Meltdown and Here’s Mud in Your Eye

 

As parts of our nation suffer horrific storms and incalculable flooding, those of us on the searingly warmed Western United States know what to expect when the massive wildfires are finally extinguished… until still warmer temperatures reignite our forests. We need water, we are hoping that somehow the disappearance of water-storing glaciers and mountain snow can be reversed, but we also know what happens when heavy rains, maybe any consistent measurable rain, hit vast tracts of burned-out forests.

As hydrologist Peter Gleick tells in his OpEd for the October 1st Los Angeles Times, “For those of us who work on California water challenges, the start of the new year isn’t Jan. 1; it’s Oct. 1, the official beginning of the state’s wet season. This is the time of year we start to look out over the Pacific for the storms we hope will bring life-giving precipitation, replenishing our rivers and streams, coating our mountains with snow, refilling our reservoirs and recharging our soils, forests, wetlands and groundwater.

“And while we hope for a good water year, we also hope for moderation in the face of ever-worsening climate change, for storms that don’t overwhelm our levees, flood our cities and towns, or wash away our farms and homes… And while we hope for a good water year, we also hope for moderation in the face of ever-worsening climate change, for storms that don’t overwhelm our levees, flood our cities and towns, or wash away our farms and homes.

“We’re looking ahead with no small amount of worry. The last two years have been bad: years of drought, heat, fire and ecological collapse. A repeat of the last two years would be catastrophic. Every drought is different, but with climate change upping the ante, the current drought has been one for the record books.

“We’ve seen rapidly disappearing snow that simply evaporated off the mountains rather than producing runoff, the death of native salmon when the temperatures in our rivers rose to lethal levels, parched farms, extreme fires that even now are sweeping through our dry forests, expanses of exposed mud at the bottom of our emptying reservoirs, and the nonstop overdraft of groundwater sucked up by stronger and stronger pumps from deeper and deeper wells, causing Central Valley communities on the front lines to lose access to safe and affordable drinking water.

“Will the next water year be wet or dry? We don’t know. We can only watch the weather patterns swirl and shift, the storms form, move and dissipate. But we can do far more than that to actively prepare California’s water system for whatever shapes up over the Pacific.” Though Western farmers are hopping mad at water restrictions that limit their access to water, the harsh reality is that we have allowed over-cultivation in areas where water resources are scarce, particularly crops – like nut trees – that suck up a disproportionate share of precious water.

But as we know from so many part experiences: if there is a big burn, we can expect a big litany of floods and landslides. It happens every time. Homeowners stock up on sandbags, municipalities try and clear out flood channels and sewer drainage, but we never seem able to prevent the massive damages that always follows. In California, traditionally, our limited “rainy season” is November through March. We need that rain, but… As I pointed on in numerous prior blogs, most recently in my The Burned Convention piece, we are going to need a massive new approach to managing forests and preparing for the obvious consequences of rising climate change damage… from heat, fire and water.

Meanwhile, searing summer heat has played hob with efforts to conserve water usage in the parched West. We are just running out of water resources. Reservoirs, lakes and streams are at some of the lowest levels in recorded history. Snowpack and glacial ice, as noted above, are quite literally vaporizing… even as the threat of mudslides persists. As other California communities actually have been able to reduce water consumption, Los Angeles actually increased water usage this summer by one percent. California, along with several other Western states, just may have to move from advisory to mandatory water restrictions.

“Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said Thursday [9/30] that bigger steps may be needed if the drought doesn’t ease this winter, and turning to statewide mandatory conservation measures will be an option… ‘We’re going to be watching very closely here in the coming ... months how that voluntary water conservation goes,’ Crowfoot said in a call with reporters. ‘We’ve achieved 16% water-use reduction since the last drought. So we know that Californians can step up. But the governor has been clear that we need to consider additional actions, and mandatory restrictions, you know, need to be on the table here as, if and when the drought worsens.’

