President Trump Urges Prayers For Recovery After Coronavirus Crisis Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu leaders said prayers at the event, which ended with a gospel choir singing 'God Bless America' and then an a cappella worship song as an encore at Trump’s request. by Fred Lucas

President Donald Trump called for Americans to continue to pray amid the COVID-19 crisis Thursday, as clergy of several faiths prayed for the nation’s recovery in the Rose Garden of the White House.  

“As Scripture assures us, ‘The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save.’ I think it’s so true,” Trump said, quoting Zephaniah 3:17 during the ceremony marking the National Day of Prayer. 

“We are being reminded once again that God has blessed our land with heroes of faith,” the president said.

Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu leaders said prayers at the event, which ended with a gospel choir singing “God Bless America” and then an a cappella worship song as an encore at Trump’s request. 

“On this National Day of Prayer, America is engaged in a fierce battle against a very terrible disease,” the president said, adding:

Throughout our history and times of challenge, our people have always called upon the gift of faith, the blessing of belief, the power of prayer, and the eternal glory of God. I ask all Americans to join their voices and their hearts in spiritual union as we ask our Lord in heaven for strength and solace, for courage and comfort, for hope and healing, for recovery and for renewal. 

In recent days and weeks, our country has endured a grave hardship. We pray for every family stricken by grief and devastated with a tragic loss. We pray for the doctors and nurses and first responders waging war against the invisible enemy. We pray for the scientists and researchers who pioneer treatments, that they find therapies and vaccines and that they find them soon. We pray for the front-line workers keeping our nation fed, nourished, keeping our nation safe and secure. May God watch over them all. 

Before the president spoke, first lady Melania Trump prayed as the invited members of the audience sat 6 feet apart, as suggested by the government’s coronavirus guidelines. 

“On this National Day of Prayer, let us take a moment to extend our deepest sympathy to those who have lost their loved ones to COVID-19,” the first lady prayed, adding:

Let us pray for the ill, the ones who are suffering, and those who are serving on the front lines. When evil darkens our world, give us light. When despair numbs our souls, give us hope. When we stumble and fall, lift us up. When doubts assail us, give us faith.

When nothing seems sure, give us trust. When ideas fade, give us vision. When we lose our way, be our guide that we may find serenity in your presence and purpose in doing your will. Amen.

Why Russia's Anti-Coronavirus Economic Measures Will Backfire Can Moscow find a way to recover? by Stratfor Worldview

As the COVID-19 pandemic bites harder on Russia’s economy, Moscow's reluctance to divert its vast financial reserves toward more stimulus spending will restrain its ability to fend off a cumulative economic crunch that triggers longer term setbacks. In a televised address on April 14, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced additional or advanced support measures to help the country’s private sector weather the COVID-19 crisis. The support measures’ narrow scope, however, has failed to impress both the business community and economists.  

Indeed, most of the “new” measures Putin unveiled only represent the further implementation of prior announcements or the expansion of existing measures. But with more than a third of domestic companies already at risk of bankruptcy, Russia’s unwillingness to cough up the capital needed to keep its private sector afloat during the pandemic could come at the cost of a much longer and more painful recession. 

Limited Support Measures

• Wage support: Putin announced that the government would provide direct financial support to small- and medium-sized businesses in the form of minimum wage salary payments. With Russia’s minimum wage set at 12,130 rubles ($162) per month, this measure falls significantly short of average wages in the country that are about $623. These funds will also only be available beginning May 18, leaving companies with a relatively long period to bridge before receiving the support. The total size of this package will limit its reach to only a fifth of Russians currently employed by small- and medium-sized enterprises as well.
• Interest-free loans: The government will also guarantee 75 percent of the value of interest-free loans to businesses to pay wages. However, only the first six months of these loans will be interest-free, after which a (still favorable) rate of 4 percent will be applied. The government has also only allocated 150 billion rubles ($2 billion) to this scheme, which will severely limit the scope of its application. In addition, banks have been reluctant to provide these loans without a way to recover the added work and bureaucratic requirements attached to them through interests.
• Subsidized loans: For so-called “backbone industries,” which the government is still trying to define, the government has promised to subsidize loans for working capital at the central bank’s rate (currently at 6%). The Ministry of Finance will also guarantee half the size of these loans to the commercial banks offering them. In addition to wage, these loans can also be spent on new equipment or the acquisition of stock. But they still only provide limited relief to the sectors Moscow deems crucial to the Russian economy.
• Airline and region-specific bailouts: Moscow will also set 23 billion rubles ($307 million) aside to directly support the country’s airline industry, as well as another 200 billion rubles ($2.7 billion) to support Russia’s regions. These underwhelming amounts come in far below the estimated $1.4 billion in losses that Russian airlines face, and vast shortages of reserves - which currently total only a mere $10 billion outside of Moscow - across 70 percent of Russia’s 83 regional governments.

