Costly disbelief: covid-19 ravages Brazil again

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Given that they're absolutely everywhere these days, it's hard to imagine that people once thought lasers could never be made. We look at how they've changed everything from manufacturing to medicine. And at the scientific frontiers they're still shining light on. And deep within dozens of water pollution monitoring centers in Poland, you'll find a bunch of clams. Engineers have put them to a curiously good use. First up though, On Sunday, after a marathon five hour broadcast, Brazil's health regulator at last approved two coronavirus vaccines. One from Chinese pharma company sinovac and the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine from Britain. The message from the regulator was direct. Trust the vaccines that have been certified and get vaccinated when you can. That's a rare bit of clarity from the government. President Jair Bolsonaro has brushed off the pandemic and measures to control it from the start. Brazil's COVID 19 death toll stands at more than 210,000, second only to America's. And new variants of the virus threaten to add swiftly to that total, nowhere is feeling that rising pressure more than Manaus, a city of 2 million people in the Amazon rainforest, where rising hospitalizations have led to deadly shortages of oxygen.

Manaus is a city of about 2 million people in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. It's a port city right on the river and is a really sprawling and urban place, considering it's surrounded by trees.

Sarah Maslin is our Brazil correspondent.

Manaus was the first city back at the beginning of the pandemic to have its health system collapse and see really tragic scenes of people dying in their homes and mass graves being dug. And that rapid rise was then succeeded by a pretty quick fall in the number of cases and many months of relative tranquility. But in the past couple of months, and really just in the past few weeks, cases have rocketed up again, and we're seeing really tragic scenes. The rate of hospital occupancy and the number of deaths are exceeding what Manaus saw in the first wave. The city and the state have now declared states of emergency. But it seems it maybe was too late because last week some of the hospitals and clinics ran out of oxygen. So patients were dying from COVID 19 and not having enough oxygen. But also other patients were dying because of other illnesses that they needed oxygen for. People are mounting intensive care units in their homes, buying their own oxygen tanks and contracting their own nurses because the hospitals are so completely chaotic and overfilled.

And so how did they get to the point of running out of oxygen, though?

Well, with the oxygen issue in particular, it seems that both the state and federal government have dropped the ball. It was clear weeks in advance that oxygen use was much higher than it had been in the first wave and that they were running out of supplies and, you know, a full week before they, in fact did run out. The federal health minister, who's a general appointed by the president, Jair Bolsonaro, received a letter saying that they were going to run out and ignored it. When they did run out, he blamed what's happening on the population's failure to adopt precautionary treatments like hydroxychloroquine and other unproven medicines that the federal government is telling people to take instead of doing social distancing or starting to work out a vaccine plan.

And why was it so bad, in particular in Manaus?

Manaus has a really high rate of population density. People weren't particularly rigid about social distancing guidelines. You see groups of people without masks throughout the pandemic. Another factor is that scientists have identified two new strains of the coronavirus, which seem to be originating in Manaus in the Amazon, and they appear to be spreading much more rapidly than previous strains. But the other thing that is important to mention is there was really a sense in Manaus that they were out of the woods. And because by August and September there didn't seem to be significant case increases, people really assumed that so many people had been infected in Manaus that a second wave was impossible. And a study came out in September saying that up to two thirds of people might have already been infected with COVID 19 in Manaus. That led people to believe that in fact, Manaus had achieved some sort of herd immunity. I've spoken to a lot of hospital directors and nurses, and they really thought that the city would be shielded from a second wave.

But the central idea that enough people had been infected already as to achieve herd immunity for everyone was flawed in some way. Where did that fall down?

Well, first of all, the study was misinterpreted. The researchers were trying to make the point that the threshold for herd immunity is very high. One of the authors told me she really wishes they hadn't put the phrase herd immunity in the title of that preprint, or when it was published in Science this month, the title was actually changed to 3/4 attack rate, suggesting that maybe even a prevalence of 75% wasn't enough to get a kind of herd immunity that would protect the population at large.

And what about outside Manaus? What about the rest of Brazil? How is it faring?

Well, there really is a worry that what's happening in Manaus could be a sign of what's to come for other regions in Brazil. We've seen cases and hospitalization rates and deaths ticking up in Brazil, and that's really worrisome because most states don't have anything near the infection rate that Manaus had. So most people haven't yet had Covid. And as this new variant accelerates the spread, if indeed that's what it's doing, the second wave in Brazil could be much worse than the first one.

And what about vaccinations? How's the inoculation push going?

