The “king of beers” won’t be reigning over the Super Bowl 2021 commercial space this year.
Budweiser is the latest corporation to back out of advertising during this year’s broadcast, choosing instead to join a public awareness campaign for the COVID-19 vaccine.
For the first time in 37 years, the company won’t air its game-stealing commercials, Anheuser-Busch, which owns Budweiser, announced Monday.
“Like everyone else, we are eager to get people back together, reopen restaurants and bars, and be able to gather to cheers with friends and family,” said Monica Rustgi, vice president of marketing at Budweiser. “To do this, and to bring consumers back into neighborhood bars and restaurants that were hit exceptionally hard by the pandemic, we’re stepping in to support critical awareness of the COVID-19 vaccine.”
Thirty-second ad spots for the Super Bowl reportedly go for about $55 million a piece. Budweiser will instead route some of that money to the Ad Council’s efforts to raise public awareness about the vaccine, as well as a 90-second COVID-themed “film” called “Bigger Picture” narrated by actress Rashida Jones. It will air digitally leading up to the Super Bowl, which airs on Feb. 7, 2021 on CBS.
Other Super Bowl commercial giants such as Pepsi, Coke and Hyundai will also take a step back from this year’s game, reallocating their funds in light of the pandemic. Pepsi, for instance, will focus primarily on its halftime show, headlined by The Weeknd.
“Instead of buying a traditional 30-second in-game Super Bowl ad, we decided to double down on the 12 minutes Pepsi already has in the middle of the game — the Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show,” vice president of marketing Todd Kaplan said in a statement.
Coca-Cola execs said they will no run ads in this year’s broadcast to “ensure we are investing in the right resources during these unprecedented times.”
Coca-Cola, which has featured endearing polar bears in past years’ Super Bowl commercials, said it will not run ads during this year’s CBS broadcast.Coca-Cola
Many others are struggling to figure out how to strike the right tone amid the devastation caused by the virus.
“There is trepidation around Super Bowl advertising this year,” Bill Oberlander, co-founder and executive creative of ad agency Oberlander recently told The Post. “For the Super Bowl, you generally go big or go home. I think brands are going home rather than spending tens of millions of dollars and not getting it right. They’re saying, ‘Let’s wait until this s – – t storm clears.’”
In years past, Budweiser’s Super Bowl commercials have stolen the show, with ads featuring singing frogs and stately Clydesdales. Last year, their crowd-favorite ad challenged stereotypes of a “Typical American” by showcasing the extraordinary actions of ordinary Americans.
At dawn, market vendors busily unload fresh fruits and vegetables. Office workers fill popular eateries during their lunch break. As dusk falls, elderly couples descend on the city’s parks, practicing dance moves by the Yangtze River. Red lanterns have been erected around the city in anticipation of the Lunar New Year celebrations.
A year has passed since the central Chinese city of 11 million people was placed under the world’s first coronavirus lockdown on January 23. At least 3,869 Wuhan residents eventually died from the virus, which has since claimed more than two million lives around the globe.
But the Chinese government has since heralded those drastic steps as crucial to curbing the initial outbreak, and similar measures have now been enforced in countries around the world — with some cities outside China undergoing multiple lockdowns.
In that context, Wuhan has become a success story in taming the virus. It has not reported a local coronavirus infection for months.
On December 31, as millions of people in other countries spent New Year’s Eve in the confinement of another lockdown, Wuhan’s residents packed glittering streets to celebrate the arrival of 2021 with a midnight countdown.
Today, residents speak proudly of the resilience and strength of their city, and the efforts they made to ward off Covid-19.
But the severe measures also came at a huge personal cost to residents, and despite the apparent return to normal life, deep emotional scars haunt the city.
Some residents who lost loved ones to the virus are still living in grief, angry at the government for its early missteps in preventing people from knowing facts that could have saved lives.
“To seek truth is the best way to remember her”
Yang Min, 50, still wonders if her daughter would be alive had she been told that coronavirus was infectious just four days earlier.
On January 16, her 24-year-old daughter went to hospital to receive chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. Healthcare workers had already been sickened from the virus — a dangerous sign that it was infectious —but their cases had not been made public. Instead, Wuhan officials insisted there was “no obvious evidence for human-to-human transmission,” and maintained that the virus was “preventable and controllable.”
Three days later, the night before authorities finally admitted the virus is transmittable from person to person on January 20, Yang’s daughter developed a high fever. She was transferred to another hospital, before eventually ending up in Jinyintan Hospital, a designated facility for coronavirus patients. She died there on February 6.
