Associated Press, by Seth Borenstein, April 22, 2020
These maps made available by NASA show nitrogen dioxide levels over California during March 2-6, 2020, pre-shutdown against the COVID-19 coronavirus; March 9-13 during soft shutdown measures, March 16-20 when “shelter in place” orders were announced, and March 23-27 during a full period of “shelter in place” orders. NO2 is a noxious gas emitted by motor vehicles, power plants, and industrial facilities. (NASA/European Space Agency via AP)
An unplanned grand experiment is changing Earth.
As people across the globe stay home to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, the air has cleaned up, albeit temporarily. Smog stopped choking New Delhi, one of the most polluted cities in the world, and India’s getting views of sights not visible in decades. Nitrogen dioxide pollution in the northeastern United States is down 30%. Rome air pollution levels from mid-March to mid-April were down 49% from a year ago. Stars seem more visible at night.
People are also noticing animals in places and at times they don’t usually. Coyotes have meandered along downtown Chicago’s Michigan Avenue and near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. A puma roamed the streets of Santiago, Chile. Goats took over a town in Wales. In India, already daring wildlife has become bolder with hungry monkeys entering homes and opening refrigerators to look for food.
When people stay home, Earth becomes cleaner and wilder.
“It is giving us this quite extraordinary insight into just how much of a mess we humans are making of our beautiful planet,” says conservation scientist Stuart Pimm of Duke University. “This is giving us an opportunity to magically see how much better it can be.”
Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, assembled scientists to assess the ecological changes happening with so much of humanity housebound. Scientists, stuck at home like the rest of us, say they are eager to explore unexpected changes in weeds, insects, weather patterns, noise and light pollution. Italy’s government is working on an ocean expedition to explore sea changes from the lack of people.
“In many ways we kind of whacked the Earth system with a sledgehammer and now we see what Earth’s response is,” Field says.
Researchers are tracking dramatic drops in traditional air pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide, smog and tiny particles. These types of pollution kill up to 7 million people a year worldwide, according to Health Effects Institute president Dan Greenbaum.
The air from Boston to Washington is its cleanest since a NASA satellite started measuring nitrogen dioxide,in 2005, says NASA atmospheric scientist Barry Lefer. Largely caused by burning of fossil fuels, this pollution is short-lived, so the air gets cleaner quickly.
These maps made available by NASA shows the average concentration of nitrogen dioxide in March 2015-19, top, and in March 2020 as people stay home against the COVID-19 coronavirus. NO2 is a noxious gas emitted by motor vehicles, power plants, and industrial facilities. (NASA via AP)
Compared to the previous five years, March air pollution is down 46% in Paris, 35% in Bengaluru, India, 38% in Sydney, 29% in Los Angeles, 26% in Rio de Janeiro and 9% in Durban, South Africa, NASA measurements show.
“We’re getting a glimpse of what might happen if we start switching to non-polluting cars,” Lefer says.
Cleaner air has been most noticeable in India and China. On April 3, residents of Jalandhar, a city in north India’s Punjab, woke up to a view not seen for decades: snow-capped Himalayan peaks more than 100 miles away.
Cleaner air means stronger lungs for asthmatics, especially children, says Dr. Mary Prunicki, director of air pollution and health research at the Stanford University School of Medicine. And she notes early studies also link coronavirus severity to people with bad lungs and those in more polluted areas, though it’s too early to tell which factor is stronger.
The greenhouse gases that trap heat and cause climate change stay in the atmosphere for 100 years or more, so the pandemic shutdown is unlikely to affect global warming, says Breakthrough Institute climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. Carbon dioxide levels are still rising, but not as fast as last year.
Aerosol pollution, which doesn’t stay airborne long, is also dropping. But aerosols cool the planet so NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt is investigating whether their falling levels may be warming local temperatures for now.
Stanford’s Field says he’s most intrigued by increased urban sightings of coyotes, pumas and other wildlife that are becoming video social media staples. Boar-like javelinas congregated outside of a Arizona shopping center. Even New York City birds seem hungrier and bolder.
In Adelaide, Australia, police shared a video of a kangaroo hopping around a mostly empty downtown, and a pack of jackals occupied an urban park in Tel Aviv, Israel.
We’re not being invaded. The wildlife has always been there, but many animals are shy, Duke’s Pimm says. They come out when humans stay home.
For sea turtles across the globe, humans have made it difficult to nest on sandy beaches. The turtles need to be undisturbed and emerging hatchlings get confused by beachfront lights, says David Godfrey, executive director of the Sea Turtle Conservancy.
But with lights and people away, this year’s sea turtle nesting so far seems much better from India to Costa Rica to Florida, Godfrey says.
