Science Friday - New CDC Mask Rules, Viral Persistence, Disaster Preparedness. July 30, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

With Delta Rising, New Rules On Masks And Vaccines This week, the CDC released new guidelines for mask use in the U.S., just months after many cities and towns relaxed mask mandates. The guidance says that “to reduce their risk of becoming infected with the Delta variant and potentially spreading it to others: CDC recommends that fully vaccinated people wear a mask in public indoor settings if they are in an area of substantial or high transmission.” Right now, many parts of the country fall under that category. In response to the guidance, several municipalities re-instituted mask mandates for their communities. This week, New York chose to require either COVID-19 vaccination or weekly testing for public employees. Other municipalities have also announced vaccine requirements—and some private companies, including Facebook, have also indicated that vaccination will be required for employment. Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American, joins guest host Roxanne Khamsi to talk about the new rules and other stories from the week in science, including studies of clouds and climate change, Olympic psychology, and caffeinated bees. How Long Do Viruses Hang Out In Your Body? Throughout the pandemic, scientists have been learning more about SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. But there are still big questions, like how long the virus can survive in your body. This week, infectious disease specialist Diane Griffin talks about how viruses—from SARS-CoV-2 to HIV to measles—persist in the body, and how this can provide new insights into how long people might stay contagious. A Disasterologist On Coming Together To Weather The Climate Crisis As climate change amplifies the risks of natural hazards like wildfires, hurricanes, drought, and more, there’s a group of scientists hoping to change the way the United States responds to the disasters that often result. They are disaster researchers: the people who study the engineering, sociology, and even psychology of what makes the difference between an easily handled hurricane, and a catastrophe like Hurricane Maria, which wiped out infrastructure, destroyed 800,000 homes, and killed an estimated 5,000 people in Puerto Rico in 2017. Emergency management researcher Samantha Montano is the author of the forthcoming book Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis. She talks to producer Christie Taylor about the nuts and bolts of preparing for a disaster, how climate change is changing the equation, and how justice in disaster response will be more important than ever. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Roxanne Camsey. I'm a longtime science journalist, and I'm happy to be filling in for Ira this week. Later in the hour, how viruses hang around longer than we thought in our bodies, and rethinking disaster response. But first, we'll dive into some major science updates on COVID-19. This week, the CDC released new guidelines for mask use in the U.S., just months after many municipalities relaxed their mask mandates. That's as health officials now recognize that the Delta variant may be far more transmissible than the original SARS-CoV-2 strain from the start of the pandemic. Joining me now to talk about the new guidance and how to interpret it is Sophie Bushwick, an editor at Scientific American. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you. So, Sophie, this wasn't really a surprise to anyone and not really pleasant news.

There's been a return of mask guidance. Can you tell us about that? That's right. With the Delta variant driving COVID numbers back up, the CDC has changed its mask recommendations again. And it's now saying that in areas with significant to high COVID spread, everyone, even vaccinated people, should mask up in public indoor spaces. They've also said that everyone in schools should be wearing masks. And if you live with someone who's immunocompromised or an unvaccinated child, it's also good to be masked, even if you've already received your vaccine. For a context, when we're talking about an area with significant or high COVID spread, at the moment, that that's a category that covers about two-thirds of all counties in the U.S.

And some communities are reinstating mask mandates to go along with that guidance, right? A lot of this depends on where you are. So, for example, in Nevada, on a state level and in Kansas City, Missouri, on a city level, they've reestablished mask mandates. But there are certain states who are saying they're not going to have them. So Arizona, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, they've all said that they're not going to reestablish mask mandates in those states. Hmm. Yeah, that's definitely a different landscape depending on where you are. In related news, some municipalities and private companies even are moving to require vaccination.