Yang believes her daughter caught the virus in hospital, and blames the government for not warning the public about the severity and true nature of the outbreak earlier. “If I knew there was an infectious disease, I wouldn’t send my child (to hospital for cancer treatment),” Yang said. “I sent her to the hospital for life, not death.”
While tending to her daughter, Yang also caught the virus. Her husband didn’t tell Yang that their daughter had died until she had recovered herself, fearing the news would devastate her.
At the end of February, she learned that she would never see her daughter again.“My last memory of my child was the top of her head and her hair when she was wheeled (to the ICU) on a trolley bed. She didn’t even look back at me. It still pains me,” she said.
Yang accused the government of covering up the severity of the initial outbreak, and says she has met local officials several times to demand accountability. “I was told by the street and district leaders that (the government) did not cover up the pandemic. (They said they) released an online notice on December 31,” she said.
On December 31, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued a statement that reported the discovery of a cluster of “pneumonia” cases. But it claimed there was no sign of “human-to-human transmission.”
Around the same time, authorities silenced healthcare workers who tried to sound the alarm of the virus — including Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang, who was punished by police for “spreading rumors” and later died of Covid-19. The suppression likely led to unnecessary cross-infections inside hospitals, as well as in families and communities, according to health experts.
In an interview with state broadcaster CCTV on January 27, Wuhan’s then-mayor Zhou Xianwang admitted his government did not disclose information on the coronavirus “in a timely fashion.” He said the city’s management of the epidemic was “not good enough” and offered to resign if that would help the efforts to control the crisis.
Two weeks later, amid widespread public criticism of the authorities’ handling of the outbreak, several senior local officials were removed from office, but Zhou stayed on. Last week, state media reported that Zhou had resigned due to an unspecified “work arrangement.”
Yang wants all officials involved in the early handling of Wuhan’s crisis to be punished, and for the truth to be told over their actions.
“I want to hold them accountable. I need to ask for an explanation. If there’s no explanation, there’s no justice,” she said. “To seek truth for (my daughter) … is the best way to remember her.”
“I’m a patriot, too”
Yang is not the only bereaved family member demanding justice. Zhang Hai, who lost his father to the coronavirus, spent much of last year trying to sue the government for compensation over his father’s death.
Taking the government to court is a rare — and often futile — step in China, where the judiciary is firmly controlled by the ruling Communist Party.
Still, Zhang was undeterred. He filed a lawsuit against the governments of Wuhan and Hubei province in June, but a local court rejected the case. He turned to a higher-level court two months later, only to be dismissed again. In November, he submitted a complaint — seen by CNN — to have his case heard at China’s highest judicial organ, the Supreme People’s Court, but has received no reply so far.
“‘Ruling the country by law’ and ‘everyone is equal before the law’ have long been our country’s slogans. But so far, I haven’t seen any evidence of that,” he said.
Like Yang, Zhang blames the Wuhan government for withholding the truth about the coronavirus.
On January 17, a day after Yang sent her daughter for cancer treatment, Zhang brought his father Zhang Lifa to a Wuhan hospital to treat his leg fracture. The surgery went smoothly, but his father was infected with Covid-19 while recovering in hospital. He died on February 1, aged 76.
“I’m feeling very emotional, and at the same time, my heart is filled with anger,” Zhang said, standing by the water in a Wuhan park — it was the last place that the father and son visited together, before going to the hospital.
“If the Wuhan government hadn’t concealed (the severity of the outbreak), my father wouldn’t have left this world,” he said.
Zhang’s father was an army veteran who worked on China’s nuclear weapons program — and suffered long-term health effects because of his work. “My father is a patriot. He sacrificed his youth and his health for the country,” Zhang said.
“And I’m a patriot, too. By speaking out and seeking accountability, I’m conducting an act of patriotism. No country, no political party can be perfect. In Wuhan, officials covered up (the outbreak) and went unpunished. By punishing them, I believe it’s doing a service to our country and our party,” he said.
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin said last month that accusations China covered up the epidemic were “simply groundless.”
Wang said: “There’s a clear timeline of China’s effort to fight Covid-19, which is open and transparent. At the earliest time possible we reported the epidemic to the WHO, identified the pathogen and shared its genome sequence with the world, and we shared our information and containment experience of the virus with other countries and regions in a timely manner.”
A tale of triumph
There is little indication that the Chinese government is going to address Yang and Zhang’s grievances. A week before the one-year anniversary of Wuhan’s lockdown,more than 90 bereaved family members suddenly found their WeChat group had been shut down, according to Zhang. The group had been a source of support for Zhang and others — and provided a rare space for them to share their grief.
