New story in Science and Health from Time: Artificial Intelligence Is Here To Calm Your Road Rage Artificial Intelligence Is Here To Calm Your Road Rage

I am behind the wheel of a Nissan Leaf, circling a parking lot, trying not to let the day’s nagging worries and checklists distract me to the point of imperiling pedestrians. Like all drivers, I am unwittingly communicating my stress to this vehicle in countless subtle ways: the strength of my grip on the steering wheel, the slight expansion of my back against the seat as I breathe, the things I mutter to myself as I pilot around cars and distracted pedestrians checking their phones in the parking lot.

“Hello, Corinne,” a calm voice says from the audio system. “What’s stressing you out right now?”

The conversation that ensues offers a window into the ways in which artificial intelligence could transform our experience behind the wheel: not by driving the car for us, but by taking better care of us as we drive.

Before coronavirus drastically altered our routines, three-quarters of U.S. workers—some 118 million people—commuted to the office alone in a car. From 2009 to 2019, Americans added an average of two minutes to their commute each way, according to U.S. Census data. That negligible daily average is driven by a sharp increase in the number of people making “super commutes” of 90 minutes or more each way, a population that increased 32% from 2005 to 2017. The long-term impact of COVID-19 on commuting isn’t clear, but former transit riders who opt to drive instead of crowding into buses or subway cars may well make up for car commuters who skip at least some of their daily drives and work from home instead.

Longer commutes are associated with increased physical health risks like high blood pressure, obesity, stroke and sleep disorders. A 2017 research project at the University of the West of England found that every extra minute of the survey respondents’ commutes correlated with lower job and leisure time satisfaction. Adding 20 minutes to a commute, researchers found, has the same depressing effect on job satisfaction as a 19% pay cut.

Switching modes of transit can offer some relief: people who walk, bike or take trains to work tend to be happier commuters than those who drive (and, as a University of Amsterdam study recently found, they tend to miss their commute more during lockdown). But reliable public transit is not universally available, nor are decent jobs always close to affordable housing.

Technology has long promised that an imminent solution is right around the corner: self-driving cars. In the near future, tech companies claim, humans won’t drive so much as be ferried about by fully autonomous cars that will navigate safely and efficiently to their destinations, leaving the people inside free to sleep, work or relax as easily as if they were on their own couch. A commute might be a lot less stressful if you could nap the whole way there, or get lost in a book or Netflix series without having to worry about exits or collisions.

Google executives went on the record claiming self-driving cars would be widely available within five years in 2012; they said the same thing again in 2015. Elon Musk throws out ship dates for fully autonomous Teslas as often as doomsday cult leaders reschedule the end of the world. Yet these forecasted utopias have still not arrived.

The majority of carmakers have walked back their most ambitious estimates. It will likely be decades before such cars are a reality for even a majority of drivers. In the meantime, the car commute remains a big, unpleasant, unhacked chunk of time in millions of Americans’ daily lives.

A smaller and less heralded group of researchers is working on how cars can make us happier while we drive them. It may be decades before artificial intelligence can completely take over piloting our vehicles. In the short run, however, it may be able to make us happier—and healthier—pilots.

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Lane changes, left turns, four-way stops and the like are governed by rules, but also rely on drivers’ making on-the-spot judgments with potentially deadly consequences. These are also the moments where driver stress spikes.

Many smart car features currently on the market give drivers data that assist with these decisions, like sensors that alert them when cars are in their blind spots or their vehicle is drifting out of its lane.

Another thing that causes drivers stress is uncertainty. One 2015 study found commuters who drove themselves to work were more stressed by the journey than were transit riders or other commuters, largely because of the inconsistency that accidents, roadwork and other traffic snarls caused in their schedules. But even if we can’t control the variables that affect a commute, we’re calmer if we can at least anticipate them—hence the popularity of real-time arrival screens at subway and bus stops.

The Beaverton, Ore.-based company Traffic Technology Services (TTS) makes a product called the Personal Signal Assistant, a platform that enables cars to communicate with traffic signals in areas where that data is publicly available. TTS’s first client, Audi, used the system to build a tool that counts down the remaining seconds of a red light (visually, on the dashboard) when a car is stopped at one, and suggests speed modifications as the car approaches a green light. The tool was designed to keep traffic flowing—no more honking at distracted drivers who don’t notice the light has turned green. But users also reported a marked decrease in stress. At the moment, the technology works in 26 North American metropolitan areas and two cities in Europe.

TTS has 60 full- and part-time employees in the U.S. and Germany, and recently partnered with Lamborghini, Bentley and a handful of corporate clients. Yet CEO Thomas Bauer says it can be hard to interest investors in technologies that focus on improving human drivers’ experience instead of just rendering them obsolete. “We certainly don’t draw the same excitement with investors as [companies focused on] autonomous driving,” Bauer says. “What we do is not quite as exciting because it doesn’t take the driver out of the picture just yet.”

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Pablo Paredes, an instructor of radiology and psychiatry at the Stanford School of Medicine, is the director of the school’s Pervasive Wellbeing Technology Lab. Situated in a corner of a cavernous Palo Alto, Calif., office building that used to be the headquarters of the defunct health-technology company Theranos, the lab looks for ways to rejigger the habits and objects people use in their everyday lives to improve mental and physical health. Team members don’t have to look far for reminders of what happens when grandiose promises aren’t backed up by data: Theranos’ circular logo is still inlaid in brass in the building’s marble-floored atrium.

It can be hard to tell the lab’s experiments from its standard-issue office furniture. To overcome the inertia that often leads users of adjustable-height desks to sit more often than stand, one of the workstations in the team’s cluster of cubicles has been outfitted with a sensor and mechanical nodule that make it rise and lower at preset intervals, smoothly enough that a cup of coffee won’t spill. In early trials, users particularly absorbed in their work just kept typing as the desk rose up and slowly stood along with it.

But the millions of hours consumed in the U.S. each day by the daily drive to work hold special fascination for Paredes. He’s drawn to the challenge of transforming a part of the day generally thought of as detrimental to health into something therapeutic. “The commute for me is the big elephant in the room,” he says. “There are very simple things that we’re overlooking in normal life that can be greatly improved and really repurposed to help a lot of people.”

In a 2018 study, Paredes and his colleagues found that it’s possible to infer a driver’s muscle tension—a proxy for stress—from the movement of their hands on a car’s steering wheel. They’re now experimenting with cameras that detect neck tension by noting the subtle changes in the angle of a driver’s head as it bobs with the car’s movements.