“Californians in cities and towns across the state reduced water use by 1.8% overall in July as compared with the same month last year. State officials said they’ll be watching to see how the water conservation numbers look for August and subsequent months… Crowfoot said the state has been focusing on supporting cities and water agencies in pursuing ‘customized approaches’ to conservation based on their different drought situations, and has been scaling up California’s Save Our Water campaign to get the word out about the need to conserve.

“He and other state water officials spoke ahead of the Oct. 1 start of the new water year. California gets much of its rain and mountain snow between November and March, and the next several months will determine whether the state must cope with a third dry winter… ‘Heading into this winter, we’ll be watching, one, how Californians do on voluntary conservation toward that 15%,’ Crowfoot said. ‘There’s no set sort of trigger date for considering mandatory conservation, but we’ll be watching it closely.’” Los Angeles Times, October 1st. And maybe, just maybe, we need to stop calling this climate change phenomenon impacting the West a “drought.” It’s beginning to look permanent. We should call it “desertification.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and as older generations spent their lifetimes in careless and excess exploitation of resources and emitting greenhouse gasses, think of the legacy being left to the rising generations that are now saddled with the serious consequences for the rest of their lives.

Unseasonable Mega-Killer-Tornado – Climate Change or Not

 

"One word: remarkable; unbelievable would be another… 

It was really a late spring type of setup in the middle of December." 

Victor Gensini, Professor of Meteorology at Northern Illinois University

It was a killer December weekend. The fiercest and longest tornado (227 miles, 200 of which touched down in Kentucky), accompanied by other parallel twisters, leveled entire towns, crushed buildings, tossed cars, sucked animals and even structural steel into its vortex… leaving dozens and dozens of dead, numbers that we will still be counting as we sift through the rubble left behind. A Republican governor and a Democratic President came together as Americans to address the massive pain and suffering. December tornados are exceptionally rare; uniform late autumn/winter cold is not tornado season, and while tornados exist in this part of the United States, this particular rain of powerful twisters was farther east than “normal.”

Experts warned of expected strong tornados before the devastation. Weather services across the area measured the anomalous weather – unusual temperatures in the high 70s (even 80) in what would be the path of that tornado swarm on the other side of a western cold front with temperatures in the 30s, more normal for this time of the year. Cold was about to slam into warm and moist. And when it did, the experts were beyond right. While residents were aware of the danger, which may have saved lives, there was no clear prediction of exactly where tornados would touchdown. There really never is. The above map shows those paths of destruction. The small Kentucky town of Mayfield, pictured above, for all intents and purposes ceased to exist. And that was only a small part of the twister paths.

On December 12th, Suman Naishadham and Seth Borenstein, writing for the Associated Press, surveyed experts on what causes tornados and exactly why this bizarre attack of twisters happened on December 11th: “Tornadoes are whirling, vertical air columns that form from thunderstorms and stretch to the ground. They travel with ferocious speed and lay waste to everything in their path… Thunderstorms occur when denser, drier cold air is pushed over warmer, humid air, conditions scientists call atmospheric instability. As that happens, an updraft is created when the warm air rises. When winds vary in speed or direction at different altitudes - a condition known as wind shear - the updraft will start to spin.

“These changes in winds produce the spin necessary for a tornado. For especially strong tornadoes, changes are needed in both the wind's speed and direction… ‘When considerable variation in wind is found over the lowest few thousand feet of the atmosphere, tornado-producing 'supercell thunderstorms' are possible,’ said Paul Markowski, professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University. ‘That's what we had yesterday.’

“There's usually a lot of wind shear in the winter because of the big difference in temperature and air pressure between the equator and the Arctic, Gensini said… But usually, there's not a lot of instability in the winter that's needed for tornadoes because the air isn't as warm and humid, Gensini said. This time there was.” So, this set of killer tornados, punctuated with that 227-mile mega-death twister, happened because of anomalous super-warm temperatures over what became the unfortunate target area. Is that enough to attribute this destruction to climate change? The answer is a big maybe but with a statistical “highly probable.”

“Scientists are still trying to sort out the many conflicting factors about whether human-caused climate change is making tornadoes more common - or even more intense. About 1,200 twisters hit the U.S. each year - though that figure can vary - according to the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory. No other country sees as many.

