not for your “aspirational life” but for the one you are actually living: If, realistically, you’re never going to make your own pasta or pack gourmet lunches for your kids, don’t shop for those meals. “There’s no lunchbox sheriff,” she told me. (Comforting!)

    Once you unpack the groceries, experts say to be strategic about making perishable foods highly visible, accessible, and appetizing. Julia Rockwell, a San Francisco mom and sustainability expert, recommends an “Eat Me” station, whether it’s a basket, a bowl, a tray, or a section of the refrigerator, which she says is especially helpful for teenagers, inclined as they are to “go full claws into the fridge.” A designated place for high-urgency snacks reminds them, “Here’s a yogurt that you missed, or here’s a half of a banana, or here’s the things let’s go to first,” she told me. Leftovers and soon-to-spoil foods also make great dinners or lunches for younger kids, who will be happy to snack on items that don’t necessarily go together in a traditional meal.

    If you’re cleaning out your fridge and pantry strictly according to expiration dates, stop: If a food is past its expiration date but looks and smells fine, it probably is; most of the time, expiration dates are an indicator of quality, not safety. (Deli meats and unpasteurized cheeses are notable exceptions.) Brush up on the language of food packaging—“best by” is just a suggestion, while “expiration” is the date the manufacturer has decided when quality will begin to decline. Frozen food is pretty much always safe, and packaged foods and canned goods without swelling, dents, or rust can last for years, though they may not taste as good. (You can conceal your less-than-fresh nonperishables in another meal, such as adding older ground beef from the freezer to a chili. When in doubt about, say, an older vegetable, Roe says, “coat it in panko and fry it up.”)

    Read: Expiration dates are meaningless

    And whatever you’re feeding your kids, experts repeatedly told me, you should probably be feeding them less. How many blueberries does your pickiest kid really eat at the breakfast table? And how many do you put on their plate that you wish they’d eat? The difference in this pint-size math equation is an essential factor in food-waste management for families. Jennifer Anderson, a mom and registered dietician, discourages “wishful portions.” “You know the amount you want your child to eat, so you put that much on their plate … Take that amount, cut it in half, then cut it in half again,” she told me. “A practical portion is a quarter of what you wish they would eat.”

    Since talking to Anderson, I’ve kept her advice in mind. I still spend more time than I’d like trying to convince my kids to eat yellow peppers when they’ve decided the red ones are the only acceptable type. But the math is simple: Smaller portions on their plate means fewer leftovers in the trash later, and I’ve noticed a real difference.

    And I still find myself dumping plates of picked-over food into the trash or compost. But I move on to the next meal with more grace and less guilt for having helped my kids become little stewards of a healthier planet. I want them to understand that our food comes from somewhere, and that not eating it has consequences. That doesn’t mean guilting them for not liking dragon fruit, or demanding that they clean their plate at every meal, or scaring them about climate change. It’s more like bringing them along, helping them participate in a family project with planetary implications. Wish me luck with the peppers.

    This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.

    Alexandra Frost

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  • Somehow, the Science on Masks Still Isn’t Settled

    Somehow, the Science on Masks Still Isn’t Settled

    For many Americans, wearing a mask has become a relic. But fighting about masks, it seems, has not.

    Masking has widely been seen as one of the best COVID precautions that people can take. Still, it has sparked ceaseless arguments: over mandates, what types of masks we should wear, and even how to wear them. A new review and meta-analysis of masking studies suggests that the detractors may have a point. The paper—a rigorous assessment of 78 studies—was published by Cochrane, an independent policy institution that has become well known for its reviews. The review’s authors found “little to no” evidence that masking at the population level reduced COVID infections, concluding that there is “uncertainty about the effects of face masks.” That result held when the researchers compared surgical masks with N95 masks, and when they compared surgical masks with nothing.

    On Twitter, longtime critics of masking and mandates held this up as the proof they’d long waited for. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet, quoted a researcher who has called the analysis the “scientific nail in the coffin for mask mandates.” The vaccine skeptic Robert Malone used it to refute what he called “self-appointed ‘experts’” on masking. Some researchers weighed in with more nuanced interpretations, pointing out limitations in the review’s methods that made it difficult to draw firm conclusions. Even the CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, pushed back against the paper in a congressional testimony this week, citing its small sample size of COVID-specific studies. The argument is heated and technical, and probably won’t be resolved anytime soon. But the fact that the fight is ongoing makes clear that there still isn’t a firm answer to among the most crucial of pandemic questions: Just how effective are masks at stopping COVID?