Facing growing criticism and blame from countries around the world, Beijing has unleashed its army of propagandists and censors to reshape the narrative around its coronavirus response as a victorious one from the start, and suppress any voices that stray from the official line.
China’s subsequent success in containing the virus has been used as proof to deny that any mistakes were made in the early stages. Wang said: “Faced with the once-in-a-century pandemic, can such achievements ever be made by covering up the truth? The answer is simple enough. China’s achievements in fighting the pandemic are the best response to the fallacy of China concealing the virus.”
Authorities have detained citizen journalists who documented the harsh reality of life in Wuhan during the height of the outbreak. One of them, Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer, was sentenced to four years in jail last month for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
The story of Wuhan, by the official narrative, has become one of heroism, solidarity and triumph.
At a convention center in the city, which previously served as a makeshift quarantine site for Covid-19 patients, a massive exhibition opened in October, to commemorate the city’s struggle against the coronavirus. It is titled “Putting People and Lives First — A Special Exhibition on the Fight Against Covid-19 Pandemic,” and features more than 1,000 items reminding visitors of the effort and sacrifice healthcare workers, soldiers, volunteers, officials and citizens made to defeat the virus. The Party’s unfaltering leadership over the fight is highlighted throughout the exhibit, but there is no mention of any mistakes the government had made.
“The propaganda machine is on full force to promote the government’s success — the (hardship) is all over and we can now sing and dance in celebration of peace,” Zhang Hai said. “But the so-called victory was achieved by sacrificing the people.”
“Most tormenting time”
In the heart of Wuhan’s city center, there is one unmistakeable reminder that not everything has recovered from the coronavirus: the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where a cluster of coronavirus cases was first detected, propelling the site to international notoriety.
Today, the market — with its name removed from the gates — remains shut behind metal fences, its future uncertain.
Xiao Chuan’an, who sells sugar cane near the market, remembers the lockdown with dread. As restrictions kicked in, Xiao, who comes from a neighboring city, was trapped in Wuhan for more than two months. In the days before the lockdown was imposed, her daughter had kept pleading with her to go home, but Xiao didn’t want to abandon her stock of sugar cane. In the end, she was unable to sell any of it — as the lockdown dragged on, her sugar cane all rotted.
“I really washed my face with tears every day. It was the most tormenting time, and I was so sad and scared to death,” she said.
But the strict measures apparently worked. By mid-March, the number of new infections had slowed to a trickle from thousands per day at its worst in February. Residents were allowed to return to work. Public buses and underground trains resumed service. Finally, on April 8, the lockdown was officially lifted.
Chinese authorities have largely been able to avoid a Wuhan-style city-wide lockdown during subsequent local flareups, by resorting to mass testing, extensive contact tracing and more targeted restrictions.
As the pandemic spreas, China’s overall success in containing the virus, especially when contrasted with the chaotic and deadly failures to do so in countries like the US and UK, has won wide domestic support for Beijing.
A year on from the lockdown, Xiao’s business has resumed outside the closed market. It isn’t as good as pre-pandemic times, but Xiao remains hopeful. “Wuhan will definitely be getting better and better,” she said. “The people in Wuhan are very tough and doing great.”
“Those efforts were worthwhile”
But the virus can make a comeback after a long respite. Earlier this month, tens of millions of people in northern China were placed under strict lockdowns, similar to what Wuhan underwent, after hundreds of people were infected in the country’s worst outbreak in months.
Authorities are also rushing to build a massive quarantine camp that can house more than 4,000 people, reminiscent of earlier efforts undertaken in Wuhan, where several medical facilities, including a 1,000-bed hospital, were built from scratch in just 10 days.
These sweeping measures have evoked familiar memories for some Wuhan residents, who are once again wearing masks in public,as are people now in Beijing and Shanghai, with the country entering a cautious mode ahead of the Lunar New Year next month.
The festival typically sees tens of millions of Chinese traveling home to reunite with family. But authorities have discouraged people from traveling this year, requiring those returning to rural areas to produce a negative Covid-19 test taken within 7 days and a 14-day quarantine upon arrival.
Wu Hui,a 40-year-old food delivery driver in Wuhan, said he hoped this time around, authorities in northern China learned from the initial chaos in Wuhan and would handle things more humanely during their lockdowns.
“During the early stage of the Wuhan lockdown, (the government) was at a loss of how to deal with issues concerning residents’ livelihood, it was an utter mess. I’m sure everybody hasn’t forgot about it,” he wrote in a post on Weibo last week.
