Dangerous fungal infections are on the rise, and a growing body of research suggests warmer temperatures might be a culprit.
The human body’s average temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheithas long been too hot for most fungi to thrive, infectious-disease specialists say. But as temperatures have risen globally, some fungi might be adapting to endure more heat stress, including conditions within the human body, research suggests. Climate change might also be creating conditions for some disease-causing fungi to expand their geographical range, research shows.
“As fungi are exposed to more consistent elevated temperatures, there’s a real possibility that certain fungi that were previously harmless suddenly become potential pathogens,” said
Peter Pappas,
an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Deaths from fungal infections are increasing, due in part to growing populations of people with weakened immune systems who are more vulnerable to severe fungal disease, public-health experts said. At least 7,000 people died in the U.S. from fungal infections in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, up from hundreds of people each year around 1970. There are few effective and nontoxic medications to treat such infections, they said.
Photos: What We Know About Deadly Fungal Infections
In the video game and HBO show “The Last of Us,” a fungus infects people en masse and turns them into monstrous creatures. The fungus is based on a real genus, Ophiocordyceps, that includes species that infect insects, disabling and killing them.
There have been no known Ophiocordyceps infections in people, infectious-disease experts said, but they said the rising temperatures that facilitated the spread of the killer fungi in the show may be pushing other fungi to better adapt to human hosts and expand into new geographical ranges.
A January study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that higher temperatures may prompt some disease-causing fungi to evolve faster to survive.
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Researchers at Duke University grew 800 generations of a type of Cryptococcus, a group of fungi that can cause severe disease in people, in conditions of either 86 degrees Fahrenheit or 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The researchers used DNA sequencing to track changes in the fungi’s genome with a focus on “jumping genes”—DNA sequences that can move from one location on the genome to another.
Asiya Gusa, a study co-author and postdoctoral researcher in Duke’s Molecular Genetics and Microbiology Department, said movement of such genes can result in mutations and alter gene expression. In fungi, Dr. Gusa said, the movement of the genes could play a role in allowing fungi to adapt to stressors including heat.
Dr. Gusa and her colleagues found that the rate of movement of “jumping genes” was five times higher in the Cryptococcus raised in the warmer temperature.
Cryptococcus infections can be deadly, particularly in immunocompromised people. At least 110,000 people die globally each year from brain infections caused by Cryptococcus fungi, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Candida auris, a highly deadly fungus that has been reported in about half of U.S. states, also appears to have adapted to warmer temperatures, infectious-disease specialists said.
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“Fungi isn’t transmitted from person to person, but through fungal spores in the air,” Dr. Gusa said. “They’re in our homes, they’re everywhere.”
An analysis published last year in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases said some potentially deadly fungi found in the soil, including Coccidioides and Histoplasma, have significantly expanded their geographical range in the U.S. since the 1950s. Andrej Spec, a co-author of the analysis and an associate professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said warming temperatures, as well as other environmental alterations associated with climate change, could have played a role in this spread.
Cases of Coccidioidomycosis or Valley fever, a disease caused by Coccidioides, were once mostly limited to the Southwest, Dr. Spec said. Now people are being diagnosed in significant numbers in most states. Histoplasma infections, once common only in the Midwest, have been reported in 94% of states, the analysis said. Histoplasma is also spread through bat droppings and climate change has been linked to changing bat migration patterns, Dr. Spec said.
The World Health Organization has identified Cryptococcus, Coccidioides, Histoplasma and Candida auris as being among the fungal pathogens of greatest threat to people.
“We keep saying these fungi are rare, but this must be the most common rare disease because they’re now everywhere,” Dr. Spec said.
Write to Dominique Mosbergen at dominique.mosbergen@wsj.com
When the virologist Kirsten St. George learned last summer that a paralyzed patient in New York’s Rockland County had tested positive for polio, she turned her attention to the state’s sewers.
Polio is particularly stealthy because most infected people never develop symptoms but can still spread the virus. A wastewater-surveillance network established during the Covid-19 pandemic helped officials at the New York State Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center track polio’s spread in several counties.
New York is now expanding wastewater monitoring and starting to look for flu, RSV, hepatitis A, norovirus and antibiotic-resistant genes in parts of the state, as health officials across the U.S. consider wastewater as a more permanent public-health tool for watching a variety of threats.
“Are we on the brink of another outbreak, if it’s rising? Is it just sort of holding steady?” asked Dr. St. George, Wadsworth’s director of virology. “These are all important public health questions.”
Dr. Kirsten St. George of the Wadsworth Center is looking for clues in the state’s sewage.
An analysis conducted at the Wadsworth Center indicates the presence of the hepatitis A virus.
Dr. Kirsten St. George of the Wadsworth Center, which is starting to track the spread of pathogens including the hepatitis A virus.
For decades, researchers around the world used wastewater primarily to track poliovirus, which spreads through contact with an infected person’s feces. At the onset of the pandemic, scientists found that the Covid-19 virus’s genetic material could be detected in sewage. That meant sewage might help trackother respiratory viruses, too.
Researchers built surveillance networks around the country to track Covid-19 and monitor for variants.
Now they are starting to leverage that system to search for other pathogens they had wanted to track through the sewers for years including norovirus and antibiotic-resistant microbes, said Amy Kirby, program lead of wastewater surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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“Once you have this system, it’s much easier to activate it for a new pathogen,” Dr. Kirby said.
Sewage samples from treatment plants are sent to labs, where genetic material that can come from hundreds of thousands of people is isolated. Researchers usually test samples for pathogens with the PCR technology used in a Covid-19 lab test administered at the doctor’s office.
Health officials use the data to track changing concentrations of a virus, which can help them monitor the spread of pathogens including flu and RSV for which many people might not be tested. The technique has yielded early evidence of Covid-19 outbreaks and helped officials tailor public messaging and decide where to opentesting sites.
Biobot Analytics Inc., which works with the CDC to monitor Covid-19 and the renamed mpox, started tracking opioids in wastewater before the pandemic. It has collected data on substances including fentanyl in more than 100 counties across 47 states. Officials in Cary, N.C., used that data to encourage people to dispose of drugs properly and to distribute more overdose-reversal drugs, Biobot said.
Not everything can be tracked through sewage, and there isn’t a standard national system for collecting data and comparing readings from site to site. Privacy can be a concern in smaller communities or when tracking illicit substances, researchers said, though wastewater data is processed as an anonymous group sample. And some communities that collect wastewater data aren’t using it to guide public-health policy, researchers said.
The wastewater treatment plant in Schenectady, N.Y., is participating in the study of sewage.
Workers at the Schenectady treatment plant collect samples and ship them for analysis.
Analysis of the wastewater samples is conducted at the Wadsworth Center in Albany, N.Y.
The wastewater treatment plant in Schenectady, N.Y., where workers collect samples and ship them for analysis at the Wadsworth Center in Albany, N.Y.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said in a report Thursday that the U.S. should invest more in the CDC’s wastewater-surveillance network and expand its reach.The report recommended that the CDC should have an open process for picking which pathogens to track and establish an ethics committee, among other steps.
“We’re at a critical juncture where it has gone from being a grass-roots effort to a more nationally recognized tool,” said Megan Diamond, head of the Rockefeller Foundation’s wastewater-surveillance program, who wasn’t involved with the report.
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After a polio case was confirmed in New York in July, health officials reviewed stored wastewater samples and found poliovirus in wastewater from several counties, including as far back as spring. Health officials urged people who weren’t vaccinated against polio to get the shots and alerted doctors.
The CDC extended poliovirus wastewater testing to a handful of counties with low vaccination rates or potential connections to New York’s polio case.
“What you might expect a virus to do when it starts circulating is exactly what we saw in the wastewater,” said Dan Lang, deputy director of New York’s Center for Environmental Health and head of the state’s wastewater-monitoring program.
