Where will we be...?

theconversation.com March 30, 2020 11.26am BST Yi Xin/EPA-EFE Where will we be in six months, a year, ten years from now? I lie awake at night wondering what the future holds for my loved ones. My vulnerable friends and relatives. I wonder what will happen to my job, even though I’m luckier than many: I get good sick pay and can work remotely. I am writing this from the UK, where I still have self-employed friends who are staring down the barrel of months without pay, friends who have already lost jobs. The contract that pays 80% of my salary runs out in December. Coronavirus is hitting the economy badly. Will anyone be hiring when I need work? There are a number of possible futures, all dependent on how governments and society respond to coronavirus and its economic aftermath. Hopefully we will use this crisis to rebuild, produce something better and more humane. But we may slide into something worse. I think we can understand our situation – and what might lie in our future – by looking at the political economy of other crises. My research focuses on the fundamentals of the modern economy: global supply chains, wages, and productivity. I look at the way that economic dynamics contribute to challenges like climate change and low levels of mental and physical health among workers. I have argued that we need a very different kind of economics if we are to build socially just and ecologically sound futures. In the face of COVID-19, this has never been more obvious. The responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are simply the amplification of the dynamic that drives other social and ecological crises: the prioritisation of one type of value over others. This dynamic has played a large part in driving global responses to COVID-19. So as responses to the virus evolve, how might our economic futures develop? From an economic perspective, there are four possible futures: a descent into barbarism, a robust state capitalism, a radical state socialism, and a transformation into a big society built on mutual aid. Versions of all of these futures are perfectly possible, if not equally desirable. You can listen to the audio version of this article. What might our future hold? Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez/Unsplash Coronavirus, like climate change, is partly a problem of our economic structure. Although both appear to be “environmental” or “natural” problems, they are socially driven. Yes, climate change is caused by certain gases absorbing heat. But that’s a very shallow explanation. To really understand climate change, we need to understand the social reasons that keep us emitting greenhouse gases. Likewise with COVID-19. Yes, the direct cause is the virus. But managing its effects requires us to understand human behaviour and its wider economic context. Tackling both COVID-19 and climate change is much easier if you reduce nonessential economic activity. For climate change this is because if you produce less stuff, you use less energy, and emit fewer greenhouse gases. The epidemiology of COVID-19 is rapidly evolving. But the core logic is similarly simple. People mix together and spread infections. This happens in households, and in workplaces, and on the journeys people make. Reducing this mixing is likely to reduce person-to-person transmission and lead to fewer cases overall. This article is part of Conversation Insights The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges. Reducing contact between people probably also helps with other control strategies. One common control strategy for infectious disease outbreaks is contact tracing and isolation, where an infected person’s contacts are identified, then isolated to prevent further disease spread. This is most effective when you trace a high percentage of contacts. The fewer contacts a person has, the fewer you have to trace to get to that higher percentage. We can see from Wuhan that social distancing and lockdown measures like this are effective. Political economy is useful in helping us understand why they weren’t introduced earlier in European countries and the US. Lockdown is placing pressure on the global economy. We face a serious recession. This pressure has led some world leaders to call for an easing of lockdown measures. Even as 19 countries sat in a state of lockdown, the US president, Donald Trump, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro called for roll backs in mitigation measures. Trump called for the American economy to get back to normal in three weeks (he has now accepted that social distancing will need to be maintained for much longer). Bolsonaro said: “Our lives have to go on. Jobs must be kept … We must, yes, get back to normal.” In the UK meanwhile, four days before calling for a three-week lockdown, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was only marginally less optimistic, saying that the UK could turn the tide within 12 weeks. Yet even if Johnson is correct, it remains the case that we are living with an economic system that will threaten collapse at the next sign of pandemic. The economics of collapse are fairly straightforward. Businesses exist to make a profit. If they can’t produce, they can’t sell things. This means they won’t make profits, which means they are less able to employ you. Businesses can and do (over short time periods) hold on to workers that they don’t need immediately: they want to be able to meet demand when the economy picks back up again. But, if things start to look really bad, then they won’t. So, more people lose their jobs or fear losing their jobs. So they buy less. And the whole cycle starts again, and we spiral into an economic depression. The City of London, empty. Yui Mok/PA Wire/PA Images In a normal crisis the prescription for solving this is simple. The government spends, and it spends until people start consuming and working again. (This prescription is what the economist John Maynard Keynes is famous for). But normal interventions won’t work here because we don’t want the economy to recover (at least, not immediately). The whole point of the lockdown is to stop people going to work, where they spread the disease. One recent study suggested that lifting lockdown measures in Wuhan (including workplace closures) too soon could see China experience a second peak of cases later in 2020. As the economist James Meadway wrote, the correct COVID-19 response isn’t a wartime economy – with massive upscaling of production. Rather, we need an “anti-wartime” economy and a massive scaling back of production. And if we want to be more resilient to pandemics in the future (and to avoid the worst of climate change) we need a system capable of scaling back production in a way that doesn’t mean loss of livelihood. So what we need is a different economic mindset. We tend to think of the economy as the way we buy and sell things, mainly consumer goods. But this is not what an economy is or needs to be. At its core, the economy is the way we take our resources and turn them into the things we need to live. Looked at this way, we can start to see more opportunities for living differently that allow us to produce less stuff without increasing misery. I and other ecological economists have long been concerned with the question of how you produce less in a socially just way, because the challenge of producing less is also central to tackling climate change. All else equal, the more we produce the more greenhouse gases we emit. So how do you reduce the amount of stuff you make while keeping people in work? Proposals include reducing the length of the working week, or, as some of my recent work has looked at, you could allow people to work more slowly and with less pressure. Neither of these is directly applicable to COVID-19, where the aim is reducing contact rather than output, but the core of the proposals is the same. You have to reduce people’s dependence on a wage to be able to live. We could be in for some long-term changes. EPA-EFE/Mahmoud Khaled The key to understanding responses to COVID-19 is the question of what the economy is for. Currently, the primary aim of the global economy is to facilitate exchanges of money. This is what economists call “exchange value”. The dominant idea of the current system we live in is that exchange value is the same thing as use value. Basically, people will spend money on the things that they want or need, and this act of spending money tells us something about how much they value its “use”. This is why markets are seen as the best way to run society. They allow you to adapt, and are flexible enough to match up productive capacity with use value. What COVID-19 is throwing into sharp relief is just how false our beliefs about markets are. Around the world, governments fear that critical systems will be disrupted or overloaded: supply chains, social care, but principally healthcare. There are lots of contributing factors to this. But let’s take two. First, it is quite hard to make money from many of the most essential societal services. This is in part because a major driver of profits is labour productivity growth: doing more with fewer people. People are a big cost factor in many businesses, especially those that rely on personal interactions, like healthcare. Consequently, productivity growth in the healthcare sector tends to be lower than the rest of the economy, so its costs go up faster than average. Second, jobs in many critical services aren’t those that tend to be highest valued in society. Many of the best paid jobs only exist to facilitate exchanges; to make money. They serve no wider purpose to society: they are what the anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”. Yet because they make lots of money we have lots of consultants, a huge advertising industry and a massive financial sector. Meanwhile, we have a crisis in health and