“There’s some silver lining for wildlife in what otherwise is a fairly catastrophic time for humans,” he says.
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Associated Press writer Aniruddha Ghosal in New Delhi contributed to this report.
KrebsOnSecurity.com, April 20, 2020
A “reopen California” protest over the weekend in Huntington Beach, Calif. Image: Reddit.
The past few weeks have seen a large number of new domain registrations beginning with the word “reopen” and ending with U.S. city or state names. The largest number of them were created just hours after President Trump sent a series of all-caps tweets urging citizens to “liberate” themselves from new gun control measures and state leaders who’ve enacted strict social distancing restrictions in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s a closer look at who and what appear to be behind these domains.
A series of inciteful tweets sent by President Trump on April 17, the same day dozens of state-themed “reopen” domains were registered — mostly by conservative groups and gun rights advocates.
KrebsOnSecurity began this research after reading a fascinating Reddit thread over the weekend on several “reopen” sites that seemed to be engaged in astroturfing, which involves masking the sponsors of a message or organization to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants.
The Reddit discussion focused on a handful of new domains — including reopenmn.com, reopenpa.com, and reopenva.com — that appeared to be tied to various gun rights groups in those states. Their registrations have roughly coincided with contemporaneous demonstrations in Minnesota, California and Tennessee where people showed up to protest quarantine restrictions over the past few days.
A “reopen California” protest over the weekend in Huntington Beach, Calif. Image: Reddit.
Suspecting that these were but a subset of a larger corpus of similar domains registered for every state in the union, KrebsOnSecurity ran a domain search report at DomainTools [an advertiser on this site], requesting any and all domains registered in the past month that begin with “reopen” and end in “.com.”
That lookup returned approximately 150 domains; in addition to those named after the individual 50 states, some of the domains refer to large American cities or counties, and others to more general concepts, such as “reopeningchurch.com” or “reopenamericanbusiness.com.”
Many of the domains are still dormant, leading to parked pages and registration records obscured behind privacy protection services. But a review of other details about these domains suggests a majority of them are tied to various gun rights groups, state Republican Party organizations, and conservative think tanks, religious and advocacy groups.
For example, reopenmn.com forwards to minnesotagunrights.org, but the site’s WHOIS registration records (obscured since the Reddit thread went viral) point to an individual living in Florida. That same Florida resident registered reopenpa.com, a site that forwards to the Pennsylvania Firearms Association, and urges the state’s residents to contact their governor about easing the COVID-19 restrictions.
Reopenpa.com is tied to a Facebook page called Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine, which sought to organize an “Operation Gridlock” protest at noon today in Pennsylvania among its 68,000 members.
Both the Minnesota and Pennsylvania gun advocacy sites include the same Google Analytics tracker in their source code: UA-60996284. A cursory Internet search on that code shows it also is present on reopentexasnow.com, reopenwi.com and reopeniowa.com.
More importantly, the same code shows up on a number of other anti-gun control sites registered by the Dorr Brothers, real-life brothers who have created nonprofits (in name only) across dozens of states that are so extreme in their stance they make the National Rifle Association look like a liberal group by comparison.
This 2019 article at cleveland.com quotes several 2nd Amendment advocates saying the Dorr brothers simply seek “to stir the pot and make as much animosity as they can, and then raise money off that animosity.” The site dorrbrotherscams.com also is instructive here.
A number of other sites — such as reopennc.com — seem to exist merely to sell t-shirts, decals and yard signs with such slogans as “Know Your Rights,” “Live Free or Die,” and “Facts not Fear.” WHOIS records show the same Florida resident who registered this North Carolina site also registered one for New York — reopenny.com — just a few minutes later.
Merchandise available from reopennc.com.
Some of the concept reopen domains — including reopenoureconomy.com (registered Apr. 15) and reopensociety.com (Apr. 16) — trace back to FreedomWorks, a conservative group that the Associated Presssays has been holding weekly virtual town halls with members of Congress, “igniting an activist base of thousands of supporters across the nation to back up the effort.”
Reopenoc.com — which advocates for lifting social restrictions in Orange County, Calif. — links to a Facebook page for Orange County Republicans, and has been chronicling the street protests there. The messaging on Reopensc.com — urging visitors to digitally sign a reopen petition to the state governor — is identical to the message on the Facebook page of the Horry County, SC Conservative Republicans.
Many of the reopen sites that have redacted names and other information about their registrants nevertheless hold other clues, mainly based on precisely when they were registered. Each domain registration record includes a date and timestamp down to the second that the domain was registered. By grouping the timestamps for domains that have obfuscated registration details and comparing them to domains that do include ownership data, we can infer more information.