No samples tested positive for poliovirus by the end of November, but it was detected again in Orange County last month. Health officials are planning to analyze past samples from additional counties for traces of the virus before deciding whether to widen poliovirus wastewater monitoring when the weather warms and the virus can spread more readily.
“We’re worried about a big sort of roaring back,” said Dr. Eli Rosenberg, a lead epidemiologist who coordinates New York’s polio response. “We’re using this time now to prepare.”
Poliovirus was found in Orange County, N.Y., last month.
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt—President Biden is moving to tighten restrictions on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and boost funding for developing countries to adapt to the effects of climate change and transition to cleaner technologies, according to the White House.
Mr. Biden is expected to announce the measures in a speech before a United Nations climate conference, known as COP27, according to a fact sheet released by the White House ahead of the address. The measures include plans for the Environmental Protection Agency to require oil-and-gas companies to monitor existing production facilities for methane leaks and repair them, according to administration officials.
Methane is 80 times as potent at trapping heat from solar radiation as carbon dioxide over its first 20 years in the atmosphere. It is responsible for about half a degree Celsius of global warming since the preindustrial era, and its levels are rising fast, according to measurements made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The planned rules affect hundreds of thousands of U.S. wells, storage tanks and natural-gas processing plants, and require companies to replace leaky, older equipment and buy new monitoring tools.
EPA Administrator
Michael Regan
said flaring—a technique used by gas producers to burn off excess methane from oil and natural-gas wells—would be reduced at all well sites under the planned rules. Owners would be required to monitor abandoned wells for methane emissions and plug any leaks, he said.
“We’ve tightened down to limit flaring as much as possible without banning it,” Mr. Regan said.
President Biden met on Friday with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi in Sharm El Sheikh.
Photo:
KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS
The American Petroleum Institute, which represents U.S. oil and gas producers, said it was reviewing the proposed rule.
“Federal regulation of methane crafted to build on industry’s progress can help accelerate emissions reductions while developing reliable American energy,”
Frank Macchiarola,
API’s senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs, said in a statement.
Lee Fuller of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, a Washington, D.C., trade group that represents many smaller producers, said his group would be reviewing the regulations closely.
“While everyone wants to produce oil and natural gas using sound environmental procedures, there will always be a need to assure that the regulatory structure is cost effective and technologically feasible,” he said in a statement.
Rachel Cleetus, lead economist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group, said in a statement that the EPA had “taken an important step forward by issuing a robust standard for methane emissions from oil-and-gas operations.”
Mr. Biden is walking a political tightrope during his brief stopover in Egypt on his way to summits in Cambodia and Indonesia. The war in Ukraine has unleashed turmoil in energy markets, underscoring the world’s continued reliance on fossil fuels.
Control of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives still hinged on races that were too close to call as of early Friday morning, with both parties girding for a final outcome that might not be known for days. If Republicans win control of either chamber it would mean more power to a party that is deeply skeptical of Mr. Biden’s climate agenda and reluctant to spend billions of dollars to help other countries transition to cleaner sources of energy.
The White House said Mr. Biden is expected to announce an additional $100 million for the United Nations Adaptation Fund, which helps countries adapt to floods, droughts and storms that climate scientists say are increasing in frequency and severity as the earth’s atmosphere and oceans warm. The U.S. has yet to pay the $50 million it pledged to the fund at last year’s climate talks in Glasgow.
As world leaders gather for the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, WSJ looks at how the war in Ukraine and turmoil in energy markets are complicating efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Photo: Mohammed Salem/Reuters
The U.S. also owes $2 billion to the U.N. Green Climate Fund, which finances renewable energy and climate adaptation projects in the developing world. The administration has asked for $1.6 billion for the fund in the fiscal 2023 budget.
The White House said Mr. Biden would also pledge $150 million to a U.S. fund for climate adaptation and resilience across Africa; $13.6 million to the World Meteorological Organization to collect additional weather, water and climate observation across Africa; and $15 million to support the deployment of early-warning systems in Africa by NOAA in conjunction with local weather-forecasting agencies.
The U.S. pledges don’t address demands from poorer nations to provide money for damage they say is the result of climate-related weather events—a new category of funding known as “loss and damage.” This week at the summit, Belgium and Germany pledged a combined 172 million euros, equivalent to $176 million, to support loss-and-damage payments to developing countries. Scotland pledged $5.8 million and Ireland pledged $10 million.
Developing countries have made a renewed push to set up a mechanism for loss-and-damage payments after severe floods in Pakistan this summer that caused $30 billion in losses, according to World Bank estimates, killed more than 1,700 people and displaced 33 million residents. Sen.
Sherry Rehman,
Pakistan’s federal minister for climate change, said she is hoping for more resources from the U.S. and other nations to help her country.
U.S. negotiators are concerned the concept of loss and damage exposes wealthier nations to spiraling liability. There is also the scientific uncertainty of determining which effects can be tied to human-induced climate change and which are part of normal seasonal variation. However, U.S. climate envoy
John Kerry
said this week at the conference that he is open to discussing loss and damage.
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“We need more,” Ms. Rehman said in an interview. “What you hear everywhere at COP is ‘action now.’ Everything else is fluff.”
Mr. Biden arrived at the climate summit Friday after most world leaders have departed. He met privately with Egyptian President
Abdel Fattah Al Sisi
at the conference, located at a resort town along the Red Sea. The U.S. and Germany were expected to announce Friday a $250 million financing program to build 10 gigawatts of new wind-and-solar energy facilities in Egypt while decommissioning 5 gigawatts of inefficient natural-gas power plants.
The Biden administration’s efforts to curb methane emissions follow an agreement reached on the sidelines of the Glasgow summit a year ago, in which China and the U.S. pledged to work on reducing emissions of the gas. Beijing this week announced a plan to cut methane emissions but hasn’t yet included the new measures in its climate plans submitted to the U.N.
Nigeria announced its first-ever regulations, including limits on flaring, to cut overall methane emissions by more than 60% over 2020 levels. Canada said Thursday it plans to cut emissions of methane from its oil-and-gas industry by more than 75% over 2012 levels by 2030.
Emissions from flaring are far higher than previous government and industry estimates, according to an analysis of 300 wells in four states published in September in the journal Science.
The White House says 260 billion cubic meters of gas are wasted every year from flaring and methane emissions within the oil-and-gas sector.
Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, countries aim to limit global warming to well under 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and preferably to 1.5 degrees. The gap between the emissions cuts pledged by 166 nations, including the U.S., and their current emissions puts the world on track to warm 2.5 degrees Celsius, or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century, according to a recent U.N. report.
White House officials point to Mr. Biden’s support of the Democrats’ climate, health and tax legislation that allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to climate and energy programs, including tax credits for buying electric vehicles and investments in clean technologies.
Administration officials said the legislation has helped put the U.S. on track to meeting Mr. Biden’s goal of cutting domestic emissions 50% below 2005 levels by 2030.
—Matthew Dalton and Scott Pattersoncontributed to this article.
said he was open to negotiations with Russia if they are focused on safeguarding Ukraine’s territorial integrity, compensating Kyiv and bringing to justice perpetrators of war crimes.
Speaking ahead of his address to a global climate summit in Egypt on Tuesday, Mr. Zelensky said late Monday: “Anyone who treats seriously the climate agenda should just as seriously treat the necessity of immediately stopping Russian aggression, resuming our territorial integrity and forcing Russia into genuine peace talks.”
Mr. Zelensky’s statement comes after the U.S., Ukraine’s key backer in its defense against Russia’s invasion, has urged Kyiv to publicly signal that it is open to talks with Moscow, to avoid alienating international opinion.