“Attributing a specific storm like [what happen on 12/10-12/11] to the effects of climate change remains very challenging. Less than 10% of severe thunderstorms produce tornadoes, which makes drawing conclusions about climate change and the processes leading up to them tricky, said Harold Brooks, a tornado scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory… Some of this is due to La Niña, which generally brings warmer than normal winter temperatures to the Southern U.S. But scientists also expect atypical, warm weather in the winter to become more common as the planet warms….

“Scientists have observed changes taking place to the basic ingredients of a thunderstorm, however, as the planet warms. Gensini says in the aggregate, extreme storms are ‘becoming more common because we have a lot warmer air masses in the cool season that can support these types of severe weather outbreaks.’… The U.S. is likely to see more tornadoes occur in the winter, Brooks said, as national temperatures rise above the long-term average. Fewer events will take place in the summer, he said.” AP.

“Tornado alley” seems to have shifted eastward into the Mississippi/Ohio River Valleys, because of increases in temperature, moisture and shear. But explaining the ferocity of this tornado attack, far beyond anything in recently recorded history, suggests a permanent and growing change in regional climate realities. Normally, a tornado hits the ground and dissipates in minutes, albeit able to leave substantial destruction even for the short time it is on the ground. We really have not seen a sustained touchdown like this since 1925, and scientists believe this December event may actually exceed that record. When you look at all the ingredients that gave rise to this killer event, it’s like a list of the hallmarks of global warming.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as long as this planet is left with leaders that deny or marginalize the impact of climate change (climate “emergency”?), trying to soften the unpleasant truths and remedies to a skeptical public thus delaying what must be done, the more devastating the consequences.

As American Democracy Dies, Can We Bankrupt the Bastards?

   

“The world is becoming more authoritarian as non-democratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many  democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law, exacerbated by what threatens to become a ‘new normal’ of Covid-19 restrictions. For the fifth consecutive year, the number of countries moving in an authoritarian direction exceeds the number of countries moving in a democratic direction. In fact, the number moving in the direction of authoritarianism is three times the number moving towards democracy.”  

Introductory Paragraph of the International IDEA Global State of Democracy Report 2021, November 22nd.

The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, is an intergovernmental organization that supports sustainable democracy worldwide. Its member states include much of Europe, Latin America, parts of Asia, Canada and Africa, but notably missing are the United States, the People’s Republic of China and Russia. So, let’s start with a little observation about Sweden itself, often lambasted by vocabulary manipulating right-wing American zealots as “socialist.” 

While its citizens face higher taxes and there is a vastly lower income inequality gap between rich and everyone else than in the United States, they have universal healthcare, childcare, employee protection and powerful social safety nets that are weak or non-existent here (as the above picture of homeless Americans attests)… but they actually lack those necessary characteristics that define a socialist state: government ownership of land, factories (the means of production) and wealth in general. Hmmm? No, Sweden is not a socialist country.

Every year, International IDEA releases a report on the state of global democracy, focusing on those nations where freedom has indeed suffered. The report identifies the United States as one of the democracies that is “backsliding,” meaning that it has “experienced gradual but significant weakening of Checks on Government and Civil Liberties, such as Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Association and Assembly, over time.”

​​“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,” the report continues. We can see the evidence, which ranges from the explosive rise of right-wing militia (far in excess of their left-wing counterparts), voter suppression, the politization of the pandemic to the legitimization of vigilantism and political violence (pictured above)… supported by the angry, inciting and blame-filled, false narrative rhetoric of a former president, who now totally controls one of the two major American political parties and has been imbued by that party to exclude anyone who disagrees with him.

Aside from the Congressional hearings on the causes and consequences of the January 6th attack on the Capitol (also pictured above), the varying criminal prosecutions and investigations associated with those who promulgated that attack as well as state and federal civil and criminal investigations of Donald Trump and his associates, there just may be a new tool to crush the rise of right-wing militia’s and those who incite them with conspiracy theories and direct suggestion. Bankrupt them with civil litigation for their wrongful actions. Technically, those unlawful efforts might not even be dischargeable in bankruptcy; they just might be debts that follow the perpetrators for the rest of their lives. Lawsuits for money damages are an additional remedy, not a replacement, to criminal prosecution.