Is that something that we hadn't seen before for COVID? There had been a reluctance to require people to get vaccinated. And when the vaccines first became available, a lot of people were voluntarily getting their jabs. But as that rate has ticked down and as the rate of coronavirus transmission has ticked up, over just this past week we've seen a lot of government and private organizations saying, look, we're serious now, vaccines are required. So Google and Facebook are going to be requiring vaccinations. New York City is saying that all city workers have to either get vaccinated or get tested weekly.

for the virus. The Department of Veterans Affairs has said that it's going to require frontline health care workers get vaccinated. And in fact, Biden just has said that small and medium-sized businesses are going to get reimbursed if they allow employees and families time off to get vaccinated. So one of the big things that might prevent someone from getting vaccinated is if they simply don't have time to go get their shot. So hopefully this will also help. It seems like a real change is happening. But at the same time, Aren't there places where this isn't the case? Yes, there has been some pushback against requiring any vaccine requirements at all. So there's been five states who previously have passed legislation

that bars businesses from requiring COVID-19 vaccinations. So even if a private company wants to force its employees to get vaccinated, it cannot do that. And that's in Tennessee, Arkansas, Utah, North Dakota, and Montana. And in Texas, just this week, Governor Abbott signs an executive order that says that entities that receive state funds cannot establish vaccine requirements. You know, this is all very concerning. And in other concerning news, there's a troubling story from France this week about a couple lab workers being infected with preons from their research. Can you tell us about that? That's correct. A preon is a type of protein that can make the regular proteins in the brain start folding abnormally. And so these diseases, they seem scary because they

cause this progressive loss of brain function and often are fatal. The most common preon disease we see in humans is called Kreuzfeld-Yacob. And this is a disease that two French researchers who work with Priyons have developed in the past couple years. And one of the scary things about it is that it incubates for a long time. So the case that we understand better, a lab worker pricked her finger through her two layers of latex gloves back in 2010, and then she died of Kreuzfeld Yakob 10 years later at only 33 years old. What's happened most recently is another lab worker has been diagnosed with Kreuzfeld-Yacob, and so public research institutions in France have said, look, we're going to set up a three-month moratorium on any pre-on research until we can get to the

bottom of what happened here and possibly set up new safety protocols to prevent this from happening again. And it seems like there's still a little bit of mystery about whether this second case is truly from the lab. Is that right? That's right. The first case, they are much more positive that it's from the lab first because of the researcher just remembering this incident where she pricked her finger, but also she had variant Kreuzfeld-Yakob, which is a version of the disease that previously had been caused by eating beef that had a bovine form of preon disease. But that outbreak had ended in 2000. And that variant had virtually disappeared outside of the lab. So the chance that she had coincidentally also gotten that disease was negligible or non-existent. So the government has basically

shut down this type of research for the time being, right? That's right. And it's because, you know, this is such a nefarious illness, as you described? So Kreuzfeld-Yacob, because it attacks proteins in the brain, it just causes you lose brain function, you lose mobility. It's a very devastating disease and it ends in death. And the fact that the researcher who we know contracted it in 2010 lived 10 years not sure whether she was going to get this disease or not, it's just a very devastating illness. Yeah, it sounds like it. Now, moving away from infectious disease and looking to the sky, there's new research this week about modeling clouds and how they fit into global warming estimates. Can you tell us about that?

So clouds can have different effects depending on what type of cloud you've got, what the local climate is, how much of the sky they cover, and they're also very difficult to model. So a cloud is made up of all these little individual water drops. So if you're trying to model cloud cover across the whole globe that would require just an astronomical computing power. So we just have to use simpler simulations. And previously, researchers knew that cloud cover was going to affect the final numbers for global warming and should be included in models, but they were just very difficult to get accurate estimates on. So the question is, were they going to exacerbate global warming by a great deal? Were they going to have a negligible effect? Were they going to maybe

mitigate, it was still unknown. But then in the past couple of months, multiple studies have come out all looking at cloud cover and its effect on global warming. And a lot of these, now that we have more advanced machine learning models, machine learning is kind of stepping into the breach and helping figure out cloud behavior and model clouds in a way that doesn't eat up tons of data, but also is more accurate. And what the studies are finding is that changing clouds will probably speed up global warming and make it worse, but they won't be doing it to an extreme, worst-case scenario level. It won't be as devastating as some previous models had suggested it might be. Well, going from clouds to crowds, we've all been watching the Olympics, and one of