Wu said the people of Wuhan paid “a great price” when their city was sealed off, but was proud the citywas able to pull through.
“Now, after so long, no new case has been identified and Wuhan has begun to recover for a while. The streets are full of people. I just feel that all those efforts made at that time were worthwhile,” he said.
David Culver reported from Wuhan, Nectar Gan wrote from Hong Kong.
On Jan. 19, 2020, CNET posted its first guide to a mystery coronavirus discovered in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Dozens of cases and two deaths had been recorded, but as we wrote at the time, little was known about “how destructive the new virus might be.” The coronavirus — and the disease it causes — hadn’t even been named. It hadn’t officially been found in the US.
Today we call the mystery pathogen SARS-CoV-2. It’s responsible for COVID-19, a respiratory illness that has infected over 100 million people. In just one year, we’ve gone from two deaths to 2 million, across the world.
Reading our original article, it’s immediately obvious that everyone — virologists, epidemiologists, journalists — was flying blind in those very early days. We were oblivious, perhaps even shortsighted. No one predicted exactly what would occur over the next 365 days, though there were those who tried to sound the alarm early.
From the lab to your inbox. Get the latest science stories from CNET every week.
Back then, research had only just begun to uncover how we might combat COVID-19. In those early days, new data came quickly, but there were significant gaps in our knowledge that allowed a deluge of misinformation, conspiracy and fear to fester.
We attempted to answer six questions on Jan. 19, 2020. They were fundamental questions about the new virus, its symptoms and how it spread. A year on, we are revisiting them. This updated guide reveals how much we’ve learned and charts how science was able to provide certainty and hope in the face of the biggest public health crisis in a century.
Science and technology have provided clarity where there was none — but much remains unknown as we face the second pandemic year.
What is a coronavirus?
There is no better-known virus on Earth than the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, which was first detected in Wuhan in December 2019. In a landslide victory, the coronavirus beats out Ebola, influenza, HIV and the panoply of viruses that cause the common cold for Earth’s Most Renowned Virus. But it’s not the only coronavirus.
Coronaviruses belong to a taxonomic family known as Coronaviridae, which includes dozens of different species. First described in 1968, coronaviruses are shaped like soccer balls wrapped in a blanket of spikes. Under an electron microscope, these spikes look like the sun’s corona — hence their name. Only a handful are known to cause disease in humans.
World famous.
Alissa Eckert, MSMI/Dan Higgins, MAMS
The SARS epidemic of 2002-03 and the MERS epidemic of 2012 showed coronaviruses have the capability to cause significant outbreaks of deadly disease. The epidemics launched an international effort to understand the pandemic potential of coronaviruses.
In 2020, 65,000 papers were published and listed on PubMed under the term “coronavirus.” A year prior, that number was 885. The lessons we’re learning about SARS-CoV-2 are relevant to this particular virus but also revealing more and more about coronaviruses in general. “It is the fastest-moving field I have ever seen in my life,” says Stuart Turville, an immunovirologist at the Kirby Institute in Australia.
Among the defining characteristics of the coronavirus are the numerous “spikes” on its surface. These proteins function like keys, allowing a coronavirus to enter a cell. Spikes are able to unlock entry by binding to a “lock,” a cell surface protein in humans (and other animals) known as ACE2. The two pieces of molecular machinery have been the focus of thousands of researchers around the world since January 2020.
During the SARS epidemic, scientists had learned that the spike elicits an immune response, stimulating cells and antibodies to fight the virus. This gave them a headstart on building vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. “Labs could download the [genetic] sequence of the spike protein and start developing vaccines as soon as the scientists in China had sequenced it,” says Larisa Labzin, an immunologist at the University of Queensland, Australia. By the end of 2020, several vaccines had already been rolled out.
But the spike in SARS-CoV-2 appears to be changing.
We’re seeing new variants of the virus emerge across the world, with slight changes to the spike proteins. Scientists are watching these changes occur in real time by analyzing the genome of virus samples faster than ever before. We don’t yet understand a lot about why they are changing. The virus is evolving in a way that may help it evade our immune system, and similar variants seem to be cropping up across the globe — a development that may affect vaccines.
Where did the virus come from?
Of the six questions posed in January 2020, this remains the most difficult to answer — and investigations into the origins of the pandemic have become a tangled mess of conspiracy and politicking.