These lawsuits are beginning to generate huge-dollar verdicts against right-wing militants and those who, in support, maliciously incite violence and/or spread lies setting the stage for very toxic events. These decisions augur badly for Trump and his coterie of “do anything I say” supporters, especially in the lawsuits filed by Dominion Voting Systems against various right-wing television networks and Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who falsely claimed Dominion’s voting machines were manipulated via the Internet to hand Biden the election. Unfortunately for the defendants, the machines were not even hooked up to the Internet. 

Looking at those lawyer-enablers of fake narratives: Make them pay for their misuse of the courts. “Attorneys Gary D. Fielder and Ernest John Walker filed suit in Denver in December 2020, supposedly on behalf of 160 million American voters, alleging a vast conspiracy to steal the 2020 election. They accused, among others, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the company Dominion Voting Systems, a manufacturer of voting equipment and a favorite target of the tin-foil hat crowd. The attorneys asked for $160 billion in damages… The case was — surprise! — dismissed in April, but [the judge] wasn’t finished with the litigious duo. He hauled the attorneys up for a hearing last summer to consider possible sanctions. He asked whether it occurred to the co-counsel — Walker, a former government lawyer; Fielder, a onetime local prosecutor — that they were being used by Trump to spread his self-serving propaganda?” Mark Barabak for the Los Angeles Times, November 26th. But just before Thanksgiving, that Colorado magistrate judge, N. Reid Neureiter, ordered those two attorneys “to pay nearly $190,000 to the defendants they targeted in a meritless and irresponsible lawsuit claiming fraud in the November 2020 election — a wholly aboveboard exercise that resulted in the clear-cut and irrefutable defeat of the nation’s 45th president.” Barabak. And mass media liars?

How about Infowars’ host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones? He was found liable in early November for damages in Connecticut lawsuits brought by parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting over Jones' claims that the massacre was a hoax. Connecticut Judge Barbara Bellis took the rare step of defaulting Jones in the defamation lawsuits for his and his companies' “failure to produce critical material information that the plaintiffs needed to prove their claims.” The default means the judge found in favor of the parents. Bellis said Jones and his attorneys showed a “callous disregard of their obligations to fully and clearly comply with discovery and court orders.”

The ruling in the Connecticut lawsuits essentially mirrors a Texas judge’s September 27th order to default Jones in three similar defamation lawsuits filed by victims’ families there with similar accusations that Jones repeatedly ignored orders to turn over records to the families’ lawyers. Now the lawsuits in both states will be turned over to juries, likely sometime next year, to hear the extent to which Jones’ conspiracy theories harmed the families. Expect large damage awards, which may result in debts that may not be dischargeable in bankruptcy and which are likewise unlikely to be reversed on appeal.

November produced another key verdict against right-wing militants in a judicial ruling in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a “jury awarded more than $25 million in damages Tuesday [11/23] against white nationalist leaders for violence that erupted during the 2017 Unite the Right rally… After a nearly month-long civil trial, a jury in U.S. District Court in Charlottesville deadlocked on two key claims but found the white nationalists liable on four other counts in the lawsuit filed by nine people who suffered physical or emotional injuries during two days of demonstrations.

“The verdict is a rebuke to the white nationalist movement, particularly for the two dozen individuals and organizations who were accused in a federal lawsuit of orchestrating violence against African Americans, Jews and others in a meticulously planned conspiracy… Lawyers for the plaintiffs invoked a 150-year-old law passed after the Civil War to shield freed slaves from violence and protect their civil rights. Commonly known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, the law contains a rarely used provision that allows private citizens to sue other citizens for civil rights violations…

“Hundreds of white nationalists descended on Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally on Aug. 11 and 12, 2017 [pictured above], ostensibly to protest city plans to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. During a march on the University of Virginia campus, white nationalists chanted, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ surrounded counter-protesters and threw tiki torches at them. The following day, an avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman and injuring dozens of other people… Then-President Trump touched off a political firestorm when he failed to immediately denounce the white nationalists, saying there were ‘very fine people on both sides.’