The flagship of the team’s mindful-commuting project is the silver-colored Nissan Leaf in their parking lot. The factory-standard electric vehicle has been tricked out with a suite of technologies designed to work together to decrease a driver’s stress.

On a test drive earlier this year, a chatbot speaking through the car’s audio system offered me the option of engaging in a guided breathing exercise. When I verbally agreed, the driver’s seatback began vibrating at intervals, while the voice instructed me to breathe along with its rhythm.

The lab published the results of a small study earlier this year showing that the seat-guided exercise reduced driver stress and breathing rates without impairing performance. They are now experimenting with a second vibrating system to see if lower-frequency vibrations could be used to slow breathing rates (and therefore stress) without any conscious effort on the driver’s part.

The goal, eventually, is a mass-market car that can detect an elevation in a driver’s stress level, via seat and steering wheel sensors or the neck-tension cameras. It would then automatically engage the calming-breath exercise, or talk through a problem or tell a joke to ease tension, using scripts developed with the input of cognitive behavioral therapists.

These technologies have value even as cars’ autonomous capabilities advance, Paredes says. Even if a car is fully self-driving, the human inside will still often be a captive audience of one, encased in a private space with private worries and fears.

Smarter technologies alone aren’t the solution to commuters’ problems. The auto industry has a long history of raising drivers’ tolerance for long commutes by making cars more comfortable and attractive places to be—all the while promising a better driving experience that’s just around the corner, says Peter Norton, an associate professor of science, technology, and society at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. From his perspective, stress-busting seats would join radios and air conditioners as distractions from bigger discussions about planning, transit and growing inequality, all of which could offer much more value to commuters than a nicer car.

In addition, how long it will be before these latest features become widely available options is an open question. Paredes’ lab had to suspend work during the pandemic, as it’s hard to maintain social distancing while working inside of a compact sedan. TTS is in talks to expand its offerings to other automakers, and Paredes has filed patents on some of his lab’s inventions. But just because a technology is relatively easy to integrate in a car doesn’t mean it will be standard soon. The first commercially available backup cameras came on the market in 1991. Despite their effectiveness in reducing collisions, only 24% of cars on the road had them by 2016, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, and most were newer luxury vehicles. (The cameras are now required by law in all new vehicles.)

These technologies also raise new questions of inequality and exploitation. It’s one thing for a commuter to opt for a seat that calms them down after a tough day. But if you drive for a living, should the company that owns your vehicle have the right to insist that you use a seat cover that elevates your breath rate and keeps you alert at the wheel? Who owns the health data your car collects, and who gets to access it? All of the unanswered questions that self-driving technologies raise apply to self-soothing technologies as well.

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Back in Palo Alto, the pandemic still weeks away, I am piloting the Leaf around the parking lot with a member of the lab gamely along for the ride in the back. The chatbot asks again what’s stressing me out. I have a deadline, I say, for a magazine article about cars and artificial intelligence.

The bot asks if this problem is “significantly” affecting my life (not really), if I’ve encountered something similar before (yep), if previous strategies could be adapted to this scenario (they can) and when I’ll be able to enter a plan to tackle this problem in my calendar (later, when I’m not driving). I do feel a little better. I talk to myself alone in the car all the time. It’s kind of nice to have the car talk back.

“Great. I’m glad you can do something about it. By breaking down a problem into tiny steps, we can often string together a solution,” the car says. “Sound good?”

New story in Science and Health from Time: How Science is Revolutionizing the World of Dog Training How Science is Revolutionizing the World of Dog Training

I was about a month into raising a new border collie puppy, Alsea, when I came to an embarrassing realization: my dog had yet to meet a Black person.

This was worrying for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it forced me to admit I have next to zero Black friends in Portland, Ore. Also, I’d read several books on raising a dog, and they all agree on at least one thing: proper socialization of a puppy, especially during the critical period from eight to 20 weeks, means introducing her to as many people as I possibly could. Not just people, but diverse people: people with beards and sunglasses; people wearing fedoras and sombreros; people jogging; people in Halloween costumes. And, critically, people of different ethnicities. Fail to do this, and your dog may inexplicably bark at people wearing straw hats or big sunglasses. Or at Black people.

This emphasis on socialization is an important element of a new approach to raising the modern dog. It eschews the old, dominating, Cesar Millan–style methods that were based on flawed studies of presumed hierarchies in wolf packs. Those methods made sense when I raised my last dog, Chica, in the early aughts. I read classic dominance-oriented books by the renowned upstate New York trainers The Monks of New Skete, among others, to teach her I was the leader of her pack, even when that meant stern corrections, like shaking her by the scruff of the neck. Chica was a well-behaved dog, but she was easily discouraged when I tried teaching her something new.

I don’t mean to suggest I had no better option; there was then a growing movement to teach dog owners all about early socialization and the value of rewards-based training, and plenty of trainers who employed only positive reinforcement. But in those days, the approach was the subject of debate and derision: treat-trained mongers might do what you want if they know a biscuit is hidden in your palm, but they’d ignore you otherwise. I proudly taught my dog tough love.

This time, with the assistance of a new class of trainers and scientists, I’ve changed my methods entirely, and I have been shocked to discover booming product lines of puzzles, entertaining toys, workshops and “canine enrichment” resources available to the modern dog “parent,” which has helped boost the U.S. pet industry to $86 billion in annual sales. Choke collars, shock collars, even the word no are all-but-verboten. It’s a new day in dog training.

The science upon which these new techniques are based is not exactly new: it’s rooted in learning theory and operant conditioning, which involves positive (the addition of) or negative (the withdrawal of) reinforcement. It also includes the flipside: positive or negative punishment. A brief primer: Petting a dog on the head for fetching the newspaper is positive reinforcement, because you’re taking an action (positive) to encourage (reinforce) a behavior. Scolding a dog to stop an unwanted behavior is positive punishment, because it’s an action to discourage a behavior. A choke collar whose tension is released when the dog stops pulling on it is negative reinforcement, because the dog’s desirable behavior (backing off) results in the removal of an undesirable consequence. Taking away a dog’s frisbee because he’s barking at it is negative punishment, because you’ve withdrawn a stimulus to decrease an unwanted behavior.

Much has changed about the way that science is applied today. As canine training has shifted from the old obedience-driven model directed at show dogs to a more relationship-based approach aimed at companion dogs, trainers have discovered that the use of negative reinforcement and positive punishment actually slow a dog’s progress, because they damage its confidence and, more importantly, its relationship with a handler. Dogs that receive too much correction—especially the harsh physical correction and mean-spirited “Bad dog!” scoldings—begin to retreat from trying new things.