“One more time: restoration of territorial integrity, respect for the U.N. charter, compensation for all material losses caused by the war, punishment for every war criminal and guarantees that this does not happen again,” Mr. Zelensky said. “Those are completely understandable conditions.”
U.S. officials have said it is up to Ukraine to define the terms of any acceptable settlement. Many Western officials are skeptical that Russian President
Vladimir Putin
will be open soon to a settlement that involves Russian withdrawal from occupied regions of Ukraine—a key demand for Kyiv.
A building damaged by shelling in Shchurove, eastern Ukraine.
Photo:
Andriy Andriyenko/Associated Press
Since Mr. Putin said in late September that swaths of Ukraine’s east and south belonged to Russia, Kyiv has said it wouldn’t negotiate with Moscow until there is a different leader in the Kremlin. Mr. Putin’s insistence that Russia’s territorial demands are nonnegotiable, meanwhile, appears to leave little scope for talks at present.
“We’ve always made clear our readiness for such talks,” Russia’s deputy foreign minister,
Andrei Rudenko,
said Tuesday in comments carried by state news agency RIA. “From our side there are no preliminary conditions whatsoever, except the main condition—for Ukraine to show goodwill.”
Buoyed by recent battlefield successes, Ukraine has demanded that all occupied areas are returned to its control as a condition for any peace deal—including Crimea and parts of the eastern Donbas area that Russia seized in 2014.
Military realities will dictate how much of its internationally recognized borders Ukraine is able to restore, officials in Kyiv and Western capitals say.
Ever since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February, many Western governments have been skeptical about how much of its territory Ukraine can take back through fighting. Kyiv has sought to erase such doubts with offensives in eastern and southern Ukraine since late summer, which have made inroads, especially in the Kharkiv region.
Continued Western military and financial support is vital for Ukraine’s ability to advance, however. Many in Kyiv fear that a reduction in aid could scuttle Ukraine’s hopes of retaking occupied regions, forcing it into negotiations with a weak hand.
Ukraine also fears any cease-fire would allow Russian forces to regroup and that Mr. Putin would use talks to consolidate Russian control of occupied areas.
Kyiv officials continue to warn the West of the dangers of premature talks.
“What do you mean by the word ‘negotiations’? Russian ultimatums are well-known: ‘we came with tanks, admit defeat and territories loss.’ This is unacceptable. So what to talk about? Or you just hide the word ‘surrender’ behind the word ‘settlement’?,” Ukrainian presidential adviser
Mykhailo Podolyak
said Tuesday in a tweet.
As Russia suffers losses in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has made veiled threats to use nuclear weapons—a scenario that security experts still deem unlikely. WSJ looks at satellite images and documents to understand how the process of launching a strike would work. Photo composite: Eve Hartley
Widespread evidence of alleged Russian war crimes in places such as Bucha and Izyum, which Moscow has denied, has hardened Ukraine’s insistence of a full Russian withdrawal from its territory.
However, the global economic toll of the war and signs of fraying political consensus in Western nations are raising uncertainty about how long the U.S. and Europe will continue to back Kyiv’s position.
U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan has in recent months engaged in confidential conversations with top aides to Mr. Putin in an effort to reduce the risk of the war widening, while warning Moscow against using nuclear weapons against Ukraine, U.S. and allied officials said Monday.
The aim has been to guard against the risk of escalation and keep communications channels open, and not discuss a settlement of the war in Ukraine, the officials said.
Ukraine has continued to call for further arms deliveries from the West to protect its cities against Russian missile-and-drone attacks and help it recapture occupied territories.
A firefighter works at the scene of a damaged residential building in Lyman, eastern Ukraine.
Photo:
Andriy Andriyenko/Associated Press
Mr. Zelensky, in his comments late Monday, hailed the provision this week of the U.S.-Norwegian National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, or Nasams, and of Spanish-supplied Aspide air-defense systems, after weeks of Russian attacks that have caused substantial damage to Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and caused numerous blackouts in Ukrainian cities.
“The defense of Ukraine’s sky is obviously not complete, but gradually we are moving toward our goal,” Mr. Zelensky said. He added that Russia had hit 50 towns and cities across Ukraine with missile attacks on Monday, the latest barrage aimed at sapping Ukrainian morale as winter sets in.
Ukraine’s military offensive against Russian occupation forces in the south has slowed as both sides tire after weeks of fighting and as muddy ground in some areas makes advancing difficult for armored vehicles.
In the southern Kherson region, Russian-installed officials say they have almost completed a mass-evacuation campaign aimed at clearing the regional capital of residents in advance of their planned defense against advancing Ukrainian forces. Some elite Russian forces have left the city, Ukrainian officials say, and in their place Moscow has brought in newly mobilized soldiers tasked with holding the line if Kyiv’s forces reach the city.
A market in downtown Kyiv.
Photo:
Bernat Armangue/Associated Press
Western officials said Tuesday that Russia has begun constructing defensive structures near occupied Mariupol, a city deep behind the front lines in the country’s southeast that was captured by Russia in May after months of intense fighting that reduced much of it to rubble.
Russian occupation authorities in Mariupol are producing concrete antitank structures known as dragon’s teeth as part of efforts to reinforce the area, the U.K.’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday. Dragon’s teeth have also been sent to the regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, which Russia partly controls and now claims as part of its territory, the ministry said.
The reported construction of fortification lines far from areas of active fighting is evidence of a Russian campaign to shore up occupied areas as fortunes on the battlefield shift in Kyiv’s favor, Western officials say.
“This activity suggests Russia is making a significant effort to prepare defenses in depth behind their current front line, likely to forestall any rapid Ukrainian advances in the event of breakthroughs,” the U.K. Defense Ministry said.
People line up for soup, bread and hot food at a stand in Kyiv.
Photo:
Ed Ram/Getty Images
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at Matthew.Luxmoore@wsj.com and Marcus Walker at marcus.walker@wsj.com
To counter the impact of a decline in global commerce and persistent shortages of labor, commodities and energy, central bankers might lift interest rates higher and for longer than in recent decades—which could result in weaker economic growth, higher unemployment and more frequent recessions.
The Federal Reserve’s current round of interest-rate increases, which economists say have pushed the U.S. to the brink of a recession, could be a taste of this new environment.
“The global economy is undergoing a series of major transitions,” said
Mark Carney,
former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor, in a speech at an economics conference in March. “The long era of low inflation, suppressed volatility and easy financial conditions is ending.”
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This new era would mark an abrupt about-face after a decade in which central bankers worried more about the prospects of anemic economic growth and too-low inflation, and used monetary policy to spur expansions. It also would be a reversal for investors accustomed to low interest rates.
The challenges for policy makers will take center stage from Thursday to Saturday when they gather for the Kansas City Fed’s annual retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyo., being held in person for the first time since 2019.
The Fed could still succeed at curbing inflation by raising interest rates. Postpandemic headwinds might abate or fail to materialize if protectionism and geopolitical risks recede, labor productivity improves, a slowdown in China’s economy reduces demand for global commodities, or new technologies reduce the costs of developing new energy sources.
Mr. Powell with Mark Carney, then Bank of England Governor, in Jackson Hole, Wyo., in 2019.
Photo:
Amber Baesler/Associated Press
“Since the pandemic, we’ve been living in a world where the economy is being driven by very different forces,” Fed Chairman
Jerome Powell
said on a June panel discussion in Portugal. “What we don’t know is whether we will be going back to something that looks more like, or a little bit like, what we had before.”
European Central Bank President
Christine Lagarde
on the panel offered a more pessimistic appraisal: “I don’t think that we are going to go back to that environment of low inflation.”
The new environment reflects the stalling or potential reversal of three forces that pushed inflation down in recent decades by limiting workers’ ability to win higher wages and companies’ ability to raise prices.