“The driver of the car, James Alex Fields Jr., is serving life in prison for murder and hate crimes. Fields is one of 24 defendants named in the lawsuit funded by Integrity First for America, a nonprofit civil rights organization formed in response to the violence in Charlottesville.” Associated Press, November 24th. Another case unlikely to be reversed on appeal, and one that very likely will not be discharged in bankruptcy. 

How about all those lawyers representing these obviously false narratives?

Where red state prosecutors are loath to charge and try these villainous perpetrators of violence and damaging conspiracy theories, where biased juries and Trump-leaning judges find ways to distort otherwise solid prosecutions, even where the federal Department of Justice is overwhelmed, perhaps a tsunami of private plaintiff civil litigation against them will exert the chilling effect necessary to shelter our democracy from overthrow. Even as the GOP attempts to strangle fair and free elections, thus working in the opposite direction. Step hard over those lines protecting democracy and prepare to be personally sued for more money than you are likely to earn in a lifetime. Stand back and standby! 

I’m Peter Dekom, and there are many ways to skin this villainous cat; private civil litigation is a legitimate and effective way for true believers in America to preserve our democracy.

What About the Kids?

 

Police in Key West, Florida, 2018, with an 8-yr-old

“I can’t go to sleep… I keep thinking about the police coming.”

10-year-old Royal Smart remembering police guns, handcuffs, freezing cold… when he was 8 (no one was arrested in the weapons search).

The majority of police departments across the United States have few if any specialized rules and procedures for handling young children. Officers are generally provided limited if any training when dealing with such young charges, and as we shall see, a disproportionate number of children traumatized by the application of adult police procedures and restraints are black or Latino. Many of these young charges are simply caught up in a police search, usually under a warrant, and are simply restrained during the search. They are often not the subject of the search or likely to be arrested, regardless of the result.

Writing for the Associated Press (November 25th), Helen Wieffering, Colleen Long and Camille Fassett provide details of the AP’s analysis of the available data: “Kids are still an afterthought in reforms championed by lawmakers and pushed by police departments. But in case after case, an Associated Press investigation has found that children as young as 6 have been treated harshly — even brutally — by officers of the law.

“They’ve been handcuffed, felled by stun guns, taken down and pinned to the ground by officers often far larger than they were. Departments nationwide have few or no guardrails to prevent such incidents… The AP analyzed data on about 3,000 instances of police use of force against children younger than 16 over the last 11 years. The data, provided to the AP by Accountable Now, a project of the Leadership Conference Education Fund aiming to create a comprehensive use-of-force database, include incidents from 25 police departments in 17 states.

“It’s a small representation of the 18,000 police agencies nationwide and the millions of daily encounters police have with the public… But the information gleaned is troubling… Black children made up more than 50% of those who were handled forcibly, though they are only 15% of the U.S. child population. They and other minority kids are often perceived by police as being older than they are. The most common types of force were takedowns, strikes and muscling, followed by firearms pointed at or used on children. Less often, children faced other tactics, such as the use of pepper spray or police dogs.

“In Minneapolis, officers pinned children with their body weight at least 190 times. In Indianapolis, more than 160 kids were handcuffed; in Wichita, Kan., police officers drew or used their Tasers on kids at least 45 times. Most children in the data set are teenagers, but the data included dozens of cases of children age 10 or younger who were also subject to police force… Force is occasionally necessary to subdue children, some of whom are accused of serious crimes.