These new methods are backed by a growing body of science—and a rejection of the old thinking, of wolves (and their descendants, dogs) as dominance-oriented creatures. The origin of so-called “alpha theory” comes from a scientist named Rudolph Schenkel, who conducted a study of wolves in 1947 in which animals from different packs were forced into a small enclosure with no prior interaction. They fought, naturally, which Schenkel wrongly interpreted as a battle for dominance. The reality, Schenkel was later forced to admit, was that the wolves were stressed, not striving for alpha status.

A study from Portugal published last fall in the pre-print digital database BioRxiv (meaning it is not yet peer-reviewed) evaluated dozens of dogs selected from schools that either employed the use of shock collars, leash corrections and other aversive techniques or didn’t—sticking entirely or almost entirely to the use of positive reinforcement (treats) to get the behavior they wanted. Dogs from the positive schools universally performed better at tasks the researchers put in front of them, and the dogs from aversive schools displayed considerably more stress, both in observable ways—licking, yawning, pacing, whining—and in cortisol levels measured in saliva swabs.

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These new findings are especially relevant this year. Dog adoption in the COVID-19 era has ballooned, arguably because isolated Americans are newly in search of companionship and because working from home makes at least the idea of raising a puppy feasible. Before the pandemic, it was young city dwellers driving the boom in demand for and supply of dog trainers who employ positive methods, and an explosion in the proliferation of professional trainers across the globe. Often because they’ve delayed or decided against having children, millennials and Generation Z are spending lavish amounts of money on pets: toys, food, puzzles, fancy harnesses, rain jackets, life jackets and training. And those professional trainers, from the Guide Dogs for the Blind organization to renowned handler Denise Fenzi, have formed a legion of experimenters. They universally report that the less negativity they use in training, the more quickly their dogs learn.

Over the past 15 years, handlers with Guide Dogs for the Blind, which trains dogs to be aides for sight-impaired people, have extinguished nearly all negative training techniques and with dramatic results. A new dog can now be ready to guide its owner in half the time it once took, and they can remain with an owner for an extra year or two, because they’re so much less stressed out by the job, says Susan Armstrong, the organization’s vice president of client, training and veterinary operations. Even bomb-sniffing and military dogs are seeing more positive reinforcement, which is why you might have noticed that working dogs in even the most serious environments (like airports) seem to be enjoying their jobs more than in the past. “I don’t think you’re imagining that,” Armstrong says. “These dogs love working. They love getting rewards for good behavior. It’s serious, but it can be fun.”

Susan Friedman, a psychology professor at Utah State University, entered the dog-training world after a 20-year career in special education, a field in which she has a doctorate. In the late 1990s, she adopted a parrot, and was shocked to discover that most of the available advice she could find about raising a well-mannered bird involved only harsh corrections: If it bites, abruptly drop the bird on the floor. If it makes too much noise, shroud the cage in complete darkness. If it tries to escape, clip the bird’s flight feathers. Friedman applied her own research and experience to her parrot training, and discovered it all comes down to behavior. “No species on the planet behaves for no reason,” she says. “What’s the function of a parrot biting your hand? Why might a child throw down at the toy aisle? What’s the purpose of the behavior, and how does it open the environment to rewards and also to aversive stimuli?”

Friedman’s early articles about positive-reinforcement animal training met a skeptical audience back in the early aughts. Now, thanks to what she calls a “groundswell from animal trainers” newly concerned about the ethics of animal raising, Friedman is summoned to consult at zoos and aquariums around the world. Some of her advice centers on two key principles now widely appreciated in dog training. The first is of arbitrary reinforcement, the same principle used to addict gamblers to slot machines. If rewarded on an intermittent schedule, we’re likely to keep trying, and trying to make those rewards more consistent. Same with dogs: if rewards for good behavior come at a seemingly arbitrary pace, they will keep behaving well in an effort to make those rewards arrive more regularly.

Friedman’s other main emphasis is on understanding how a better analysis of an animal’s needs might help trainers punish them less. Last year, she produced a poster called the “hierarchy roadmap” designed to help owners identify underlying causes and conditions of behavior, and address the most likely influencers—illness, for example—before moving on to other assumptions. That’s not to suggest old-school dog trainers might ignore an illness, but they might be too quick to move to punishment before considering causes of unwanted behavior that could be addressed with less-invasive techniques.

The field is changing rapidly, Friedman says. Even in the last year, trainers have discovered new ways to replace an aversive technique with a win: if a dog scratches (instead of politely sitting) at the door to be let out, many trainers would have in recent years advised owners to ignore the scratching so as not to reward the behavior. They would hope for “extinction,” for the dog to eventually stop doing the bad thing that results in no reward. But that’s an inherently negative approach. What if it could be replaced with something positive? Now, most trainers would now recommend redirecting the scratching dog to a better behavior, a come or a sit, rewarded with a treat. The bad behavior not only goes extinct, but the dog learns a better behavior at the same time.

The debate is not entirely quashed. Mark Hines, a trainer with the pet products company Kong who works with dogs across the country, says that while positive reinforcement certainly helps dogs acquire knowledge at the fastest rate, there’s still a feeling among trainers of military and police dogs that some correction is required to get an animal ready for service. “Leash corrections and pinch collars are science-based, as well,” Hines says. “Positive punishment is a part of science.”

The key, Hines says, is to avoid harsh and unnecessary kinds of positive punishment, so as not to damage the relationship between handler and dog. Dogs too often rebuked will steadily narrow the range of things they try, because they figure naturally that might reduce the chance they get yelled at.

The Cesar Millans of the world are not disappearing. But the all- or mostly positive camp is growing faster. Hundreds trainers attend “Clicker Expos,” an annual event put on in various cities by one of the most prominent positivity-based dog-training institutions in the world, the Karen Pryor Academy in Waltham, Mass And Fenzi, another of the world’s most successful trainers, teaches her positive-reinforcement techniques online to no less than 10,000 students each term.