• Force 1: Globalization. Increased flows of trade, money, people and ideas flourished with the Cold War’s end and China’s entry into the international trading system in the 1990s. Multinational companies using new technologies constructed global supply chains focused on driving down costs by finding the cheapest place and workers to produce products. Worldwide competition drove prices lower for many goods.
This helped keep U.S. inflation stable. Over the 20 years ending in 2019, U.S. goods prices rose an average of 0.4% a year, while services prices grew 2.6% annually, leaving “core inflation”—which excludes volatile food and energy prices—around 1.7%.
After the pandemic and the Ukraine war disrupted supply chains, many business leaders adopted new processes to increase reliability even if they cost more, such as by moving production closer to home or buying from multiple suppliers. And tensions between Western democracies and Russia and China raise concerns about a possible further retreat from globalization and rise of protectionism, which would raise production costs.
“If you had all of your supply chain in just one country, you have to question why take that risk in a world where pandemics could hit or country relations could deteriorate or wars could happen between countries,” said Richmond Fed President
Tom Barkin,
a former McKinsey & Co. executive. It is difficult to predict just how durable such changes will be, he added.
• Force 2: Labor markets. In an August 2020 book, “The Great Demographic Reversal,” former British central banker
Charles Goodhart
and economist Manoj Pradhan argued that the low inflation since the 1990s had less to do with central-bank policies and more with the addition of hundreds of millions of low-wage Asian and Eastern European workers, which held down labor costs and prices of manufactured goods exported to richer countries.
A farmworker adjusts sprinklers in Ventura County, Calif., in 2021.
Photo:
patrick t. fallon/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Mr. Goodhart wrote that global labor glut was giving way to an era of worker shortages, and hence higher inflation.
Meanwhile, the U.S. labor force has roughly 2.5 million fewer workers since the pandemic began, compared to what it would have if the prepandemic trend in workforce participation had continued and after accounting for the aging of the population, according to an analysis by Didem Tüzemen, an economist at the Kansas City Fed. Its growth had already slowed before Covid-19, reflecting an aging population, declining birthrates and less immigration. The slower growth rate of the U.S. workforce could force wages higher, feeding inflation.
Wages rose about 3% annually before the pandemic. Average hourly earnings grew 5.2% in the year ended in July.
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Roughly a million people moved to the U.S. annually in the years after the 2007-09 recession. That pace began to taper during the Trump administration and turned into a trickle after the pandemic started. The slowdown left the U.S. with 1.8 million fewer immigrants of working age—about 0.9% of the working-age population—than if pre-2019 immigration trends had continued, according to research by Giovanni Peri, a labor economist at the University of California, Davis.
Mr. Powell in a May interview pointed to the potential for reduced immigration to create a “persistent imbalance between supply and demand in the labor market.” He added: “If you have a slower growing labor market, you’re going to have a smaller economy.”
• Force 3: Energy, commodity prices. Energy and commodity firms haven’t heavily invested in new production over the past decade, creating risks of more persistent shortages when global demand is growing. When the Fed broke the back of high inflation in the early 1980s, then-Chairman Paul Volcker enjoyed some helpful tailwinds in the form of decadelong investments in oil.
Before the emergence of these three factors, the Fed could raise rates at a leisurely pace and could pursue policies that simultaneously kept unemployment and inflation low, something economists later dubbed the “divine coincidence.”
That was possible when the main threats to the economy were “demand shocks”—pullbacks in hiring, consumer spending and business investment—which slow both inflation and growth, as in the recessions of 2001 and 2007-09.
Ben Bernanke, then Fed chairman, testifies on Capitol Hill in 2008.
Photo:
Susan Walsh/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Fed cut rates to near zero in 2008 to stimulate economic activity, held them there until 2015, then raised them at a glacial pace by historical standards. The unemployment rate fell below 4% in 2018, and inflation stayed at or just below the central bank’s 2% target. After raising the fed-funds rate to around 2.4% at the end of 2018, Mr. Powell cut rates slightly following a growth scare in 2019.
Those experiences heavily shaped the Fed’s initial response to the pandemic in 2020. Fearing another decade of sluggish growth and too-low inflation, it cut rates to near zero and promised to keep providing stimulus even after the White House and Congress aggressively boosted federal spending.
‘Supply shocks’
Rather than reducing economic demand, the forces that emerged during the pandemic were what economists call “supply shocks”—events that curtail the economy’s ability to provide goods and services, which in turn hurt growth and spurred inflation. Covid-19 lockdowns and stronger demand for goods disrupted supply chains, as did Russia’s Ukraine invasion and the West’s financial counterassault. Labor shortages emerged across the U.S.
With supply shocks, the Fed faces a harder trade-off between growth and inflation, because attacking inflation invariably means damping growth and employment. In such an environment, “there is no divine coincidence anymore,” said
Jean Boivin,
a former Bank of Canada official who heads the BlackRock Investment Institute.
The Fed and most other central banks initially misread the economy because, in early 2021, price increases could be traced clearly to the effects of the pandemic, affecting a small number of goods, such as used cars. By the end of the year, however, higher inflation had become increasingly broad-based.
One measure produced by the Dallas Fed, called a “trimmed mean” annual inflation rate, which excludes the most volatile categories to capture an underlying trend, rose from 2% last August to 3.5% in January and 4.3% in June.
“This is looking like the 1990s turned on its head,” said Stephen Cecchetti, a Brandeis University economics professor. “Every forecaster back then underestimated growth and overestimated inflation systemically for almost the whole decade. Now, it looks like we’re in for the reverse of this, which will be very, very unpleasant because it means we’re suddenly going to hit trade-offs.”
A wheat field burns after Russian shelling in Ukraine in July.
Photo:
Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press
The low-inflation environment of the past 30 years caused consumers and businesses to not think much about price increases. Fed officials now worry that even if prices rise temporarily, consumers and businesses could come to expect higher inflation to persist. That could help fuel higher inflation as workers demand higher pay that employers would pass onto consumers through higher prices.
“The risk is that because of a multiplicity of shocks, you start to transition to a higher-inflation regime,’’ Mr. Powell said on the June panel. “Our job is literally to prevent that from happening. And we will prevent that from happening.”
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Last year, Mr. Powell suggested he was skeptical of the idea that the forces underpinning globalization would shift overnight, as Mr. Goodhart suggested. But he has given more attention to the idea in the aftermath of the Ukraine war, which has highlighted the potential for significant economic and financial fallout from geopolitical conflicts.
By sending inflation, and especially energy prices, to such elevated levels, the war could serve as a trigger “to make people realize that inflation—and quite high inflation—is a real possibility,” said Mr. Goodhart. In turn, that could weaken the public’s confidence that “everything will go back to normal.”
“The argument of central banks, that they will get inflation back to target at 2% two years from now, is becoming increasingly implausible because they’ve said that all along and, of course, they haven’t achieved it,” he said.
Recession risk
The Fed’s aggressive interest-rate increases this year could be the first example of what happens with U.S. monetary policy in this new environment. Faster and bigger rate rises create greater risks of recession and could upend popular investment strategies by leading to more frequent losses for the two main components of traditional asset portfolios—stocks and long-term U.S. Treasury bonds.
The closed doors of the Pasadena, Calif., community job center during the coronavirus outbreak in May 2020.
Photo:
Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press
Fed officials have raised the fed-funds rate by a cumulative 2.25 percentage points this year, the fastest pace since they began using the rate as their primary policy-setting tool in the early 1990s. The rate influences other borrowing costs throughout the economy.
The Fed began with a quarter-point increase in March, followed by a half-point rise in May and increases of 0.75 point each in June and in July. At their meeting last month, officials debated how and when to dial back the pace of those increases, according to minutes of the meeting released Aug. 17.
