Health Trotter

September 02, 2021 at 08:41PM Some two weeks before U.S. President Joe Biden announced on Aug. 18 that nursing homes must require their staff to get vaccinated or risk losing their Medicare and Medicaid funding , Genesis HealthCare, which manages about 250 facilities nationwide that offer long-term care and other services, had said its workers would need to be vaccinated . “The growing spread of the Delta variant makes clear that we need to increase our vaccination rates substantially to better protect our patients, residents and employees,” read an Aug. 2 memo to employees, noting that 65% of staffers were vaccinated at that point; employees had until Aug. 23 to get their shots. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] In the memo, Dr. Richard Feifer, the company’s chief medical officer, said that while voluntary vaccination of staff was appropriate after the vaccines were first made available, “the pandemic is different now.” With the U.S. in the grips of a fourth wave of COVID-...

September 02, 2021 at 07:00PM A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here . For many climate reporters, myself included, the arrival of Hurricane Ida brought a recognizable pit to the stomach. The details of the stories emerging as the storm barreled toward the Gulf Coast were new—of course—but they all had a familiar ring to them from the storms I’ve covered in the past decade. Ida offered an example of how climate change is making hurricanes stronger . The storm demonstrated the bigger trend of extreme weather harming the poorest the most. And the hurricane—like so many Gulf Coast storms before it—threatened the oil and gas infrastructure that powers much of the rest of the country. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Welcome to climate change. The details—the storm surge, the wind speed, the death count—are going to vary. But as the effects of warming become increa...

September 02, 2021 at 04:30PM In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in late August 2005, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with building a new flood-defense network. Congress allocated billions of dollars to build pumps, dikes and floodwalls for a system meant to withstand a so-called “100-year storm.” That’s typical. In building flood protection, engineers can’t guarantee their designs can survive every possible weather event. Instead, they often build to a standard based on the 100-year storm, an extreme weather event with a 1% probability of occurring in any given year, calculated statistically from past floods and rains in a given area. That standard works fine when you’re building a dike in areas where a flood won’t cause enormous damage, like an area of farmland. But in New Orleans the metric is woefully inadequate to defend the city from another disaster, partially because the usefulness of past weather data in predicting what the fut...