social care, where people are often forced out of useful jobs they enjoy, because these jobs don’t pay them enough to live. Bullshit jobs are innumerable. Jesus Sanz/Shutterstock.com The fact that so many people work pointless jobs is partly why we are so ill prepared to respond to COVID-19. The pandemic is highlighting that many jobs are not essential, yet we lack sufficient key workers to respond when things go bad. People are compelled to work pointless jobs because in a society where exchange value is the guiding principle of the economy, the basic goods of life are mainly available through markets. This means you have to buy them, and to buy them you need an income, which comes from a job. The other side of this coin is that the most radical (and effective) responses that we are seeing to the COVID-19 outbreak challenge the dominance of markets and exchange value. Around the world governments are taking actions that three months ago looked impossible. In Spain, private hospitals have been nationalised. In the UK, the prospect of nationalising various modes of transport has become very real. And France has stated its readiness to nationalise large businesses. Likewise, we are seeing the breakdown of labour markets. Countries like Denmark and the UK are providing people with an income in order to stop them from going to work. This is an essential part of a successful lockdown. These measures are far from perfect. Nonetheless, it is a shift from the principle that people have to work in order to earn their income, and a move towards the idea that people deserve to be able to live even if they cannot work. This reverses the dominant trends of the last 40 years. Over this time, markets and exchange values have been seen as the best way of running an economy. Consequently, public systems have come under increasing pressures to marketise, to be run as though they were businesses who have to make money. Likewise, workers have become more and more exposed to the market – zero-hours contracts and the gig economy have removed the layer of protection from market fluctuations that long term, stable, employment used to offer. Deliveroo workers from Belgium and Netherlands protest against their working conditions, January 2018. Stephanie Lecocq/EPA-EFE COVID-19 appears to be reversing this trend, taking healthcare and labour goods out of the market and putting it into the hands of the state. States produce for many reasons. Some good and some bad. But unlike markets, they do not have to produce for exchange value alone. These changes give me hope. They give us the chance to save many lives. They even hint at the possibility of longer term change that makes us happier and helps us tackle climate change. But why did it take us so long to get here? Why were many countries so ill-prepared to slowdown production? The answer lies in a recent World Health Organisation report: they did not have the right “mindset”. There has been a broad economic consensus for 40 years. This has limited the ability of politicians and their advisers to see cracks in the system, or imagine alternatives. This mindset is driven by two linked beliefs: The market is what delivers a good quality of life, so it must be protected The market will always return to normal after short periods of crisis These views are common to many Western countries. But they are strongest in the UK and the US, both of which have appeared to be badly prepared to respond to COVID-19. In the UK, attendees at a private engagement reportedly summarised the Prime Minister’s most senior aide’s approach to COVID-19 as “herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”. The government has denied this, but if real, it’s not surprising. At a government event early in the pandemic, a senior civil servant said to me: “Is it worth the economic disruption? If you look at the treasury valuation of a life, probably not.” This kind of view is endemic in a particular elite class. It is well represented by a Texas official who argued that many elderly people would gladly die rather than see the US sink into economic depression. This view endangers many vulnerable people (and not all vulnerable people are elderly), and, as I have tried to lay out here, it is a false choice. One of the things the COVID-19 crisis could be doing, is expanding that economic imagination. As governments and citizens take steps that three months ago seemed impossible, our ideas about how the world works could change rapidly. Let us look at where this re-imagining could take us. To help us visit the future, I’m going to use a technique from the field of futures studies. You take two factors you think will be important in driving the future, and you imagine what will happen under different combinations of those factors. The factors I want to take are value and centralisation. Value refers to whatever is the guiding principle of our economy. Do we use our resources to maximise exchanges and money, or do we use them to maximise life? Centralisation refers to the ways that things are organised, either by of lots of small units or by one big commanding force. We can organise these factors into a grid, which can then be populated with scenarios. So we can think about what might happen if we try to respond to the coronavirus with the four extreme combinations: 1) State capitalism: centralised response, prioritising exchange value 2) Barbarism: decentralised response prioritising exchange value 3) State socialism: centralised response, prioritising the protection of life 4) Mutual aid: decentralised response prioritising the protection of life. The four futures. © Simon Mair State capitalism is the dominant response we are seeing across the world right now. Typical examples are the UK, Spain and Denmark. The state capitalist society continues to pursue exchange value as the guiding light of the economy. But it recognises that markets in crisis require support from the state. Given that many workers cannot work because they are ill, and fear for their lives, the state steps in with extended welfare. It also enacts massive Keynesian stimulus by extending credit and making direct payments to businesses. The expectation here is that this will be for a short period. The primary function of the steps being taken is to allow as many businesses as possible to keep on trading. In the UK, for example, food is still distributed by markets (though the government has relaxed competition laws). Where workers are supported directly, this is done in ways that seek to minimise disruption of normal labour market functioning. So, for example, as in the UK, payments to workers have to be applied for and distributed by employers. And the size of payments is made on the basis of the exchange value a worker usually creates in the market, rather than the usefulness of their work. Could this be a successful scenario? Possibly, but only if COVID-19 proves controllable over a short period. As full lockdown is avoided to maintain market functioning, transmission of infection is still likely to continue. In the UK, for instance, non-essential construction is still continuing, leaving workers mixing on building sites. But limited state intervention will become increasingly hard to maintain if death tolls rise. Increased illness and death will provoke unrest and deepen economic impacts, forcing the state to take more and more radical actions to try to maintain market functioning. This is the bleakest scenario. Barbarism is the future if we continue to rely on exchange value as our guiding principle and yet refuse to extend support to those who get locked out of markets by illness or unemployment. It describes a situation that we have not yet seen. Businesses fail and workers starve because there are no mechanisms in place to protect them from the harsh realities of the market. Hospitals are not supported by extraordinary measures, and so become overwhelmed. People die. Barbarism is ultimately an unstable state that ends in ruin or a transition to one of the other grid sections after a period of political and social devastation. Could this happen? The concern is that either it could happen by mistake during the pandemic, or by intention after the pandemic peaks. The mistake is if a government fails to step in in a big enough way during the worst of the pandemic. Support might be offered to businesses and households, but if this isn’t enough to prevent market collapse in the face of widespread illness, chaos would ensue. Hospitals might be sent extra funds and people, but if it’s not enough, ill people will be turned away in large numbers. Potentially just as consequential is the possibility of massive austerity after the pandemic has peaked and governments seek to return to “normal”. This has been threatened in Germany. This would be disastrous. Not least because defunding of critical services during austerity has impacted the ability of countries to respond to this pandemic. The subsequent failure of the economy and society would trigger political and social unrest, leading to a failed state and the collapse of both state and community welfare systems. State socialism describes the first of the futures we could see with a cultural shift that places a different kind of value at the heart of the economy. This is the future we arrive at with an extension of the measures we are currently seeing in the UK, Spain and Denmark. The key here is that measures like nationalisation of hospitals and payments to workers are seen not as tools to protect markets, but a way to protect life itself. In such a scenario, the state steps in to protect the parts of the economy that are essential to life: the production of food, energy and shelter for instance, so that the basic provisions of life are no longer at the whim of the market. The state nationalises hospitals, and makes housing freely available. Finally, it provides all