Forget temperature checks and deep-cleaning surfaces. The best way to protect people from Covid-19 as they return to offices and other indoor spaces is to bolster air quality and vaccination coverage, experts on the transmission of the virus say.
Their consensus reflects an evolving understanding of the spread of a virus that the World Health Organization declared the cause of a pandemic two years ago this Friday. Deep-cleaning surfaces and temperature checks—still a mainstay at many businesses—have been understood for many months to be of relatively little help stopping the virus from spreading. Rather, as businesses and communities across the U.S. begin what is shaping up to be the broadest return yet to pre-pandemic behaviors, transmission and infectious-disease experts said broad vaccine coverage and good air hygiene stand out as the most important mitigation efforts.
Naatlia Slesareva, 54, at Fairytale Kindergarten, where she has worked for 37 years. The school was hit by shells on Thursday.Credit…Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
STANYTSIA LUHANSKA, Ukraine — The sharp cracks of explosions echoed off buildings and flashes of light from incoming artillery shells silhouetted trees on the edge of this town on the frontline of the war in eastern Ukraine, which escalated sharply on Thursday.
The fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces has been flaring for eight years, long before the threat of a broader conflict between Russia and Ukraine that has loomed for the last month. Daily skirmishes, mostly low-level and localized, had become routine.
But an outbreak of hostilities on Thursday, which each side blamed on the other, was viewed in Ukraine and in Western capitals as a particularly perilous moment for its potential to spiral into a bigger conflict that would draw the United States and Europe into a tense standoff with Russia.
The United States has said that Russia has massed about 150,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. And Western military analysts have predicted that Russia may claim an unprovoked attack, perhaps manufactured by Moscow, to justify an intervention in eastern Ukraine, possibly under the claim of serving as a peacekeeping force.
That sequence of events has played out before. In 2008, the Russian army invaded Georgia after a flare-up in fighting between government troops and a Russian-backed separatist movement in South Ossetia, a region of Georgia that Moscow now recognizes as an independent state.
Russian or Russian-
backed military
positions as of Feb. 13
Approximate line
separating Ukrainian
and Russian-backed
separatistforces.
Russian or Russian-backed
military positions as of Feb. 13
Approximate line
separating Ukrainian
and Russian-backed
separatist forces.
The artillery strikes began early Thursday and continued into the evening. The Ukrainian military reported 47 cease-fire violations in at least 25 different locations, including two towns, Stanytsia Luhanska and Popasna.
The Ukrainian military said shells hit a kindergarten, wounding three teachers but no students, as well as the playground of a high school. They also said two soldiers and a woman at a bus station were wounded. There were no reported fatalities.
Video
Shelling in eastern Ukraine damaged a kindergarten, knocked out electricity and wounded at least four adult civilians and two soldiers, according to the Ukrainian military.CreditCredit…Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
“It was a whistling sound, then an explosion,” said Tatyana Podikay, the director of the school, called Fairytale Kindergarten.
The teachers herded the students into a hallway with no windows, the building’s safest place, and waited for parents to pick them up. “To create a calm psychological atmosphere the teachers told stories, and whoever needed it got a hug,” Ms. Podikay said.
Analysts said the nature of the shelling, which hit multiple sites along the contact line all in a single day, was unusual compared to recent months. “Today it was long-distance and synchronized shelling,” said Maria Zolkina, a political analyst. “It was simultaneous. This is notable.”
After a lull in the afternoon, artillery fire resumed Thursday evening in Stanytsia Luhanska, a hardscrabble town of dusty, potholed roads surrounded by farm fields, not far from the Russian border. There is a gas station, a few leafy residential streets and not much else.
Shells exploded in or near the town in at least two volleys of a half dozen rounds each. Drivers stopped their cars, got out and listened, worriedly.
Amid the fighting, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine flew to the front line to visit troops and was quoted in Ukrainian media saying he was proud of the army for “giving a worthy rebuff to the enemy.”
In Brussels, the U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, said that the reports of shelling were “troubling.” While the United States was still gathering details, Mr. Austin said: “We’ve said for some time that the Russians might do something like this in order to justify a military conflict. So we’ll be watching this very closely.”
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, blamed Russia for a “severe violation” of the tenuous cease-fire agreement in the region, while Mr. Zelensky described it as “provocative shelling.”
The Kremlin was taking a different line. “We have warned many times that excessive concentration of Ukrainian forces near the contact line, together with possible provocations, can pose terrible danger,” President Vladimir V. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said. He added that he hoped Western countries would warn Kyiv against a “further escalation of tensions.”