the things that really stands out is the empty arenas. You have a story this week about how that is affecting athletes psychologically. That's right. We've seen throughout the pandemic, sports events have these empty stadiums. And in some cases, they've sort of compensated by putting cutouts of audience members or celebrities out there. But at the Olympics, we're really seeing empty arenas. And for an elite athlete who prepares to perform in front of a crowd, who might be doing visualization exercises where they walk themselves through a routine step by step while

imagining the roar of the crowd in the background, to suddenly switch to this quiet, empty space can really damage them psychologically and have an impact on their performance. Wow. I mean, I think that that's something that we're definitely noticing. And it's interesting to know how this is all affecting them from a psychological point of view. Right. Because in some cases, this is the opposite of how it might affect like you or me. I think that if I had a crowd of people screaming in the background while I was, you know, doing the day's work, I would do a terrible job. But at an elite level, athletes have prepared themselves for that. And many of them actually feed off the energy of the crowd. Well, speaking about changing your mental state, let's talk about

caffeine. I mean, what week would be complete without caffeinated bees? That's right. Caffeine gives us a buzz, and it turns out that bees are no different. And this isn't just a fun, buzzy story. Bees are essential to agriculture. You know, they pollinate billions of dollars of crops every year, plants like peppers and strawberries and cucumbers. And a lot of those bees are easily distracted. So they're supposed to be on farm fields, pollinating these crops, but they might go off to the side and go into the wild flowers and not do their job as efficiently as maybe farmers would like.

So researchers have now found that feeding these bees caffeine while exposing them to a target scent helps them stay focused and perform better. And they tested this out using robot flowers. They gave two different groups of bees either caffeinated sugar water or regular sugar water, and they exposed them to the scent of strawberry flowers. And the idea is that bees who are exposed to that priming scent will then go seek out those blossoms. But when they let the bees loose, they let them loose in a field of fake robot flowers that sort of let out puffs of smell. So either it was a puff of strawberry smell or a puff of a distracting smell.

And the caffeinated bees went right to the target about 70% of the time. And the ones that had only gotten plain sugar water only did that about 60% of the time. And then the other thing is that when you had caffeine, the bees, their pace increased. They went faster as they went from flower to flower, which could be a sign of enhanced motor skills from the cup of Joe. And the idea is that we might be able to harness this caffeine buzz to like train bees to go after the things we want them to, to help pollinate the stuff that we're interested in? So if you're using a bee in a field full of avocados, you could give your bees some caffeine and a puff of avocado scent, and that would sort of prepare them to go and seek out their

avocados and pollinate those. Well, that's quite fascinating, and I think it's a good reason to enjoy that extra cup of coffee each day because we might be priming our brains similarly. I hope so, because I'm already a caffeine addict, so I hope that it's helping me as much as it helps the bees. Amazing. Sophie Bushwick is a technology editor at Scientific American in New York. Thanks for being with me today. Thanks for having me. When we come back, what we know about how viruses hide out in the body, and why they might do that. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Roxanne Kamsi. Throughout the pandemic, scientists have been learning more about SARS-Co-V-2, the virus that causes COVID. But there are

still big questions, one being, how long does the virus persist? In other words, how long does it hang around in the body? Persistence can clue us into ideas of immunity and how long people are infectious. And this is a question that researchers have about all sorts of viruses, from SARS-CoV-2 to HIV to measles. My next guest is here to talk about what we know about how viruses hide out in the body, and why they might do that. Diane Griffin is a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland. Welcome. Thank you.

So, Diane, I had mentioned this idea of persistence of viruses. What does that mean? Like, why is this important to understand? Well, the persistence can be in several different forms. Mostly when we get sick with these acute kinds of infections, SARS is a good example. But the example that we've been studying is measles. you think that as soon as you feel better and go home, that the whole infection is over. But actually, that's not really the case.

Even though the infectious virus that we can actually culture and that makes you be able to give the virus to somebody else, is actually usually cleared or gone very quickly after people start to feel better. But the RNA, in this case, that's the genome of the, virus itself, actually it takes a much longer period of time for it to be able to be cleared. And that may be actually doing something during that very long period of time that it hangs around. One question at the beginning of COVID was with PCR tests, which tap into some of that RNA that you're talking about. So was that test picking up the virus itself or fragments of the virus? Well, it's picking up the genome, the RNA of the virus, and the test itself doesn't really tell you whether it's picking up the whole viral genome, which then could start replicating again if you gave it a chance, or just a piece.