Russia’s Fiscal Frugality

Russia's reluctance to divert its vast financial reserves toward more stimulus spending is restraining its ability to offer more significant COVID-19 relief measures, which explains why its support efforts have so far been largely based on reducing regulatory requirements for businesses or providing limited direct support. This fiscal restraint is baked into Russia’s economic legislation, which doesn’t allow the federal budget to spend more than 0.5 percent of its GDP (about $8 billion) over the government’s actual revenues. Instead, Russia’s reserves are automatically allocated to replace missed government revenues when oil prices (one of the main sources of government revenue) fall below the level at which the budget was calculated. This allows Russia to extend these reserves, and its budget, over longer periods of crisis. Right now, however, this means that Russia faces the difficult challenge of reallocating funds within its established budget, and inevitably cutting spending in some planned projects, in order to redirect as much of its finances as possible toward the COVID-19 response and support measures.

This has so far resulted in limited COVID-19 measures that Russia’s business community have deemed ineffective. Russia has attempted to convince businesses not to lay off its employees to avoid the burden of unemployment support and reduced economic activity. But its limited COVID-19 measures have yet to decisively convince employers to forgo layoffs. Over 16 percent of Russian private companies have already made staff reductions due to the COVID-19 crisis, and up to 31 percent more are expecting to conduct layoffs in the near future. 

But even if the government were able to successfully stem additional layoffs, wage cuts and forced unpaid leave will still significantly reduce the income of Russia’s workforce. By impacting domestic consumption, this will, in turn, cause the crisis to reverberate further throughout the Russian economy. Declining expendable incomes could further restrict retail sales as well, which already dropped by 35 percent in April amid stay-at-home measures to contain the virus.

Risks Beyond COVID-19

Some projections have indicated that even with these support measures, up to 30 percent of Russian companies remain at risk of bankruptcy. The government has imposed a moratorium for at least six months on processing bankruptcies, but the financial situation of companies is unlikely to be rectified by the time this moratorium is lifted. Particular sectors at risk of bankruptcy include trade, transportation, real estate, construction, technology and heavy industry. This means that the impact of such bankruptcies could be spread widely across Russia’s economy, though they will most likely be concentrated among smaller, more vulnerable businesses.

Employment and industrial activity will pick up again over time once the COVID-19 pandemic has waned. However, the purchasing power of Russia’s population will most likely continue to erode, constricting domestic consumption. This ongoing dynamic has failed to rectify itself since the country’s 2015-17 economic crisis, generating a downward pressure throughout most of Russia’s economy. In addition to this, defaults on existing household debt or even corporate debt in the case of bankruptcies could threaten the stability of Russia’s banking sector. The full extent of the havoc COVID-19 could wreak on the Russian economy remains to be seen, but the crisis is certain to exacerbate the cracks in Russia’s economic foundation. 

Could Lasers Help Expedite the Process of Identifying Coronavirus? Right now, the rapid and accurate detection of the novel coronavirus is of paramount importance. by Mauricio Terrones

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. 

The big idea

The most common type of test for the new coronavirus takes several hours and is uncomfortable; samples are obtained by sliding a swab into the nose or throat.

Shining a laser onto virus samples trapped in mesh of carbon nanotubes will produce a signature ‘reflection.’ Penn State University, 

I am collaborating with other scientists, including Yin-Ting Yeh at Penn State, Elodie Ghedin at New York University, Shengxi Huang at Penn State and Sharon X. Huang at Penn State, on a diagnostic tool to rapidly trap and identify viruses using a laser beam and a detector. The team includes myself, a physicist, as well virologists, engineers, chemists and data scientists.

How we do the work

Our approach uses a technique called Raman spectroscopy to identify viruses by shining a light on a disposable cartridge that collects samples from oral cotton swabs or a person blowing through the device. Once a sample is collected, a spectrometer measures the interatomic vibrations that result from shining the light on the collected viruses. Each virus has its own signature vibrations, which act as a sort of optical fingerprint that can distinguish the coronavirus from, for example, the virus that causes influenza.

We could capture viruses from patients’ saliva taken with a swab or by a person blowing through a device, called a microfluidic cartridge. The air and liquid pass an array of carbon nanotubes, cylinder-shape molecules used in different materials.

The diameters of the nanotubes are microscopic, between 10-60 nanometers. Because they are smaller than microbes – flu viruses range from 90-120 nanometers in diameter and coronaviruses range from 125-150nm in diameter – the pathogens collect on the carbon nanotubes. Once trapped by passing through the carbon nanotubes, the viruses can be optically identified by shining a laser on the sample. Shining the light on the carbon nanotubes and pathogens creates a distinctive optical fingerprint, or “Raman peaks.”

After the laser shines on the trapped sample, machine learning algorithms identify the signature spectrum of the virus that results from the light that bounces off the virus particles. With the assistance of machine learning, the identification takes less than two minutes with an accuracy rate of up to 70% to 90%, comparable to state-of-the-art microbiology techniques.