The Russian-backed separatists also blamed the Ukrainian army. Leonid Pasechnik, head of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, said the Ukrainian army had shelled civilians early Thursday morning — a claim that could not be independently verified.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, has said about a quarter of the inhabitants in the separatist regions — that would be 750,000 out of about three million — are Russian citizens. A strike that wounds or kills a Russian citizen could elevate the risk of a Russian response.
To highlight what it called reckless firing into civilian areas, the Ukrainian military flew reporters to the site of the damaged kindergarten. The strike also knocked out electricity and sent residents scrambling into basements to seek cover.
The Ukrainian military said a 122-millimeter artillery shell hit the school, spraying cinder blocks into a play area for toddlers that was empty at the time.
Artillery and small-arms fire are common along the frontline, where an international monitoring group typically reports dozens to hundreds of cease-fire violations every day in recent years. Homes, schools, administrative buildings and infrastructure including electrical pylons are often damaged. Earlier this year, Ukrainian authorities reported that a drone strike hit an abandoned school in an eastern Ukrainian town.
Andrew E. Kramer reported from Stanytsia Luhanksa, Ukraine, and Valerie Hopkins from Kyiv. Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kyiv, and Ivan Nechepurenko from Moscow.
With winter setting in across the country, and the COVID-19 pandemic still going strong, it looks like we’ll be spending a lot of time indoors for the next few months. Though it can be tempting to crank up the thermostat inside your home when it’s cold outside, doing so on a regular basis throughout an entire season can leave you with sky-high energy bills.
But there are strategies for setting your thermostat during the winter that will make sure you stay warm(ish), while still being able to afford your heating bills. Here’s what to know.
Energy-saving winter thermostat settings
For a variety of reasons, people are comfortable at different indoor temperatures. Some prefer keeping it on the cooler side, and then getting cozy under blankets and in warm clothing. Others would rather wear shorts and T-shirts all winter, and keep their home feeling more like a tropical climate.
But if you’re approaching it strictly in terms of keeping your heating costs low, Energy Saver, the U.S. Department of Energy’s consumer resource on saving energy, has some recommendations—starting with setting your thermostat to around 68°F during the daytime in the winter, and a few degrees cooler at night, and when you’re away from home.
If 68°F sounds a bit chilly, there’s a reason for that. According to Energy Saver, the smaller the difference is between the indoor and outdoor temperatures, the lower your energy bill will be:
During winter, the lower the interior temperature, the slower the heat loss. So the longer your house remains at the lower temperature, the more energy you save, because your house has lost less energy than it would have at the higher temperature.
Other cost-saving winter heating tips
In addition to your thermostat settings, here are a few other tips from Energy Saver to help you stay warm this winter, while keeping your heating costs down:
Clean and/or replace furnace filters once a month, or according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
Keep heating vents/registers, baseboard heaters, and radiators clean.
Make sure that heating vents/registers, baseboard heaters, and radiators aren’t not blocked by furniture, carpeting, or drapes.
Put your window treatments to work, keeping curtains/drapes and shades on your south-facing windows open during the day (to allow the sunlight in) and closed at night to help block out any drafts.
And if keeping your thermostat at 68°F or lower isn’t exactly your idea of comfortable, remember that it is winter, and time to break out the thick sweaters, sweatpants, and blankets.
Last week, the Biden administration released 90 percent of the $3.75 billion in funds dedicated to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provided an average of $439 to more than five million families the year before the pandemic. It received $4.5 billion in additional emergency grants this year. Usually, funding for the program isn’t released until all budget items for the fiscal year are approved, but Congress recently made an exception as cold months approached and sparring over spending bills continued.
Mr. Wolfe’s group has urged Congress to include $5 billion more for the program in the social safety net package being negotiated in Washington.
The increase in home heating costs is sure to hover over economic debates in Washington about inflation. White House allies, fighting to push through the president’s sweeping agenda, assert that the current surge in consumer prices mostly reflects pandemic disruptions that will dissipate next year. Federal Reserve officials, who have been trying to put in place a policy framework less keenly sensitive to inflation, will be pushed to gauge whether that contention is well founded.
The latest outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggests a decent chance of a milder-than-average winter. But according to projections by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, if winter is somewhat colder than usual, energy bills could rise 15 percent for households heated by electricity, 50 percent for those depending on natural gas and 59 percent for those that mostly use heating oil. Propane users would be in for the biggest blow — a 94 percent increase, or potentially hundreds of dollars over the six-month heating season.