An important shift occurred between Fed officials’ May and June meetings, when Mr. Powell secured consensus that they would need to raise rates high enough to slow growth. Through the summer, Fed officials have been unusually united over their goal, but if the labor market cools and the economy slows, Mr. Powell could face a trickier task forging agreement.
Several former Fed officials who have worked closely with Mr. Powell say he is likely to err on the side of raising rates too much, rather than too little, because tolerating excessive inflation would represent a much greater institutional failure for the central bank. Mr. Powell has hammered home the primacy of lowering inflation to the Fed’s 2% target.
“We can’t fail on this,” Mr. Powell told lawmakers on June 23, describing the Fed’s commitment as “unconditional.”
For more than half a century, monkeypox was a rare infectious disease confined to one region of the world. A few months ago, that suddenly changed. Scientists are building a picture of what happened.
The explosion of monkeypox around the world is a case study in how infectious diseases can leap from limited circulation to wide geographic spread with just a few chance events. Infectious-disease experts knew that the virus was on the rise in parts of West and Central Africa. All it took for monkeypox to take off around the world was for the virus to get into a group that would give it more opportunities for transmission.
“You have a virus that was able to establish itself in a dense social and sexual network and transmit efficiently because there’s no immunity,” said Anne Rimoin, professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
A gradual decline of herd immunity against the closely related smallpox virus gave monkeypox more possibilities to jump from its natural animal hosts, infection-disease experts say. And one day, years ago, it infected someone who was part of a network with close physical contact between members—maybe a gay man with multiple sexual partners, or a sex worker—allowing it to spread sustainably among humans for the first time, these experts theorize.
In 2017, researchers in Central Africa were examining animals who may have carried the monkeypox virus.
Photo:
The Washington Post via Getty Images
That spread likely continued for years, undetected, until someone—or some people—with the virus traveled to large international events in Europe in May. Some attendees caught the virus and brought it back to their home countries, setting in motion the global outbreak that has now infected more than 29,000 people.
In the 1970s, many countries stopped routine vaccination against smallpox. A long-running campaign to eradicate one of the world’s deadliest diseases had the added benefit of preventing human infections of monkeypox, a closely related, though less severe, virus.
Starting in 1970, sporadic cases of monkeypox sprang up, mainly in people who lived in small villages in the rainforests of Central and West Africa, in close proximity to some animal populations—such as tree squirrels and other rodents—known to harbor monkeypox. Between 1970 and 1979, the World Health Organization recorded 45 cases. The majority were young children who had been infected by an animal. The virus spread to a close family member on four occasions, but went no further.
As the proportion of unvaccinated people increased, so too did the frequency of monkeypox. A 2010 study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that in one of the most affected regions in Congo, the rate of monkeypox was 20 times higher between 2005 and 2007 than during the 1980s, a period when the WHO conducted widespread testing for the virus.
Before this year, the longest known chain of person-to-person infections for monkeypox was just nine people, according to the World Health Organization.
Photo:
NurPhoto via Getty Images
Almost all cases were in younger people who had been born after mass vaccination ended in 1980. UCLA’s Dr. Rimoin, who led the study, at the time urged governments to tackle the rise of monkeypox in central Africa, while the disease’s geographic range was still limited.
As population immunity declined, the virus was still held back by its limited ability to spread between people. Monkeypox requires close contact to spread. Typically, that means direct contact with the skin lesions caused by the virus, although it can also spread through shared personal items like bed linens or respiratory droplets from prolonged face-to-face contact. African researchers believe that, for most of the last five decades, monkeypox outbreaks quickly fizzled out, with a person catching the virus from an animal and then maybe spreading it to a few people they lived with. Before this year, the longest known chain of transmission—meaning the number of successive person-to-person infections—for monkeypox was just nine people, according to the WHO.
Now, though, virologists and infectious-disease experts say that at some point in the past few years, the virus jumped from an animal to a person and then kept spreading.
Genomic analysis of samples from the current outbreak suggests that the virus has been spreading among people for years, according to Geoffrey Smith, professor of pathology at the University of Cambridge and an expert in poxviruses. The pattern of mutations, he says, is consistent with genetic blips that would have been introduced by a human protein that interferes with viral replication.
So far, there is no evidence that those mutations have led to the virus becoming more transmissible, or brought about any other new properties such as drug resistance or increased severity, said Prof. Smith.
U.S. health officials have declared monkeypox a public-health emergency, after the World Health Organization declared it a global health emergency in late July. WSJ explains what you should look out for and what scientists know about how the virus is spreading. Illustration: Adele Morgan
It isn’t known precisely when that sustained human-to-human transmission began. The number of genetic mutations linked to the human protein suggests that the current outbreak can be traced to an animal-to-human infection that took place around April 2016, according to researchers at the University of Edinburgh.
Dimie Ogoina, an infectious-disease doctor in Nigeria, said he suspected that sexual contact had become an important route of transmission for monkeypox when the virus suddenly resurfaced in that country in 2017, after nearly four decades without a case.
An early clue, he said, came from a husband and wife. The husband had a rash that was most prominent in his genitals. The wife later developed a single lesion in her genital area, but had no other symptoms. The couple had two children at home under the age of 10, neither of whom caught the virus.
Dr. Ogoina, who has treated a few dozen cases since 2017, said he could link the virus with sexual contact in the majority of patients that he has seen. However, when he shared this observation with colleagues at a conference in 2019, some were skeptical, as it didn’t fit with how monkeypox had spread in the past.
“It’s a roll of the dice as to whether or not it’s going to end up in a dense network,” said Dr. Rimoin. She said it is likely that the virus was already circulating among men who have sex of men and that some of them traveled to large gatherings in the Canary Islands and Belgium that took place in May. Those events were linked to multiple cases that were later identified in various European countries including the U.K., Spain and Portugal.
Although the virus is circulating predominantly through sexual networks of gay and bisexual men, that isn’t its only mode of spread. A small number of women and children have also caught the virus by, for example, catching it from someone they live with.
“This is something that was wholly predictable if monkeypox got itself into the right population for spread,” said Dr. Rimoin. “Now we have to wake up and get to work.”
Covid-19 is circulating widely as the BA.5 Omicron subvariant elevates the risk of reinfections and rising case counts, spoiling chances for a summer reprieve from the pandemic across much of the U.S.
Covid-19 levels are high in a fifth of U.S. counties, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s metric based on case and hospital data, a share that has been mostly rising since mid-April. BA.5 is estimated to represent nearly two in three recent U.S. cases that are averaging just more than 100,000 a day, CDC data show. The true number of infections may be roughly six times as high, some virus experts said, in part because so many people are using at-home tests that state health departments largely don’t track.
“We think we’re in a very high level of community transmission, second only to the Omicron peak from the wintertime,” said
Jeffrey Duchin,
health officer for the public-health agency covering Seattle and King County, Wash.
Biden Administration health officials said Tuesday that BA.5 has the potential to push the number of infections higher in the coming weeks. They urged eligible people to get vaccine booster shots to lower the risk of hospitalization and death, and not to wait for potential updated boosters targeting Omicron subvariants.
Getting a booster now “does not preclude your also doing it in the fall,” said
Anthony Fauci,
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during a White House briefing. “If the risk is now, address the current risk.”
Nationally, wastewater data tracking the prevalence of the Covid-19 virus through July 6 has recently trended up, according to Biobot Analytics. Such data can provide clues about the pandemic’s trajectory.
Covid-19 hospital admissions are going up in Los Angeles County, and local authorities have said they might impose a mask mandate.
Photo:
caroline brehman/Shutterstock
New York City last week urged people to resume masking in public, indoor settings and around crowds outside. Los Angeles County’s public health department said rising Covid-19 hospital admissions mean that the county also could soon reach high community prevalence and that officials would reinstate a mask mandate if the county stayed at that level for two weeks.