Why it matters

Right now, the rapid and accurate detection of the novel coronavirus is of paramount importance. While Raman spectroscopy has the potential to be enormously helpful in identifying this virus, doctors can also use this technique to test for other illnesses, such as influenza. By identifying the virus easily, quickly and at the point of contact, Raman spectroscopy could significantly halt disease spread.

Compare that to our current methods of analyzing samples; a process that is relatively slow, tedious, labor intensive and requires extensive scrutiny at laboratories. Early and rapid detection with this new device has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.

What other work is being done

For the identification of viruses, existing technologies do provide relatively sensitive detection. However, they take several hours and sometime days depending on the quality of the sample collected because low virus concentrations are very difficult to process and results in false negatives.

Unfortunately, both immune- and molecular-based methods, including enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR), require prior knowledge of the strains. Another technique known as deep sequencing is another promising new approach, but obtaining sufficient viral reads for it to work well depends on the quality of the sample and its preparation. Processing steps involve incorporating different benchtop equipment, reagents and technical expertise. This Raman technique has been recently developed to identify different bacteria, thus demonstrating the technique is indeed novel and viable.

What’s next

We are applying for federal funds to demonstrate that this technology works for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that cause COVID-19, and then build reliable prototypes that can be scaled up for mass production and field deployment. We are also talking with several manufacturers and exploring ways to move the technology forward to help in the current crisis.

We have been successful in capturing human respiratory viruses from clinical samples using this technique. Eventually, we foresee this technology becoming available to anyone visiting their family doctor. Within two minutes, a person would know whether you have a respiratory virus by comparing the result of the spectroscopy test with other results in a database. In the future, this technology could be at hospitals, airports and inside commercial aircraft to avoid outbreaks. And the captured viruses, still viable, can be replicated to develop a vaccine.

Coronavirus As the Spark for a U.S.-North Korea Nuclear Deal? "Perhaps the COVID crisis could do some good by creating political cover (or an excuse) for the United States to offer sanctions relief to North Korea out of humanitarian concern. That could facilitate the revival of a deal that has yet to come to fruition." by Devin Stewart

It’s always difficult to discern the goings-on inside North Korea--much less its future. If the failure of the wild speculations to materialize about a provocative “Christmas gift” last December did not teach commentators that lesson, then the recent unfounded rumors about Kim Jong-un’s health surely did. Or is that wishful thinking? South Korea’s unification minister rightly condemned these rumors as “fake news,” and cautioned about their harmful impact. 

But if we look at North Korea’s recent gestures and the international context, we can reasonably guess a few unexciting things about the future of the Korean Peninsula. Overall, the year 2020 looks like a dud all around: the economy, diplomacy, jobs, solidarity. And that also goes for peace between the Koreas. If we look at current trends, this year will likely see little progress with North Korea--with a tiny chance of upside, best case scenario.

One optimistic interpretation of the nonappearance of a provocative Christmas gift, such as a nuclear or ICBM test, is that Kim prefers doing business with Trump due to this administration’s unorthodox approach. This interpretation would wager that Kim and Trump would, therefore, avoid provoking one another or embarrassing one another politically. 

It also presumes that Kim thinks that Trump will win reelection this November, but the devastation from the COVID crisis is dragging him down in the polls. Meanwhile, the total deterioration of U.S.-China relations provides North Korea with a divided, polarized international community. And North-South Korean relations are bad, too. Firing guns at one another doesn’t exactly say “brotherly love.” 

If Kim believes Trump will lose the election, North Korea will continue to develop its nuclear weapons technology and might overplay its hand if Trump and Kim do end up meeting, thus guaranteeing no deal--as Kim did at the summit in Hanoi last year. 

The Hanoi failure did serve to remind observers how important sanctions relief is for North Korea, however. And it showed that the United States may have been willing to offer a peace declaration and diplomatic liaison offices if the deal were right. Indeed, while North Korea has been sending friendly signals to Russia and China, the CIA director nominee said he believes Pyongyang would give up “some” of its nuclear arsenal for sanctions relief. 

That leaves a tiny shred of hope. Crises can have counterintuitive effects. Here’s an idea: Perhaps the COVID crisis could do some good by creating political cover (or an excuse) for the United States to offer sanctions relief to North Korea out of humanitarian concern. That could facilitate the revival of a deal that has yet to come to fruition.

Chinese Warships Are Now Armed with Supersonic Anti-Ship Missiles "A volley of the YJ-12s could pose a significant threat to even the most sophisticated air defense system. It also has a large warhead that could make it potentially quite devastating even to capital warships such as aircraft carriers." by Peter Suciu

The Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has increased the potency of its Luhai-class Type 051B destroyer, Shenzhen (DD 167), with 16 container launchers for YJ-12 supersonic anti-ship missile. The warship, the only one of its class, first entered service in 1999 and was commissioned by the PLAN Navy South Sea Fleet as its flagship. It was originally armed with the YJ-83 subsonic sea-skimming anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM), which have been described as being comparable to the U.S. Navy's Harpoon.