    An important feature of Cochrane reviews is that they look only at “randomized controlled trials,” considered the gold standard for certain types of research because they compare the impact of one intervention with another while tightly controlling for biases and confounding variables. The trials considered in the review compared groups of people who masked with those who didn’t in an effort to estimate how effective masking is at blunting the spread of COVID in a general population. The population-level detail is important: It indicates uncertainty about whether requiring everyone to wear a mask makes a difference in viral spread. This is different from the impact of individual masking, which has been better researched. Doctors, after all, routinely mask when they’re around sick patients and do not seem to be infected more often than anyone else. “We have fairly decent evidence that masks can protect the wearer,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University, told me. “Where I think it sort of falls apart is relating that to the population level.”

    The research on individual masking generally shows what we have come to expect: High-quality masks provide a physical barrier between the wearer and infectious particles, if worn correctly. For instance, in one study, N95 masks were shown to block 57 to 90 percent of particles, depending on how well they fit; cloth and surgical masks are less effective. The caveat is that much of that support came from laboratory research and observational studies, which don’t account for the messiness of real life.

    That the Cochrane review reasonably challenges the effectiveness of population-level masking doesn’t mean the findings of previous studies in support of masking are moot. A common theme among criticisms of the review is that it considered only a small number of studies by virtue of Cochrane’s standards; there just aren’t that many randomized controlled trials on COVID and masks. In fact, most of those included in the review are about the impact of masking on other respiratory illnesses, namely the flu. Although some similarities between the viruses are likely, Nuzzo explained on Twitter, COVID-specific trials would be ideal.

    The handful of trials in the review that focus on COVID don’t show strong support for masking. One, from Bangladesh, which looked at both cloth and surgical masks, found a 9 percent decrease in symptomatic cases in masked versus unmasked groups (and a reanalysis of that study found signs of bias in the way the data were collected and interpreted); another, from Denmark, suggested that surgical masks offered no statistically significant protection at all.

    Criticisms of the review posit that it might have come to a different conclusion if more and better-quality studies had been available. The paper’s authors acknowledge that the trials they considered were prone to bias and didn’t control for inconsistent adherence to the interventions. “The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect,” they concluded. If high-quality masks worn properly work well at an individual level, after all, then it stands to reason that  high-quality masks worn properly by many people in any situation should indeed provide some level of protection.

    Tom Jefferson, the review’s lead author, did not respond to a request for comment. But in a recent interview about the controversy, he stood by the practical implications of the new study. “There’s still no evidence that masks are effective during a pandemic,” he said.

    Squaring all of this uncertainty with the support for masking and mandates early in the pandemic is difficult. Evidence for it was scarce in the early days of the pandemic, Nuzzo acknowledged, but health officials had to act. Transmission was high, and the costs of masking were seen as low; it was not immediately clear how inconvenient and unmanageable masks could be, especially in settings such as schools. Mask mandates have largely expired in most places, but it doesn’t hurt most people to err on the side of caution. Nuzzo still wears a mask in high-risk environments. “Will that prevent me from ever getting COVID? No,” she said, but it reduces her risk—and that’s good enough.

    What is most frustrating about this masking uncertainty is that the pandemic has presented many opportunities for the U.S. to gather stronger data on the effects of population-level masking, but those studies have not happened. Masking policies were made on sound but limited data, and when decisions are made that way, “you need to continually assess whether those assumptions are correct,” Nuzzo said—much like how NASA collects huge amounts of data to prepare for all the things that could go wrong with a shuttle launch. Unfortunately, she said, “we don’t have Houston for the pandemic.”

    Obtaining stronger data is still possible, though it won’t be easy. A major challenge of studying the effect of population-level masking in the real world is that people aren’t good at wearing masks, which of course is a problem with the effectiveness of masks too. It would be straightforward enough if you could guarantee that participants wore their masks perfectly and consistently throughout the study period. But in the real world, masks fit poorly and slip off noses, and people are generally eager to take them off whenever possible.