Signs of acute illness remain muted, continuing a hallmark of the spring surge, as treatments plus immunity from vaccines and previous infections reduce risks for many people. But the high prevalence of infection in many areas continues to cause disruptions, including canceled flights and spoiled travel plans, sick children sidelined from camp and child care and hospital employees who can’t report to work.
BA.5’s mutations make it particularly adept at causing repeat infections, even in people who had the version of Omicron that caused the largest recorded spike in cases last winter. There is no evidence to suggest BA.5 causes more severe disease, CDC Director
Rochelle Walensky
said.
Ashish Jha,
the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, noted some mixed signals from overseas. Portugal, where vaccine and booster coverage is robust, experienced a sizable wave of serious illness and death after BA.5 hit there recently, Dr. Jha said over the weekend. South Africa, on the other hand, recorded a low rate of deaths after BA.5 surged there this spring, he said.
The BA.5 Omicron subvariant surged in South Africa in the spring, and the death rate was low.
Photo:
Denis Farrell/Associated Press
In addition to vaccines, health officials urged people to use treatment medications such as
Pfizer Inc.’s
Paxlovid. They encouraged people to test before gatherings and use high-quality masks in crowded, indoor spaces.
The pace of hospital admissions for Covid-19-positive patients has recently sped up, federal data indicate. The seven-day moving average for confirmed Covid-19 patients in hospitals has topped 33,000, federal data show, up from a low near 10,000 in April but far below January’s record peak topping 150,000.
Many of the hospitalizations are cases where patients test positive after being admitted for other reasons. Data indicate the portion of Covid-19 patients who need intensive care remains low. Deaths are hovering around 300 to 350 a day, Dr. Jha said Tuesday. This is much closer to historic lows than highs, though he called the current level unacceptable.
Couples whose weddings were cancelled or diminished because of Covid-19 participated in a symbolic ceremony Sunday in New York City, one sign that many people are less shy about crowds at this point in the pandemic.
Photo:
Julia Nikhinson/Associated Press
The reduced threat is one reason a pandemic-fatigued populace is less likely to change behavior when cases are high, said
Robert Wachter,
chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Crowds are once again common, from concerts to restaurants to airport terminals. Mask use is scattered, while mandates remain rare.
“Part of what motivated people to be super careful for a long time was the fear that I’m going to die of this thing,” Dr. Wachter said. “I think people have less fear of that, and that’s not inappropriate.”
He and other health experts said they continue to take precautions in their own lives because of the risk of developing long Covid symptoms after an infection. Persistently high levels of infections in communities can also leave elderly people and those with compromised immune systems more exposed, according to epidemiologists. Tamping down on the spread of the virus also gives it less chance to mutate, Dr. Fauci said.
As a surge that started in early spring grinds along through the summer, some health officials are thinking about the fall. U.S. health authorities are planning a fall booster campaign to protect against a potential winter surge, and vaccine makers are racing to update their vaccines to target Omicron subvariants, including BA.5.
Public-health officials and experts hope modified shots will help get some booster-hesitant people off the fence. “With a good public-health campaign behind the rollout of the vaccine, we can shift the scales of that trajectory of people getting both their boosters and vaccinated,” said
Debra Furr-Holden,
dean of New York University School of Global Public Health.
Dr. Duchin, in Seattle, said he hoped communities would head toward the fall at a low level of Covid-19 transmission to ease pressure on health systems. He said he was worried about the consequences if instead Covid-19 is circulating widely at what is traditionally a more intense time for respiratory illnesses generally.
“This virus is relentless in the way it’s challenging us in unexpected ways,” he said.
Write to Jon Kamp at jon.kamp@wsj.com and Jared S. Hopkins at jared.hopkins@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications The BA.5 subvariant is estimated to represent nearly two in three recent U.S. Covid-19 cases. An earlier version of this article misstated the portion as more than one in three cases. (Corrected on July 12)
DIDOVYCHI, Ukraine—About two dozen civilians were evacuated Saturday from the besieged steel plant in Mariupol, while elsewhere Ukrainians faced fuel shortages and rising prices following recent Russian missile strikes on oil refineries and storage depots in the country.
On Saturday afternoon, the Mariupol city council announced plans for an evacuation of residents from the occupied city, though it didn’t confirm whether it had gone ahead. Russian state media reported on Saturday that a group of 25 civilians including six children, were evacuated from the Azovstal plant.
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Russian media had also shown videos of vehicles from the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross preparing for civilian evacuations in Mariupol. Representatives of the U.N. and the ICRC didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The Azov regiment’s deputy commander, Svyatoslav Palamar, confirmed in a video posted to Telegram that both sides had upheld a promised cease-fire that commenced Saturday morning. He said that at 6:25 p.m. an evacuation team arrived to spirit out civilians. He said they were headed for the city of Zaporizhzhia.
Mr. Palamar added that many more holdouts in the plant still need to be evacuated. “We ask guarantees for the departure not only of civilians but also our wounded service members who require necessary medical help,” he said.
Firefighters put out a blaze at an oil depot near Chuhuiv, Ukraine, following Russian missile strikes last week.
Photo:
sergey bobok/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Separately, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister
Iryna Vereshchuk
said in a Telegram post that a prisoner exchange took place on Saturday where seven civilians and seven military personnel, including a pregnant fighter, returned to Ukraine. There was no comment on the subject from Russian officials.
Ukrainian officials planned to address the fuel shortages through new contracts from Western Europe.
“The occupiers are deliberately destroying the infrastructure for the production, supply and storage of fuel,” Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky
said Friday night. “Russia has also blocked our ports, so there are no immediate solutions to replenish the deficit.”
“Queues and rising prices at gas stations are seen in many regions of our country,” he added.
Gasoline shortages were felt by the thousands of Ukrainians traveling across the country to return to homes they left behind when the war began on Feb. 24, now that Russia has shifted its military campaign to the east and south from the capital, Kyiv. People driving from western Ukraine to Kyiv and towns nearby waited on Friday in lines for gasoline that grew as they approached the capital.
A woman puts plastic sheeting over shattered windows in her home near Bucha, Ukraine.
Photo:
Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press
Most gasoline stations were rationing fuel to 10 liters, or a little over 2.6 gallons, for a customer, and some had run out altogether. Some lines stretched for a quarter of a mile, one for each filling pump.
“We have no idea if we’ll get a delivery any time soon,” said Oleksandr Kovalchuk, a gasoline-station attendant off the E40 highway leading from Lviv in western Ukraine to Kyiv.
At another station on the same route, drivers had to provide cellphone numbers to which a code would be sent authorizing them to refill with 10 liters of gasoline. Each customer was allowed one code and would be denied further refills at other stations operated by the same company, West Oil Group SA, a cashier said.
Father Roman Danchivskyi, an Orthodox priest who was en route to celebrate Mass in the capital, had canisters totaling 60 liters of gasoline in the trunk of the minivan he was traveling in with family and friends. He said he had stopped at three stations since leaving Lviv, waiting 40 minutes at the first one he visited outside the city.
“If you plan ahead, you’ll be fine,” he said. “But the war is clearly affecting our lives.”
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister
Yulia Svyrydenko
on Friday pinned the shortages on Russian attacks on the Kremenchuk oil refinery and other locations holding fuel reserves. She said the issue would be resolved over the next seven days through Western European contracts, resulting in slightly higher fuel prices. She didn’t explain how the fuel would be delivered to Ukraine but it could potentially enter by rail and truck tankers crossing in from Poland and other neighboring countries.
Ukrainians waited to flee the conflict zone on Friday after the town of Ruska Lozova was recaptured by the Ukrainian army.