The YJ-83 boasted an impressive range, but it lacked the strategic impact of the YJ-12 – which has both speed and range. Forbes noted that a volley of the YJ-12s could pose a significant threat to even the most sophisticated air defense system. It also has a large warhead that could make it potentially quite devastating even to capital warships such as aircraft carriers.

Also known as the CM-302 in its export name, the YJ-12 employs a ramjet engine that allows it to cruise at supersonic speed Mach 2 to 3, or a maximum range of 280 to 400 kilometers per hour. The missile reportedly utilizes an inertial guidance system that is coupled with a global navigation satellite system (GNSS). The new missiles are also reportedly being refitted to the PLAN's Sovremenny-class destroyers, which are based on Russian designs from when China upgraded its defense capabilities with Russian technology.

At the time of its introduction of the Shenzhen, it was the largest surface combatant vessel ever commissioned by the PLAN, but despite its increased size and displacement, the destroyer did not feature any significant improvements in weapons systems and sensors and was largely seen to be deployed with rather "meager armament," which include a single HHQ-7 short-range anti-aircraft missile launch, just four twin 76mm guns, and the eight YJ-83 anti-ship missiles.

All this explains the efforts of the Chinese to refit and upgrade the warship. It had been spotted undergoing a modernization refit at the Zhanjiang Naval Base in 2015, which included some significant improvements in its weapons and sensors. In recent years the warship's Type 381A radar was upgraded to the Type 382 and additional Type 364 radar systems.

Last November the Shenzhen returned from its most recent major refit, which included the installation of an HHQ-16 vertical launch system consisting of four sets of eight units and allows it to host 32 ship-to-air missiles to shoot down incoming hostile aircraft and missiles. This replaced the single HHQ-7 SAM launch on the bow deck.

Forbes noted that China's first-generation of modern warships, including the Shenzhen, are unlikely to be as capable as newer and larger types, these upgrades will ensure the ability to pack a heavy punch. 

The Shenzhen has participated in numerous military operations, but it also worth noting that it has made port calls to numerous countries, making it a star in naval diplomacy. It now has even more to show off.

Why Human Challenge Trials Will Be Necessary to Get a Coronavirus "Is the risk to volunteers too high? Firefighters and physicians take on risk for the social good, as do kidney donors. Over a thousand people have already volunteered to be considered for a challenge trial. I believe that as with firefighters, physicians and kidney donors, we should accept the choices of the volunteers as rational and well informed. They should have our gratitude and our thanks." by Alex Tabarrok

What if we develop a vaccine for COVID-19 but can’t find enough patients to run a randomized clinical trial? It sounds absurd, but this problem has happened in the past. Ebola was identified in 1976, and candidate vaccines were proven safe and effective in mice and primates in 2004 and 2005, respectively. But no human vaccine was produced because it was extremely difficult, bordering on impossible, to trial an Ebola vaccine. The problem? Ebola is so deadly that people take precautionary measures long before a vaccine can be tested. 

Vaccines are intended to prevent disease in healthy people, so they’re tested for efficacy in healthy populations. But to test a vaccine, you need a population of still-healthy people who might get sick. An Ebola vaccine was eventually approved only because in 2014, in the midst of an Ebola outbreak, trials were started in Guinea. Even in these cases, however, there wasn’t enough time nor a large enough population to run a randomized, clinical trial—so an adaptive, ring vaccination trial was designed. The vaccine proved successful, at least under some statistical assumptions, and the vaccine was approved, but because the trial was not a pure randomized trial, the results remain controversial.

When a COVID-19 vaccine is available, it will be necessary to find a large population of people who are still at high risk of contracting COVID-19. This may be difficult. In developing countries, which may not be able to contain the virus, herd immunity may have developed. In richer countries, social distancing, testing and other measures may have made the probability of infection relatively low. China, for example, has tested a vaccine in primates. But China no longer has enough COVID-19 cases to test a vaccine in China. An Oxford group has started clinical trials in humans but if their vaccine isn’t very effective, they may need much larger samples to detect an effect. A natural group to consider for a vaccine trial would be health care workers.

Even health care workers, however, have a low enough infection rate that you either need many months to determine if there is a significant effect, or you need large populations. In Italy, about 6,000 doctors were infected over two months, out of a population of about 241,000 Italian doctors. This is a monthly infection rate of 1.2 percent. If the vaccine is 50 percent effective, then to detect this within a month, you need a sample size of 7,776 people equally divided between a vaccinated group and a non-vaccinated group. You could run the test in a smaller sample of 1,322 but then the trial would take six months. A more effective vaccine would make detecting an effect easier, but flu vaccines work at 40 to 60 percent effectiveness, so an assumption of 50 percent is not unreasonable.