In our initial report, we said the virus “appears to have originated in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market” in Wuhan. A majority of the early cases were linked to the market in December 2019, but further investigation revealed COVID-19 infections in people who had no known contact with the market at all.
The market was shut down on Jan. 1, 2020, and hundreds of environmental samples from the site were analyzed. Traces of SARS-CoV-2 were found, but there was no definitive link between animals in the market and the virus. The World Health Organization and China’s CDC have both suggested that the coronavirus may have been circulating in Wuhan prior to the outbreak and that the market merely helped amplify the spread. A year on, we still don’t have a clear answer about the market’s role in the pandemic.
Bats are reservoirs of coronavirus — did this pandemic begin in a bat?
Getty
Scientists have not yet discovered a direct progenitor to SARS-CoV-2, but they have found several bat coronaviruses that share genetic similarities. One, known as RaTG13, shares 96.2% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2. Another, RmYN02, shares 93.3%. Both highlight how viruses like SARS-CoV-2 can arise in nature. Some scientists argue this shows clear evidence for a natural origin.
But the origin puzzle has not been solved. While natural origin seems likely, an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, scientists say, cannot be dismissed. The so-called “lab leak theory” has become intricately tied to conspiracy theories in the past, but it’s important to separate the more extreme, debunked ideas about COVID-19’s emergence (it’s created by Bill Gates or it’s a bioweapon, for instance) from a legitimate investigation into an accidental leak.
In January 2021, a 10-person investigative team convened by the WHO arrived in Wuhan to carry out examinations of the Huanan market by mapping supply chains and testing frozen sewage samples for hints about the virus. The investigation’s terms of reference don’t mention investigating a lab leak. Some scientists are concerned the investigation doesn’t focus on this area of inquiry enough and has a significant conflict of interest. “I have zero confidence left in the WHO team,” Alina Chan, a scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, told CNET in January.
How many cases have been reported?
Over 100 million cases have been reported, with COVID-19 infections now found on every continent, including Antarctica. Over 2 million people have died.
Over half of these deaths have happened in just six nations: the US, Brazil, India, Mexico, the UK and Italy. In the US alone, over 400,000 deaths have been recorded.
When the history of the pandemic is written, these nations will be considered failures. Mismanagement, misinformation and misapprehension inhibited an effective response from their governments, leading to uncontrolled spread and overwhelmed health care systems.
On the other end of the scale are great success stories. Australia’s and New Zealand’s efforts to aggressively suppress or outright eliminate the virus with hard, fast lockdowns and strict border controls have helped to stop outbreaks throughout the year.
In Sydney, life feels like it has settled into a “COVID normal” — the ubiquity of face masks at the supermarket and on public transport, and the need to sign in with a QR code at every venue we visit, is a reminder that the virus still poses a serious threat. Complacency crept in, particularly over the holiday period, but outbreaks are dealt with swiftly and lockdowns are mandated as soon as cases begin to spike. There’s been a wide public acknowledgement and acceptance that the situation changes daily — we’ve had to adapt to that in order to prevent the virus from spreading uncontrollably.
How does the coronavirus spread?
We did not have the answer to this question on Jan. 19, 2020. Initially, there were limited reports of health officials and health care workers being infected. With only 60 known cases, it seemed SARS-CoV-2 was not highly contagious. We now know that was wrong.
Scientists understood from early on that the virus predominantly spread through the air, moving from person to person via coughing, sneezing and talking. Such expulsions would produce large droplets ferrying viral particles between people. This idea informed early attempts to slow down the virus, focusing on social distancing, because large droplets do not carry far.
But some scientists were convinced that large droplets were not the only form of transmission for COVID-19. Perhaps small droplets — aerosols, as they’re known — were also contributing to the spread. Because of their size, these droplets spent a lot longer in the air and may accumulate over time. This led to heated discussion around the airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
The debate came to a head in July 2020, when 239 scientists co-signed an invited commentary piece in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases calling on national and international health and regulatory bodies to “recognize the potential for airborne spread of coronavirus disease 2019.” Clashes with the World Health Organization followed. The WHO argued that the science wasn’t “definitive” enough and urged further study.
In October, the WHO (and other agencies, like the US CDC) updated transmission advice, stating aerosols could spread COVID-19 in “specific settings” that are poorly ventilated and crowded, such as restaurants or nightclubs. How much infection is caused by aerosol transmission is still an open question, but there is a clear and obvious way to reduce your risk: masks.
WHO technical lead Maria Van Kerkhove speaks at a March 11 press briefing on COVID-19, at which WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that the coronavirus outbreak could be characterized as a pandemic.
Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
We won’t relitigate all the arguments against mask wearing here, and it’s an area of public health where misinformation has been rampant. The vast majority of scientific research now shows masks are an essential component of the COVID-19 response. Alone, they’re not enough, but combined with distancing, hand hygiene, cough etiquette and a range of other measures, they will limit the spread of disease.
Infection via contaminated surfaces was a concern early, with all manner of objects and materials being tested to see how long SARS-CoV-2 would survive on them. Money, packages and door handles were all considered potential hotspots. In May, the CDC specified that this type of transmission was not likely to be “the main way the virus spreads.”
What are the symptoms?
SARS-CoV-2 has proven to be a much more canny virus than we predicted. Like previous coronaviruses, it chiefly affects the respiratory tract. Mild symptoms, like a dry cough and a fever occur commonly and can resolve without hospitalization. Some patients will have lethargy and a sore throat.
More severe symptoms see infected individuals experience a shortness of breath and chest pain. The lungs are compromised and become inflamed and the tiny air sacs within fill with fluid. In the most severe cases, patients require mechanical ventilation to assist breathing. These characteristics have been seen since the first cases appeared in Wuhan.
Reports began to surface in March that some coronavirus patients were experiencing anosmia — a loss of smell. Research has shown the virus is able to enter and impair the activity of specialized cells in the human olfactory system responsible for our sense of smell. Loss of taste has also been reported.
Although the respiratory tract is where SARS-CoV-2 gets a foothold in the body, the virus has far-reaching and long-lasting effects on the human body. “Originally we thought that COVID-19 was primarily a respiratory illness,” says Adrian Esterman, an epidemiologist at the University of South Australia. “We now know that it can affect just about every organ, with the potential to cause long-term health problems.”
The most severe cases of COVID-19 are characterized by inflammation. “An overexuberant immune response is what wreaks havoc with your body,” Labzin says. Some COVID-19 cases see the body’s white blood cells produce a lot of cytokines, small proteins that fight infections. They can also recruit more cells to defend against a virus. However, generating too much cytokine can do real damage — and research has shown an abundance of cytokines can damage the cells lining blood vessels.
This full-body response can even be damaging to the brain. In some patients, blood vessels in the brain are damaged indirectly — SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t necessarily infect brain cells (it may be able to), but the body’s overactive immune response can cause the vessels to thin or leak and may result in lasting neurological damage.
Scientists are learning that bodies don’t just bounce back to full health after infection. A variety of disparate symptoms seem to stick around long after patients leave the hospital or no longer test positive for the disease. The long-term prognosis for recovery from a COVID-19 infection will be an intense area of study in 2021 as scientists try to understand how negative effects linger in patients known as “long haulers.” Sometimes these symptoms last for weeks, other times they are still with patients eight months later — the impact will only truly come to light as the year progresses.
Is there a treatment for the coronavirus?
A year ago, this section was three sentences long. It called coronaviruses “notoriously hardy organisms” (they are) and stated “we have not developed any reliable treatments or vaccines that can eradicate them” (we hadn’t.). By the end of 2020, multiple biotech firms had built vaccines that can protect against coronaviruses, in an incredible feat of scientific research and spirit. “To develop a safe and efficacious vaccine in 12 months is unheard of,” Esterman says.
Vaccine rollouts have been occurring across the world. Different candidates, using a variety of different biotechnologies, have been approved for emergency use in places like the US, UK, Canada, Israel and a handful more nations. Many others will approve jabs in the months to come and begin to vaccinate their populations.
The first two vaccines across the finish line are built around mRNA, the instructions cells use to build proteins. The technology has been in development for over two decades, but the pandemic accelerated research into this vaccine strategy.
The vaccines contain a synthetized strand of mRNA that tells human cells to make spike proteins, similar to those on the surface of SARS-CoV-2. The cells oblige, and when the spikes are shown to the immune system, the body’s defenses kick into gear. The vaccines then simulate a real infection without the nasty symptoms — and help provide lasting immunity. If a patient comes into contact with the real coronavirus, the body knows to destroy it before it can cause any harm.
Having coronavirus vaccines approved for emergency use in less than a year is remarkable.
Sarah Tew/CNET
While two mRNA vaccines, from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, have been approved for use, there are still questions over how long they might provide immunity and whether they can stop disease transmission. The data shows they are safe and can prevent severe disease, but do they stop a person from being infected? That’s still unclear.