    Ideally, the research needed to gather strong data—about masks, and other lingering pandemic questions—would be conducted through the government. The U.K., for example, has funded large randomized controlled trials of COVID drugs such as molnupiravir. So far, that doesn’t seem to have happened in the U.S.  None of the new studies on masking included in the Cochrane review were funded by the U.S. government. “The fact that we never as a country really set up studies to answer the most pressing questions is a failure,” said Nuzzo. What the CDC could do is organize and fund a research network to study COVID, much like the centers of excellence the agency has for fields such as food safety and tuberculosis.

    The window of opportunity hasn’t closed yet. The Cochrane review, for all of its controversy, is a reminder that more research on masking is needed, if only to address whether pro-mask policies warrant the rage they incite. You would think that the policy makers who encouraged masking would have made finding that support a priority. “If you’re going to burn your political capital, it’d be nice to have the evidence to say that it’s necessary,” Nuzzo said.

    At this point, even the strongest possible evidence is unlikely to change some people’s behavior, considering how politicized the mask debate has become. But as a country, the lack of conclusive evidence leaves us ill-prepared for the next viral outbreak—COVID or otherwise. The risk is still low, but bird flu is showing troubling signs that it could make the jump from animals to humans. If it does, should officials be telling everyone to mask up? That America has never amassed good evidence to show the effect of population-level masking for COVID, Nuzzo said, has been a missed opportunity. The best time to learn more about masking is before we are asked to do it again.

    Yasmin Tayag

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  • Is COVID a Common Cold Yet?

    Is COVID a Common Cold Yet?

    At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, one of the worst things about SARS-CoV-2 was that it was so new: The world lacked immunity, treatments, and vaccines. Tests were hard to come by too, making diagnosis a pain—except when it wasn’t. Sometimes, the symptoms of COVID got so odd, so off-book, that telling SARS-CoV-2 from other viruses became “kind of a slam dunk,” says Summer Chavez, an emergency physician at the University of Houston. Patients would turn up with the standard-issue signs of respiratory illness—fever, coughing, and the like—but also less expected ones, such as rashes, diarrhea, shortness of breath, and loss of taste or smell. A strange new virus was colliding with people’s bodies in such unusual ways that it couldn’t help but stand out.

    Now, nearly three years into the crisis, the virus is more familiar, and its symptoms are too. Put three sick people in the same room this winter—one with COVID, another with a common cold, and the third with the flu—and “it’s way harder to tell the difference,” Chavez told me. Today’s most common COVID symptoms are mundane: sore throat, runny nose, congestion, sneezing, coughing, headache. And several of the wonkier ones that once hogged headlines have become rare. More people are weathering their infections with their taste and smell intact; many can no longer remember when they last considered the scourge of “COVID toes.” Even fever, a former COVID classic, no longer cracks the top-20 list from the ZOE Health Study, a long-standing symptom-tracking project based in the United Kingdom, according to Tim Spector, an epidemiologist at King’s College London who heads the project. Longer, weirder, more serious illness still manifests, but for most people, SARS-CoV-2’s symptoms are getting “pretty close to other viruses’, and I think that’s reassuring,” Spector told me. “We are moving toward a cold-like illness.”

    That trajectory has been forecast by many experts since the pandemic’s early days. Growing immunity against the coronavirus, repeatedly reinforced by vaccines and infections, could eventually tame COVID into a sickness as trifling as the common cold or, at worst, one on par with the seasonal flu. The severity of COVID will continue to be tempered by widespread immunity, or so this thinking goes, like a curve bending toward an asymptote of mildness. A glance at the landscape of American immunity suggests that such a plateau could be near: Hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. have been vaccinated multiple times, some even quite recently with a bivalent shot; many have now logged second, third, and fourth infections with the virus. Maybe, just maybe, we’re nearing the level of cumulative exposure at which COVID gets permanently more chill. Then again? Maybe not—and maybe never.

    Read: What does it mean to care about COVID anymore?

    The recent trajectory of COVID, at least, has been peppered with positive signs. On average, symptoms have migrated higher up the airway, sparing several vulnerable organs below; disease has gotten shorter and milder, and rates of long COVID seem to be falling a bit. Many of these changes roughly coincided with the arrival of Omicron in the fall of 2021, and part of the shift is likely attributable to the virus itself: On the whole, Omicron and its offshoots seem to prefer infecting cells in the nose and throat over those in the lungs. But experts told me the accumulation of immune defenses that preceded and then accompanied that variant’s spread are almost certainly doing more of the work. Vaccination and prior infection can both lay down protections that help corral the virus near the nose and mouth, preventing it from spreading to tissues elsewhere. “Disease is really going to differ based on the compartment that’s primarily infected,” says Stacey Schultz-Cherry, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. As SARS-CoV-2 has found a tighter anatomical niche, our bodies have become better at cornering it.