But will Italian doctors still be getting infected at a rate of 1.2 percent per month when a vaccine becomes available for trial in six months or a year? We hope not. The hope is that social distancing and the use of personal protective equipment will have greatly lowered the infection rate. A low infection rate is great, unless you want to properly test a vaccine.

There is a second, related problem. Historically, most vaccine candidates fail. Thus, in a year or two, we want many vaccine candidates, not just one. But even if we are fortunate and have, say, seven vaccine candidates available, it probably won’t be possible to run efficacy trials on all seven candidates. The efficacy trial bottleneck may reduce us to three or fewer candidates, but then we are gambling because none of the trials may prove successful.

The efficacy-trial bottleneck motivates the use of challenge trials. In a challenge trial, healthy individuals are split into two groups, one half vaccinated, the other not, and then both groups are infected or “challenged” with the virus. No waiting for natural infections here. (Some healthy people also need to be infected prior to the trial to determine the appropriate dose of virus to match or not exceed the natural infection.)

The virtue of a challenge trial is that the results would be available very quickly, within a few weeks, and using only a small population. If the vaccine is 50 percent effective, for example, then we would need around 100 volunteers or perhaps even fewer depending on how many people exposed to the virus in laboratory conditions contract the disease.

By advancing a vaccine by many months, a challenge trial could save many thousands of lives and spare the world the huge economic costs of the lockdowns and social distancing that we will be using to combat the virus.

Challenge trials have been used many times in the past, including with Edward Jenner’s first cowpox vaccine for smallpox in 1796, but many people consider them a last-resort because of the ethical issues inherent in exposing healthy people to disease.

The risks to the challenged, however, can be minimized along several dimensions. First, COVID-19 mortality rates are much lower for healthy individuals under the age of forty, so volunteers would be carefully selected and closely monitored. For those individuals who contracted COVID-19, treatment could begin even before symptoms fully manifest by using an endpoint of viral load (particles). Volunteers could also be drawn from health care workers whose probability of contracting the disease at some point is already relatively high, thus minimizing the opportunity cost of the risk. We can also hope that by the time a candidate vaccine is ready for trial, there will be effective drugs and treatment regimes, again reducing the risk to the volunteers. It’s also important to remember that an ordinary vaccine trial is not without risk—a vaccine could backfire and make the disease worse—so exposing fifty or so volunteers to the virus in a challenge trial must be balanced against exposing thousands to a potentially dangerous vaccine in an ordinary clinical trial.

Is the risk to volunteers too high? Firefighters and physicians take on risk for the social good, as do kidney donors. Over a thousand people have already volunteered to be considered for a challenge trial. I believe that as with firefighters, physicians and kidney donors, we should accept the choices of the volunteers as rational and well informed. They should have our gratitude and our thanks.

How Bats Might Have Tamed the Coronavirus The animals have a remarkable resilience to all sorts of diseases that afflict humans. by KATHERINE J. WU and UNDARK

In the past few months, Arinjay Banerjee has gotten an unexpected taste of internet fame.

Since December, when news of COVID-19 began to shudder across the world, Banerjee—who studies the immune systems of bats at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada—has pivoted his research to focus on SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus behind the pandemic. Now among the small minority of scientists still regularly doing laboratory experiments, he’s watched his Twitter following grow and his email inbox fill, often with words of encouragement and queries about how and when the virus will be stopped.

But not all the messages Banerjee gets are positive. “You can’t even imagine the range,” he says. Some even include “statements like, ‘You guys have been working with bats; you guys made COVID-19 or SARS-2.’ Or, ‘The reason you have isolated this is because you have it in your lab.’”

These alarmist (and unfounded) accusations are neither new nor exclusive to Banerjee and his colleagues. Many researchers think that the negative attention is spurred at least in part by widespread fear of bats—a group of mammals that, in the past several decades, has been repeatedly linked to the emergence of viral diseases, including SARS, MERS, and, most recently, COVID-19.

Scientists have suspected for years that bats have struck a strange armistice with some of nature’s deadliest viral killers. Bats that carry infamous pathogens such as Ebola, Hendra, Marburg, and Nipah rarely if ever fall ill, or at least show obvious symptoms. Even bats that contract rabies, which is almost always lethal to animals when left untreated, can sometimes emerge from the infection unscathed.

This remarkable resilience has drawn the attention of scientists eager to unravel the secrets of bats’ evolutionary détente with disease—a relationship that could someday yield novel therapies to shore up our own antiviral defenses. But it’s also made bats the target of loathing among those who consider them little more than stealthy pests teeming with zoonoses, or diseases that can pass from animals to humans. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, bats have been slandered on social media, targeted for capture or cullings, and even reportedly burned out of roosts—actions that imperil a group of animals vital to ecosystems around the world, Banerjee and other researchers say.