While there is some lingering argument about how much positivity vs. negativity to introduce into a training regimen, there’s next to zero debate about what may be the most important component of raising a new dog: socialization. Most trainers now teach dog owners about the the period between eight and 20 weeks in which it is vital to introduce a dog to all kinds of sights and sounds they may encounter in later life. Most “bad” behavior is really the product of poor early socialization. For two months, I took Alsea to weekly “puppy socials” at Portland’s Doggy Business, where experienced handlers monitor puppies as they interact and play with one another in a romper room filled with ladders and hula hoops and children’s playhouses, strange surfaces that they might otherwise develop fear about encountering. Such classes didn’t exist until a few years ago.

Holly Andres for TIMEA vizsla puppy at a dog training class at Doggy Business in Portland, Oregon, on Jun. 4.

I also took Alsea to dog-training classes, at a different company, Wonder Puppy. At the first session, trainer Kira Moyer reminded her human students that the most important thing we need to do for our dogs is advocate, which is also based in a renewed appreciation of science. Instead of correcting your dog for whining, for example, stop for a moment and think about why that’s happening? What do they want? Can you give that to them, or give them an opportunity to earn the thing they want, and learn good behavior at the same time?

Enrichment is another booming area of the dog-training world. I didn’t feed Alsea out of a regular dog bowl for the first six months she’s been with me, because it was so much more mentally stimulating for her to eat from a food puzzle, a device that makes it just a little bit challenging for an animal to acquire breakfast. These can be as simple as a round plastic plate with kibble dispersed between a set of ridges that have to be navigated, or as complex as the suite of puzzles developed by Swedish entrepreneur Nina Ottosson. At the highest level, a dog might have to move a block, flip the lid up, remove a barrier or spin a wheel to earn food. Another common source of what we consider “bad” behavior in dogs is really just an expression of boredom, of a dog that needs a job and has decided to give himself one: digging through the garbage, barking at the mail carrier. Food puzzles make dinnertime a job. When Ottosson first started, “they called me ‘the crazy dog lady.’ Nobody believed dogs would eat food out of a puzzle,” she says. “Today, nobody calls me that.”

When Alsea was 4 months old (she’s 12 months now), I traveled south of Portland to Oregon’s Willamette Valley to introduce her to Ian Caldicott, a farmer who teaches dogs and handlers how to herd sheep. First we watched one of his students working her own dog. As the border collie made mistakes, the tension in her owner’s voice escalated and her corrections grew increasingly harsh. “Just turn your back and listen,” Caldicott said to me. “You can hear the panic in her voice creeping in.”

Dogs are smart and can read that insecurity. It makes them question their faith in the handler and, in some cases, decide they know better. Raising a good sheepdog is about building trust between the dog and the handler, Caldicott says. That does require some correction—a “Hey!” when the dog goes left instead of right, at times—but what’s most important is confidence, both in the dog and the handler. In the old days, sheepdogs were taught left and right with physical coercion. Now, they’re given just enough guidance to figure out the right track by themselves. “We’re trying to get an animal that thinks for itself. A good herding dog thinks he knows better than you. Your job is to teach him you’re worth listening to,” Caldicott says. “The ones born thinking they’re the king of the universe, all you have to do is not take that away.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: Exclusive: The Chinese Scientist Who Sequenced the First COVID-19 Genome Speaks Out About the Controversies Surrounding His Work Exclusive: The Chinese Scientist Who Sequenced the First COVID-19 Genome Speaks Out About the Controversies Surrounding His Work

Over the past few years, Professor Zhang Yongzhen has made it his business to sequence thousands of previously unknown viruses. But he knew straight away that this one was particularly nasty. It was about 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 3 that a metal box arrived at the drab, beige buildings that house the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center. Inside was a test tube packed in dry ice that contained swabs from a patient suffering from a peculiar pneumonia sweeping China’s central city of Wuhan. But little did Zhang know that that box would also unleash a vicious squall of blame and geopolitical acrimony worthy of Pandora herself. Now, he is seeking to set the record straight.

Zhang and his team set to work, analyzing the samples using the latest high-throughput sequencing technology for RNA, the viral genetic building blocks, which function similar to how DNA works in humans. By 2 a.m. on Jan. 5, after toiling through two nights straight, they had mapped the first complete genome of the virus that has now sickened 23 million and killed 810,000 across the globe: SARS-CoV-2. “It took us less than 40 hours, so very, very fast,” Zhang tells TIME in an exclusive interview. “Then I realized that this virus is closely related to SARS, probably 80%. So certainly, it was very dangerous.”

The events that followed Zhang’s discovery have since become swathed in controversy. Crises beget scapegoats and the coronavirus is no different. The floundering U.S. response to the pandemic has prompted a wave of racially tinged soundbites, such as “China virus” and “Kung Flu,” as President Donald Trump’s Administration seeks to divert blame onto the nation where the pathogen was first identified. “The outbreak of COVID angered many people in the Administration and presented an election issue for President Trump,” Ambassador Jeffrey Bader, formerly President Obama’s chief adviser on Asia, said at a recent meeting of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China.

Read more: Inside the Global Quest to Trace the Origins of COVID-19—and Predict Where It Will Go Next

Upon first obtaining the genome, Zhang says he immediately called Dr. Zhao Su, head of respiratory medicine at Wuhan Central Hospital, to request the clinical data of the relevant patient. “I couldn’t say it was more dangerous than SARS, but I told him it was certainly more dangerous than influenza or Avian flu H5N1,” says Zhang. He then contacted China’s Ministry of Health and traveled to Wuhan, where he spoke to top public health officials over dinner Jan. 8. “I had two judgements: first that it was a SARS-like virus; second, that the virus transmits by the respiratory tract. And so, I had two suggestions: that we should take some emergency public measures to protect against this disease; also, clinics should develop antiviral treatments.”

Afterward, Zhang returned to Shanghai and prepared to travel to Beijing for more meetings. On the morning of Jan. 11, he was on the runway at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport when he received a phone call from a colleague, Professor Edward Holmes at the University of Sydney. A few minutes later, Zhang was strapped in for takeoff and still on the phone—then Holmes asked permission to release the genome publicly. “I asked Eddie to give me one minute to think,’” Zhang recalls. “Then I said ok.” For the next two hours, Zhang was cocooned from the world at 35,000 feet, but Holmes’ post on the website Virological.org sent shockwaves through the global scientific community.

By the time Zhang touched down in Beijing, his discovery was headline news. Officials swooped on his laboratory to demand an explanation. “Maybe they couldn’t understand how we obtained the genome sequence so fast,” says Zhang. “Maybe they didn’t fully believe our genome. So, I think it’s normal for the authorities to check our lab, our protocols.”

Read more: China Says It’s Beating Coronavirus. But Can We Believe Its Numbers?