For example, more than 50 reopen domains were registered within an hour of each other on April 17 — between 3:25 p.m. ET and 4:43 ET. Most of these lack registration details, but a handful of them did (until the Reddit post went viral) include the registrant name Michael Murphy, the same name tied to the aforementioned Minnesota and Pennsylvania gun rights domains (reopenmn.com and reopenpa.com) that were registered within seconds of each other on April 8.
A large number of “reopen” domains were registered within the same one-hour period on April 17, and tie back to the same name used in the various reopen domains connected to gun rights groups. A link to the spreadsheet where this screen shot is drawn from is included below.
A Google spreadsheet documenting much of the domain information sourced in this story is available here.
No one responded to the email addresses and phone numbers tied to Mr. Murphy, who may or may not have been involved in this domain registration scheme. Those contact details suggest he runs a store in Florida that makes art out of reclaimed or discarded items, and that he operates a Web site design company in Florida.
Update, April 21, 6:40 a.m. ET:Mother Jones has published a compelling interview with Mr. Murphy, who says he registered thousands of dollars worth of “reopen” and “liberate” domains to keep them out of the hands of people trying to organize protests. KrebsOnSecurity has not be able to validate this report, but it’s a fascinating twist to this tale: How an ‘Old Hippie’ Got Accused of Astroturfing the Right-Wing Campaign to Reopen the Economy
Update, April 22, 1:52 p.m. ET: Mr. Murphy told Jacksonville.com he did not register reopenmn.com or reopenpa.com, contrary to data in the spreadsheet linked above. I looked up each of the records in that spreadsheet manually, but did have some help from another source in compiling and sorting the information. It is possible the registration data for those domains got transposed with reopenmd.com and reopenva.com, which included Mr. Murphy’s information prior to being redacted by the domain registrar.
Original story:
As much as President Trump likes to refer to stories critical of him and his administration as “fake news,” this type of astroturfing is not only dangerous to public health, but it’s reminiscent of the playbook used by Russia to sow discord, create phony protest events, and spread disinformation across America in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
This entire astroturfing campaign also brings to mind a “local news” network called Local Government Information Services (LGIS), an organization founded in 2018 which operates a huge network of hundreds of sites that purport to be local news sites in various states. However, most of the content is generated by automated computer algorithms that consume data from reports released by U.S. executive branch federal agencies.
The relatively scarce actual bylined content on these LGIS sites is authored by freelancers who are in most cases nowhere near the localities they cover. Other content not drawn from government reports often repurpose press releases from conservative Web sites, including gunrightswatch.com, taxfoundation.org, and The Heritage Foundation. For more on LGIS, check out the 2018 coverage from The Chicago Tribune and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Solano County Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Updates and Resources. Check out basic information in this screenshot. IMPORTANT: The County’s interactive page has more. On the County website, you can click on “Number of cases” and then hover over the charts for detailed information.
Yesterday’s report, Tuesday, April 21:
Summary
Solano County reported 5 NEW POSITIVE CASES today – total is now 186. No new deaths, total remains at 3. As of today:
BY AGE GROUP:
No additional positive cases of young persons under 19 years of age, total of 3 cases, less than 2% of total confirmed cases.
All 5 new cases were persons 19-64 years of age, total of 154 cases, 83%, of the total 186 confirmed cases. No new deaths, total of 1.
No new cases of persons 65 or older, total of 29 cases, 16% of the 186 total. No new deaths, total of 2.
HOSPITALIZATIONS: 48 of Solano’s 186 cases resulted in hospitalizations (6 more than yesterday).
ACTIVE CASES: Only 21 of the 186 are active cases. This is 9 less than yesterday. Good news!
The County’s “Hospital Impact” graph (below) shows that only 10 of the 48 hospitalized cases are currently hospitalized, 1 morethan yesterday. Note also that only 10 of the 21 active cases are currently hospitalized. The County’s count ofICU beds andventilators available continues at 31-100%, or GOOD. (No information is given on our supply of test kits, PPE and staff.)
CITY DATA
Vallejoadded all 5 of today’s new cases, total of 76.
Fairfield remains at 47 cases.
Vacaville remains at 26 cases.
Suisun City remains at 11 cases.
Benicia remains at 12 cases.
Dixon, Rio Vista and “Unincorporated” are still not assigned numerical data: today all remain at <10 (less than 10). Residents and city officials have been pressuring County officials for city case counts for many weeks. Today’s data is welcome, but still incomplete.