Communicating research findings about bats and viruses without fueling demonization has always been tricky, says Hannah Frank, an evolutionary ecologist at Stanford University. That’s become especially true in the midst of a pandemic with likely zoonotic origins. Through the invasion and destruction of the world’s wild spaces, humans have driven their own exposure to animal pathogens—a cycle that’s only fueled when people act on bat-based fears. But in a moment like this, Frank says, messages like these are easily lost.

Rather than vilifying bats, perhaps humans should consider them our allies in the fight against disease, says David Schneider, a disease ecologist at Stanford. “I always hope, you know, how can we become more bat-like? That’s the way to do it.”

The world’s first proper bat likely evolved several tens of millions of years ago, when a lone branch on the mammalian tree converted forelimbs into wings. In the millennia since, bats have splintered into more than 1,200 species—about a fifth of Earth’s modern known mammals—and expanded to every continent except Antarctica. They pollinate plants, disperse seeds, and gobble up insect pests—including bugs such as mosquitoes that themselves spread disease. “In many ways, bats are helping us, even though we’re often not helping them,” says Kate Langwig, a disease ecologist and bat conservationist at Virginia Tech.

Given this staggering diversity, it’s important to avoid attributing traits to bats as a whole, says Kristen Lear, a bat conservationist at the University of Georgia. (Some species, Frank points out, haven’t shared a common ancestor in more than 50 million years, making them more evolutionarily distant from one another than humans are from howler monkeys.)

Still, across species, bats seem to accomplish what many other creatures can’t. Winged yet warm-blooded, they’re the only mammals that fly. They age well, in some cases outliving similarly sized mammals such as mice by several decades. Several bat species are also resistant to a multitude of ailments, from cancers to infectious fevers that prove devastating to other species, including humans.

Curiously, the apparent lack of sickness in bats doesn’t seem attributable to an immunity to infection. Many of the viruses that have plagued humans in recent decades are found in bats too—just absent typical symptoms.

Raina Plowright, a disease ecologist at Montana State University, thinks that this oddity may be a by-product of bats’ foray into the skies. Flight is strenuous, ratcheting a bat’s metabolism roughly 15 times above its resting state, sometimes for prolonged periods of nighttime travel. Such exertion takes a toll at even the molecular level, triggering the production of harmful chemicals that can damage the DNA that cells need to function and survive. To cope, bats have apparently evolved sophisticated ways to rein in these destructive substances and stitch battered bits of genetic material back together.

These repair systems appear to be multifunctional, also protecting bats from some of the symptoms of infectious disease, says Michelle Baker, a bat immunologist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO, an Australian federal-government agency for scientific research. On the one hand, when most mammals detect a viral invader, they’ll battle it with inflammation, a wildfire-like weapon that helps purge the pathogen from the body but that can also wreak havoc on the host’s own tissues. Bats, on the other hand, are able to tamp down these risky responses. Part of this dial-down may overlap with ways they mitigate the detriments of flight; bat cells also seem to have lost some of the machinery required to kick inflammatory systems into gear.

On top of this, laboratory experiments suggest that bats’ bodies may continuously churn out powerful proteins that instruct cells to block parts of the viral life cycle, giving them a “head start” on combatting infection, Baker says. Scientists theorize that, with this potent combination of tactics, bats may have hit an immunological sweet spot, mounting a response that keeps invaders at bay without causing unnecessary harm to their own bodies.

To keep their infective skills sharp, viruses that target bats have devised ways to counteract these “unique bat properties,” including evolving powerful molecular tools that allow them to rapidly spread from cell to cell, says Cara Brook, a disease ecologist at UC Berkeley. Accustomed to waging war with the robust defenses of bats, these pathogens can then devastate other species with immune systems that are less resistant to viruses—a bit like a seasoned swordsman parrying with an untrained apprentice.

Bats are tough to study under the best of circumstances: They are both notoriously challenging to monitor in the wild and ill-suited to life in the lab. Many of the conclusions scientists have drawn about bat biology are tentative, and it’s possible that some will apply only to the select species that scientists have so far managed to snare, says Vikram Misra, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine.

It could be, for instance, that viruses do cause illnesses in bats—just not in a way that humans have yet detected, Langwig says: “Just because a bat is flying around happily doesn’t necessarily mean it’s feeling totally great.”

Other factors beyond immunology play into bat disease dynamics as well. In combination with their longevity and far-ranging flight, the highly social lifestyles of many bats bring them into regular and close contact with one another, offering ample opportunity for infections to spread. All of these complex traits are variables that ecologists have only begun to understand.

Researchers also disagree on whether bats disproportionately harbor viruses with the potential to cause illness in humans. While a 2017 study concluded that bats play host to more zoonoses than other mammals do, another analysis published in April found that they were “unexceptional” in their propensity to carry viruses of human concern. Perhaps the preponderance of new virus discoveries in bats, the latter group suggested, could be chalked up to a lack of studies in other animals.