Photo:
sergey kozlov/Shutterstock
Authorities in Kyiv said drivers should restrict the use of private vehicles except where urgent, as more residents returned to the Ukrainian capital following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the area.
“Today, we have different priorities for fuel,” Kyiv official
Mykola Povoroznyk
said, urging residents who have returned to the capital to use public transit.
The Kyiv administration pointed out that city buses, trams, trolleys and private buses are in operation on a total of nearly 200 routes, and the Kyiv Metro rapid-transit system is running all day.
On April 2, the Russian Defense Ministry said it used high-precision long-range weapons to damage gasoline and diesel fuel-storage facilities at the Kremenchuk refinery, which has supplied Ukrainian troops in central and eastern parts of the country.
The strike came after Russian officials accused Ukraine of firing missiles at an oil depot in Belgorod, a Russian city 20 miles from the Ukrainian border, in a predawn helicopter raid a day earlier.
Thousands of people have died and millions have been displaced since Russia invaded Ukraine, with fears growing that the conflict could spill over into other countries. The war has raised the specter of a wider confrontation between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers. U.S. officials say they aim to see Russia’s military force degraded.
Footage shows explosions rocking Kyiv during the U.N. secretary-general’s visit to the Ukrainian capital; Russian troops have gradually seized more of eastern Ukraine; The House passed a bill to make it easier to send military equipment. Photo: Valeria Ferraro/Zuma Press
On the battlefront, Ukrainian troops on Friday hoisted the country’s flag above the town of Ruska Lozova, north of Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city. Russian forces had seized Ruska Lozova and pressed into Kharkiv on the first day of the war, using positions there to shell the city’s residential neighborhoods. The recapture of Ruska Lozova follows other Ukrainian advances north of Kharkiv as Ukrainian troops aim to reduce Russia’s ability to strike the city with artillery.
Aiming to stall a Russian advance in the eastern Donbas region, Ukrainian forces Friday blew up a railway bridge near the town of Lyman, according to footage broadcast on national television. Heavy fighting continued across the Donbas front, with both sides releasing videos of destroyed enemy armor.
The head of the Odessa regional military administration, Maksym Marchenko, said that the Odessa airport had been struck Saturday with missiles fired from Crimea, the peninsula Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014. No one was injured in the attack but a runway was damaged, he said.
Ukrainian officials and Western analysts say the Russian forces are making slow progress.
Back on the road, Sergey Zhelepa, a marketing specialist, was traveling with his wife and 1-year-old daughter, Polina, from Lutsk, a city in western Ukraine where the family relocated for safety reasons after Russia invaded. On Friday, they were heading back to the home they had left behind in Kyiv.
“Before you had so much choice at gas stations, with two different types of diesel and three options for gas,” he said. “Now there’s very little left anywhere.”
For Yury Surinets, who works at a firm that makes electronic security systems, gasoline is also a necessary commodity to power the generator he and his family run at their home in Makarov, a town near Kyiv that was shelled heavily by Russian forces in the early days of the war and has been left largely without power.
Mr. Surinets and his family left Makarov on Feb. 25 as part of a relocation of his company’s staff to the Zakarpattia region in western Ukraine, but were returning to replant their garden and check on their home.
“When you travel, you have to have backup supplies because the situation is even worse in the Kyiv region,” he said. “And we have to be able to get back to the west soon.”
—Yuliya Chernova contributed to this article.
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at Matthew.Luxmoore@wsj.com
BOSTON—At a sewage treatment plant on a sliver of land in Boston Harbor, trickles of wastewater are pumped into a plastic jug every 15 minutes. Samples from the jugs, analyzed at a lab in nearby Cambridge, Mass., are part of the growing effort to monitor the Covid-19 virus in wastewater across the U.S.
On Deer Island in Boston, readings from the system covering 2.4 million people have recently shown virus readings leveling off after a steep decline from this winter’s Omicron-driven rise. In some areas, levels of the virus may be edging higher.
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“The last few days have been a little worrisome,”
Larry Madoff,
medical director of the bureau of infectious disease and laboratory sciences at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, said late last week. “It certainly bears careful watching.”
Wastewater sampling here and at hundreds of sites nationwide is once more drawing closer scrutiny from epidemiologists worried the spread of what appears to be a yet-more-contagious version of Omicron, known as BA.2, and rising cases in Europe could soon spoil the latest U.S. recovery. The number of wastewater sites indicating virus increases on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dashboard has risen in recent weeks, though the majority of sites still show declining levels.
In Boston and beyond, these systems during the Omicron wave helped quickly detect virus-concentration surges, declines and circulating variants, often before testing and case data. Health authorities believe it will become an increasingly important early-warning tool that can help guide public messaging and other responses, like marshaling resources to surging areas.
Massachusetts public health official Larry Madoff says, ‘The last few days have been a little worrisome.’
A view through the grates at the Deer Island treatment facility in Boston.
But the technique is also suffering some growing pains from a mix of technological, data-interpretation and logistical challenges as U.S. authorities try to build out a national system.
“We’re trying to figure out how you can take that data and turn it into public-health action and how that can be incorporated into a surveillance system,” said
Kelly Wroblewski,
director of infectious-disease programs at the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “It hasn’t quite matured yet.”
Researchers determined early in the pandemic they could track the new coronavirus through the sewers. The low-cost technique has speed and coverage benefits: People can shed virus in their waste before they feel sick enough to get tested. Many never get tests that generate results that can be tallied by public-health officials, especially now that people are self-testing more at home. States have also started closing testing sites and dialing back daily data reporting, making a passive data source like the sewers increasingly important.
“We are really relying more and more on wastewater as testing goes down,” said
Loren Hopkins,
chief environmental science officer with the Houston Health Department, which detected Omicron’s presence via wastewater before it confirmed a case in the city.
Wastewater samples can show an increase in Covid-19 virus levels before it shows up in the case data.
The CDC established a wastewater surveillance network in late 2020 and added wastewater data to its public Covid-19 dashboard in February. The system currently includes data from more than 700 sampling sites that cover roughly one-quarter of the U.S. population. The agency has a contract with a testing company to provide twice-weekly testing to more sites and is aiming to expand its network into all 50 states within the next few years.
Still, some places aren’t well-suited to wastewater monitoring. Roughly one in five households, concentrated in rural areas, use septic systems that don’t feed into sewers or wastewater treatment plants, federal officials estimate.
“We will have a challenge bringing wastewater surveillance to all communities, particularly those that are very rural,” said
Amy Kirby,
team lead on the National Wastewater Surveillance System at the CDC. “But we are hopeful that we can continue to get as many communities on board as possible.”
The CDC’s network has hit some challenges in its expansion. The well-established testing program on Boston’s Deer Island is working through some data-collection hurdles before it can submit numbers to the CDC, said
Steve Rhode,
a laboratory director for the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority.
Lab technicians analyze wastewater samples in Cambridge, Mass.
Photo:
ALLISON DINNER/REUTERS
Sewage samples from Boston and neighboring towns helped preview the Omicron surge.
Some states and facilities aren’t participating. The Wyoming Department of Health stopped its wastewater monitoring system in December after funding for the program ended. There hasn’t been a firm decision on future wastewater monitoring, a department spokeswoman said.
North Dakota monitors wastewater, but some lawmakers and citizens were opposed to reporting the data federally. The state declined to participate in the federal program, the state’s health department said.
Other states are aiming to build bigger programs. Louisiana has sampling sites in the New Orleans area transmitting data to the CDC. The state wants to build up to 100 sites including cities and places like prisons and nursing homes, said
Theresa Sokol,
Louisiana’s state epidemiologist.