Critics of China’s response have latched onto the Jan. 11 date of publication as evidence of a cover-up: why, they ask, didn’t Zhang publish it on Jan. 5, when he first finished the sequencing? Also, Zhang’s lab was probed by Chinese authorities for “rectification,” an obscure term to imply some malfeasance. To many observers, it seemed that furious officials scrambling to snuff out evidence of the outbreak were punishing Zhang simply for sharing the SARS-CoV-2 genome—and in the meanwhile, slowing down the release of this key information.

Yet Zhang denies reports in Western media that his laboratory suffered any prolonged closure, and instead says it was working furiously during the early days of the outbreak. “From late January to April, we screened more than 30,000 viral samples,” says Fan Wu, a researcher who assisted Zhang with the first SARS-CoV-2 sequencing.

And, in fact, Zhang insists he first uploaded the genome to the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) on Jan. 5—an assertion corroborated by the submission date listed on the U.S government institution’s Genbank. “When we posted the genome on Jan. 5, the United States certainly knew about this virus,” he says. But it can take days or even weeks for the NCBI to look at a submission, and given the gravity of the situation and buoyed by the urging of colleagues, Zhang chose to expedite its release to the public, by publishing it online. (Approached by TIME, Holmes deferred to Zhang’s version of events.) It’s a decision that facilitated the swift development of testing kits, as well as the early discussion of antivirals and possible vaccines.

Read more: ‘We Will Share Our Vaccine with the World.’ Inside the Chinese Biotech Firm Leading the Fight Against COVID-19

Zhang, 55, is keen to downplay the bravery of his actions. But the stakes of doing what is right over what one is told are rendered far higher in authoritarian systems like China’s. Several whistleblower doctors were detained early in the pandemic. According to a Jan. 3 order seen by respected Beijing-based finance magazine Caixin, China’s National Health Commission, the nation’s top health authority, forbade the publishing of any information regarding the Wuhan disease, while labs were told to destroy or transfer all viral samples to designated testing institutions. Caixin also reports that other labs had processed genome sequences before Zhang obtained his sample. None were published.

It’s difficult to know what conclusions to draw. Dr. Dale Fisher, head of infectious diseases at Singapore’s National University Hospital, says he doesn’t think that any delay by the Chinese authorities was malicious. “It was more like appropriate verification,” he says. Fisher traveled to China as part of a World Health Organization (WHO) delegation in early February and says outbreak settings are always confusing and chaotic with people unsure what to believe. “To actually have the whole genome sequence by early January was outstanding compared to outbreaks of the past.”

Of course, Zhang’s fears based on the viral genome were just one evidence strut to inform China’s decision-making process, alongside public health data and clinical reports about specific cases. Despite mounting evidence of human-to-human transmission, including doctors falling ill, it was only on Jan. 20 that China officially confirmed community transmission. Two days later, Wuhan’s 11 million residents were placed on a bruising lockdown that would last for 76 days. Even while the WHO publicly praised China for transparency, internal documents seen by the Associated Press suggest health officials were privately frustrated by the slow release of information. One joint study by scientists in China, the U.K. and U.S. suggests there would have been 95% fewer cases in China had lockdown measures been introduced three weeks earlier. Two weeks earlier, 86% fewer; one week, 66% fewer.

Read more: ‘I Told Myself to Stay Calm.’ As Wuhan’s Lockdown Ends, A Doctor Recalls Fighting Coronavirus on the Front Line

Yet there was some historical basis for skepticism about the severity of the emerging viral disease. After all, the last global pandemic—the swine flu outbreak of 2009—was far less deadly than initially feared, mainly because many older people had some immunity to the virus, leading to criticism that the WHO was overly hasty and even overly dramatic in declaring a pandemic when the virology didn’t warrant it. “In China, even though we had a very bad experience with SARS and other diseases, in the beginning nobody—not even experts from China’s CDC and the Ministry of Health—predicted the disease could be quite so bad,” says Zhang.

Donald Trump disagrees. He has repeatedly claimed that swifter action by China could have stopped the pandemic in its tracks. “The virus came from China,” Trump said Aug. 10. “It’s China’s fault.” Beijing concedes that mistakes were made at the outset, though insists that blame lies solely with bungling local officials (who have since been punished for those failures), while the central government’s response was exemplary. This is, of course, its own politically motivated oversimplification. On both sides, wild accusations have eclipsed reason as Sino-U.S. relations spiral to an unprecedented nadir. While U.S. officials have suggested that COVD-19 originated in a Wuhan laboratory, their Chinese counterparts have propagated conspiracy theories that the U.S. military is responsible. “It’s not a good thing for China and the U.S. to be involved in this struggle,” says Zhang. “If we can’t work together, we can’t solve anything.”

Read more: The Coronavirus Outbreak Could Derail Xi Jinping’s Dreams of a Chinese Century

Some facts are undeniable. The first U.S. case was confirmed on Jan. 21—a man in his 30s who had just returned from Wuhan to his hometown in Washington State. Japan confirmed its first coronavirus case one day later, and reported the world’s highest infection number early in the outbreak, before getting a handle on the situation. Today, the U.S. has 16,407 cases per million population compared with 462 in Japan. Across the world, authoritarian and democratic nations have both handled the crisis well and poorly.

For its part, the global scientific community has risen to the challenge, working across national boundaries to advance understanding of the disease, including priceless collaborations between Chinese and Western virologists. Previously, the best described epidemic in terms of viral genetics was the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak. Then, about 1,600 genomes were mapped over three years, providing insights into how viruses move between locations and accumulate genetic differences as they do. But for SARS-CoV-2, following Zhang’s initial genome, scientists mapped about 20,000 within three months. Genomic surveillance enables scientists to trace the speed and character of genetic changes, with ramifications for infection rates and the production of vaccines and antivirals. “Very large-scale genomic screening can evaluate whether any resistance mutations have occurred and, if they do, how those spread through time,” says Oliver Prybus, professor of evolution and infectious disease at Oxford University.

For Zhang, focus must now be on understanding how pathogens and the environment interact. Over the past century, an inordinate number of new viral diseases have emerged in China, including the 1956 Asian Flu, 2002 SARS and 2013 H7N9. Zhang attributes this to China’s diverse ecology and enormous population. Moreover, as China’s economy boomed its people have begun traveling far and wide in search of work, education and opportunities. According to the World Bank, almost 200 million people moved to urban areas in East Asia during the first decade of the 21st century. In China, 61% of the population lived in urban areas in 2020 compared with just 18% in 1978. This brings unknown pathogens and people without natural defenses into close proximity. “People and pathogens must be in contact [for outbreaks],” says Zhang. “If no contact, no disease.”