Brazil's lack of progress at starting vaccination has been the central focus of people's anger and frustration in recent weeks. On the day that oxygen ran out in Manaus, people banged pots and pans out their windows in anger at the federal government for the first time in months. And basically, the president of Brazil is not only anti lockdown, but he's also anti vaccines. He said he himself won't take a vaccine. He spent months spreading fake news about the Chinese made Coronavac, which is currently the only vaccine that Brazil actually has access to. And now the regulator has finally given emergency use authorization to both the CoronaVac and AstraZeneca. But the skepticism that he expressed for months really did lead to a breakdown in all of the logistics planning that is needed to launch a vaccine program in a country of 210 million people.

And so how will all of this, this realization of where things went wrong in the naus and the anger about oxygen shortages and the like and the beginnings at least of a vaccination program, how does that bode for the country as a whole, do you think?

The level of failure of the federal government to take this pandemic seriously and people's understandable response that why should we be doing our part if the government's not doing their part, I think means that it's going to be kind of a one step forward, two steps back for the next few months. And it's going to take a few months for the vaccine rollout to really get going. And in that time, a lot of Brazilians are going to die.

Sarah, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

Hi, this is Christy from Back to the Bar. You've probably heard about GLP1 weight loss medications and the side effects that can come with jumping in too fast. That's why I love Noom. Makes getting started easy. Their microdose GLP1 program begins with a smaller dose and gradually scales up based on how your body reacts. The Noom GLP1 microdose program starts at $99 and is delivered to your door in seven days. Start your microdose GLP1 journey today at Noom.com that's n o o m dot com Noom micro changes big results. Average weight loss eight pounds in first month. Meds and personalization based on clinical need and not available to all individuals. Medications are not reviewed by FDA for safety, efficacy or quality. Pricing based on first month only.

You'd be hard pressed to find an area of modern life that lasers haven't shaped. They've revolutionized the manufacturing process. They've been central to countless medical advances. Without them, we wouldn't have the barcode, the laser printer and yes, even laser tag. The basic principle of the laser goes all the way back more than 100 years to Albert Einstein. But it took some time before the laser became a reality.

There were some scientists who were coming up with ideas and arguments on why this was either Fundamentally impossible, respected scientists. So it was not to be ignored or practically impossible.

That's physicist Theodore maiman speaking in 1983. He's the one who proved all those scientists wrong more than two decades earlier when he made the world's first working laser.

It was actually just one year after the laser was invented that they started to be applied to laser surgery. In medicine. They used from everything from, I guess, destroying kidney stones to studying how viruses invade our cells.

Few people know this stuff as well as Mike Dunn. He's led some of the world's biggest laser facilities and currently works at one run by Stanford University.

Lasers are the basis of how we're talking now on the Internet. Optical fibers that underpin our communications are driven by laser systems. Almost every aspect of our life is touched by lasers. Now, Ted Maiman's first laser back in May of 1960, was maybe just a few hundred watts of power. That's about the same as a toaster. But his approach that he adopted, which is making a short pulse of light, a burst of laser light rather than a continuous beam, actually provided the direction for all the future developments. And so today, the most powerful laser in the world is not a few hundred watts. It's what we call 10 petawatts. That's 10 million billion watts, or one with 16 zeros followed after it. And to put that in context, you know, the electrical power generation of the entire planet is a few thousand times smaller than that. You think, well, how can that be? But of course, it's because the laser light is delivered in an incredibly short burst of time, and so the amount of energy is only tiny. So the lights don't dim when you operate these lasers, but the power is huge. So we've come a long, long way from a few hundred watts to almost making up phrases. 10 petawatts is where we are today.

When Maiman invented the laser, he foresaw loads of wondrous things that lasers could achieve. But to his regret, the media focused on just one thing. Its potential as a weapon. It not only makes the United States invincible in war, but in so doing, promises to become the greatest force for world peace ever discovered. You'll notice that all of the sharks have laser beams attached to their heads. I figure every creature deserves a warm meal. Ingenious, isn't it, Mr. Burnt Scorpio?

You're totally mad.

Science fiction has had such a hold on the public's imagination that President Ronald Reagan even proposed using lasers to defend America against nuclear attacks in what was dubbed the Star wars program. I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace. To give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

You do see lasers on the battlefield, just not the way you would think, just not as those ray guns. I mean, they're used to map out tu aim the so called lidar, which is of course light based radar, or as the basis of super precise gyroscopes for navigation, or of course for making a lot of the precise equipment, the ability to cut and weld and peen equipment in a very precise way. But as ray guns, they're actually not very effective. One of the main reasons is the air in between you and your enemy tends to disrupt that laser beam. And so you may start out from the end of your ray gun, very powerful beam, but by the time it traverses a few tens of meters from you to where you want it to go, it's been disrupted by all of that atmospheric interference.

Let's get away from the military applications here. What are lasers doing these days at the real frontiers of science?