    With the virus largely getting relegated to smaller portions of the body, the pathogen is also purged from the airway faster and may be less likely to be passed to someone else. On the individual level, a sickness that might have once unfurled into pneumonia now gets subdued into barely perceptible sniffles and presents less risk to others; on the population scale, rates of infection, hospitalization, and death go down.

    This is how things usually go with respiratory viruses. Repeat tussles with RSV tend to get progressively milder; post-vaccination flu is usually less severe. The few people who catch measles after getting their shots are less likely to transmit the virus, and they tend to experience such a trivial course of sickness that their disease is referred to by a different name, “modified” measles, says Diane Griffin, a virologist and an immunologist at Johns Hopkins University.

    It’s good news that the median case of COVID diminished in severity and duration around the turn of 2022, but it’s a bit more sobering to consider that there hasn’t been a comparably major softening of symptoms in the months since. The full range of disease outcomes—from silent infection all the way to long-term disability, serious disease, and death—remains in play as well, for now and the foreseeable future, Schultz-Cherry told me. Vaccination history and immunocompromising conditions can influence where someone falls on that spectrum. So too can age as well as other factors such as sex, genetics, underlying medical conditions, and even the dose of incoming virus, says Patricia García, a global-health expert at the University of Washington.

    New antibody-dodging viral variants could still show up to cause more severe disease even among the young and healthy, as occasionally happens with the flu. The BA.2 subvariant of Omicron, which is more immune-evasive than its predecessor BA.1, seemed to accumulate more quickly in the airway, and it sparked more numerous and somewhat gnarlier symptoms. Data on more recent Omicron subvariants are still being gathered, but Shruti Mehta, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, says she’s seen some hints that certain gastrointestinal symptoms, such as vomiting, might be making a small comeback.

    Read: Will we get Omicron’d again?

    All of this leaves the road ahead rather muddy. If COVID will be tamed one day into a common cold, that future definitely hasn’t been realized yet, says Yonatan Grad, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s School of Public Health. SARS-CoV-2 still seems to spread more efficiently and more quickly than a cold, and it’s more likely to trigger severe disease or long-term illness. Still, previous pandemics could contain clues about what happens next. Each of the past century’s flu pandemics led to a surge in mortality that wobbled back to baseline after about two to seven years, Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me. But SARS-CoV-2 isn’t a flu virus; it won’t necessarily play by the same epidemiological rules or hew to a comparable timeline. Even with flu, there’s no magic number of shots or past infections that’s known to mollify disease—“and I think we know even less about how you build up immunity to coronaviruses,” Gordon said.

    The timing of when and how those defenses manifest could matter too. Almost everyone has been infected by the flu or at least gotten a flu shot by the time they reach grade school; SARS-CoV-2 and COVID vaccines, meanwhile, arrived so recently that most of the world’s population met them in adulthood, when the immune system might be less malleable. These later-in-life encounters could make it tougher for the global population to reach its severity asymptote. If that’s the case, we’ll be in COVID limbo for another generation or two, until most living humans are those who grew up with this coronavirus in their midst.

    COVID may yet stabilize at something worse than a nuisance. “I had really thought previously it would be closer to common-cold coronaviruses,” Gordon told me. But severity hasn’t declined quite as dramatically as she’d initially hoped. In Nicaragua, where Gordon has been running studies for years, vaccinated cohorts of people have endured second and third infections with SARS-CoV-2 that have been, to her disappointment, “still more severe than influenza,” she told me. Even if that eventually flips, should the coronavirus continue to transmit this aggressively year-round, it could still end up taking more lives than the flu does—as is the case now.