As urbanization intensifies, outbreaks of pathogenic diseases will only become more common. Mitigation, says Zhang, comes from deeper understanding of viruses, so that we can accurately map and predict which are likely to spill over into human populations. Just as satellites have made forecasting weather patterns unerringly reliable, Zhang believes science holds the key to predicting viral outbreaks with similar accuracy as with which we now anticipate typhoons and tornadoes. “If we don’t learn lessons from this disease,” says Zhang, “humankind will suffer another.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: Local Economies Have Been Decimated by the Coronavirus—But This Is Just a Preview of What Climate Change Could Do Local Economies Have Been Decimated by the Coronavirus—But This Is Just a Preview of What Climate Change Could Do

This summer has been a cruel one in the American Sunbelt. In our hospitals, pain, fear and death abound because of COVID-19. Outside, a mass of restive, unemployed workers face down deadly heat waves, swiftly rising sea levels and the peak of hurricane season.

But even if the viral hardship feels wanton, it doesn’t have to be without purpose. In South Florida, Phoenix and the Rio Grande Valley – all of which have battled surging COVID cases – citizens are being offered a vision of their climate-changed future through the pathogen’s devastation. Which means we have a chance to adapt now and avoid the worst of what’s to come.

That’s because the economic ravages of the coronavirus are surprisingly similar to what these three regions can expect to suffer if humans continue to pump carbon dioxide into earth’s atmosphere with reckless abandon. The playbook for mitigating those negative effects is similar as well.

Consider South Florida. The unemployment rate for Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties this June hovered around 11%. Tourism – the main driver of its local economy – is almost at a standstill. People aren’t flying. Cruise ships aren’t sailing. Hotels aren’t being booked. It’s unclear when the more than 37 million holidaymakers who visited in 2018 will return.

But what is clear is that the beaches those tourists enjoy are likely to disappear into the rising sea by the time that I’m 80. Infrastructure planners in the region are already bracing for more than two extra feet of water by 2060.

So will tourists visit South Florida if it has no beaches?

Phoenix Arizona offers another heat-hazy vision. As the city bakes during its hottest summer on record and people awaiting coronavirus tests pass out during the blazing western day, a regional economy founded on exurban development and defense contracting falters under the twin suns of delinquent mortgage payments and government austerity.

But where COVID-19 may only ground the Phoenix economy for a relatively short period of time, the mean temperatures projected for the region should C02 emissions remain unchecked seem sure to provide a permanent damper. An average of 10 degrees Fahrenheit more heat by the end of the century is expected, which could lead to outside summer temperatures that rapidly endanger the health of the average human.

Can Phoenix adapt to the heat, or will it become, in the words of Andrew Ross, a “bird on fire”?

And then there’s the Rio Grande Valley: until recently, one of America’s fastest-growing regions, forged on the carry trade between Mexico and the U.S., and now reeling from the twin effects of a major coronavirus outbreak and a direct strike by Hurricane Hanna, which made landfall as a high-end Category 1 storm, with sustained winds around 90 miles per hour.

Coronavirus lockdowns, coupled with the disruptions in trade brought by the closing of the borders between the U.S. and Mexico, have spiked unemployment – in June it ranged from 11% to 18.5% in the four counties that make up the Rio Grande Valley. The hospitals are near capacity, and the lines for the food banks are long.

Yet the future looks even bleaker. As the region’s population – and water demand – grows, the Rio Grande shrivels. In a climate-changed world, rain falls less often, but more intensely, challenging agriculture and water-management infrastructure. And nativism – rising on the American side of the border – threatens more than 130 years of successful water cooperation between the two countries that share the river.

It’s clear that climate change presents an existential threat to all three region’s economies. Yet what is lacking are leaders that see the immediate – but temporary- threat of SARS-COV-2 as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to shift idled workers, businesses and capital away from doomed sectors and toward ones that will not face similar destruction, like renewable energy and climate adaptation.

Busting the monopolies held by investor-owned utilities on energy generation in Florida with a pivot to broad-based rooftop solar could swiftly create clean electricity and hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs. The cost of retrofitting metro-Phoenix to the bristling heat may seem at first to be astronomical, but shifting the area’s exurbs to dense, xeriscaped, transit-oriented developments that are efficient to cool could help save lives, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and spur investment. Solving the Rio Grande Valley’s water woes may seem like an intractable bog, but far-sighted investments in riparian infrastructure that integrates climate variability and embraces bi-national cooperation could secure the region’s future from both drought and hurricane.

Overall total world spending on resilience and adaptation to climate change stands at .38% of global GDP in 2018. From 2008 to 2015, adaptation and resilience spending in the 10 world megacities most likely to be affected by climate change rose 27%, according to Carbon Brief. These markets are only set to grow with the shocks and stresses of the anthropocene. And the pandemic – awful as it is – could represent a pivot point. It’s time for leaders in these regions to lean into their vulnerability and recognize that they are in unique positions to capture the windfalls of adaptation – and then export them around the world.

New story in Science and Health from Time: An Ohio Artist and Activist is Turning Acid Mine Pollution Into Paint An Ohio Artist and Activist is Turning Acid Mine Pollution Into Paint

Sunday Creek begins around Corning, a small town in southeastern Ohio, before snaking down 27 miles to connect with the Hocking River. Like much of Appalachia, the creek’s watershed was historically home to communities of coal miners, but the mines have since closed, leaving only their runoff: nearly 1,000 gal. a minute of water so badly contaminated that Sunday Creek is now home to the worst acid mine drainage (AMD) site in the state. John Sabraw, an Ohio University professor of art who is also interested in sustainability, first noticed the effects of AMD when exploring the area with an environmentalist group in 2003.

Ben Siegel—Ohio UniversityJohn Sabraw deep in acid mine drainage in Bat Gate cave, Sulfur Springs Hollow, Ohio.

Michelle ShivelyDischarge and tanks in Corning, Ohio, December 2017.

“As we toured southeastern Ohio, I was struck by local streams that are not only devoid of aquatic life, but are orange, red and brown, as if from a mudslide upstream,” recalls Sabraw. From the environmentalists, he came to understand the source of the water’s discoloration. “The colors were mainly from iron oxide—the same raw material used to make many paint colors…I thought it would be fantastic to use this toxic flow to make paintings.”