“Police reports obtained for a sample of incidents show that some kids who were stunned or restrained were armed; others were undergoing mental health crises and were at risk of harming themselves. Still other reports showed police force escalating after kids fled from police questioning. In St. Petersburg, Fla., for instance, officers chased a Black boy on suspicion of attempted car theft after he pulled the handle of a car door. He was 13 years old and 80 pounds, and his flight ended with his thigh caught in a police K-9’s jaw.” No one is suggesting that young perpetrators should go unrestrained and unpunished, although we have a juvenile “justice” system that is supposed to be designed for more age-appropriate procedures, hearings and, where necessary, confinement. But…

The younger the child, the more their minds and bodies are growing and changing. Many are too young and lack the mental capacity to understand the gravity of their offenses. Yet too many children are restrained and harmed in situations were they are not even suspected of a crime. Most police officers simply do not know what to do. “There are no laws that specifically prohibit police force against children. Some departments have policies that govern how old a child must be to be handcuffed, but very few mention age in their use-of-force policies. While some offer guidance on how to manage juveniles accused of crime or how to handle people in mental distress, the AP could find no policy that addresses these issues together.

“That’s by design, policing experts said, in part so that officers can make critical decisions in the moment. But that means police don’t receive the training they need to deal with kids… ‘Adolescents are just so fundamentally different in so many respects, and the techniques that officers are accustomed to using ... it just doesn’t lend itself to the interaction going well with youth,’ said Dylan Jackson, a criminologist at Johns Hopkins University, who is working with the Baltimore Police Department on juvenile encounters… The trauma lasts. Kids can’t sleep. They withdraw, act out. Their brains are still developing, and the encounters can have long-term impact, psychologists said.” AP. 

The excuse that “that’s the way we’ve always done it” may justify these harsh treatments where “law and order” politics trumps tailoring individual responses to fit the situation. It shouldn’t take a junior George Floyd result to trigger a more humane response. This is the 21st century, and our experts have evolved a vastly more sophisticated knowledge base around disciplining children. Spanking in public schools ended decades ago. It’s time to take our specialized knowledge and apply that knowledge to train police officers how to deal appropriately yet effectively with children… either those simply at a crime or search scene or those sought because they are suspected of a crime.

I’m Peter Dekom, and when we learn more about the impact of child trauma, it would seem obvious to take that knowledge and apply it to police interfacing with children.

Huh? What? Oh….

 

As vaccines are deployed more widely, as new containment treatments are discovered and approved, at least here in the United States, COVID-19 is beginning to fade. We are becoming less cautious, more frustrated with preventative measures… just plain burning out on the whole damned COVID thang. But still, we are not really sure how many people succumbed to the disease. The November 6th The Economist explains: “On November 1st, the official global covid death toll passed 5m. But these official numbers are unreliable, not least because data from testing for the virus can be patchy. A more reliable method to count death tolls is to measure ‘excess deaths’—how many more people died during a year than one would expect in normal years. According to The Economist’s excess-death tracker, the actual number of people lost to the virus is probably closer to 17m.

“The World Health Organisation said [in the first week in November] that Europe is again the centre of the covid pandemic, and warned that the disease may kill another 500,000 Europeans by February. It blamed near-record caseloads on sketchy vaccine take-up.” Even in the US, governmental tracking agencies often have legacy computer systems that cannot communicate with each other. Different jurisdictions have tracked COVID with a clear political slant. For example, Florida fired a senior data software engineer because she tracked genuine COVID mortality statistics despite an order from the governor to report deaths as solely attributable to any other key symptom (like pneumonia). 

But we still have to ask: Is the United States closer to ending its pandemic spread than most of the developed world? Merck has even released a treatment, molnupiravir, that significantly reduces the severity of the disease if applied early enough. With 28 million 5- to 11-year-old children becoming eligible for the vaccine, even experts are hopeful that COVID will just be an endemic annoyance with decreasing impact on all of us, much like HIV which is dramatically contained but still not cured. The inoculation of children seems to be administered as much to prevent the spread of the disease as it is to protect the young.