There's a very large number of applications of lasers to do with investigating disease and how our bodies respond to disease and how drugs fight disease. You know, obviously a huge issue for the entire planet at the moment with COVID And the ability of lasers to image, whether it be the level of a cell or the level of a molecule that's trying to invade a cell, teaches you an awful lot about the struct those cells, the structure of those molecules. And because laser light can be delivered incredibly quickly, you can look at the motion of those molecules and those cells as they're responding to some environmental attack, let's say from a virus. And so that can help teach us how to build better and better pharmaceuticals and understand how our body fights disease or where it goes wrong.

What's left that the laser might still yet disrupt. What uses applications, everyday stuff, not battlefield stuff. Might we see lasers creeping into in future, do you think?

One that's really intriguing at the moment that's taking off around us is this whole area of 3D printing. You can build some very complex device from the ground up. They don't generate much heat, and so they're incredibly good at building 3D objects. We're at the very, very beginning, I think, of that whole journey as to where that's going. I think in terms of computing, we have quite a traditional development of computers over these past few decades, so called Moore's law. What will really disrupt that? Well, could be very precise manufacturing tools to get to ever smaller and smaller chips, or it could be the emergence of quantum computing and the playing out of quantum mechanics in our everyday world. And again, lasers and their ability to provide what we call coherence, this orderly approach to light and matter could well disrupt computing over these coming years. And then there's my own personal field, which is in so called laser fusion. Can we replicate here on Earth the energy source of the stars and the sun in a way to produce clean energy for all of our needs? And who knows that that's. It's a grand challenge. Hopefully one day we will get there.

Objectively and as objectively as I can think about this stuff. It sounds as if you hold out all the same promise for the laser today that you might have had 10 or 20 or 30 or even 40 years ago, that the vistas are still wide open.

Actually, I think even more so. I mean, I think back at the very beginning of lasers, there was an old joke about, you know, a solution looking for a problem. Perhaps it's just the reverse. At the beginning, people scouted out a number of different possible uses of the lasers. But now, given the ability to tailor and tune the lasers to these incredibly precise levels that we've seen for communications, for manufacturing and so forth, I actually think the future potential is far, far larger now over the coming years and decades than it has been over this first 50 or 60 years or so of the laser.

But still, no ray guns.

Well, maybe that's a good thing.

You can hear lots more enlightening chat on the latest episode of Babbage, our sister show on science and technology. My colleague Oliver Morton has written a sweeping, fascinating report about how the mastery of light has changed the world. Talking to the scientists who've capitalized on Einstein's great insight.

We're taking all this data, all these.

Images, and hopefully we'll discover things that we don't even know about or we can't even dream about. This week's episode of Babbage is out later today. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts, They're great in many things, in linguine or in chowder. But clams aren't just for dinner, as some residents of Warsaw know well.

So in the middle of the Vistula river is a giant water pump that the locals call Gruber Kaska.

Giorgio Banjo writes about foreign affairs for the Economist.

To get there, you've got to walk through a really long tunnel underwater that's very dark and slimy. And at the end of that tunnel, you'll find ape clams working away, hooked up to computers.

Clams hooked up to computers, why?

So they're there to monitor the city's drinking water. The system is designed to take advantage of their biology, in which they're very sensitive to water pollution. So when the clams encounter heavy metals, pesticides and other pollutants, they literally clam up or close their shells. Scientists collect the clams from rivers and reservoirs, attaching a coil and a magnet to each of their shells. Computers then register whether their shells are open or closed by monitoring for changes in their magnetic field activity. If the clams are closed, it could mean that there's a contamination in the water supply, perhaps because of a terrorist attack or ecological disaster. In that event, the water supply would be automatically cut off.

And in terms of water monitoring, that really works.

Yeah. So I spoke to Piotr Domit of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, and he's worked on this project for nearly 30 years. He says the clams are lifesavers and he's persuaded 50 waterworks in Poland to use the clams. There are limits to this method. Basically, the clams can't tell you what's causing them to clam up, and the effectiveness varies between species. The jury is also still out about how sensitive they might be to medicines and pharmaceuticals, which increasingly pollute groundwater.

And given those uncertainties and limits, would a more high tech solution be a better answer here?

Yeah. So most waterworks use chemical testing, so you can use this through using test strips, digital instruments and color disk kits. But Professor Piotr Klimasic, who leads the team in Poznan, says that the benefits of clams are hard to overlook. It's a really low cost method. It also gives you instant results. And the clams are monitoring the water 24 hours a day.

And for their part, they're happy as clams.

Yeah. So after two to three months, when the clams have finished their service, they're released back into water reservoirs and they're marked so that they're never recruited again and hopefully can enjoy a happy retirement.

Thanks very much for joining us, Georgia.

Thanks, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show Notes. See you back here tomorrow.