citizens with a means of accessing various goods – both basics and any consumer goods we are able to produce with a reduced workforce. Citizens no longer rely on employers as intermediaries between them and the basic materials of life. Payments are made to everyone directly and are not related to the exchange value they create. Instead, payments are the same to all (on the basis that we deserve to be able to live, simply because we are alive), or they are based on the usefulness of the work. Supermarket workers, delivery drivers, warehouse stackers, nurses, teachers, and doctors are the new CEOs. It’s possible that state socialism emerges as a consequence of attempts at state capitalism and the effects of a prolonged pandemic. If deep recessions happen and there is disruption in supply chains such that demand cannot be rescued by the kind of standard Keynesian policies we are seeing now (printing money, making loans easier to get and so on), the state may take over production. There are risks to this approach – we must be careful to avoid authoritarianism. But done well, this may be our best hope against an extreme COVID-19 outbreak. A strong state able to marshal the resources to protect the core functions of economy and society. Mutual aid is the second future in which we adopt the protection of life as the guiding principle of our economy. But, in this scenario, the state does not take a defining role. Rather, individuals and small groups begin to organise support and care within their communities. The risks with this future is that small groups are unable to rapidly mobilise the kind of resources needed to effectively increase healthcare capacity, for instance. But mutual aid could enable more effective transmission prevention, by building community support networks that protect the vulnerable and police isolation rules. The most ambitious form of this future sees new democratic structures arise. Groupings of communities that are able to mobilise substantial resources with relative speed. People coming together to plan regional responses to stop disease spread and (if they have the skills) to treat patients. Volunteers shop for groceries during the lockdown, in Arese, Italy, March 24 2020. Sergio Pontorieri/EPA-EFE This kind of scenario could emerge from any of the others. It is a possible way out of barbarism, or state capitalism, and could support state socialism. We know that community responses were central to tackling the West African Ebola outbreak. And we already see the roots of this future today in the groups organising care packages and community support. We can see this as a failure of state responses. Or we can see it as a pragmatic, compassionate societal response to an unfolding crisis. These visions are extreme scenarios, caricatures, and likely to bleed into one another. My fear is the descent from state capitalism into barbarism. My hope is a blend of state socialism and mutual aid: a strong, democratic state that mobilises resources to build a stronger health system, prioritises protecting the vulnerable from the whims of the market and responds to and enables citizens to form mutual aid groups rather than working meaningless jobs. What hopefully is clear is that all these scenarios leave some grounds for fear, but also some for hope. COVID-19 is highlighting serious deficiencies in our existing system. An effective response to this is likely to require radical social change. I have argued it requires a drastic move away from markets and the use of profits as the primary way of organising an economy. The upside of this is the possibility that we build a more humane system that leaves us more resilient in the face of future pandemics and other impending crises like climate change. Social change can come from many places and with many influences. A key task for us all is demanding that emerging social forms come from an ethic that values care, life, and democracy. The central political task in this time of crisis is living and (virtually) organising around those values

COVID Antibodies “fall rapidly after infection”

ADVERTISEMENT Covid: Antibodies 'fall rapidly after infection' By James Gallagher Health and science correspondent Published2 days ago Related Topics Coronavirus pandemic Person in facemask IMAGE COPYRIGHTGETTY IMAGES Levels of protective antibodies in people wane "quite rapidly" after coronavirus infection, say researchers. Antibodies are a key part of our immune defences and stop the virus from getting inside the body's cells. The Imperial College London team found the number of people testing positive for antibodies has fallen by 26% between June and September. They say immunity appears to be fading and there is a risk of catching the virus multiple times. The news comes as figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the number of Covid-19 deaths in the UK rose by 60% in the week of 16 October. The ONS figures suggest there have now been more than 60,000 deaths involving Covid-19 in the UK. More than 350,000 people in England have taken an antibody test as part of the REACT-2 study so far. In the first round of testing, at the end of June and the beginning of July, about 60 in 1,000 people had detectable antibodies. But in the latest set of tests, in September, only 44 per 1,000 people were positive. It suggests the number of people with antibodies fell by more than a quarter between summer and autumn. How close are we to a coronavirus vaccine? How worried should we be about Covid? "Immunity is waning quite rapidly, we're only three months after our first [round of tests] and we're already showing a 26% decline in antibodies," said Prof Helen Ward, one of the researchers. The fall was greater in those over 65, compared with younger age groups, and in those without symptoms compared with those with full-blown Covid-19. The number of healthcare workers with antibodies remained relatively high, which the researchers suggest may be due to regular exposure to the virus. Antibody IMAGE COPYRIGHTGETTY IMAGES image captionY-shaped antibodies stick to the surface of viruses to stop them infecting the body's cells Antibodies stick to the surface of the coronavirus to stop it invading our body's cells and attacking the rest of the immune system. Exactly what the antibody drop means for immunity is still uncertain. There are other parts of the immune system, such as T-cells, which may also play a role, directly killing infected host cells and calling to other immune cells to help out. However, the researchers warn antibodies tend to be highly predictive of who is protected. Prof Wendy Barclay said: "We can see the antibodies and we can see them declining and we know antibodies on their own are quite protective. "On the balance of evidence, I would say it would look as if immunity declines away at the same rate as antibodies decline away, and that this is an indication of waning immunity." There are four other seasonal human coronaviruses, which we catch multiple times in our lives. They cause common cold symptoms and we can be reinfected every six to 12 months. Many people have mild or asymptomatic coronavirus infections. Two out of every three people who tested positive for coronavirus in a study published today by the Office for National Statistics experienced none of the main symptoms of coronavirus. Separate figures from the ONS today showed that Covid-19 deaths in the UK increased from just under 500 to just over 750 in the week to 16 October, pushing the total number of deaths 6% over the level expected for this time of year. The ONS figures suggest that more than 60,000 deaths in the UK have involved coronavirus so far this year. By 16 October, more than 59,000 of these deaths had happened and, since then, a further 1,200 people have died within 28 days of a positive test for coronavirus. Ninety per cent of these deaths happened before the end of June. There have been very few confirmed cases of people getting Covid twice. However, the researchers warn this may be due to immunity only just starting to fade since the peak infection rates of March and April. The hope is the second infection will be milder than the first, even if immunity does decline, as the body should have an "immune memory" of the first encounter and know how to fight back. The researchers say their findings do not scupper hopes of a vaccine, which may prove more effective than a real infection. One of the researchers, Prof Graham Cooke, said: "The big picture is after the first wave, the great majority of the country didn't have evidence of protective immunity. "The need for a vaccine is still very large, the data doesn't change that." Professor Paul Elliott, director of the REACT-2 study, said it would be wrong to draw firm conclusions from the study about the impact of a vaccine. He said: "The vaccine response may behave differently to the response to natural infection." But he said it was possible that some people might need follow-up booster doses of any vaccine that became available to top up fading immunity over time. Banner image reading 'more about coronavirus' LOCKDOWN LOOK-UP: The rules in your area THREE TIERS: How do latest rules affect you? SOCIAL DISTANCING: Can I give my friends a hug? PAY-PACKET SUPPORT: What do chancellor's plans mean for wages? Banner Commenting on the findings, Prof Jonathan Ball from the University of Nottingham said: "This study confirms suspicions that antibody responses - especially in vulnerable elderly populations - decrease over time." However, he said it was still important to get a better overall view of "what protective immunity looks like". Prof Eleanor Riley, from the University of Edinburgh, said it would be "premature" to assume immunity did not last, but "the data do lend weight to the concern that antibodies induced by natural infection may be short-lived, as is the case for other seasonal coronaviruses."