Sabraw’s idea inspired not only a line of his paintings but also a collaborative effort between artists, researchers and community organizers to turn Sunday Creek’s AMD into paint pigments via an artistically inclined water-treatment facility breaking ground next year. Should the project prove to be a success, its backers at Rural Action, a regional nonprofit, are hoping to replicate it throughout Appalachia, turning the runoff from abandoned mines into art, jobs and clean water.

There are more than 23,000 abandoned mines across the U.S., according to records maintained by the Department of the Interior. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency identifies these mines as the main regional source of AMD, a pollutant that contaminates drinking water, disrupts the growth of plants and animals, and corrodes infrastructure like bridges. While the federal government has been attempting to mitigate acid mine drainage since 1977 (by removing the sources of contamination, diverting polluted channels or allowing them to rewild, with funding from the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act), it remains a health and environmental hazard, especially in Appalachia.

“The three states with the highest number of abandoned mine lands and acid mine drainage sites on their state inventories are Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky,” says Michelle Shively of Rural Action. “The next three are Ohio, Virginia and Alabama.” (The Appalachian Regional Commission defines Appalachia as extending from southwestern New York to northeastern Mississippi along the Appalachian Mountains.)

Since 1999, Rural Action has been analyzing Sunday Creek’s water quality, installing remediation projects and leading educational tours of the area. The creek’s greatest AMD hazard is an abandoned underground coal mine in Millfield, Ohio, known as the Truetown Discharge. (The site was named after its former township, Truetown, which has since been incorporated into Millfield.) Mining at this and other such sites unearthed naturally occurring pyrite, which reacts with air and water to produce sulfuric acid and iron oxide. According to Shively, the Truetown Discharge now sends more than 1,000 tons of granular iron oxide into Sunday Creek each year.

Commercial ventures have harvested iron oxide from acid mine discharge before. When heated, iron oxide changes color, from yellow to red to purple, depending on the temperature. Nearly 240,000 tons of it is used in the U.S. each year, much of it imported from China, to produce oil and acrylic paints and to tint everything from cosmetics to concrete. Companies have traditionally pulled the iron oxide from bodies like Sunday Creek by diverting the flow into settling ponds, then evaporating the water. But that does nothing to detoxify the source stream.

Ben Siegel—Ohio UniversityAerial view of the acid mine drainage near Oreton, Ohio in 2018.

Rural Action hopes to take a different approach with True Pigments, its water-treatment facility in Millfield, a town of fewer than 400 people through which Sunday Creek runs. Based on the research of another Ohio University professor—Guy Riefler, chair of the university’s civil-engineering department and a specialist on AMD treatment—Rural Action piloted a smaller facility farther up Sunday Creek at Corning, with a patent-pending process that takes in contaminated water, reduces its acidity, removes iron oxide and returns clean water to the source. The scaled-up facility at Millfield would produce 1,200 tons of iron oxide each year while simultaneously remediating seven miles of waterway.

True Pigments would address only a fraction of the U.S.’s iron oxide needs as well as its AMD-polluted streams, but Rural Action doesn’t plan on stopping there. It intends to channel profits from the operation’s iron oxide pigment sales—nearly $2 million a year, according to the group’s projections—into building other water-treatment facilities in the region. That reinvestment, says Brent Means, a hydrologist with the U.S. Department of the Interior, is “unique” and “really forward-thinking.” Rural Action’s plan would also reduce U.S. imports of iron oxide, thereby cutting carbon emissions as well as reducing demand for operations that mine or artificially synthesize paint pigment. The local benefits would extend beyond ecology to the economy, in an area with only eight other registered businesses.

“This project alone will double the annual payroll of the Millfield ZIP code,” says Shively.

Construction of True Pigments is set to begin in the spring of 2021, with its planned completion in 2022. Rural Action has already secured $3.5 million from the Ohio department of natural resources and is currently fundraising for the remaining $4.5 million in anticipated construction costs. With the funds from an anonymous gift, the organization has purchased all 48 acres necessary for the facility and its grounds. It is also finalizing a deal with Ohio University to license the AMD treatment process developed by Riefler.

John SabrawGamblin Reclaimed Earth Violet and AMD pigment set.

Sabraw, who serves as a research consultant to True Pigments, was the inspiration for using the iron oxide produced by Riefler’s process to create paint pigment. The paintings he made with pigment harvested from Sunday Creek are circular compositions that simultaneously evoke alien planets and microscopic cells. Chroma S4 Chimaera, for example, could be a tie-dye Jupiter, while Chroma S4 Blue River resembles an azure fungal growth on rust. Taken together, the paintings suggest a relationship between the universal and the infinitesimal, an interconnectedness Sabraw says captures the significance of AMD.

“Everything is intertwined,” he says. “The streams these pigments come from connect to other streams, rivers and eventually the ocean. This might seem like a local issue, but it’s not—it’s a global issue.”

 

New story in Science and Health from Time: COVID-19 Could Threaten Firefighters As Wildfire Season Ramps Up COVID-19 Could Threaten Firefighters As Wildfire Season Ramps Up

Jon Paul was leery entering his first wildfire camp of the year late last month to fight three lightning-caused fires scorching parts of a Northern California forest that hadn’t burned in 40 years.

The 54-year-old engine captain from southern Oregon knew from experience that these crowded, grimy camps can be breeding grounds for norovirus and a respiratory illness that firefighters call the “camp crud” in a normal year. He wondered what COVID-19 would do in the tent cities where hundreds of men and women eat, sleep, wash and spend their downtime between shifts.

Paul thought about his immunocompromised wife and his 84-year-old mother back home. Then he joined the approximately 1,300 people spread across the Modoc National Forest who would provide a major test for the COVID-prevention measures that had been developed for wildland firefighters.

“We’re still first responders and we have that responsibility to go and deal with these emergencies,” he says. “I don’t scare easy, but I’m very wary and concerned about my surroundings. I’m still going to work and do my job.”

Paul is one of thousands of firefighters from across the U.S. battling dozens of wildfires burning throughout the West. It’s an inherently dangerous job that now carries the additional risk of COVID-19 transmission. Any outbreak that ripples through a camp could easily sideline crews and spread the virus across multiple fires—and back to communities across the country—as personnel transfer in and out of “hot zones” and return home.