    Wherever, whenever a severity plateau is reached, Gordon told me that our arrival to it can be confirmed only in hindsight, “once we look back and say, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s been about the same for the last five years.’” But the data necessary to make that call are getting harder to collect as public interest in the virus craters and research efforts to monitor COVID’s shifting symptoms hit roadblocks. The ZOE Health Study lost its government funding earlier this year, and its COVID-symptom app, which engaged some 2.4 million regular users at its peak, now has just 400,000—some of whom may have signed up to take advantage of newer features for tracking diet, sleep, exercise, and mood. “I think people just said, ‘I need to move on,’” Spector told me.

    Mehta, the Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, has encountered similar hurdles in her COVID research. At the height of the Omicron wave, when Mehta and her colleagues were trying to find people for their community studies, their rosters would immediately fill up past capacity. “Now we’re out there for weeks” and still not hitting the mark, she told me. Even weekly enrollment for their long-COVID study has declined. Sign-ups do increase when cases rise—but they drop off especially quickly as waves ebb. Perhaps, in the view of some potential study volunteers, COVID has, ironically, become like a common cold, and is thus no longer worth their time.

    For now, researchers don’t know whether we’re nearing the COVID-severity plateau, and they’re worried it will get only more difficult to tell. Maybe it’s for the best if the mildness asymptote is a ways off. In the U.S. and elsewhere, subvariants are still swirling, bivalent-shot uptake is still stalling, and hospitalizations are once more creeping upward as SARS-CoV-2 plays human musical chairs with RSV and flu. Abroad, inequities in vaccine access and quality—and a zero-COVID policy in China that stuck around too long—have left gaping immunity gaps. To settle into symptom stasis with this many daily deaths, this many off-season waves, this much long COVID, and this pace of viral evolution would be grim. “I don’t think we’re quite there yet,” Gordon told me. “I hope we’re not there yet.”

    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Effective Altruism’s Philosopher King Just Wants to Be Practical

    Effective Altruism’s Philosopher King Just Wants to Be Practical

    Academic philosophers these days do not tend to be the subjects of overwhelming attention in the national media. The Oxford professor William MacAskill is a notable exception. In the month and a half since the publication of his provocative new book, What We Owe the Future, he has been profiled or excerpted or reviewed or interviewed in just about every major American publication.

    MacAskill is a leader of the effective-altruism, or EA, movement, whose adherents use evidence and reason to figure out how to do as much good in the world as possible. His book takes that fairly intuitive-sounding project in a somewhat less intuitive direction, arguing for an idea called “longtermism,” the view that members of future generations—we’re talking unimaginably distant descendants, not just your grandchildren or great-grandchildren—deserve the same moral consideration as people living in the present. The idea is predicated on brute arithmetic: Assuming humanity does not drive itself to premature extinction, future people will vastly outnumber present people, and so, the thinking goes, we ought to be spending a lot more time and energy looking out for their interests than we currently do. In practice, longtermists argue, this means prioritizing a set of existential threats that the average person doesn’t spend all that much time fretting about. At the top of the list: runaway artificial intelligence, bioengineered pandemics, nuclear holocaust.

    Whatever you think of longtermism or EA, they are fast gaining currency—both literally and figuratively. A movement once confined to university-seminar tables and niche online forums now has tens of billions of dollars behind it. This year, it fielded its first major political candidate in the U.S. Earlier this month, I spoke with MacAskill about the logic of longtermism and EA, and the future of the movement more broadly.

    Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    Jacob Stern: Effective altruists have been focused on pandemics since long before COVID. Are there ways that EA efforts helped with the COVID pandemic? If not, why not?

    William MacAskill: EAs, like many people in public health, were particularly early in terms of warning about the pandemic. There were some things that were helpful early, even if they didn’t change the outcome completely. 1Day Sooner is an EA-funded organization that got set up to advocate for human-challenge trials. And if governments had been more flexible and responsive, that could have led to vaccines being rolled out months earlier, I think. It would have meant you could get evidence of efficacy and safety much faster.

    Read: How future generations will remember us

    There is an organization called microCOVID that quantifies what your risk is of getting COVID from various sorts of activities you might do. You hang out with someone at a bar: What’s your chance of getting COVID? It would actually provide estimates of that, which was great and I think widely used. Our World in Data—which is kind of EA-adjacent—provided a leading source of data over the course of the pandemic. One thing I think I should say, though, is it makes me wish that we’d done way more on pandemics earlier. You know, these are all pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. I think EA did very well at identifying this as a threat, as a major issue we should care about, but I don’t think I can necessarily point to enormous advances.