We know that different individuals who have had COVID noted different symptoms. Some had little or no inconvenience. Others died. Well over 750,000 of us (or more if the above trend is accurate). Others survived with those long-term symptoms (“long COVID”), some that never seem to go away. It’s a crap shoot, and too many false “cures,” “preventatives,” “treatments” and stupid beliefs of deified natural power have taken down some of the most stalwart resisters. We haven’t lived with the disease long enough to understand what that virus really does to the body. But as we gather more data, some of the findings are particularly disturbing; the aftereffects of the disease in some just might be more permanent… or more intense. From a litany of micro-clots to perhaps permanent brain damage.

“The disease may be best known for its ability to rob people of their breath, but as the pandemic spread, patients began reporting a disconcerting array of cognitive and psychiatric issues — memory lapses, fatigue and a mental fuzziness that became known as brain fog. There were also more acute problems, including paranoia, hallucinations, thoughts of suicide and psychosis… This strange constellation of symptoms has led researchers to suspect that the disease is mounting a direct attack on the brain. Researchers want to figure out how — and what the assault’s long-term effects may be.” Amina Kahn, writing for the November 5th Los Angeles Times.

Science fiction movies have often dealt with invasive species focusing on eating the human brain. It’s ugly and scary. But when it gets real, those fictional feelings that fade when we leave the theater can be downright terrifying. Adults and children. And while long COVID is particularly rare in children who contract the disease, for those who contract severe infections, the horribles can even result in death. There may be an associated vulnerability – like diabetes or obesity – or it could be the luck of the draw. We used to believe the disease did not infect children, but variants changed that assumption.

For a few children, there is also the possibility of multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C), a condition where different body parts can become inflamed, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal organs. Kawasaki disease has also become associated with a few children who have succumbed to COVID infections. Kawasaki disease causes swelling (inflammation) in the walls of medium-sized arteries throughout the body. It primarily affects children. The inflammation tends to affect the coronary arteries, which supply blood to the heart muscle. And yes, it can be fatal. In that small percentage of children who have longer effects, the November 6th NJ.com reports: “The most common symptoms of long COVID in children and teens include the following:

• Brain fog

• Fatigue

• Trouble breathing

• Cough

• Joint or muscle pain

• Chest or stomach pain

• Fever

• Headache

• Mood swings

• Lightheadedness upon standing

• Heart palpitations

• Loss of sense of smell or taste

 

“Experts say certain symptoms present themselves only in children when it comes to long COVID.” For most children, even with some form of long COVID, those symptoms tend to disappear in a few weeks. 

 

OK, there are risks everywhere, but what are we learning about the longer-term impact of COVID on the brain? In kids and adults? Working in her laboratory at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, Dr. Maura Boldrini is examining the brain cells of people who have died from COVID-19. What she has found is that in some, the virus may impact the brain as well as the respiratory system. “Researchers have found signs that the virus can establish a foothold of sorts on the periphery of the brain, where the protective blood-brain barrier opens up to allow key molecules to slip through. One of those places is the olfactory bulb, which can be reached through the nose — a fact that could explain why so many COVID-19 patients lose their sense of smell… Yet scientists have so far found little evidence that the virus penetrates any deeper than that. Instead, they’ve seen the type of damage caused by strokes, as well as the blood clots that may have precipitated them.

 

“That’s part of why Boldrini and many others suspect that inflammation — the immune system’s all-hands-on-deck response to an invader — may play an essential role in the brain damage experienced by COVID-19 patients… Inflammation can trigger blood clots, and once a clot forms, inflammation increases around it. It’s similar to what’s seen in people who experience traumatic brain injury, including football players, military veterans and victims of car accidents… ‘People that have this kind of trauma in the brain have presented with sudden changes in behavior and personality and suicide and other brain symptoms,’ Boldrini says. It’s eerily similar to what many COVID-19 patients face — and she doesn’t think that’s a coincidence.” Los Angeles Times, November 6th. In a world of hyper-accelerating technology research, laced with a tsunami of conspiracy of false-hope remedies, there is little patience among many for the kinds of answers only time can generate. Instant gratification is simply not an option!

 

I’m Peter Dekom, and we tend to forget that we simply have not had that much time and experience with the novel coronavirus to fully understand the disease or deal with its long-term implications, and there is no substitute for that learning curve.