So the PCR test itself does not really give you that information. So, I mean, it sounds like this is very new terrain because we've got these tests now. that we can poke into this new question. But like historically, we've thought there's two kinds of viruses, right? Like those that clear out of the body, just as you described, and once you get over the illness, the virus is gone. And then others that stick around for a lifetime, like HIV or herpes. Can you give us a basic idea of how this works, like whether a virus sticks around or not?

Yes. Well, the viruses that stick around that you've mentioned, like herpes and, HIV, actually stick around in a form where they're still infectious. And those viruses all have a DNA phase to their replication. So they have a mechanism for being often incorporated into the genome of the host cell so that they are not easily cleared or basically can't be cleared. But other viruses don't have that same mechanism, which is the reason that we've been surprised. that these viruses that don't replicate or have a nuclear phase, they're all in the cytoplasm, they can still hang around for very long periods of time.

There's a fair amount of evidence that they're actually at least making viral proteins because they're stimulating the immune response. Interesting. Okay. So if I understand, right, viruses like HIV and herpes, they actually get into the nucleus of our cells, that innermost part, and kind of get into the DNA and integrate there, but that there's evidence that other viruses that don't do that might be hanging around for a while because, as you say, they're making proteins for a longer time. Right.

The ones like HIV and all the herpes viruses actually have mechanisms as a part of their natural replication for being able to, as you say, hang around for a lifetime usually. So has our view on viruses changed? Is it still so clear cut that a virus sticks around or is cleared? Yeah. So I think our views are changing because we didn't really appreciate that this was an issue, whether it's a problem or not, but whether it was an issue with these more acute infections. So influenza, you think of a lot of different, as I say, measles, a lot of different infections where you're only sick for. for a very short period of time. But now that we have these other kinds of techniques, we can appreciate the fact that actually the RNA

or the genomes of these viruses also hang around for very long periods of time. Well, like, this is now making me think, again, about measles, what you've studied throughout your career. We thought for decades that we cleared measles. Measles happened, but then it was over, and that's not the case. So there's a study in Japan in the 90s where they looked at people who had measles as kids.

What did that study tell us about measles? Well, it was very interesting because they found using these same kinds of techniques. They found RNA present in people who were dying and they were quite elderly, still present in a certain percentage. It wasn't that they found it in everybody. but it indicated that it's possible that some of these viruses can really stay around for a lifetime, although they don't usually cause disease during that period of time. I mean, it's not somebody you really want to hang around with for a lifetime, a virus. It's a little scary to hear about this hanging around with us.

But I know that you have studied measles very intensely, and I was wondering, what do we know about the mechanism for measles? Like, why does it hide out in the body? Well, that's a good question. And for measles, it's hanging out in cells that actually turn over. So these aren't really long-live cells necessarily. But it's primarily in lymphoid tissue, the tissue where the immune response is generated. So another thing that we know about measles is that it does establish lifelong immunity.

And not all viruses do that. But the fact that it remains and continues to stimulate the immune response over a long period of time, maybe one of the reasons or one of the mechanisms that it uses in order to be able to establish lifelong immunity, in which case that's an advantage for the host. Yeah, it sounds like there's an upside to having a virus for a while. It's kind of stimulating the immune system and keeping us on alert, but not getting too. dangerous? I mean, is there a risk of it going awry? Well, that's a good question, but it's almost an epidemiologic question, but there's not to know whether people are infectious or not, and that's

certainly been one of the major questions with SARS-CoB-2 is whether people where you can detect the RNA by this RTPR kinds of mechanisms are infectious or not. For measles, it's pretty clear. There's not any evidence that the virus can be transmitted after maybe three or four days after the rash has cleared. People are no longer infectious. So why aren't you infectious if you've got measles in your body? That, to me, is a bit of a puzzle. If it's hanging around for a while, potentially, why wouldn't you infect other people? Right.