As with other price shocks stemming from the pandemic, the pain will be particularly acute for those of limited means. Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed by the Census Bureau have reported reducing or forgoing household expenses to pay an energy bill in the last year.
Before the pandemic, Jamillia Grayson, 43, of Buffalo, had a successful event-planning business. Her work dried up, and even with unemployment insurance, she couldn’t meet household expenses while supporting her 8-year-old daughter, who has sickle cell anemia, as well as an older aunt, who depends on a home oxygen tank and lives with them.
Electricity and gas bills piled up throughout this year, and by the end of the summer, she owed $3,000, she said.
Amber Cox shovels snow from the porch roof at her home in Auburn, Maine, on March 8, 2018. With prices surging worldwide for heating oil, natural gas and other fuels, the U.S. government said Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2021 it expects households to see jumps of up to 54% for their heating bills compared to last winter. (Daryn Slover, Sun Journal)
Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
NEW YORK — Get ready to pay sharply higher bills for heating this winter, along with seemingly everything else.
With prices surging worldwide for heating oil, natural gas and other fuels, the U.S. government said Wednesday it expects households to see their heating bills jump as much as 54% compared to last winter.
Nearly half the homes in the U.S. use natural gas for heat, and they could pay an average $746 this winter, 30% more than a year ago. Those in the Midwest could get particularly pinched, with bills up an estimated 49%, and this could be the most expensive winter for natural-gas heated homes since 2008-2009.
The second-most used heating source for homes is electricity, making up 41% of the country, and those households could see a more modest 6% increase to $1,268. Homes using heating oil, which make up 4% of the country, could see a 43% increase — more than $500 — to $1,734. The sharpest increases are likely for homes that use propane, which account for 5% of U.S. households.
This winter is forecast to be slightly colder across the country than last year. That means people will likely be burning more fuel to keep warm, on top of paying more for each bit of it. If the winter ends up being even colder than forecast, heating bills could be higher than estimated, and vice-versa.
The forecast from the U.S. Energy Information Administration is the latest reminder of the higher inflation ripping across the global economy. Earlier Wednesday, the government released a separate report showing that prices were 5.4% higher for U.S. consumers in September than a year ago. That matches the hottest inflation rate since 2008, as a reawakening economy and snarled supply chains push up prices for everything from cars to groceries.
The higher prices hit everyone, with pay raises for most workers so far failing to keep up with inflation. But they hurt low-income households in particular.
“After the beating that people have taken in the pandemic, it’s like: What’s next?” said Carol Hardison, chief executive officer at Crisis Assistance Ministry, which helps people in Charlotte, North Carolina, who are facing financial hardship.
She said households coming in for assistance recently have had unpaid bills that are roughly twice as big as they were before the pandemic. They’re contending with more expensive housing, higher medical bills and sometimes a reduction in their hours worked.
“It’s what we know about this pandemic: It’s hit the same people that were already struggling with wages not keeping up with the cost of living,” she said.
To make ends meet, families are cutting deeply. Nearly 22% of Americans had to reduce or forego expenses for basic necessities, such as medicine or food, to pay an energy bill in at least one of the last 12 months, according to a September survey by the U.S. Census Bureau.
“This is going to create significant hardship for people in the bottom third of the country,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association. “You can tell them to cut back and try to turn down the heat at night, but many low-income families already do that. Energy was already unaffordable to them.”
Many of those families are just now getting through a hot summer where they faced high air-conditioning bills.
It’s what we know about this pandemic: It’s hit the same people that were already struggling with wages not keeping up with the cost of living.
–Carol Hardison
Congress apportions some money to energy assistance programs for low-income households, but directors of those programs are now watching their purchasing power shrink as fuel costs keep climbing, Wolfe said.
The biggest reason for this winter’s higher heating bills is the recent surge in prices for energy commodities after they dropped to multi-year lows in 2020. Demand has simply grown faster than production as the economy roars back to life following shutdowns caused by the coronavirus.
Natural gas in the United States, for example, has climbed to its highest price since 2014 and is up roughly 90% over the last year. The wholesale price of heating oil, meanwhile, has more than doubled in the last 12 months.
Another reason for the rise is how global the market for fuels has become. In Europe, strong demand and limited supplies have sent natural gas prices up more than 350% this year. That’s pushing some of the natural gas produced in the United States to head for ships bound for other countries, adding upward pressure on domestic prices as well.
The amount of natural gas in storage inventories is relatively low, according to Barclays analyst Amarpreet Singh. That means there’s less of a cushion heading into winter heating season.