What is an endemic and how will we know when Covid-19 becomes one? WSJ’s Daniela Hernandez breaks down how public-health experts assess when a virus like Covid-19 enters an endemic stage. Photo: Michael Nagle/Zuma Press
Comparing data from different sites can be difficult, water and public-health experts say. Facilities across the country often collect samples at different frequencies or use different analytical approaches. Local factors such as rainfall, the mix of industrial and residential developments and population surges in tourist areas can also affect readings. Some researchers have found workarounds, including measuring substances like other viruses consistently found in humans to normalize the data.
At low levels of virus, data gathered from wastewater can also be noisy, and the CDC’s current wastewater dashboard can show some confusing readings. It lists percent changes in virus concentrations at individual sites over 15-day periods, but not the virus levels themselves or the trends over time. This can lead to what look like huge increases—some recently topped 2 billion percent—likely in instances where there are changes from low virus levels, agency scientists say. The CDC is working on new ways to standardize and display its data, they say.
In Massachusetts, wastewater data are part of a broader picture health authorities are using to gauge trends, said Dr. Madoff of the state’s health department. But the sewage samples proved their particular value by previewing the Omicron surge and decline.
“It was clearly the first signal,” he said.
The Deer Island wastewater treatment plant is near the suburban community of Winthrop, Mass.
Write to Brianna Abbott at brianna.abbott@wsj.com and Jon Kamp at jon.kamp@wsj.com
California universities are turning dormitory lounges into bedrooms, putting students in hotel rooms, and leasing entire apartment buildings to deal with a housing shortage that recently led to a judge ordering UC Berkeley to freeze its on-campus enrollment.
The state’s public higher learning institutions have added tens of thousands fewer beds than students in recent years, as a problem across the state—a lack of affordable homes caused in large part by restraints on construction—hits college towns particularly hard.
Spurred by a national outcry over the Berkeley decision, California legislators have proposed measures to delay its impact or spur more construction at colleges. On Monday, Democratic Gov.
Gavin Newsom
signed a measure passed unanimously by the state legislature that will render the judge’s decision unenforceable and give Berkeley and other public colleges and universities 18 months to address challenges to campus population growth before a judge can enforce any changes.
State Sen.
Scott Wiener
has introduced a broader proposal that would exempt many student housing projects from environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, which was at the heart of the Berkeley suit.
“We are making it so hard for the next generation of students to access this education because of the lack of housing,” Mr. Wiener, a Democrat, said.
McKenzie Carling in August of 2020. She says UC Berkeley is her dream school.
Photo:
Sara Carling
UC Berkeley, the crown jewel of California’s public higher education system, had been preparing to cut its on-campus enrollment by at least 2,500 students this fall, after the state’s highest court overruled its request to reverse an enrollment cap instituted by a trial judge. The University said Monday that under the law signed by Mr. Newsom, it will instead proceed with its original admissions plan, offering spots to more than 15,000 incoming freshmen and 4,500 transfers for in-person enrollment this year.
Mr. Wiener will still push to pass his proposal, while Republicans in the Democratic-controlled legislature have called for more sweeping CEQA reform.
In their lawsuit, local groups have accused the university of violating CEQA by admitting more students than it had projected without fully considering negative impacts on traffic, noise and housing availability.
Both sides agree there aren’t enough homes for the students who are already there.
Signed into law in 1970 by then-Gov.
Ronald Reagan,
CEQA requires local governments to study the potential environmental impacts of building projects before approving them. Over the years, the law has been wielded by groups that oppose developments for numerous reasons, going far beyond its original intent, according to housing advocates.
California has added 3.2 times more people than housing units over the past 10 years, according to an analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California. Its median home price of $765,580 is more than twice the national average, and the state has the second-lowest homeownership rate in the nation behind New York.
“The student housing affordability crisis is essentially the broader California housing affordability crisis turned up to 11,” said M. Nolan Gray, an urban-planning researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.
UC Berkeley had been preparing to cut its on-campus enrollment by at least 2,500 students this fall.
Photo:
Stephen Reiss/The Wall Street Journal
Since 2015, UC campuses have added 21,700 beds while enrollment grew by about 43,000, according to a report last year by the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office. More than 16,000 California college students at UC and California State University campuses were wait-listed for university-provided housing last fall.
Those who find housing they can afford off-campus often crowd into small apartments or face long commutes to classes. Rachel Forgash, a Ph.D. student at UCLA, said she spends about half of her $2,580 monthly stipend to split a 600-square-foot apartment and commute an hour to campus. “I feel extremely stressed perpetually about housing,” she said.
McKenzie Carling, who is waiting to find out if she has been accepted to UC Berkeley, said she worries that the court fight will hurt her chances of attending what she says is her dream school.
“I don’t think they’re thinking of the kids who’ve had to work through a pandemic, whose graduations were in cars, whose blood, sweat and tears were in Zoom meetings,” said Ms. Carling, 19, who lives in a two-bedroom apartment with her mother and shares a room with her 18-year-old brother in Rocklin, outside Sacramento.
Phil Bokovoy says university officials have expanded enrollment too quickly without considering the impact on affordable housing.
Photo:
Stephen Reiss/The Wall Street Journal
Many Berkeley residents and city leaders are alumni of the university who now find themselves at odds over whether to give priority to expanding educational access or maintain the look and feel of a low-rise city full of single-family homes. “The most obvious and important thing you can do is build dense student housing right next to campus,” said City Councilmember Rigel Robinson, a 2018 graduate who supports increased construction.
Phil Bokovoy, a local resident who is leading the lawsuit against UC Berkeley, said university officials have expanded enrollment too quickly without considering the impact on residents and students looking for an affordable place to live.
In the fall of 2001, the median rent for a studio apartment for new leases was $900, according to data from the city of Berkeley. Last fall, it was nearly $1,800.
“They’ve created a housing crisis that makes it almost impossible for low-income students in any greater numbers to come to Berkeley,” said Mr. Bokovoy, who received a master’s degree from the university in 1989. He said the bill Mr. Newsom signed doesn’t address the underlying issue.
UC Santa Cruz says lawsuits from local residents stalled a 3,000-bed student housing development approved by university officials years ago.
Photo:
Clara Mokri for The Wall Street Journal
He said he would like UC Berkeley to follow the path of UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz, which have said they would provide housing to accommodate any increase in on-campus student enrollment.
UC Santa Cruz has struggled to make good on that pledge. Cynthia Larive, the school’s chancellor, told state legislators in November that lawsuits from local residents stalled a 3,000-bed student housing development approved by university officials nearly three years ago.
“We can’t move forward even though students need housing now,” Ms. Larive said in an interview.
In the interim, UC Santa Cruz has increased capacity by placing as many as six students in converted lounges, and has rented dozens of hotel rooms to provide overflow housing for some graduate students.
UC Santa Cruz student Louise Edwards says she has slept in her car.
Photo:
Clara Mokri for The Wall Street Journal
Louise Edwards often studied and slept in her car alongside her dog, Thelma, while she attended community college in the Bay Area.
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The 53-year-old was admitted to UC Santa Cruz last year, but has struggled to find a reliable place to live with her Section 8 housing voucher. She signed a lease on a one-bedroom unit 9 miles from campus last fall for $2,216 a month—the maximum she could afford with her voucher—but now her landlord is trying to sell the property, she said.
She is hoping to live closer to campus because of rising gas prices, but hasn’t found anything yet. She opted to enroll in online classes next quarter because of the uncertainty.
“The only thing I know how to do is go into a shelter,” Ms. Edwards said of her options when she loses her current dwelling. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”
Tuition at America’s public universities has nearly tripled since 1990. With President Biden looking to ease the burden for some students, experts explain how federal financial aid programs can actually contribute to rising costs. Photo: Storyblocks
Write to Christine Mai-Duc at christine.maiduc@wsj.com