None of that necessarily detracts from the animals’ curious relationship with viruses, says Banerjee, who sees the bat as a biomedical muse for future antiviral treatments. The large majority of microbes that exist in wildlife, including in bats, pose no threat to humans. But bat-borne infections can still inform a path to peaceful coexistence with viruses and other disease-causing microbes.

In the rare instances where a pathogen does cross the species divide, bats are almost never to blame, Plowright says. Many cultures have a long history of hunting and eating bats and other animals for subsistence. But in recent decades, other human interactions with wild species have escalated to an unprecedented degree as urban areas balloon, forests fragment, and the global wildlife trade—including the sale of exotic luxury meats—booms.

When bat viruses do make the hop to humans, it’s almost always because people have encroached into the territory of animals—not the other way around. Cross-species spillovers, which require a pathogen to be compatible with two often genetically dissimilar hosts in close contact, are extremely uncommon. But by charging into wild spaces, we humans “put ourselves in harm’s way,” says Dan Crowley, a disease ecologist at Montana State University. “If I get drunk and walk in front of a train, I’m not going to blame the train.”

As economic development continues to expand, so too will the number of infectious diseases that plague our population, Plowright says. “We are driving these species to the edge of their ability to survive,” she says. “There’s nothing that’s untouched anymore.”

Pressures such as habitat loss and hunting can also drive animals into new environments and cause them undue stress. This in turn hamstrings their immune defenses and increases the likelihood that they’ll shed pathogens into their surroundings. By agitating bats, “we’re just making it much more likely for that perfect storm to happen,” Misra says.

All this makes the recent glut of anti-bat sentiment all the more concerning, Lear says. Based on media reports, violent incidents targeting these creatures appear to have escalated in frequency since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic—putting aggressors in even closer contact with the very viruses they fear. These attacks, which have included attempted exterminations by fire, are also occurring in the absence of definitive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 passed directly from bats to humans; so far, preliminary studies suggest that at least one “intermediate” host played a role in ferrying the pathogen to people.

Schneider draws a parallel to Isaac Asimov’s “Hostess,” a 1951 science-fiction short story that describes the spread of a mysterious, deadly disease among several alien races that have come to visit Earth. Humans, it turns out, are the source of the infection, which has become a natural and largely unnoticeable part of their existence but swiftly kills extraterrestrial creatures.

“We don’t know the silent viruses that we carry,” Schneider says.

So perhaps bats shouldn’t be faulted for the company they keep, Langwig says. In fact, they may now need protection more than ever before. In April, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the International Union for Conservation of Nature both recommended a suspension of fieldwork involving direct interaction with wild bats, out of concern that humans could spread SARS-CoV-2 to North American species. Though a bat version of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, is highly unlikely given these animals’ viral history, bats do suffer their own infectious illnesses, including white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that has devastated populations across the continent.

Halts to bat research won’t last forever. But Langwig and Lear both worry that even a brief pause in research, including projects focused on bat conservation, could further jeopardize vulnerable species—and, by extension, the ecosystems they support. Bats need to be kept safe, Lear says, especially when they still have so much to teach us.

“There is a huge opportunity there to say, ‘Okay, they can do it; how can we then do it too?’” she says of their ability to coexist with viruses. “So, don’t kill bats. They might actually be the key to learning how to fight these viruses in the future.”

Brazil’s Pandemic Is Just Beginning The hardest-hit country in Latin America is facing a “perfect storm,” as inequality collides with COVID-19. by URI FRIEDMAN

The United States is clearly ground zero for the coronavirus outbreak at the moment, but the next one may already be emerging 4,500 miles south.

“Brazil is probably the next epicenter of the pandemic in the world,” Luciano Cesar Azevedo, a physician who has been spending his days and nights treating COVID-19 patients in intensive-care units in São Paulo, the country’s largest city, told me this week. “I think Brazil is going to get close to 100,000 deaths.” On the day we spoke, Azevedo noted that ICU beds in the city’s public health-care system were at 90 percent occupancy. He said Rio de Janeiro, whose health-care system is already seriously strained by the outbreak, could become Brazil’s New York.

Tom Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health notes that the country reported 3,700 new daily cases on April 23. Less than two weeks later, on May 6, new daily cases had more than tripled, to 11,896. The developments in Brazil “are really concerning,” Inglesby told me.