TESTING
The County reports that 2,555 residents have been tested as of today. This is an increase of only 49 tested since yesterday’s total of 2,506 . This is not enough testing! Why so few? Last week, around 150 new tests were reported daily, but the numbers dropped over the weekend and since. (I have no information as to the reason for the slow pace of testing in Solano County – inadequate supply of kits, perhaps?) Under 6 tenths of 1% of Solano County’s 447,643 residents (2019) have been tested.
The blue bars in the chart, “Daily number of cases on the date that specimens were collected” shows why the County is interpreting a flattening of the curve. Note that the daily date in that chart refers to the date a sample was drawn and so reflects the lag time in testing.
Solano’s upward curve in cumulative cases – as of April 22
The chart above shows the infection’s trajectory in Solano County. It’s too soon to tell, but we may be seeing a flattening of the curve! Still – incredibly important…
Decision based on progress toward preparing California’s hospitals and health care delivery system for a COVID-19 surge in patients – one of California’s six indicators to gradually modify state’s stay-at-home order
State also announces plans to add at least an additional 80 testing sites, mainly in underserved communities; train up to 10,000 contact tracers
SACRAMENTO — Today, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced plans to allow hospitals and health systems to resume delayed medical care for Californians – such as heart valve replacements, angioplasty and tumor removals, and key preventive care services, such as colonoscopies – which were deferred as the state’s health care delivery systems prepared for a surge of COVID-19 patients. The decision was based on progress toward preparing California hospitals and health systems for a surge in COVID-19 patients – one of the six critical indicators the governor unveiled last week as part of the state’s framework for gradually modifying California’s stay-at-home order.
As part of the Western State’s Pact, California will work with Washington and Oregon to share best practices on how our states can allow hospitals and medical providers to resume delayed medical care in areas that have sufficient hospital capacity, while ensuring the safety and health of our health care workers and patients. The Western states had previously announced a shared, science-based vision for gradually reopening their economies and controlling COVID-19 into the future.
“From the beginning, I have said California’s decisions will be guided by science, not politics, and that Californians’ health comes first,” said Governor Newsom. “Thanks to the work our health care delivery system has done expanding hospital capacity and reducing the rate of spread of COVID-19, hospitals and health systems can consider resuming medical care that residents have delayed during this crisis, such as heart valve replacements, angioplasty and tumor removals, when such care can be delivered safety and with appropriate protections for health care workers. It’s in the best interest of the overall health of our state to allow these procedures to resume when they can be done safely.”
Last week, Governor Newsom announced six indicators that would drive California’s decision to gradually modify portions of the state’s stay-at-home order. They include:
Expanding testing and contact tracing to be able to identify and isolate those with the virus;
Preventing infection in people who are most at risk;
Being able to handle surges in hospitals and the health care delivery system;
Developing therapeutics to meet demand;
Ensuring businesses, schools and child care facilities can support physical distancing; and
Determining when to reinstate certain measures like the stay-at-home order if need be.
Also today, Governor Newsom announced that President Trump has personally committed to sending the state 100,000 testing swabs next week and 250,000 swabs the following week.
Health officials also outlined progress toward the first indicator: expanding testing and contact tracing to be able to identify and isolate those with the virus.
To that end, the state announced the expansion of community testing in underserved areas. The state is contracting with Verily, an Alphabet company, in partnership with Community Organized Relief Effort (CORE) and with support from Rockefeller Foundation and an anonymous donor, to establish six new community testing sites focused on underserved communities such as farmworkers and communities of color. Additionally, the state is contracting with OptumServe, to establish an additional 80 community testing sites, which too will be focused on underserved communities.
“We know that communities of color are disproportionately affected by COVID-19,” said Governor Newsom. “We must ensure that we are deploying testing equitably in an effort to reduce the higher death rates we are seeing in African American and Latino communities.”
In addition, the state is:
Accelerating equitable COVID-19 testing by aiming to deploy 25,000 tests per day by April 30; establishing an additional 80-100 testing sites; and identifying five new high-throughput testing hubs.
Establishing a contact tracing workforce by surveying counties on their capacity; developing a statewide training academy; and training 10,000 public health connectors to conduct contact tracing.
Developing isolation protocols and supports by identifying regional alternate isolation sites and building private-public partnerships to support those who are isolated.
Deploying data management system and tools by publishing a symptom-check app; deploying a data management platform; and establishing a data dashboard for the public.
Now that testing has become more widely available across the state, California updated its testing guidance earlier this week to become the first state to recommend testing of some asymptomatic individuals such as health care workers, first responders and correctional workers. This action will better protect Californians and prevent COVID-19 spread in high-risk settings such as congregate living facilities and correctional facilities.
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