Heating oil prices, meanwhile, are tied closely to the price of crude oil, which has climbed more than 60% this year. Homes affected by those increases are primarily in the Northeast, where the percentage of homes using heating oil has dropped to 18% from 27% over the past decade.
The fires, floods and extreme weather seen around the world in recent months are just a foretaste of what can be expected if global heating takes hold, scientists say, as the world’s leading authority on climate change prepares to warn of an imminent and dire risk to the global climate system.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will on Monday publish a landmark report, the most comprehensive assessment yet, less than three months before vital UN talks that will determine the future course of life on Earth.
Policymakers have already previewed the findings, finalised on Saturday night, which have been the subject of an intense two weeks of online discussion by experts around the world, and represent eight years of work by leading scientists.
Doug Parr, policy director at Greenpeace UK, said governments must take heed of the warnings. “Practical, funded and deliverable plans [by governments] to keep us below the supposedly safe limits [of heating] are almost non-existent. Urgent climate action was needed decades ago – now we’re almost out of time. The UK government has a huge responsibility as host of the UN climate talks to ensure world leaders sign up to policies that not just put the brakes on the climate crisis, but slam it into reverse.”
The IPCC, made up of hundreds of the world’s foremost climate scientists, publishes comprehensive assessments about every seven years, with this report the sixth since 1988. This one will be different, however: previous work has shown that the 2020s are a crucial decade, in which greenhouse gas emissions must be halved in order to limit heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, established by previous IPCC reports as the threshold of safety, and the lower of two goals in the 2015 Paris agreement.
Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University, said this would be the last IPCC assessment that can make a real difference in policy terms, before we exceed 1.5C and the ambitions of the Paris agreement.
“Climate change is now causing amplified weather extremes of the sort we’ve been witnessing this summer – droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, floods, superstorms,” he said. “The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle. We see them playing out in real time in the form of these unprecedented extreme weather disasters.”
In recent months there have been fires in the US, heatwaves in northern latitudes, and devastating floods in China and Europe. Scientists warn that this may become the norm unless climate breakdown can be stopped.
Simon Lewis, professor of global change science at University College London, said: “The observations this summer show that some impacts [predicted in previous IPCC assessments of the climate] seem to be underestimated, but we can’t know if the devastation of summer 2021 is the new normal without a few more years’ data. But what we do know is if emissions continue to rise, then increasingly severe climate impacts will occur.”
He warned that the consequences would be severe. “What we need to keep in mind is that we all live in places that have built up over decades and centuries to cope well with a given climate. The really, really scary thing about the climate crisis is that every single achievement of every human society on Earth occurred under a climate that no longer exists,” he said. “The pressure is on for world leaders to agree both detailed and achievable plans to cut emissions now, and plans to adapt to climate impacts, when they meet in Glasgow in November.”
Climate crisis: what one month of extreme weather looks like – video
This year’s weather observations are not included in the IPCC report, which draws on science published in peer-review journals before this year, and since its last comprehensive report in 2013. Mann said: “This is also a limitation. The IPCC reports always seem to be playing catch-up with what we’re witnessing on the ground. Our own work suggests that the models upon which [most IPCC projections] are made still aren’t quite capturing some of the mechanisms that are important here.”
Extreme weather this year has also shown how vital it is that countries and communities around the world take steps to cope with the impacts, said Richard Betts, professor of climate impacts at Exeter University, and head of climate impacts research at the Met Office. “We now need to live with the consequences of what we have already done to the climate. We are hopelessly unprepared to deal with increasingly severe extreme weather events, even though these have been predicted by science for decades.”
Alongside this effort, we should be cutting emissions much faster, he added. “We need to take urgent action on reducing emissions if we want to stop this getting much worse,” said Betts. “The longer it takes to bring this increase [in the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere], the greater the severity of climate change we will be stuck with.”
Alok Sharma, the UK minister who will preside over the UN’s Cop26 climate talks, to be held in Glasgow this November, said on Saturday: “This is going to be the starkest warning yet that human behaviour is alarmingly accelerating global warming and this is why Cop26 has to be the moment we get this right. We can’t afford to wait two years, five years, 10 years – this is the moment. [The consequences of failure would be] catastrophic – I don’t think there’s any other word for it.”
Rachel Kennerley, international climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “The world’s climate scientists are set to issue a stark warning that cannot be ignored. The international community must rapidly deliver the speed and scale of the action required to avoid catastrophic climate change. It’s time to end our reliance on dirty gas, coal and oil, and invest in green jobs and building the zero-carbon future we so urgently need.”