What if carbon Removal became the new Big Oil?

If carbon removal became the new Big Oil What if carbon removal becomes the new Big Oil? One giant industry emerges as another declines. An imagined scenario from 2050 The World If Jul 4th 2020 edition Jul 4th 2020 Editor’s note: Each of these climate-change articles is fiction, but grounded in historical fact and real science. The year, concentration of carbon dioxide and average temperature rise (above pre-industrial average) are shown for each one. The scenarios do not present a unified narrative but are set in different worlds, with a range of climate sensitivities, on different emissions pathways It is hard to envisage now, but the Permian basin in Texas and New Mexico used to be America’s biggest source of crude oil. At its peak it accounted for more than half of national production. Today the steel pumpjacks have been replaced by direct-air capture (dac) units. Powered by the sun, the machines suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and pump it into the sedimentary rock formations below. There is an elegant symmetry in the way the carbon is being pumped back into the ground. Big Oil has given way to Big Suck. The transformation of the Permian region illustrates an industrial shift that began in the early 2020s. The once-mighty oil industry, in its old form, has withered. From its husk a thriving new industry has emerged. Carbon-removal firms now number among the world’s biggest. Alongside big cuts in emissions, their technology has helped stabilise the climate and reduce emissions to net-zero. The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is even beginning to drop as carbon-removal efforts are expanded. At the same time, the industry has reshaped geopolitics—and is creating its own set of environmental impacts. The trouble for Big Oil started in 2014, when booming American production helped spur a plunge in prices. The covid-19 pandemic of 2020 triggered a short, sharp contraction in demand. Longer-term decline was unavoidable. Internal combustion engines in road vehicles, which made up more than two-fifths of oil use in 2020, were starting to give way to electric motors. Further pressure came from the rise in carbon taxes, as governments, cash-strapped after covid-19 bail-outs, sought new streams of revenue. The oil-price spike of the late 2020s simply reinforced the trend towards other forms of energy. Firms that built the kit used in oil production, such as refineries and pipelines, were the first to go bust as investments in new assets ground to a halt. Next up were companies that struggled to divest themselves of pricey oilfields. As oil-producing firms fought for survival, one strategy was consolidation through mergers. In the end, some supermajors ran down their reserves, halted oil investment and were run for cash. By contrast, national oil companies with low production costs, such as Saudi Aramco, kept pumping. But the most innovative giants, sensing an existential threat, realised that if they were to continue supplying oil and gas, they would need to capture and store the carbon emissions they produced, too. By the late 2020s, two methods had emerged as the most effective ways to do this. One was dac, which involves trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by sucking air through an absorbent material. The other was “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage” (beccs), where the absorption is done by trees and crops as they grow. That biomass is then burned for energy and the resulting carbon dioxide is captured. Either way, it is stored underground, permanently removing it from the atmosphere. Before it was brought into being, carbon-capture technology was assumed to be very expensive—one early study of dac suggested costs of $600 a tonne or more. When entrepreneurial start-ups tried it out in the early 2020s, though, it came in at about a third of that. The costs of beccs were never as high, because capturing carbon dioxide from a power-station chimney, where the concentration is about 10%, is inherently more efficient that capturing it from ambient air, where the concentration is just 0.045%. That said, cost estimates for beccs were—and to some extent remain—vexed by the question of how to account for the opportunity cost of the vast plantations it requires. Oil companies already had expertise in putting fluids back underground as well as taking them out: it is how fracking is done. They also had experience in mounting operations on truly large scales—which, when applied to carbon-capture, brought costs down yet further. Increasing the size of an industry by a factor of 50, as happened in the 2020s, gets you a lot of learning by doing. Most important, carbon removal allowed them to continue pumping oil. Their new business model was selling fuels in markets in which there was no feasible alternative, such as long-haul air travel, at “net-zero” prices which included the certified capture of an amount of carbon equivalent to that given off by the fuel’s combustion. It was called “carbon leasing”: the oil company lent the customer fresh new carbon and took old, used carbon back in return. International politics helped. At the cop27 climate conference, in 2022, world leaders finally managed to agree on the creation of an international carbon market in which carbon-removal credits could be traded. This let companies sell removal capacity they did not need for carbon-leasing deals and buy spare capacity when their removal systems let them down. At the same time, the Organisation for Carbon Accounting (oca), a global monitoring body, was spun out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Its real-time audits of carbon-removal facilities gave the industry credibility. The astonishingly rapid scale-up in production—outpacing the construction of railways or power grids in previous eras—was due in part to smart industrial design. Equipment for dac was tailored to existing industrial know-how: that used in car plants, gas-turbine factories, and mining and water-treatment. The beccs industry, for its part, got a boost from genetic modification, in the form of new strains of trees and crops that absorb more carbon dioxide as they grow. The giant carbon-removal utilities which emerged now pull around ten gigatonnes of carbon dioxide out of the skies each year; along with their carbon-leasing businesses and the electricity generated by their beccs plants, that gives carbon-removal companies a collective turnover of more than $1trn. Back into the ground The emergence of this new industry has had far-reaching ramifications, as some locations are better suited to carbon removal than others. Three conditions are needed: storage, space and low-cost power. Storage was the easiest to crack. Many countries have locations suitable for burying carbon dioxide, such as sedimentary or basaltic rock formations. For dac a more important factor was the continuous availability of cheap energy. In some cases this meant building dac plants by geothermal power stations, such as in Iceland. But most large-scale dac facilities depend on solar power, the cheapest energy source. dac plants also need a lot of space. An early estimate, made in 2019 by Howard J. Herzog of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was that removing 1m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from the air would require a facility ten metres high, 3-5 metres wide and 5km long. The technology has become more compact since then, but it is still land-hungry. So today most dac plants are in deserts, where sun and space are plentiful. North Africa is one hotspot, along with Australia and America’s southern states. Space is needed to grow fuel for beccs too, as are weather conditions ripe for growing biomass. Countries in the tropics, notably Indonesia and Tanzania, emerged as big beccs hubs. All this has tilted the scales of geopolitics. Some oil-rich countries, such as Venezuela, have suffered, as oil that is costly and dirty to extract remains below ground. China established a national giant, Sinodac, and solidified its role as the world’s manufacturing hub for batteries and solar panels. Other countries, such as Brazil, Indonesia and Tanzania, gained political clout as their carbon-removal sectors boomed. Money from thin air Carbon removal affected the corporate world, too. Even though the planet has now achieved net-zero emissions, individual companies still emit carbon dioxide and buy carbon credits, in the form of negative emissions, from carbon-removal firms. Unexpected price increases can hit profits in the still-carbonised sectors. That was the case in 2047 when a forest fire near a beccs plant in Kalimantan, Indonesia’s slice of Borneo, destroyed a huge number of trees, which act like temporary storage units for carbon dioxide until it is captured at a beccs plant. The resulting release of carbon dioxide made a big dent in the world’s carbonremoval capacity. Prices shot up and some companies were badly stung (at least those that had failed to hedge in the removals futures market). DeltaAmericanBlueCircle went bankrupt. The removal industry also finds itself under close scrutiny from environmental groups. One concern is just how securely carbon dioxide is stored underground. The role of the industry in the Memphis earthquake of 2042 remains hotly contested. Carbonremoval bosses dismiss these criticisms as nitpicking. Now that the climate has stabilised, they grumble, some environmental ngos are overstaffed, overfunded and have little else to do. A larger headache for bosses is navigating the long-term future of their industry. Large-scale carbon removal will be needed for a few decades yet, after world leaders pledged at cop50 in 2045 to bring atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels down further. But no agreement has been made as to how far. If and when governments agree they are happy for the concentration of carbon-dioxide to remain stable, the growth of the carbonremovals industry will stall and may go into reverse. One route for expansion is cannibalisation. Rivalry between the beccs and dac camps is growing. Both are spending more on marketing and lobbyists. They want to persuade consumers and politicians that their technology is superior, and that humanity’s aim should be to return the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide. Despite these efforts, analysts expect the sector to shrink and consolidate in the coming years. That may favour the largest carbon-removal outfits, several of which are also oil producers. The very firms that prospered by taking carbon out of the ground may profit the most from putting it back. ■

By reimagining our relationship with time...

