Tag: risk
COVID Risk Factors Could Be Hiding In Our Genes
On the surface, the September 24 announcement from the head of the CDC outlining who, exactly, would be eligible for COVID-19 booster shots seemed like a clarifying moment. But even as the agency’s leader, Rochelle Walensky, declared the need to make “concrete recommendations that optimize health,” the new guidance was hard to parse. It said, for instance, that people as young as age 18 who received the Pfizer vaccine may get a third shot as long as they have any
Rice feeds half the world. Climate change’s droughts and floods put it at risk
Under a midday summer sun in California’s Sacramento Valley, rice farmer Peter Rystrom walks across a dusty, barren plot of land, parched soil crunching beneath each step.
In a typical year, he’d be sloshing through inches of water amid lush, green rice plants. But today the soil lies naked and baking in the 35˚ Celsius (95˚ Fahrenheit) heat during a devastating drought that has hit most of the western United States. The drought started in early 2020, and conditions have
The Delta Variant: What You Can Do If You’re Vaccinated
For the past year and a half, humans around the world have been asked to do something we’re pretty bad at, even in the best of circumstances: figure out what constitutes safety, and act accordingly. A well-understood risk doesn’t necessarily improve our thought processes, thanks to a host of cognitive biases and external pressures that pull some people away from the lowest-level danger and push others toward clear peril. In the United States, at least, the circumstances for making these