Deshaun Watson trade talks are “heating up” between the Philadelphia Eagles and Houston Texans, according to a report from CBS Sports writer Chris Trapasso.
Source: Talks are heating up between #Eagles and #Texans on a Deshaun Watson trade. Still some hurdles to get over. But both sides attempting to come to an agreement.
— Chris Trapasso (@ChrisTrapasso) August 5, 2021
There’s a long timeline of the Eagles being connected to Watson but this is the first time we’ve ever heard any kind of imminency about a deal getting done.
Before we further address the contents of the report, let’s take a moment to talk about the source. Trapasso isn’t a primary NFL news breaker like Adam Schefter or Ian Rapoport. That doesn’t mean he’s without sources, though. In March 2020, Trapasso tweeted this:
Source: Big-name DL is about to get traded + paid
— Chris Trapasso (@ChrisTrapasso) March 16, 2020
About an hour later, the Indianapolis Colts traded DeForest Buckner and signed him to an $84 million extension. A search through Trapasso’s Twitter history shows him accurately reporting other news stories. So, one shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss his latest hearings on Watson.
This report also comes at an interesting time. Watson suspiciously missed practice the past two days. It’s been said that he was being examined for a foot/ankle injury … but he hasn’t even been fully participating in practice. It should also be noted (as it recently was on BGN Radio) that Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, general manager Howie Roseman, vice president of player personnel Andy Weidl, and head coach Nick Sirianni were having a pow-wow on the field after Tuesday’s practice, the first day that Watson was absent from the Texans’ practice field. Also, the Eagles recently just cleared over $14 million in cap space to give them $16.1 million total. That would be enough to take on Watson’s $10.5 million base salary this season.
So, it’s not hard to believe a trade might actually be happening.
Then again, it is hard to believe the Eagles are actually trading multiple valuable assets for someone facing serious allegations and unresolved legal issues. Here’s what we previously wrote about the possibility:
Overall, it’s a complicated situation with an unclear timeline. It seems hard to believe any team would be willing to trade for Watson without a high level of confidence that legal issues and/or suspension won’t seriously impact his availability.
Then again, it’s incredibly rare that a quarterback of Watson’s ilk is available. He’s a 25-year-old elite talent under team control through 2025. And it’s exactly this reason why the Eagles are rumored to be so intrigued about the possibility of acquiring him.
Understandably, there are those who want nothing to do with seeing Watson in a midnight green uniform. Some fans would just not be interested in cheering for him given the allegations that have come to light.
Even putting that aside, which isn’t easy to do, there’s a belief that the Eagles are best served to give Jalen Hurts a chance to be their franchise quarterback. If he proves to be The Guy, Philly can use their future draft picks to build around him instead of shipping them out to acquire a new starter. Such a scenario would be ideal.
But is it realistic? The Eagles seem to have reservations about Hurts. And that’s not unreasonable. He ultimately struggled as a rookie. Sure, he’s only 22 and has the potential and work ethic to improve. Can he realistically bridge the gap between being one of the league’s worst starters and one of the very best, though?
If we know anything about Jeffrey Lurie, he really cares about offense. He literally said “I put a heavy emphasis on wanting to have an elite offense” in his postseason press conference earlier this year. And, as Doug Pederson can attest to, he specifically cares about passing offense. So much so that Pederson was reportedly questioned for not passing more often in two of Philadelphia’s wins during the 2019 season.
It seems clear, then, that Lurie isn’t interested in settling at the quarterback position. ‘Good enough’ isn’t going to be good enough for the Eagles’ owner. He’s in pursuit of an elite quarterback and, again, Watson represents a rare opportunity. Going back to the very first report of the Eagles’ interest in Watson, it was Lurie’s name that came up.
Regarding Hurts, he’s been up and down in camp. It’s early and there’s time for things to change, to be clear, but there just hasn’t been a night and day difference from last year. Perhaps the Eagles have reached a point where they feel they need to upgrade.
But, assuming he’s not included in the deal, Hurts might be playing a good chunk — if not the entirety — of the Eagles’ 2021 season anyway. Watson isn’t just subject to legal discipline; he’s likely bound to face punishment from the NFL in some form. A multiple-game suspension seems very much in play.
Maybe this is all much ado about nothing. But if the report is to be believed, it sounds like a Watson could be in Philly sooner than expected.
UPDATE: Former Houston Chronicle reporter says nothing is imminent on the Deshaun Watson front.
No trade imminent or developing at this time for Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson, according to league sources. While there is interest and teams are conducting extensive due diligence, complex legal situation, no-trade clause are all difficult factors to work through still.