So we’re not quite out of the woods — we’re still stuck in a thicket. New variants of the coronavirus have evolved in the past three months, evading some of our immune defenses. Ensuring our vaccines will still be effective against them is one of the major challenges for 2021. Early research looks good, but there are multiple mutations in the new variants that will require further examination.
More vaccines are showing promise, too, with the New York Times’ tracker currently showing eight in limited or early use. The Sinopharm vaccine, approved for use in China, has not published results from its Phase III trial but reportedly has an efficacy of around 80%. It uses inactivated pieces of SARS-CoV-2 to generate immunity.
A year on
At the end of the original piece, we linked to a WHO thread on Twitter from Jan. 17, 2020. It provided rudimentary advice on protecting yourself against coronavirus that focused on hand hygiene and respiratory hygiene. Maria Van Kerkhove, from the WHO’s emerging diseases unit, recommended washing hands with soap and water and sneezing or coughing into your elbow.
Those recommendations the WHO still stand today. Washing your hands and sneezing into your elbow are extremely important. But we’ve added additional layers of protection as we’ve learned more about SARS-CoV-2 and its transmissibility.
Ian Mackay, a virologist at the University of Queensland, highlights these additional layers in the “Swiss Cheese Model” of pandemic defence, an infographic that went viral toward the end of 2020.
The new version as promised (ver2). It adds vaccines (at the end because gen1 won’t simply fix everything) & tracing has been combined with the fast & sensitive testing slice. I’ve combined hand & surface cleaning. Constructive feedback welcome. pic.twitter.com/mE7LOl7Y2c
— ɪᴀɴ ᴍ. ᴍᴀᴄᴋᴀʏ, ᴘʜᴅ 🦠🤧🧬🥼🦟🧻 (@MackayIM) October 15, 2020
“The real power of this infographic,” Mackay told the New York Times in December, “is that it’s not really about any single layer of protection or the order of them, but about the additive success of using multiple layers, or cheese slices.”
We’ve learned the best ways to defend against COVID-19, but cases continue to rise in many parts of the world. Is it likely we’ll be able to control the pandemic in 2021? There’s reason for hope, but we need only look at some of 2020’s great failures to see how quickly the virus can become unmanageable.
In our second pandemic year, science will continue to probe and refine the answers to these six fundamental questions. And it must. Doing so is critical to prepare for — or ultimately, to prevent — the next pandemic.
The information contained in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as health or medical advice. Always consult a physician or other qualified health provider regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition or health objectives.
A new study describes a cloudless, Jupiter-like exoplanet.Illustration: M. Weiss/Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Nearly 600 light-years from Earth, the exoplanet known as WASP-62b whips around its host star at a breakneck pace. The planet is a hot Jupiter, and despite its gassy constitution, its atmosphere is completely cloudless, according to a study published this month in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
WASP-62b was first detected in 2012 in a sweep by the Wide Angle Search for Planets South survey (hence the acronym in its name). The survey detects exoplanets by spotting them as they pass in front of their host stars, causing a dip in the brightness of the star’s shine.
“We can’t actually see these planets directly. It’s like looking at a firefly next to a streetlamp,” Munazza Alam, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the recent paper, said in a phone call. “We’re gleaning all this information about the planet’s atmosphere from what we call combined light observations, meaning we’re looking at the light from both the star and the planet.”
Hot Jupiters are a class of exoplanets, named because they are gas giants (like our local Jupiter) that orbit close to their host stars and thus are quite hot. They stand among super-Earths, mini-Neptunes, and a slew of other classifications that seek to describe exoplanets based on their archetypes in our local solar system. As a result of a hot Jupiter’s proximity to its host star, the exoplanets have extremely short orbital periods. If WASP-62b’s orbit began on a Monday morning for Earth, its year would be over before you clocked out for the weekend.
Within the Milky Way, Alam said, hot Jupiters are rarer than smaller planets, and among exoplanets, it’s more common to find cloudy atmospheres. That makes this hot Jupiter a bit of an oddball.
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The team looked at spectroscopic data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope that focused on quantities of potassium and sodium in the atmosphere. None of the former turned up, but sodium was detected in “whopping” amounts, Alam said, suggesting that the atmosphere of WASP-62b was clear at the pressures detected by Hubble. The results make the planet the first hot Jupiter with a cloud-free atmosphere and only the second exoplanet with such a clear atmosphere after a hot Saturn (WASP-96b) detected in 2018. Both planets have that significant sodium content, which appears in a tent-like peak in the data, that make for a cloud-free gas giant.
Down the line, the team aims to probe different atmospheric layers of the hot Jupiter that are not detectable by Hubble. Future observations of the exoplanet will be done with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, which will be able to see in near-infrared.
