Environmental News For The Week Ending 16January 2019
This is a collection of interesting news articles about the environment and related topics published last week. This is usually a Tuesday evening regular post at
GEI (but can be posted at other times).
Please share this article - Go to very top of page, right hand side, for social media buttons.
Note: Because of the high volume of news regarding the coronavirus outbreak, that news has been published separately:
Summary:
New US Covid infections for the week ending January 16th were 8.5% below those of the week ending January 9th, so it appears that the incidence of new cases mat have peaked and is turning down, at least for the time being. One caveat to that, though, is that we don't know how many of the prior week's cases were from reports that had been delayed over the holidays. For a check on that, we can compare new cases from the week ending January 16th to those from the week ending December 19th, two weeks which should have been unaffected by holiday reporting issues; that comparison shows a 3.3% increase in new cases, or a new case growth at a rate of less than 1% a week. And since we should be past the post-holiday surge by now, there's no reason to think that new cases will begin to rise again soon, at least not until one of the more contagious mutant strains becomes dominant here. In the UK, that appears to have taken around three months, which might give us enough time to get a significant part of the population vaccinated and slow the next surge down. But reports indicate that one of the 2 mutant Covid strains circulating in Ohio became dominant in the Columbus area in just three weeks. If that's an accurate assessment, we'll barely have time to catch our breath before it will be off and running again.