But there seems to be a mechanism, and this is not something that we understand. understand very well for actually suppressing or clearing what we call infectious virus. And that's a whole virus particles that you could actually isolate in the laboratory and that would be what would be transmitted from one person to another. The cells that were originally infected and producing the infectious virus for measles and for SARS-CoV-2 is in the respiratory tract. So virus is being produced in respiratory secretions, and that is what can spread it from one place to another. That virus is no longer being produced in respiratory secretions. Instead, inside the cells that were previously producing this kind of infectious virus, now they're no longer producing the infectious virus,

but they still have the genome inside the cells. One thing that is really important is that for those of us that got vaccinated against measles, we're not going to have to worry about this thing of measles hanging around on us, right? Like if you're vaccinated, you're not going to have persistent measles in your body. Is that right? I think that's right. All of the evidence is that it is not doing the same kind of thing as the original natural wild type measles does. So it's an attenuated virus. It doesn't replicate nearly as well as the wild type virus. So with everything that you've uncovered with measles, how are we going to figure out if COVID persists in the body? Well, I think that, first of all, as I say, some of the, first of all, we're detecting the RNA for quite long periods of time that is variable from individual to individual.

But, well, I think that it will become apparent whether people are infectious or not, as I say, mainly from, the epidemiology. When they go home, do they infect people in their families, et cetera. So these viruses are hard to culture. So, you know, I talk about infectious virus, and that means that you can culture it. Not only is it transmissible, but you can culture it in the laboratory. But that's not an easy test, and people, for the most part, are not culturing SARS-CoB-2. So it's, you know, hanging, so viruses can hang around in the body much easier than sometimes they can hang

around in a lab dish is what you're saying. Well, they can, or then you can recover them in the lab, yes. And I should say, you know, we're not talking about COVID persisting in the body, but SARS-CoV-2, the virus, just to be technical about it. Right, right, yes. So could this idea of persistence be playing into long-haul COVID? Oh, I think so. Yeah, and I think that's probably one of the main hypotheses that is being pursued is whether there is persistence.

And where that is, you know, one of the things that we know from measles is that that persistent RNA is continuing to stimulate the immune system. So a lot of the symptoms of long COVID could be, the actually, immune response that is being generated, but it may be being stimulated by the virus hanging around or the viral genome hanging around and continuing to code for viral proteins so that they continue to be made even if you're not making the whole infectious virus anymore. And, you know, I think that there's debate around latency with COVID, whether or not it hangs around our body and integrates into our DNA. But, I mean, in your opinion, do you think we should be looking for latency in COVID? Well, I don't think it's going to, that there's a big risk that

it's going to be integrating into DNA. I think that that's one of the interesting things about these RNA viruses, and COVID is an RNA virus like measles is. They stay in the cytoplasm, So they don't integrate into the DNA of the cells. So that's the reason understanding how they're persistent is a little more complicated than understanding it for HIV, for instance. Wow. I mean, it sounds like a big challenge. But speaking of challenges, you are on a committee that has put together a report

on genetic surveillance in the U.S. What is the state of genetic surveillance? Oh, I think it's improved quite a bit. At the time that we put together our report, it wasn't very good. It was much better in the UK, for instance, where they really had an organized system for monitoring these viruses and being then able to identify variants when they appeared in the population. But we're now doing quite a bit better job, so that we're sequencing many, many more isolates or genomes that are circulating.

Mainly SARS-CoV-2 is what's being sequenced in monitoring these different viruses and knowing, for instance, right now that the Delta variant is an important strain that is actually being spread much more readily than some of the earlier versions of SARS-CoV-2. We also sequence a lot of influenza viruses where it's very important to follow what the changes are over time.

So that's why it's important to track viruses like this, right, to find out what they might be doing differently based on their genetic code? Yes, we probably won't find out about it from actually just the genetic code, but we'll know to look for what those each, though those different viruses is doing and how it's acting in the population as well as in the individuals who are being infected. I'm Roxanne Kamsley, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And, you know, taking the long view, you've been a virologist for decades. You know, why are viruses interesting to you?

And is there some question about measles you're still itching to crack? Oh, we still have a lot of questions. And viruses are fascinating because they can do so many interesting things with very, code for very few proteins, very few genes, but they take over a whole cell and organize the cell to be able to make them the viruses. And so we learn a lot about cell biology as well as about viruses and what they can do. You know, right now with measles, we're very interested in how you establish lifelong immunity, basically. So we think that the, So persistent RNA is a clue, but we don't really know how it's doing that.