(Image credit: Maria Medem) By Roman Krznaric 28th October 2020 By reimagining our relationship with time – and coming to terms with death – we can improve our existence, argues Roman Krznaric. Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT “The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips,” wrote the Mexican essayist and poet Octavio Paz in the 1950s. But for his fellow countryman – who talks about it and celebrates it in the annual Day of the Dead festival – “it is one of his favourite toys and his most steadfast love”. More like this: - What it really means to ‘seize the day’ - The book that changed Japan’s image - Why embracing change is the key to a good life This was probably an exaggeration, even back then, but it raises the question of the role that death plays in the art of living. Western culture has developed multiple mechanisms for shielding us from the reality of our mortality. The advertising industry tells us that we will remain forever young, we avoid speaking about death with our children, and we shunt the elderly away in care homes out of sight and out of mind. Frida Kahlo painted her 1943 self-portrait Thinking About Death while she was bedridden with ill health; it has been interpreted as viewing death as a path to another form of life Frida Kahlo painted her 1943 self-portrait Thinking About Death while she was bedridden with ill health; it has been interpreted as viewing death as a path to another form of life We must learn to confront the terror of death and develop the courage to explore how awareness of our mortality can help us navigate the now. Just think of Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait Thinking About Death, which has a macabre skull plastered on her forehead. Or consider the pithy wisdom of Albert Camus: “Come to terms with death. Thereafter anything is possible.” But coming to terms with death is easier said than done. One of the secrets for doing so is not to spend hours contemplating visions of the Grim Reaper, but to reimagine our relationship with time itself. Here are three ideas for doing so that offer the unexpected prospect of existential sustenance. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a judge on his deathbed finds comfort in a servant, the only person around him who does not fear death (Credit: Alamy) In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a judge on his deathbed finds comfort in a servant, the only person around him who does not fear death (Credit: Alamy) The dinner party of the afterlife In Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a St Petersburg judicial prosecutor who has dedicated his career to rising through the legal ranks and helping his family achieve a respectable place in bourgeois society lies on his deathbed, aged just 45, wondering if he has wasted his life on superficial pursuits. “What if my whole life has really been wrong?” he reflects bitterly. If we project ourselves to the end of our life, how would we feel about it looking back? The story offers a useful thought experiment. If we project ourselves to the end of our life, when we are lying on our own deathbed, how would we feel about it looking back? Would we feel proud of our achievements? Would we feel that we had sucked the marrow from life? Or might we, like Ivan Ilyich, be filled with regret? The point, of course, is that such reflections can alter how we choose to act in the here and now. My favourite approach to making this temporal journey to the end of our lives is a visioning exercise I call ‘The dinner party of the afterlife’. Imagine yourself at a dinner party in the afterlife. Also present are all the other ‘yous’ who you could have been if you had made different choices. The you who studied harder for exams. The you who walked out on your first job and followed your dream. The you who became an alcoholic, and another you who nearly died in a car accident. The you who put more time into making your marriage work. You then look around at these alternative selves. Some of them are impressive, while others seem smug and annoying. A few make you feel inadequate and lazy. So which of them are you curious to meet and talk to? Which would you rather avoid? Which do you envy? Out of these many yous, is there one who you would rather be – or become? With patterns revealing family history, moko face tattoos are a Māori visual language that forms a connection with ancestors (Credit: Alamy) With patterns revealing family history, moko face tattoos are a Māori visual language that forms a connection with ancestors (Credit: Alamy) The great chain of life A second way to make sense of our existence is to draw on the wisdom of indigenous cultures whose worldviews dissolve the barriers between life and death, offering a sense of transcendence. There is an inspiring Māori concept known as whakapapa, which is their word for ‘lineage’ or ‘genealogy’. It is the idea that we are all connected in a great chain of life that links the present back to the generations of the past and forward to all the generations going on into the future. It allows us to recognise that the living, the dead and the unborn are all here in the room with us. And we need to respect their interests as much as our own It so happens that the light is shining on this moment, here and now, and the idea of whakapapa helps us shine the light more broadly, so we can see everyone throughout the landscape of time. It allows us to recognise that the living, the dead and the unborn are all here in the room with us. And we need to respect their interests as much as our own. Making this imaginative leap is challenging, especially for those of us immersed in a highly individualistic Western consumer culture. But we can begin to do so with help from another thought experiment that involves journeying through time. Think of a child you know and care about – perhaps a godchild, a niece, or one of your own children or grandchildren. Now imagine them at their 90th birthday party, surrounded by family and friends. Picture their aged face, look at what is happening in the world outside the window. And now imagine someone comes over and places a tiny baby into their arms: it’s their first great-grandchild. They look into the baby’s eyes and ask themselves, “What would this child need to survive and thrive into the years and decades ahead?” Sit with that thought for a moment. Then recognise that this tiny baby could be alive well into the 22nd Century. Their future isn’t science fiction. It’s an intimate family fact, just a couple of steps away from your own life. If we care about that baby’s life, we need to care about all life: all the people it will need for support; the air it will breathe; the whole web of life. This kind of thought experiment can help us transcend the limits of our own lifespan and get in touch with the wisdom of whakapapa. We are all part of the great chain of life. And by recognising our place in it, we start extending our sense of what constitutes ‘the now’, shifting from a now of seconds and minutes and hours to a longer now of decades, centuries and even millennia. A now that gives us a sense of responsibility for the legacies we leave for the generations of tomorrow, while respecting the generations of the past. The 2006 Studio Ghibli animation Tales from Earthsea was directed by Gorō Miyazaki, and based on Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series (Credit: Alamy) The 2006 Studio Ghibli animation Tales from Earthsea was directed by Gorō Miyazaki, and based on Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series (Credit: Alamy) Journeys into deep time We can also rethink our relationship with death by taking the perspective of ‘deep time,’ recognising that humankind, and our own lives, are just an eyeblink in the cosmic story. As the writer John McPhee put it, “Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One strike of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.” But remember, too, that just as there is deep time behind us, there is also deep time ahead. Any creatures that might still exist in five billion years when our sun dies will be as different from us as we are from the first single-celled bacteria. Deep time enables us to grasp our destructive potential: in just two centuries of industrial civilisation, with our ecological blindness and deadly technologies, we have endangered a world that took billions of years to evolve. Don’t we have a responsibility to preserve the life-giving potential of the Earth for the generations to come? At the same time, situating ourselves in the grand expanse of time helps put our mortality in perspective. We are just a passing moment in a far bigger, longer narrative. We can get there with the help of visionary science fiction writers like NK Jemisin or Ursula Le Guin, who enable our minds to travel across the aeons While deep time is elusive, its wonders are within our grasp. We can get there with the help of visionary science fiction writers like NK Jemisin or Ursula Le Guin, who enable our minds to travel across the aeons. Or try hunting for fossils, and holding a 200-million-year-old ammonite in your hand. Or gaze at stars whose light left their source before humans even evolved. Or make a pilgrimage to an ancient tree and, as novelist Richard Powers expressed it so beautifully, experience life “at the speed of wood”. As we busily swipe our phones and click the ‘Buy Now’ button, let us pause a moment and open our imaginations to a longer now. That is how we begin the journey beyond death. That is how we become good ancestors.