“Kepler showed us that there are thousands of planets out there, and TESS is doing that as well in different parts of the sky,” Alam said. “We found thousands of smaller planets, which is really changing the demographics of the planet population as we knew it.”
Microsoft is raising prices for Xbox Live Gold memberships in certain markets in an apparent effort to convert more users to its Xbox Game Pass Ulimate, and the gaming community is not receiving the news well.
Microsoft announced in a blog post Friday that, moving forward, new six-month Xbox Live Gold subscriptions will cost $59.99, while three-month plans will cost $29.99 and one-month plans will cost $10.99.
That means a full year of Xbox Live Gold will go for nearly $120, double the price Microsoft charged for the 12-month plans that it quietly got rid of last year.
“Periodically, we assess the value and pricing of our services to reflect changes in regional marketplaces and to continue to invest in the Xbox community; we’ll be making price adjustments for Xbox Live Gold in select markets,” the company said.
The pricing changes won’t affect existing Xbox Live Gold subscribers, however, as they’ll still be able to renew their current plans at the same price. Microsoft is also letting players who upgrade to its Xbox Game Pass Ultimate — which costs $14.99 per month, or roughly $180 per year — convert any remaining time on their Xbox Live Gold memberships to Xbox Game Pass Ulimate without an additional cost.
Microsoft also said that the new prices won’t kick in until 45 days after subscribers receive an email and message center notification alerting them to the increases.
The new prices dramatically close the gap between the annual costs of Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions, a sign that Microsoft is likely trying to push more users to sign up for the latter.
The move drew fierce backlash from the gaming commmunity, which accused the company of being out of touch with the economic situation of many customers during the pandemic, as well as continuing to require them to pay for subscriptions even to play free-to-play games like “Fortnite” and “Call Of Duty: Warzone.”
“@Xbox have done this in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, where kids will be most affected, where finances are tight and online gaming is their main (sometimes only) way to play and communicate with friends. Let that sink in,” @swooper_d tweeted.
“Xbox also still remains the only platform you need a subscription to play free to play games, including Warzone,” gaming news site Charlie Intel tweeted.
Others also pointed to the stark pricing differences between Xbox and other online gaming platforms.
“I’m still in shock at how there is now a $100 Difference Between getting Nintendo Switch Online for a Year and Xbox Live Gold for a Year,” @JCretor tweeted.
Nintendo Switch Online memberships cost $19.99 and Playstation Plus memberships cost $59.99 for 12 months.
“We invest in our community by strengthening the digital safety of our players, enabling new ways to share, communicate and play with your friends, and delivering industry leading reliability across our network,” Microsoft said as part of its rationale for raising prices, while adding: “In many markets, the price of Xbox Live Gold has not changed for years and in some markets, it hasn’t changed for over 10 years.”
Back in 2019, Space Cargo Unlimited sent a case of red Bordeaux wine up to the International Space Station—not so the astronauts could tipple (that’s generally against regulations), but to figure out: What happens to fermented stuff when it’s in micro-gravity for so long?
This month, the case of wine landed back down on Earth via a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule, and researchers will crack the bottles next month to, ahem, investigate.
That includes not just drinking it but figuring out how the booze changed, which the company hopes may offer some lessons for agricultural resilience down here, as climate change slowly terraforms our planet.
As the bloggers at Decanter note …
Properties in the wines and vines will also be compared against control samples that stayed behind on earth.
‘We’re going to look at everything that has evolved,’ Gaume said.
‘We’ll do a whole genome sequencing of the plants, to provide a clear view of all the DNA changes that could have happened on the stay on the ISS.’
A chemical analysis of the wines is planned, as well as a private tasting scheduled for early March.
The identity of the Bordeaux red wines has not yet been revealed, but they are from a single producer and one vintage.
Gaume described the absence of gravity, or microgravity, as the ‘ultimate stress’. He said researchers involved in the project were interested in learning more about how the vine canes may have adapted or evolved in a relatively short time to be resilient to the stressful conditions.
This, he said, could have implications for understanding how vineyards – and agriculture in general – might adapt to stress factors related to climate change.
As CNN adds:
Woody plants such as vines are crucial to feeding the human population, say researchers, but they have never been studied in space.”This could be a game-changer in unlocking the agriculture of tomorrow,” said Michael Lebert, SCU’s chief scientific officer.
(CC-2.0-licensed photo of rando Bordeaux wine courtesy the Flickr stream of filtran)