So we're working hard right now to try to understand that. And to understand the difference between wild type measles and the vaccine strain of measles, how are they different? Well, I mean, I think these are great questions about, you know, viruses hanging around lifelong. And it seems like a question of lasting interest. We've run out of time, but I'd like to thank my guest, Diane Griffin, Professor of Molecular, Microbiology, and Immunology at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland. Thanks, Diane. You're welcome. And just a reminder, Science Friday wants to hear from you on our Vox Pop app.

Let us know what science stories you'd like to hear, or tell us your question. That's on the Science Friday VoxPop app. You can download it wherever you get your apps. After the break, should disaster preparedness and response, Scale up as climate change exacerbates our natural hazards like hurricanes and wildfires. Our model of emergency management relies on mutual aid coming from other communities. And if every community is dealing with their own disaster, those resources may not be there in the full way that they were before. A disasterologist is on the case.

We'll be right back after the short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Roxanne Kamsi. If you live on the West Coast, you know it's wildfire season. You might be bracing for potential evacuations at some point this summer and hoping you don't lose your home. Meanwhile, on the East Coast and around the Gulf, maybe you're watching for tropical storms as they form and you hope dissipate. And all over the U.S., you might be dealing with either historic drought or heavy rainfall and flash flooding. All of these natural hazards become disasters when they come into contact with human happiness. or resources. And sci-fri producer, Christy Taylor, has a story about one scientist who studies disasters and what determines how well people and communities are able to bounce back. Hey, Christy. Hey there, Roxanne. So it hadn't occurred to me that disaster response is a science. Tell me about what you found about the research behind disaster response. Yeah, I talked to Samantha Montana, who is an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

She is also just about to release a book on all of what you just talked about. It's called Disasterology, which is not the official name of this field, by the way. And one of the points she made is that at least currently, most disasters that happen are handled so effectively that we don't even hear about them. It's really just the big ones that can stretch our planning or response capacity, and those are the ones that make the news. And even then, how we prepare and respond can make a huge difference in how well communities can, as you said, bounce back and recover. So it sounds like this is a field that might be trying to change some things as we stare down the impacts of global warming in the coming years. Am I right? You're exactly right, Roxanne.

Emergency managers are bracing for more and more of these as global warming amplifies our risk. But first, I started by asking Sam to explain the basics. What happens when a disaster like a flood or fire is incoming, and then what happens during and after? You know, the thing with disasters is that the decisions that you have made, the decisions that other people have made, policies, all of these other factors that have happened long before the disaster occurred, are going to affect how that disaster unfolds. Puerto Rico, for example, right, the decisions that had been made about the electric grid and the way that the electric grid was built and run in Puerto Rico happened long before Hurricane Maria.

But those decisions had a direct effect on the extent of the damage and what that response and that recovery process looks like. And so when we're thinking about responding to a disaster, you're not just thinking about that earthquake, that hurricane, that wildfire. You're also having to account for all of these other factors. the vulnerability of the community that it is going to affect. Do you have a community that has a warning system, for example, or do you have a community where people are aware of this risk and know how to react when this hazard occurs? Do they have the money and the resources to be able to take the appropriate protective actions? Do they have the money to evacuate? Do they have a car to evacuate? wait. Once that disaster is imminent and you are in that phase of response, you are really relying on

the existing relationships that you have in your community. You're relying on existing communication networks. You're relying on training and exercises and plans that you have worked on long in advance. And then when we get into recovery, we see a similar situation unfold. Again, we know from the research that communities that have pre-existing recovery plans that have thought through how they might rebuild their community, have looked at what financial resources are available to them to rebuild, tend to be able to move through that recovery process more effectively, more efficiently, because they've done that pre-existing planning, that pre-existing work. So one thing I've noticed is that you keep talking about communities, and you're right about

how emergency management isn't just a science of engineering, but it's a thing. should also be one that considers sociology, how groups of people work, as opposed to maybe the image we might have of one person sort of grabbing their go bag and running out of the house. Can you say more about that? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think here to the big Hollywood disaster movies that usually have this like one hero that's off saving the family. Like Tommy Lee Jones.

