The Morning Meeting with Al Tompkins is a daily Poynter briefing of story ideas worth considering and more timely context for journalists, written by senior faculty Al Tompkins. Sign up here to have it delivered to your inbox every weekday morning.
The World Health Organization’s emergency committee will vote today on whether to end the organization’s COVID-19 emergency status that began Jan. 30, 2020. We will know the decision on Monday, which is also Jan. 30.
Days before the vote, the head of the World Health Organization, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that he was “very concerned” about the rising number of COVID-19 deaths globally. Worldwide, 170,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the last two months.
The committee advises the director-general, who makes the final decision but usually follows committee advice. The wild card, experts agree, is how COVID-19 is roaring through China again, which could weigh against ending the emergency declaration.
Outside experts acknowledge the Covid pandemic may no longer strictly meet the criteria for a PHEIC (pronounced “fake”). (PHEIC is short for Public Health Emergency of International Concern.)
Under the International Health Regulations (IHR), a binding international treaty, a public health emergency of international concern can be declared in the face of a health event that meets three criteria: it is serious, sudden, unusual, or unexpected; it has the potential to spread across borders; and it may require a coordinated international response.
Covid is still serious, but sudden, unusual, or unexpected? Not any more. Borders have been crossed; the virus has spread planet-wide. At this point in the pandemic, international responses are being wound down.
Still, Tom Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations, doesn’t expect quick action on terminating the PHEIC. He suspects the WHO may end the Covid PHEIC in 2023 — but not now.
“I think they will be particularly slow here, given a still quite high death toll, given what’s happening in China,” Bollyky said, noting that in the past, the WHO hasn’t been quick to end PHEICs.
More than 35,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. More than 4,500 are in intensive care units. And more than 450 die every day from COVID-19. Every. Day.
Some states are seeing a significant increase in new COVID-19 cases, but nationwide, the trend is downward.
(The New York Times, Jan. 25, 2023)
The New York Times ends its Virus Briefing newsletter
On Jan. 6, 2020, The New York Times reported about a virus sweeping through Wuhan, China. Within days, the virus had a name, the coronavirus, which we now know as COVID-19.
Businesses closed, air travel froze, borders shut down, schools switched to virtual teaching, and hospitals packed desperately sick people into ICU wards while dedicated scientists scrambled to develop a safe and effective vaccine in record time. More than a million Americans died from COVID-19. 15 million died worldwide.
We started the Poynter Covering COVID-19 column and newsletter in April 2020. At the same time, others like The New York Times poured resources into covering the pandemic. And now, the Times is ending its Virus Briefing newsletter.
Does it mean the pandemic is over, or has COVID-19 just become a way of life no longer deserving of its own newsletter? I was struck by the comments from a few of the Times contributors:
“Nearly 4,000 American died just last week of Covid-19 — from a disease that did not exist four years ago. Worldwide, that figure is over 14,300 deaths, although the true number is certainly higher. Sixty-five million people are estimated to have long Covid. More people will get long Covid, and more people will die in 2023. Meanwhile, SARS-CoV-2 is continuing to evolve in surprising ways, and we are now increasingly aware of a number of potential pathogens in other animals. This story is not over, even if we want to look away.” — Carl Zimmer, science reporter
“Three years since this awful virus started spreading through our country, I’m struck by how far we have come and how far we have not. There are vaccines that reduce the risk of severe illness and death, antivirals that can help curb symptoms and a society that long ago returned to the mundane joys of in-person school, work and recreation. But dreams that once felt so attainable — herd immunity, a conclusive end to the pandemic — have faded. Covid, rather than becoming a past-tense plague, has remained a present-tense threat, even if it’s less of one than before, even if it’s one we don’t spend as much time thinking about.” — Mitch Smith, national reporter
COVID-era SNAP food benefits stop at end of February, millions affected
The end of an emergency declaration over COVID-19 also ends the pandemic-related benefit increase for participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The benefit began three years ago to defray the cost of food while people were out of work because of the pandemic shutdowns.
The monthly allotments for a single-person household jumped from a minimum of $16 a month to the maximum, now $281 a month, across the board. But the new federal spending bill ends the program March 1.
Some states are launching campaigns to get the word out, like this one in Illinois landing in mailboxes this week. Here’s another in Oklahoma:
(Oklahoma.gov)
The Washington Post reports the effects that will touch seniors the most:
But the reductions will be difficult for many, advocates say, especially since food costs were 12 percent higher in November 2022 than a year earlier, according to federal data. The rate of food insecurity has increased particularly among Black and Hispanic older adults, advocates say.