The nation of more than 200 million people has so far recorded fewer than 10,000 deaths from COVID-19, a small fraction of America’s death toll. But confirmed cases and fatalities are rapidly growing, each day leading to dismal new records and rendering Brazil the hardest-hit country in Latin America and one of the worst-off in the world. Flu season hasn’t even arrived yet (the Southern Hemisphere is heading into winter), and a dengue outbreak in the country may peak just as the coronavirus outbreak does. Inadequate testing means that Brazil’s official case count, which is already well over 100,000, could actually be as much as 10 times higher, according to Azevedo, who is also a professor of critical care and emergency medicine at the University of São Paulo, which runs a public hospital, and the head of education at Hospital Sírio-Libanês, a private facility. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, one of the world’s leading coronavirus deniers, is pushing to ease social-distancing restrictions and reopen the economy, which could accelerate the spread of the virus. “We are only at the beginning,” Azevedo said.

Just as it has in countries such as the United States, the virus is also mixing toxically with Brazil’s ugliest underlying conditions—most significantly, its status as one of the most unequal countries on the planet. If COVID-19 initially seemed like an egalitarian affliction, upending the lives of everyone, everywhere, it has with time revealed itself to be a plague that often hitches a ride on social inequities. It disproportionately torments poor people who don’t have the luxury to social distance, to adhere to lockdowns, in some cases to even wash their hands, and who are more prone to the health risks associated with the virus. The cruel irony is that in several countries, including Brazil, the wealthy first brought the disease there, before retreating into self-isolation as it began ravaging the poor.

In Brazil, “the first wave of people infected were better off, with high purchasing power, who traveled abroad and returned with the virus,” Maria Laura Canineu, the Brazil director for Human Rights Watch, told me. “They were mostly white people who have access to tests and to private hospital services. But more recently, we’ve seen increasing numbers of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths among black people in the same manner that you guys have seen in the U.S.”

Black Brazilians are concentrated in poor, crowded urban neighborhoods, including the sprawling favelas in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, where Canineu is based. Many who live in these areas lack proper sanitation such as access to clean water, let alone soap or hand sanitizer. So the simplest and most consistent advice during the pandemic—wash your hands—isn’t necessarily practical for them. Some families live with 10 or 12 people in a single room, which makes social-distancing impossible. Many work in Brazil’s large informal sector (as, say, construction workers or street vendors) and must leave home to earn money, presenting them with an awful choice: Risk your health to protect your livelihood, or risk your livelihood to protect your health. These “are the perfect conditions for the spread of the virus,” Canineu said.

Residents of favelas, where about 13 million Brazilians live, also largely depend on the public health-care system, which is being battered by coronavirus cases. Chronic diseases such as diabetes, tuberculosis, and high blood pressure are especially prevalent among this population, putting them at higher risk for serious complications from COVID-19.

Gilson Rodrigues, the president of the residents’ association in São Paulo’s Paraisópolis favela, told me that public policies on COVID-19 don’t yet include “guidelines that take into account the reality of favelas.” In the absence of those, he helped found a national network of favelas that has hired its own doctors, enlisted its own fleet of private ambulances, manufactured its own masks, provided accommodation for those who can’t otherwise self-isolate, organized food deliveries, and offered financial assistance to self-employed professionals who have lost their jobs.

In Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, the public health-care system is reeling from a surge in COVID-19 patients. Speaking about the bleak situation recently, Manaus’s mayor burst into tears on television. “Videos circulating on social media have demonstrated the desperation of families seeking urgent care, while bodies pile up next to patients in understaffed hospitals in Manaus,” Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, an international-human-rights expert at Cardozo Law in New York, wrote in a recent analysis of Brazil’s predicament.

This “perfect storm” of public-health vulnerabilities, as Kestenbaum described it, is descending on Brazil just as it struggles with political paralysis at the highest levels of government. Bolsonaro, keen to jump-start the economy, is battling local officials and the courts to relax lockdowns. (“Some people will die,” he said. “That's life.”) The president is also mired in a scandal that could lead to his impeachment.

In a country where a quarter of the population lives in poverty, and one that is still recovering from a major recession even as it hurtles toward another economic collapse, the poor are being hit hard every which way—by the coronavirus and by efforts to contain it. As Brian Winter, the editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, memorably put it to me, “Street vendors can’t work from home.”

Kestenbaum argued that the Brazilian government’s actions are also indicative of the nation’s underlying inequities. Policy makers who can easily socially distance and have access to proper health care assess risk differently from “most of the individuals living in the country,” she told me. She argued that the only reason Brazilian officials have had to resort to such severe lockdown measures is because the government was so slow in rolling out testing and contact tracing to contain the outbreak. “Right now, we have to make sure that everyone stays healthy,” she said. “Healthy people equals a productive workforce, right?”

Canineu noted that millions of poor Brazilians have not been able to access a government benefit of about $100 a month to help tide them over, because of a lack of good internet, a lack of information about how the process works, or hiccups with the process itself. That includes her manicurist, an informal worker with two kids, who downloaded the necessary app and registered to receive the relief, only to be told for nearly two months now that her case is “under analysis.”

She “cannot go to work” and therefore “doesn’t have money to do anything,” Canineu said. “She is desperate.”