Exactly. Tommy Lee Jones. The Rock in San Andreas, right? You have this one guy who's out there saving his family. family and, you know, running through fire. And that is not really the reality. When disasters happen, we see that there is a community response. There is a collective response to that disaster. Those same Hollywood movies very often portray this kind of panic and this chaos and looting and violence and kind of just mass chaos that occurs during these disasters.

And actually, disaster sociologists dating back many decades have found that that isn't actually what happens. Actually, people tend to behave very rationally. Part of this human behavior that has been observed is that people come together. We work together. In research, we call them emergent groups. But really what that's describing is people kind of randomly, spontaneously coming together to address whatever need has emerged during that disaster. So, for example, when there's a need for search and rescue, the people who are there coordinate amongst themselves. They start digging through rubble. They go to their neighbor's house and get their boat and start going out to search for people on their roots.

We see time and time again that communities are themselves the first responders. The survivors of the disaster are themselves the first responders. You are, you know, the first person to know when there is an earthquake that, your neighbor was at home and is now trapped under rubble and you go and you start digging before any kind of urban search and rescue team gets flown in. Let's start with the 2017 hurricane season. We saw Hurricane Irma. It killed almost 150 people. And then we have Hurricane Maria, which hit almost the same islands and went on to kill an estimated 5,000 people in Puerto Rico. What made the difference between Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria when we look at what

determines how people fare in a disaster? You know, the 2017 hurricane season, I think, is really instructive of what it looks like to have one disaster after another and the effect that that can have on the overall capacity of our emergency management system. So actually, even before Irma, we had Hurricane Harvey in Texas. And so we had, you know, for a month and a half, two months straight, these huge responses across the country. And the response to Harvey required people coming in from all of these other states required the federal government coming into Texas to help people were killed. There was extensive damage. But considering the size of that hurricane, considering the extent of the destruction, the actual

response, was handled relatively effectively. Same situation with Hurricane Irma in Florida. But then you get to Hurricane Maria. specifically in Puerto Rico, and you see something very different. You see not only extensive destruction, but near complete destruction, even though Puerto Ricans were certainly responding to what was happening themselves and helping themselves and their neighbors. There was not that same influx of immediate aid coming from surrounding states from the federal government in a way that met the extent of those needs in Puerto Rico. The way that our system is set up is that when a disaster

happens, other states are sending aid to support the area that has been affected. And that was what happened during Harvey and Irma. But that meant that many, if not, most of those resources were already deployed. Even if you pull them from those other communities, you are pulling people who have been out in the field working for weeks on end who are exhausted. That exhaustion, that burnout was kind of seeping throughout the emergency responders. In reports since Maria, you can see that private vendors that FEMA uses, for example, to provide food and water in communities post-disaster were at their capacity. So you see this kind of cascading failure kind of within that system that contributed to the extent of the damage in Puerto Rico. Well, I want to talk about those

compounding disasters a little bit. We are seeing more. You know, we talked about three hurricanes in 2017 earlier, but just this year, just in the U.S., we've seen unprecedented heat waves, big drought conditions, all over large portions of the southwest, flash flooding on the east coast, and then that's an addition to like regular wildfire and hurricane seasons. A lot of this is fitting the models made by climate change researchers, but the scale, I know at least personally, it has been really shocking to me to watch it all unfold. As a researcher of disasters, do you think we should be surprised by everything that's happened this year? It is certainly horrible to see and shocking in many ways to see, but at the same time, this is exactly what researchers have been

saying for decades in some cases. When we have talked about what the consequences of climate change are, a huge part of that focus has been on the impact on extreme events. When you take those climate models and what climate scientists tell us about how climate change affects extreme weather, and you pair it with the policy decisions that have been made for decades in the United States and around the world, you get a recipe for disaster. You get a recipe for exactly what we are seeing now. When you have unchecked development in known floodplains, and then you add more water than has historically been there in the past, it will flood. So it is, again, a horrific thing to see these disasters unfold one after