    Stern: What are the lessons EA has taken from the pandemic?

    MacAskill: One lesson is that even extremely ambitious public-health plans won’t necessarily suffice, at least for future pandemics, especially if one was a deliberate pandemic, from an engineered virus. Omicron infected roughly a quarter of Americans within 100 days. And there’s just not really a feasible path whereby you design, develop, and produce a vaccine and vaccinate everybody within 100 days. So what should we do for future pandemics?

    Early detection becomes absolutely crucial. What you can do is monitor wastewater at many, many sites around the world, and you screen the wastewater for all potential pathogens. We’re particularly worried about engineered pathogens: If we get a COVID-19-scale pandemic once every hundred years or so from natural origins, that chance increases dramatically given advances in bioengineering. You can take viruses and upgrade them in terms of their destructive properties so they can become more infectious or more lethal. It’s known as gain-of-function research. If this is happening all around the world, then you just should expect lab leaks quite regularly. There’s also the even more worrying phenomenon of bioweapons. It’s really a scary thing.

    In terms of labs, possibly we want to slow down or not even allow certain sorts of gain-of-function research. Minimally, what we could do is ask labs to have regulations such that there’s third-party liability insurance. So if I buy a car, I have to buy such insurance. If I hit someone, that means I’m insured for their health, because that’s an externality of driving a car. In labs, if you leak, you should have to pay for the costs. There’s no way you actually can insure against billions dead, but you could have some very high cap at least, and it would disincentivize unnecessary and dangerous research, while not disincentivizing necessary research, because then if it’s so important, you should be willing to pay the cost.

    Another thing I’m excited about is low-wavelength UV lighting. It’s a form of lighting that basically can sterilize a room safe for humans. It needs more research to confirm safety and efficacy and certainly to get the cost down; we want it at like a dollar a bulb. So then you could install it as part of building codes. Potentially no one ever gets a cold again. You eradicate most respiratory infections as well as the next pandemic.

    Stern: Shifting out of pandemic gear, I was wondering whether there are major lobbying efforts under way to persuade billionaires to convert to EA, given that the potential payoff of persuading someone like Jeff Bezos to donate some significant part of his fortune is just massive.

    MacAskill: I do a bunch of this. I’ve spoken at the Giving Pledge annual retreat, and I do a bunch of other speaking. It’s been pretty successful overall, insofar as there are other people kind of coming in—not on the size of Sam Bankman-Fried or Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, but there’s definitely further interest, and it is something I’ll kind of keep trying to do. Another organization is Longview Philanthropy, which has done a lot of advising for new philanthropists to get them more involved and interested in EA ideas.

    I have not ever successfully spoken with Jeff Bezos, but I would certainly take the opportunity. It has seemed to me like his giving so far is relatively small scale. It’s not clear to me how EA-motivated it is. But it would certainly be worth having a conversation with him.

    Stern: Another thing I was wondering about is the issue of abortion. On the surface at least, longtermism seems like it would commit you to—or at least point you in the direction of—an anti-abortion stance. But I know that you don’t see things that way. So I would love to hear how you think through that.

    MacAskill: Yes, I’m pro-choice. I don’t think government should interfere in women’s reproductive rights. The key distinction is when pro-life advocates say they are concerned about the unborn, they are saying that, at conception or shortly afterwards, the fetus becomes a person. And so what you’re doing when you have an abortion is morally equivalent or very similar to killing a newborn infant. From my perspective, what you’re doing when having an early-term abortion is much closer to choosing not to conceive. And I certainly don’t think that the government should be going around forcing people to conceive, and then certainly they shouldn’t be forcing people to not have an abortion. There is a second thought of Well, don’t you say it’s good to have more people, at least if they have sufficiently good lives? And there I say yes, but the right way of achieving morally valuable goals is not, again, by restricting people’s rights.

    Stern: I think there are at least three separate questions here. The first being this one that you just addressed: Is it right for a government to restrict abortion? The second being, on an individual level, if you’re a person thinking of having an abortion, is that choice ethical? And the third being, are you operating from the premise that unborn fetuses are a constituency in the same way that future people are a constituency?

    MacAskill: Yes and no on the last thing. In What We Owe the Future, I do argue for this view that I still find kind of intuitive: It can be good to have a new person in existence if their life is sufficiently good. Instrumentally, I think it’s important for the world to not have this dip in population that standard projections suggest. But then there’s nothing special about the unborn fetus.