Though most firefighters are young and fit, some will inevitably fall ill in these remote makeshift communities of shared showers and portable toilets, where medical care can be limited. The pollutants in the smoke they breathe daily also make them more susceptible to COVID-19 and can worsen the effects of the disease, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Also, a single suspected or positive case in a camp will mean many other firefighters will need to be quarantined, unable to work. The worst-case scenario is that multiple outbreaks could hamstring the nation’s ability to respond as wildfire season peaks in August, the hottest month and driest month of the year in the Western U.S.

The number of acres burned so far this year is below the 10-year average, but the fire outlook for August is above average in nine states, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Twenty-two large fires ignited on Aug. 17 alone after lightning storms passed through the Northwest, and two days later, California declared a state of emergency due to uncontrolled wildfires.

A study published this month by researchers at Colorado State University and the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station concluded that COVID-19 outbreaks “could be a serious threat to the firefighting mission” and urged vigilant social distancing and screening measures in the camps.

“If simultaneous fires incurred outbreaks, the entire wildland response system could be stressed substantially, with a large portion of the workforce quarantined,” the study’s authors wrote.

U.S. Forest ServiceFirefighters wear face masks at a morning briefing on the Bighorn Fire, north of Tucson, Ariz., on June 22, 2020.

This spring, the National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s Fire Management Board wrote—and has since been updating—protocols to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in fire camps, based on CDC guidelines:

• Firefighters should be screened for fever and other symptoms when they arrive at camp.
• Every crew should insulate itself as a “module of one” for the fire season and limit interactions with other crews.
• Firefighters should maintain social distancing and wear face coverings when social distancing isn’t possible. Smaller satellite camps, known as “spike” camps, can be built to ensure enough space.
• Shared areas should be regularly cleaned and disinfected, and sharing tools and radios should be minimized.

The guidelines do not include routine testing of newly arrived firefighters—a practice used for athletes at training camps and students returning to college campuses. The Fire Management Board’s Wildland Fire Medical and Public Health Advisory Team wrote in a July 2 memo that it “does not recommend utilizing universal COVID-19 laboratory testing as a standalone risk mitigation or screening measure among wildland firefighters.” Rather, the group recommends testing an individual and directly exposed co-workers, saying that approach is in line with CDC guidance.

The lack of testing capacity and long turnaround times are factors, according to Forest Service spokesperson Dan Hottle. (The exception is Alaska, where firefighters are tested upon arrival at the airport and are quarantined in a hotel while awaiting results, which come in 24 hours, Hottle says.)

Fire crews responding to early season fires in the spring had some problems adjusting to the new protocols, according to assessments written by fire leaders and compiled by the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center. Shawn Faiella, superintendent of the interagency “hotshot crew” – so named because they work the most challenging, or “hottest” parts of wildfires — based at Montana’s Lolo National Forest, questioned the need to wear masks inside vehicles and the safety of bringing extra vehicles to space out firefighters traveling to a blaze. Parking extra vehicles at the scene of a fire is difficult in tight forest dirt roads—and would be dangerous if evacuations are necessary, he wrote.

“It’s damn tough to take these practices to the fire line,” Faiella wrote after his team responded to a 40-acre Montana fire in April.

One recommendation that fire managers say has been particularly effective is the “module of one” concept requiring crews to eat and sleep together in isolation for the entire fire season. “Whoever came up with it, it is working,” says Mike Goicoechea, the Montana-based incident commander for the Forest Service’s Northern Region Type 1 team, which manages the nation’s largest and most complex wildfires and natural disasters. “Somebody may test positive, and you end up having to take that module out of service for 14 days. But the nice part is you’re not taking out a whole camp.… It’s just that module.”

There is no single system that is tracking the total number of positive COVID-19 cases among wildland firefighters among the various federal, state, local and tribal agencies. Each fire agency has its own method, says Jessica Gardetto, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management and the National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho.

The largest wildland firefighting agency in the U.S. is the Agriculture Department’s Forest Service, with 10,000 firefighters. Another major agency is the Department of the Interior, which had more than 3,500 full-time fire employees last year. As of the first week of August, 111 Forest Service firefighters and 40 BLM firefighters (who work underneath the broader Interior Department agency) had tested positive for COVID-19, according to officials for the respective agencies. “Considering we’ve now been experiencing fire activity for several months, this number is surprisingly low if you think about the thousands of fire personnel who’ve been suppressing wildfires this summer,” Gardetto says.

Goicoechea and his Montana team traveled north of Tucson, Arizona, on June 22 to manage a rapidly spreading fire in the Santa Catalina Mountains that required 1,200 responders at its peak. Within two days of the team’s arrival, his managers were overwhelmed by calls from firefighters worried or with questions about preventing the spread of COVID-19 or carrying the virus home to their families.

In an unusual move, Goicoechea called upon a Montana physician—and former National Park Service ranger with wildfire experience—Dr. Harry Sibold to join the team. Physicians are rarely, if ever, part of a wildfire camp’s medical team, Goicoechea says. Sibold gave regular coronavirus updates during morning briefings, consulted with local health officials, soothed firefighters worried about bringing the virus home to their families and advised fire managers on how to handle scenarios that might come up.

But Sibold says he wasn’t optimistic at the beginning about keeping the coronavirus in check in a large camp in Pima County, which has the second-highest number of confirmed cases in Arizona, at the time a national COVID-19 hot spot. “I quite firmly expected that we might have two or three outbreaks,” he says.

There were no positive cases during the team’s two-week deployment, just three or four cases where a firefighter showed symptoms but tested negative for the virus. After the Montana team returned home, nine firefighters at the Arizona fire from other units tested positive, Goicoechea says. Contact tracers notified the Montana team, some of whom were tested. All tests returned negative.

“I can’t say enough about having that doctor to help,” Goicoechea says, suggesting other teams might consider doing the same. “We’re not the experts in a pandemic. We’re the experts with fire.”

That early success will be tested as the number of fires increase across the West, along with the number of firefighters responding to them. There were more than 15,000 firefighters and support personnel assigned to fires across the nation as of mid-August, and the success of those COVID-19 prevention protocols depend largely upon them.

Paul, the Oregon firefighter, says that the guidelines were followed closely in camp, but less so out on the fire line. It also appeared to him that younger firefighters were less likely to follow the masking and social-distancing rules than the veterans like him. That worries him it wouldn’t take much to spark an outbreak that could sideline crews and cripple the ability to respond to a fire. “We’re outside, so it definitely helps with mitigation and makes it simpler to social distance,” Paul says. “But I think if there’s a mistake made, it could happen.”

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KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.