The expiration of the emergency benefits will translate to “$2.5 to $3 billion in food purchasing power disappearing from the American economy overnight, and impacting the most vulnerable people directly: people of color, children, and seniors,” said Vince Hall, a spokesperson for Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks that serve over 46 million people.
Minimum payments, those going to people near the upper limit of income eligibility, will decrease to $23 a month, though recipients with less income will get more. Before the pandemic, households that included a senior received an average of $120 a month, according to the Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP at the federal level.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the nation’s largest antihunger program and a lifeline for millions of people, including adults ages 50 and older, who are at risk for food insecurity.
Because SNAP is designed to respond to the needs of low income populations, it has been a particularly important program during the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions of people enrolled in SNAP during the pandemic and associated economic downturn,3 which likely played a role in keeping the share of adults ages 50 and older who were food-insecure unchanged at 8 percent (or 9.5 million people) during that time period.
Food insecurity tends to be more common and more severe among SNAP households affected by disabilities, making these households some of the most vulnerable. Older SNAP participants are also more likely to have disabilities than younger participants.
Zero in on the data:
Latest Available Month – October 2022 – State Level Participation & Benefits: Persons (pdf, xls), Households (pdf, xls), Benefits (pdf, xls)
State Monthly Pandemic EBT Program Participation and Benefits – October 2022 (pdf, zip, xls)
The Post’s story points out why this is an important topic for local journalists to explain to readers/viewers/listeners. The Post says, “Some states, such as Maryland and New Jersey, have opted to use state funds to supplement the minimum monthly benefit.” The Post also reports that in 17 states, the benefits have already ended, and food distribution centers in these states are seeing an increase in demand. In the remaining states, food banks and distribution centers are bracing themselves.
See coverage from: Detroit Free Press, Forbes, Voice of OC (California), KOLO-TV, The State (Columbia, South Carolina).
Also notice how programs like Vermont Everyone Eats also are ending soon. That one, which ends March 31, got $42 million from FEMA. The state kicked in another $1.3 million. VermontBiz.com reports:
This program has provided free restaurant-prepared meals to Vermonters in need of food assistance across the state while also providing a stabilizing source of income for Vermont restaurants negatively impacted by the pandemic and conveying economic support to Vermont farmers and food producers.
An average of 35% of meal ingredients, far exceeding the program’s 10% local ingredient minimum, have been purchased from Vermont farmers and food producers, providing over $3.5 million in revenue. This program has benefited over 700 restaurants, farms, food producers, hubs, and distribution partners throughout the state’s fourteen counties since its inception and will continue to distribute an average of 25,000 meals per week to food insecure individuals across Vermont until the program ends on March 31, 2023.
The core of the earth may be stopping its rotation. Is this a big deal?
My first instinct was to think, wait, the earth’s core spins? Wait, it is stopping its spin? Wait, will it spin the other direction? Wait, will my dog start spinning clockwise when she currently spins counterclockwise (for no reason)? Wait, am I going to die from this earth core spin thing?
OK, some vague answers are needed. Know this: We do not understand very much about the earth’s core, but it seems that it does this spin change every 70 years or so. But there is disagreement about even that. Smithsonian Magazine explains:
The idea isn’t cause for alarm—the change is a normal part of a 70-year cycle, the scientists proposed Monday in Nature Geoscience. The inner core switches between spinning just a little faster and a little slower than the surface, matching the surface’s speed roughly every 35 years, they write.
But not all scientists agree on the details of how the inner core is spinning, and some aren’t convinced that it’s spinning at all.
“No matter which model you like, there’s some data that disagrees with it,” John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Southern California who did not contribute to the new research, tells the New York Times’ Robin George Andrews.
Buried about 3,200 miles below the planet’s surface, the inner core reaches an estimated 9,000 to 13,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It can’t be accessed for samples or direct measurements of its spin. Instead, researchers have used seismic waves from earthquakes to learn about it. An earthquake sends these waves deep into the Earth and through the inner core, and scientists pick them up with sensors on the other side of the planet.
But why does the rotation change speed? Again, from Smithsonian:
This periodic change in rotation might be due to a tug-of-war effect between the Earth’s liquid outer core and solid mantle, writes the Times. As molten metals move in the outer core, they generate electromagnetic forces that influence the inner core to spin. But the gravity of the mantle pulls the opposite way, slowing the inner core’s rotation. One full cycle of this process takes about 70 years, write the researchers in the new study.
Read more: Nature, National Science Foundation, Vice