    On the individual level, having kids and bringing them up well can be a good way to live, a good way of making the world better. I think there are many ways of making the world better. You can also donate. You can also change your career. Obviously, I don’t want to belittle having an abortion, because it’s often a heart-wrenching decision, but from a moral perspective I think it’s much closer to failing to conceive that month, rather than the pro-life view, which is it’s more like killing a child that’s born.

    Stern: What you’re saying on some level makes total sense but is also something that I think your average pro-choice American would totally reject.

    MacAskill: It’s tough, because I think it’s mainly a matter of rhetoric and association. Because the average pro-choice American is also probably concerned about climate change. That involves concern for how our actions will impact generations of as-yet-unborn people. And so the key difference is the pro-life person wants to extend the franchise just a little bit to the 10 million unborn fetuses that are around at the moment. I want to extend the franchise to all future people! It’s a very different move.

    Read: Is colonizing Mars the most important project in human history?

    Stern: How do you think about trying to balance the moral rigor or correctness of your philosophy with the goal of actually getting the most people to subscribe and produce the most good in the world? Once you start down the logical path of effective altruism, it’s hard to figure out where to stop, how to justify not going full Peter Singer and giving almost all your money away. So how do you get people to a place where they feel comfortable going halfway or a quarter of the way?

    MacAskill: I think it’s tough because I don’t think there’s a privileged stopping point, philosophically. At least not until you’re at the point where you’re really doing almost everything you can. So with Giving What We Can, for example, we chose 10 percent as a target for what portion of people’s income they could give away. In a sense it’s a totally arbitrary number. Why not 9 percent or 11 percent? It does have the benefit of 10 percent being a round number. And it also is the right level, I think, where if you get people to give 1 percent, they’re probably giving that amount anyway. Whereas 10 percent, I think, is achievable yet at the same time really is a difference compared to what they otherwise would have been doing.

    That, I think, is just going to be true more generally. We try to have a culture that is accepting and supportive of these kinds of intermediate levels of sacrifice or commitment. It is something that people within EA struggle with, including myself. It’s kind of funny: People will often beat themselves up for not doing enough good, even though other people never beat other people up for not doing enough good. EA is really accepting that this stuff is hard, and we’re all human and we’re not superhuman moral saints.

    Stern: Which I guess is what worries or scares people about it. The idea that once I start thinking this way, how do I not end up beating myself up for not doing more? So I think where a lot of people end up, in light of that, is deciding that what’s easiest is just not thinking about any of it so they don’t feel bad.

    MacAskill: Yeah. And that’s a real shame. I don’t know. It bugs me a bit. It’s just a general issue of people when confronted with a moral idea. It’s like, Hey, you should become vegetarian. People are like, Oh, I should care about animals? What about if you had to kill an animal in order to live? Would you do that? What about eating sugar that is bleached with bone? You’re a hypocrite! Somehow people feel like unless you’re doing the most extreme version of your views, then it’s not justified. Look, it’s better to be a vegetarian than to not be a vegetarian. Let’s accept that things are on a spectrum.

    On the podcast I was just on, I was just like, ‘Look, these are all philosophical issues. This is irrelevant to the practical questions.’ It’s funny that I am finding myself saying that more and more.

    Stern: On what grounds, EA-wise, did you justify spending an hour on the phone with me?

    MacAskill: I think the media is important! Getting the ideas out there is important. If more people hear about the ideas, some people are inspired, and they get off their seat and start doing stuff, that’s a huge impact. If I spend one hour talking to you, you write an article, and that leads to one person switching their career, well, that’s one hour turned into 80,000 hours—seems like a pretty good trade.

    Jacob Stern

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  • Hundreds of Americans Will Die From COVID Today

    Hundreds of Americans Will Die From COVID Today

    Over the past week, an average of 491 Americans have died of COVID each day, according to data compiled by The New York Times. The week before, the number was 382. The week before that, 494. And so on.

    For the past five months or so, the United States has trod along something of a COVID-death plateau. This is good in the sense that after two years of breakneck spikes and plummets, the past five months are the longest we’ve gone without a major surge in deaths since the pandemic’s beginning, and the current numbers are far below last winter’s Omicron highs. (Case counts and hospital admissions have continued to fluctuate but, thanks in large part to the protection against severe disease conferred by vaccines and antivirals, they have mostly decoupled from ICU admissions and deaths; the curve, at long last, is flat.) But though daily mortality numbers have stopped rising, they’ve also stopped falling. Nearly 3,000 people are still dying every week.