An AI EcoDesign Pandemic Paradise

An AI EcoDesign Pandemic Paradise: Distributed Proximities, Posturban Landscapes and Reconstructed Ruins. Peter R. Diprose and Robert D. Hotten Acadia 2020 Conference: Distributed Proximities “When the wattle-blooms are drooping in the sombre she-oak glade, And the breathless land is lying in a swoon, He leaves his work a moment, leaning lightly on his spade, And he hears the bell-bird chime the Austral noon. The parakeets are silent in the gum-tree by the creek; The ferny grove is sunshine-steeped and still; But the dew will gem the myrtle in the twilight ere he seek His little lonely cabin on the hill.” Service, R W. The Younger Son. 1. The Current Situation: A Pandemic Paradise. New Zealand is currently in an unusual situation when compared with the rest of the world. Due to to its geographical remoteness, being surrounded on all sides by thousands of miles of ocean, New Zealand has very few cases of coronavirus. Body, G. NZ Herald, 16 May 2020 2. The Problem: Ecological Destruction, Isolation and Alienation A: Isolation Aside from the very real economic hardships that will be endured by many, we identify physical distancing (during and after lockdown) as a serious problem to be dealt with. The individual isolation, the fear and rising paranoia associated with the pandemic, and uncertainties over the future are some of the evolving issues. Isolation within small urban housing/apartments distances individuals/families from natural environments, removes spontaneity of shared landscape experience, and the spectacle of theatrical urban space. Diprose & Hotten, An AI EcoDesign Pandemic Paradise, Acadia 2020 1 The need for authenticity of experience and a desire for travel has been denied and continues to be denied in the form of international travel given border closures and fear of the virus. We have shut ourselves off from the rest of the world. B: Ecological Destruction & C: Alienation Isolation combined with the separation from vocation and friends has provided time for introspection and a reassessment of values with its associated social disruption. Problems that have been previously dismissed have been aired post-covid. Examples of this include the environmental debate that has been brought sharply into contrast with months of a low/no movement economy providing clear skies over previously polluted cities. Secondly, entrenched inequalities have come to the fore, highlighting persistent marginalisation and alienation of many. Diprose & Hotten, An AI EcoDesign Pandemic Paradise, Acadia 2020 2 3. Manifesto of Digital Solutions: Posturban Landscapes, Contested Hybrid Landscapes, Distributed Proximities, AI Eco Design and Reconstructed Ruins. For oft when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye ...And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. Wordsworth, W. 1807 In our view potentially useful post-covid19 digital solutions that warrant further research include the following: • 1. Posturban Landscapes: Virtual and hybrid digital landscapes: To counter isolation and fear, providing spectacle, novelty or stillness. (Problem A) • 2. Distributed Proximities: To counter commercial and intellectual isolation. (Problem A) • 3. Distributed Proximities: To provide global collaborative initiatives in ecological design through supercomputing. (Problem B) • 4. Distributed Proximities: In the form of artificial intelligence assisted design that blurs mechano-human design agency in environmental design. (Problem B) • 5. GIS/Hybrid landscapes: To counter alienation and inform the observer, revealing political and historical information with contested landscapes. (Problem C) Diprose & Hotten, An AI EcoDesign Pandemic Paradise, Acadia 2020 3 1. Posturban Landscapes: Virtual and hybrid digital landscapes: To counter isolation and fear, providing spectacle, novelty or stillness. (Problem A) Virtual world in terms of the Dominant Social Paradigm pre covid: Vicarious Escapism • Rather than the vicarious escapism offered by negative current mediums (Television, film computer games) • specifically used in an attempt to reclaim lost passion and desire while maintaining a state of ignorance and/conscious avoidance of the ecological problem. Virtual world in terms of a rise New Environmental Paradigm post covid: Intentional Eco-escapism: •Create virtual worlds through which desire can be fulfilled while consciously avoiding actual degradation of the environment or the human spirit •For example - Virtual 3D Architectural follies and/or urban environments, virtual communities. Actual world in terms of the New Environmental Paradigm post covid: Ecological Post Urban space •Designers need to Refocus on the formless aspects of urban design - • Recapture actual community spirit and desire, and those places that reject unbridled consumption. • For example Art Spaces and public gardens - Need for spectacle – novelty satisfied through vicarious landscapes. Irwin Garden at the Getty Center Los Angeles, Diprose & Hotten, An AI EcoDesign Pandemic Paradise, Acadia 2020 4 - Need for stillness and curiosity. - Ryoen-ji, Kyoto - Virtual ruins. Agora of the Italians, Delos Diprose & Hotten, An AI EcoDesign Pandemic Paradise, Acadia 2020 5 - Virtual wilderness The Olgas (Kata Tjuta) “To approach the problem “of the new”, then, one must compete the following four requirements: redefine the traditional concept of the object; reintroduce and radicalise the theory of time; conceive of “movement” as a first principle and not merely a special, dismissible case; and embed these latter three within an all-encompassing theory and politics of the “event”.” Kwinter, S. 2002, Architectures of Time, p11. 2. Distributed Proximities: To counter commercial and intellectual isolation (Problem A) The film and animation studios have shown how distributed proximities can utilised post-covid. An example of this is described in the link below. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/23/how-hollywood-movie-making-becomes-virtual-after- coronavirus.html Weta Workshop. Web page -> Design Diprose & Hotten, An AI EcoDesign Pandemic Paradise, Acadia 2020 6 Distributed Proximities: 3 & 4 3. Distributed Proximities: To provide global collaborative initiatives in ecological design through supercomputing. (Problem B) “Entropic and climatic stasis requires humanity to: Reduce carbon uptake, nitrate use, and natural forest destruction... Commission an open input independent global good supercomputing facility; collate, interpret, trend, forecast, update and disseminate all manner of biosphere information and analysis.” Core Adaptation Markers, Page 151 Riddell, Resilience Adaptation Sustainability, Blackwell, 2014. Combined with 4. Distributed Proximities: In the form of artificial intelligence assisted design that blurs mechano-human design agency in environmental design. (Problem B) We propose that we utilise artificial intelligence that could convert architectural norms into appropriately designed forms, and (with some human intervention) simultaneously compare these to mores of cultural landscape, meaning, and theories of art and architecture. A design-morphing machine is proposed within a virtual augmented reality environment as a means of interactively investigating a mosaic of form possibilities. AI Eco Design provides a rich field of opportunities and options that blur current definitions of design agency. It is critical that the design process be assisted by big data and AI to go beyond the ordinariness, and quotidian results such as new urbanism. Analogue example of new design syntheses that could be assisted by an AI Eco Designer. AD HOCISM: AI ECO DESIGN Rural Hillside Town Plan, Auckland, New Zealand, reconstructed ruins from medieval hillside town planning. We suggest that the only way to quickly achieve ad hoc hyper complexity of a reinterpreted medieval town would be through the enhanced agency of AI Eco Design and machine learning design algorithms. Sustainable town, Rennes, France Diprose & Hotten, An AI EcoDesign Pandemic Paradise, Acadia 2020 7 Reference Images and Proposed sustainable village: Rural Auckland 2018 5. GIS/Hybrid landscapes: To counter alienation and inform the observer, revealing political and historical information with contested landscapes. (Problem C) Virtual/Hybrid landscape overlays could inform the visitors to the site, of the hidden and discarded histories associated with those sites. An example of an historical narrative / site is documented in the link below. Image from: NZ Wars: Stories of Waitara, RNZ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW20zpWlCC8 “This analytical model – based on developmental pathways, dynamical interactions, singular points, and qualitative movements in abstract, sometimes multidimensional space – arguably furnishes a far richer theory of site than most currently employed orthodox aesthetic or architectural practice.” Kwinter, S. 2002, Architectures of Time, MIT Press p28 Conclusion. We identify that the elements of this manifesto would operate simultaneously. A collection of collaborations, as distributed proximities in our pandemic paradise. The whole life ... in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. (Debord, Guy 1995 The Society of the Spectacle Zone Books, p5) Diprose & Hotten, An AI EcoDesign Pandemic Paradise, Acadia 2020 8