another, but it also is a direct product of these decisions that have been made by some people. So as climate change continues, where does our disaster management infrastructure need to scale up or shift in order to accommodate, you know, these perhaps year-on-year disasters for some areas or just more places that are facing disasters? Do we need more money to fund paying firefighters, for example? I mean, what would be on your wish list? All of it. You know, as we look at these disasters that have unfolded, even, you know, just take the past four or five years, you can see that we have not had the capacity within the emerging. management system to effectively respond to them all. If we did, the Maria response would have looked a lot different. So what we need to look at here is not just what the increases in risk looks like for each community around the country, but we also need to look at the effect across the country. What does this look like as a whole? Because our model of emergency management relies on mutual aid coming from other communities. And if every community is dealing with their own disaster, those resources that we have tended to rely on in the past may not be there or at least not be there in the full way that they

were before. Actually, with the pandemic, we started to get a sense of what this could look like. For the first time since FEMA was created, we had a disaster declared in every single state and territory in the country, because everybody was focused on addressing those needs in their own community, the sharing that usually happens during a disaster wasn't what we've become accustomed to. So when we think about the future and think about this increasing risk, I think it's really useful to look at this in terms of the capacity of our emergency management system. For me, that means first and foremost building the capacity of our local emergency management agencies. When we look across the country, a lot of these emergency management agencies are really just somebody who is

working part-time, fire chief who is, you know, doing fire chief things half the time and emergency management things the other half of the time. And we need more people in these emergency management agencies who can dedicate the time that is really needed. And of course, at the national level, we need to be looking at FEMA specifically, looking at increasing funding specifically to the grant programs that FEMA runs so that they can be used to build that capacity of those local emergency management agencies, but to also make sure that we are funding our hazard mitigation projects, funding other preparedness efforts at that local level. Just a quick reminder that this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

I'm talking with disaster researcher Samantha Montana about the science of preparing for and responding to disasters. You do observe in this book that these disasters do and will continue to affect the poorest and most vulnerable first. It's a racial justice question, a disability justice question, even in some ways a gender justice question. How do our emergency management systems need to change in order to incorporate justice? The research here is very clear. The experiences of communities here is very clear. FEMA's program specifically do not.

meet the needs of everyone. We may all go through a hurricane, but the resources that we have to evacuate, the resources that we have to actually rebuild our house, those are very different. And so when you look at communities of color, you look at low-income communities, you very often see that they are further behind in recovery as compared to whiter communities, wealthier communities. And so we really need a full accounting of FEMA's programs to really understand where these disparities are coming from and what program changes need to be made to address this. We also have to acknowledge, though, that it isn't only the programs within FEMA that are causing this. There is also this broader societal issue here that, you know, communities of color are more likely to live in more hazardous areas because of policies of decades past. When you look at New Orleans and the recovery post-Katrina, you see that a community like the lower 9th ward has recovered much more slowly than the whiter, wealthier neighborhoods in New Orleans.

So it's not only about addressing the policies within FEMA and within emergency management specifically, but also addressing housing policies and health care policies, economic policies that are creating this overall inequality. That's unfortunately all the time we have, Samantha. I want to thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Sam Montano is an assistant professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy on Cape Cod. Her book is Dispatches from the frontlines of the climate crisis. You can read an excerpt on our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash disaster. I'm Christy Taylor. Thanks for that story, Christy.

One last thing. One of the great movers and shakers in physics, Stephen Weinberg passed away last Friday at the age of 88. Weinberg's work united two of the four fundamental forces of nature, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He was always eager to explain hair-herting concepts in physics in terms we could all understand, as he did as a guest on Science Friday in 2009. We understand the way particles and forces work

down to a certain scale of distances, maybe a hundredth or a thousandth the size of an atomic nucleus. But when you get to distances smaller than that, for example, light waves with a wavelength less than that, we really don't know how they behave. The laws of physics are not well understood. Condolences to his family and friends. Charles Berkwist is our director.

Our producers are Christy Taylor and Kathleen Davis. Our intern is Emily Zing. Our senior producer is Alexa Lim. John Dancosky is our news director. B.J. Liederman composed our theme music. Ira will be back next week. I'm Roxanne Kamsie.