    We could remain on this plateau for some time yet. Lauren Ancel Meyers, the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, told me that as long as a dangerous new variant doesn’t emerge (in which case these projections would go out the window), we could see only a slight bump in deaths this fall and winter, when cases are likely to surge, but probably—or at least hopefully—nothing too drastic. In all likelihood, though, deaths won’t dip much below their present levels until early 2023, with the remission of a winter surge and the additional immunity that surge should confer. In the most optimistic scenarios that Meyers has modeled, deaths could at that point get as low as half their current level. Perhaps a tad lower.

    Read: How did this many deaths become normal?

    By any measure, that is still a lot of people dying every day. No one can say with any certainty what 2023 might have in store, but as a reference point, 200 deaths daily would translate to 73,000 deaths over the year. COVID would remain a top-10 leading cause of death in America in this scenario, roughly twice as deadly as either the average flu season or a year’s worth of motor-vehicle crashes.

    COVID deaths persist in part because we let them. America has largely decided to be done with the pandemic, even though the pandemic stubbornly refuses to be done with America. The country has lifted nearly all of its pandemic restrictions, and emergency pandemic funding has been drying up. For the most part, people have settled into whatever level of caution or disregard suits them. A Pew Research survey from May found that COVID did not even crack Americans’ list of the top 10 issues facing the country. Only 19 percent said that they consider it a big problem, and it’s hard to imagine that number has gone anywhere but down in the months since. COVID deaths have shifted from an emergency to the accepted collateral damage of the American way of life. Background noise.

    On one level, this is appalling. To simply proclaim the pandemic over is to abandon the vulnerable communities and older people who, now more than ever, bear the brunt of its burden. Yet on an individual level, it’s hard to blame anyone for looking away, especially when, for most Americans, the risk of serious illness is lower now than it has been since early 2020. It’s hard not to look away when each day’s numbers are identically grim, when the devastation becomes metronomic. It’s hard to look each day at a number—491, 382, 494—and experience that number for what it is: the premature ending of so many individual human lives.

    People grow accustomed to these daily tragedies because to not would be too painful. “We are, in a way, victims of our own success,” Steven Taylor, a psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia who has written one book on the psychology of pandemics and is at work on another, told me. Our adaptability is what allowed us to weather the worst of the pandemic, and it is also what’s preventing us from fully escaping the pandemic. We can normalize anything, for better or for worse. “We’re so resilient at adapting to threats,” Taylor said, that we’ve “even habituated to this.”

    Read: America was in an early-death crisis long before COVID

    Where does that leave us? As the nation claws its way out of the pandemic—and reckons with all of its lasting damage—what do we do with the psychic burden of a death toll that might not decline substantially for a long time? Total inurement is not an option. Neither is maximal empathy, the feeling of each death reverberating through you at an emotional level. The challenge, it seems, is to carve out some sort of middle path. To care enough to motivate ourselves to make things better without caring so much that we end up paralyzed.

    Perhaps we will find this path. More likely, we will not. In earlier stages of the pandemic, Americans talked at length about a mythic “new normal.” We were eager to imagine how life might be different—better, even—after a tragedy that focused the world’s attention on disease prevention. Now we’re staring down what that new normal might actually look like. The new normal is accepting 400 COVID deaths a day as The Way Things Are. It’s resigning ourselves so completely to the burden that we forget that it’s a burden at all.

    In the time since you started reading this story, someone in the United States has died of COVID. I could tell you a story about this person. I could tell you that he was a retired elementary-school teacher. That he was planning a trip with his wife to San Diego, because he’d never seen the Pacific Ocean. That he was a long-suffering Knicks fan and baked a hell of a peach cobbler, and when his grandchildren visited, he’d get down on his arthritic knees, and they’d play Connect Four, and he’d always let them win. These details, though hypothetical, might sadden you—or sadden you more, at least, than when I told you simply that since you started this story, one person had died of COVID. But I can’t tell you that story 491 times in one day. And even if I could, could you bear to listen?

    Jacob Stern

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