How the pandemic might play out in 2021 and beyond

NEWS FEATURE 05 AUGUST 2020 How the pandemic might play out in 2021 and beyond This coronavirus is here for the long haul — here’s what scientists predict for the next months and years. Megan Scudellari Illustration of a line of people walking through a jungle that is filled with Sars-CoV-2 virus. Illustration by Ana Kova PDF version June 2021. The world has been in pandemic mode for a year and a half. The virus continues to spread at a slow burn; intermittent lockdowns are the new normal. An approved vaccine offers six months of protection, but international deal-making has slowed its distribution. An estimated 250 million people have been infected worldwide, and 1.75 million are dead. Scenarios such as this one imagine how the COVID-19 pandemic might play out1. Around the world, epidemiologists are constructing short- and long-term projections as a way to prepare for, and potentially mitigate, the spread and impact of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Although their forecasts and timelines vary, modellers agree on two things: COVID-19 is here to stay, and the future depends on a lot of unknowns, including whether people develop lasting immunity to the virus, whether seasonality affects its spread, and — perhaps most importantly — the choices made by governments and individuals. “A lot of places are unlocking, and a lot of places aren’t. We don’t really yet know what’s going to happen,” says Rosalind Eggo, an infectious-disease modeller at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). “The future will very much depend on how much social mixing resumes, and what kind of prevention we do,” says Joseph Wu, a disease modeller at the University of Hong Kong. Recent models and evidence from successful lockdowns suggest that behavioural changes can reduce the spread of COVID-19 if most, but not necessarily all, people comply. Two decades of pandemic war games failed to account for Donald Trump Last week, the number of confirmed COVID-19 infections passed 15 million globally, with around 650,000 deaths. Lockdowns are easing in many countries, leading some people to assume that the pandemic is ending, says Yonatan Grad, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. “But that’s not the case. We’re in for a long haul.” If immunity to the virus lasts less than a year, for example, similar to other human coronaviruses in circulation, there could be annual surges in COVID-19 infections through to 2025 and beyond. Here, Nature explores what the science says about the months and years to come. What happens in the near future? The pandemic is not playing out in the same way from place to place. Countries such as China, New Zealand and Rwanda have reached a low level of cases — after lockdowns of varying lengths — and are easing restrictions while watching for flare-ups. Elsewhere, such as in the United States and Brazil, cases are rising fast after governments lifted lockdowns quickly or never activated them nationwide. The latter group has modellers very worried. In South Africa, which now ranks fifth in the world for total COVID-19 cases, a consortium of modellers estimates2 that the country can expect a peak in August or September, with around one million active cases, and cumulatively as many as 13 million symptomatic cases by early November. In terms of hospital resources, “we’re already breaching capacity in some areas, so I think our best-case scenario is not a good one”, says Juliet Pulliam, director of the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis at Stellenbosch University. People wearing face masks sitting apart for social distancing at a cinema in Hangzhou, China Cinemagoers in Hangzhou, China, follow new norms of distancing and mask-wearing.Credit: AFP/Getty But there is hopeful news as lockdowns ease. Early evidence suggests that personal behavioural changes, such as hand-washing and wearing masks, are persisting beyond strict lockdown, helping to stem the tide of infections. In a June report3, a team at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London found that among 53 countries beginning to open up, there hasn’t been as large a surge in infections as predicted on the basis of earlier data. “It’s undervalued how much people’s behaviour has changed in terms of masks, hand washing and social distancing. It’s nothing like it used to be,” says Samir Bhatt, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Imperial College London and a co-author of the study. Researchers in virus hotspots have been studying just how helpful these behaviours are. At Anhembi Morumbi University in São Paulo, Brazil, computational biologist Osmar Pinto Neto and colleagues ran more than 250,000 mathematical models of social-distancing strategies described as constant, intermittent or ‘stepping-down’ — with restrictions reduced in stages — alongside behavioural interventions such as mask-wearing and hand washing. Profile of a killer: the complex biology powering the coronavirus pandemic The team concluded that if 50–65% of people are cautious in public, then stepping down social-distancing measures every 80 days could help to prevent further infection peaks over the next two years4. “We’re going to need to change the culture of how we interact with other people,” says Neto. Overall, it’s good news that even without testing or a vaccine, behaviours can make a significant difference in disease transmission, he adds. Infectious-disease modeller Jorge Velasco-Hernández at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Juriquilla and colleagues also examined the trade-off between lockdowns and personal protection. They found that if 70% of Mexico’s population committed to personal measures such as hand washing and mask-wearing following voluntary lockdowns that began in late March, then the country’s outbreak would decline after peaking in late May or early June5. However, the government lifted lockdown measures on 1 June and, rather than falling, the high number of weekly COVID-19 deaths plateaued. Velasco-Hernández’s team thinks that two public holidays acted as superspreading events, causing high infection rates right before the government lifted restrictions6. Aerial shot of people gathered inside painted circles on the grass encouraging social distancing in a San Francisco park Social distancing could be required intermittently for years to suppress COVID-19 peaks.Credit: John Edelson/AFP/Getty In regions where COVID-19 seems to be on the decline, researchers say that the best approach is careful surveillance by testing and isolating new cases and tracing their contacts. This is the situation in Hong Kong, for instance. “We are experimenting, making observations and adjusting slowly,” says Wu. He expects that the strategy will prevent a huge resurgence of infections — unless increased air traffic brings a substantial number of imported cases. Pandemic on campus: tell us how your institution is coping But exactly how much contact tracing and isolation is required to contain an outbreak effectively? An analysis7 by the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases COVID-19 Working Group at the LSHTM simulated fresh outbreaks of varying contagiousness, starting from 5, 20 or 40 introduced cases. The team concluded that contact tracing must be rapid and extensive — tracing 80% of contacts within a few days — to control an outbreak. The group is now assessing the effectiveness of digital contact tracing and how long it’s feasible to keep exposed individuals in quarantine, says co-author Eggo. “Finding the balance between what actually is a strategy that people will tolerate, and what strategy will contain an outbreak, is really important.” Tracing 80% of contacts could be near-impossible to achieve in regions still grappling with thousands of new infections a week — and worse, even the highest case counts are likely to be an underestimate. A June preprint1 from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team in Cambridge analysing COVID-19 testing data from 84 countries suggests that global infections were 12 times higher and deaths 50% higher than officially reported (see ‘Predicting cases and deaths’). “There are many more cases out there than the data indicate. As a consequence, there’s higher risk of infection than people may believe there to be,” says John Sterman, co-author of the study and director of the MIT System Dynamics Group. Graphic showing how official figures for COVID-19 infections and deaths have been significantly understated in 86 countries. Source: Data from ref. 1, updated with authors’ estimates until 10 July 2020 For now, mitigation efforts, such as social distancing, need to continue for as long as possible to avert a second major outbreak, says Bhatt. “That is, until the winter months, where things get a bit more dangerous again.” What will happen when it gets cold? It is clear now that summer does not uniformly stop the virus, but warm weather might make it easier to contain in temperate regions. In areas that will get colder in the second half of 2020, experts think there is likely to be an increase in transmission. Many human respiratory viruses — influenza, other human coronaviruses and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — follow seasonal oscillations that lead to winter outbreaks, so it is likely that SARS-CoV-2 will follow suit. “I expect SARS-CoV-2 infection rate, and also potentially disease outcome, to be worse in the winter,” says Akiko Iwasaki, an immunobiologist at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. Evidence suggests that dry winter air improves the stability and transmission of respiratory viruses8, and respiratory-tract immune defence might be impaired by inhaling dry air, she adds. In addition, in colder weather people are more likely to stay indoors, where virus transmission through droplets is a bigger risk, says Richard Neher, a computational biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Simulations by Neher’s group show that seasonal variation is likely to affect the virus’s spread and might make containment in the Northern Hemisphere this winter more difficult9. In future, SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks could arrive in waves every winter. The risk to adults who have already had COVID-19 could be reduced, as with flu, but it would depend on how rapidly immunity to this coronavirus wears off, says Neher. What’s more, the combination of COVID-19, flu and RSV in autumn and winter could be challenging, says Velasco-Hernández, who is setting up a model of how such viruses might interact. Special report: The simulations driving the world’s response to COVID-19 It remains unknown whether infection with other human coronaviruses can offer any protection against SARS-CoV-2. In a cell-culture experiment involving SARS-CoV-2 and the closely related SARS-CoV, antibodies from one coronavirus could bind to the other coronavirus, but did not disable or neutralize it10. To end the pandemic, the virus must either be eliminated worldwide — which most scientists agree is near-impossible because of how widespread it has become — or people must build up sufficient immunity through infections or a vaccine. It is estimated that 55–80% of a population must be immune for this to happen, depending on the country11. Unfortunately, early surveys suggest there is a long way to go. Estimates from antibody testing — which reveals whether someone has been exposed to the virus and made antibodies against it — indicate that only a small proportion of people have been infected, and disease modelling backs this up. A study of 11 European countries calculated an infection rate of 3–4% up to 4 May12, inferred from data on the ratio of infections to deaths, and how many deaths there had been. In the United States, where there have been more than 150,000 COVID-19 deaths, a survey of thousands of serum samples, coordinated by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that antibody prevalence ranged from 1% to 6.9%, depending on the location13. What happens in 2021 and beyond? The pandemic’s course next year will depend greatly on the arrival of a vaccine, and on how long the immune system stays protective after vaccination or recovery from infection. Many vaccines provide protection for decades — such as those against measles or polio — whereas others, including whooping cough and influenza, wear off over time. Likewise, some viral infections prompt lasting immunity, others a more transient response. “The total incidence of SARS-CoV-2 through 2025 will depend crucially on this duration of immunity,” wrote Grad, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch and colleagues in a May paper14 exploring possible scenarios (see ‘What happens next?’). Graphic showing how immunity and the role of seasons could effect temperate regions in the future. Source: Ref. 14 Researchers know little so far about how long SARS-CoV-2 immunity lasts. One study15 of recovering patients found that neutralizing antibodies persisted for up to 40 days after the start of infection; several other studies suggest that antibody levels dwindle after weeks or months. If COVID-19 follows a similar pattern to SARS, antibodies could persist at a high level for 5 months, with a slow decline over 2–3 years16. Still, antibody production is not the only form of immune protection; memory B and T cells also defend against future encounters with the virus, and little is known so far about their role in SARS-CoV-2 infection. For a clear answer on immunity, researchers will need to follow a large number of people over a long time, says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. “We’re just going to have to wait.” If infections continue to rise rapidly without a vaccine or lasting immunity, “we will see regular, extensive circulation of the virus”, says Grad. In that case, the virus would become endemic, says Pulliam. “That would be really painful.” And it is not unimaginable: malaria, a preventable and treatable disease, kills more than 400,000 people each year. “These worst-case scenarios are happening in many countries with preventable diseases, causing huge losses of life already,” says Bhatt. If the virus induces short-term immunity — similar to two other human coronaviruses, OC43 and HKU1, for which immunity lasts about 40 weeks — then people can become reinfected and there could be annual outbreaks, the Harvard team suggests. A complementary CIDRAP report17, based on trends from eight global influenza pandemics, points to significant COVID-19 activity for at least the next 18–24 months, either in a series of gradually diminishing peaks and valleys, or as a “slow burn” of continuing transmission without a clear wave pattern. Yet these scenarios remain only guesses, because this pandemic has so far not followed the pattern of pandemic flu, says Osterholm. “We’re in a coronavirus pandemic for which we have no precedents.” Mounting evidence suggests coronavirus is airborne — but health advice has not caught up Another possibility is that immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is permanent. In that case, even without a vaccine, it is possible that after a world-sweeping outbreak, the virus could burn itself out and disappear by 2021. However, if immunity is moderate, lasting about two years, then it might seem as if the virus has disappeared, but it could surge back as late as 2024, the Harvard team found. That forecast, however, does not take the development of effective vaccines into account. It’s unlikely that there will never be a vaccine, given the sheer amount of effort and money pouring into the field and the fact that some candidates are already being tested in humans, says Velasco-Hernández. The World Health Organization lists 26 COVID-19 vaccines currently in human trials, with 12 of them in phase II trials and six in phase III. Even a vaccine providing incomplete protection would help by reducing the severity of the disease and preventing hospitalization, says Wu. Still, it will take months to make and distribute a successful vaccine. The world will not be affected equally by COVID-19. Regions with older populations could see disproportionally more cases in later stages of the epidemic, says Eggo; a mathematical model from her team, published in June18 and based on data from six countries, suggests that the susceptibility to infection in children and people under 20 years old is approximately half that of older adults. There is one thing that every country, city and community touched by the pandemic has in common. “There is so much we still don’t know about this virus,” says Pulliam. “Until we have better data, we’re just going to have a lot of uncertainty.”