Science
15 Lessons Scientists Learned About Us When the World Stood Still
When the pandemic upended our lives, it gave researchers a rare chance to learn more about who we are and how we live. The simultaneous changes endured by the entire world created experiments that could never have happened otherwise. What happens when sports teams play in empty stadiums? When people see their doctors online? When the government sends people money? When women stop wearing high heels? When children stop going to school?
Research was challenging in such an extraordinary period: It’s impossible to know whether changes were caused by the specific thing scientists were studying, or by some other aspect of the pandemic — or whether we could expect the same result in normal times.
Perhaps one of the most important takeaways from the pandemic was that science is a process. Just as our understandings about masks or vaccines changed as the pandemic went on, these lessons might also change with time. For now, here are 15 things we learned.
1. Flu season doesn’t have to be so bad.
Flu virtually disappeared during the pandemic. The precautions people took to prevent the spread of Covid also played a role in preventing other respiratory viruses, experts found. Slowing their spread doesn’t necessarily require extreme measures, like stay-at-home orders, the studies showed. Simple behaviors — masking, hand-washing and avoiding social gatherings or workplaces when sick — help keep people healthy. Even those precautions haven’t stuck, though: This year, flu is surging.
2. Home-field advantage got less mysterious.
When sports teams started playing in empty stadiums, researchers could more rigorously study why players seem to do better at home. A variety of studies found that, yes, the fans made a difference: Home teams played worse without them around. They were less likely to win at home and had poorer performances — and the effect was smaller for teams that had frequently played in front of smaller crowds before the pandemic. But there was also evidence that it wasn’t just about fans. When the N.B.A. restarted play, the top 22 teams isolated in Orlando, Fla., allowing researchers to study the effects of jet lag. Rebounding, shooting accuracy and wins were all higher among players who didn’t have to travel across time zones.
3. Teenagers need to sleep in, but schools won’t let them.
Most teenagers were sleep-deprived before the pandemic — they don’t naturally tend to feel tired until around 11 p.m. and need around 10 hours of sleep a night. But when schools closed, teenagers around the world started sleeping according to their natural rhythms. They went to bed later (by about two hours, one study found) and slept longer. They woke up naturally, without an alarm or a parent, which doctors say is the sign of sufficient sleep. Teenagers lost these gains when schools reopened at their usual early start times. When high schools start later, other research has shown, it’s associated with improved concentration, behavior, attendance, learning and mental health.
4. High heels aren’t just uncomfortable — they’re dangerous.
Starting in March 2020, the number of women showing up at emergency rooms with injuries they said were from wearing high heels, like fractures or sprains, declined sharply. In 2020, there were 6,300 hospital visits for high heel injuries, down from 16,000 during each of the four years prior, according to data analyzed by Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. Now he’s looking into whether injuries have increased since people have begun socializing and working in offices again, or whether the pandemic has hastened the trend toward flats and sneakers.
5. Patients don’t always need to see a doctor in person, if at all.
Telehealth, once uncommon, accounted for half of medical visits early in the pandemic, found a study of two billion medical claims in the United States. Mostly, patients and doctors were satisfied with seeing one another online. Telehealth lowered health care costs, and was especially useful for treating chronic illnesses and for psychotherapy. And in some cases, the pandemic revealed, people don’t need to see a doctor at all. The number of people showing up with mild appendicitis decreased, while the number with complicated appendicitis didn’t change, which researchers said suggested that some patients who would typically have had surgery recovered on their own.
6. Women are better patients than men.
During the pandemic, women were more likely than men to wear masks, get vaccinated and follow other public health guidance. This was true in many countries. When men and women lived together, the men were a little more likely to follow health rules, but still less likely than the women. One group of researchers studied professional tennis players at the U.S. Open in 2020. The women were more likely than the men to skip the event because of safety concerns. This aligns with gender differences in health overall, researchers said — women are more likely to seek preventive care, visit doctors and follow health recommendations. It’s probably one reason women tend to live longer.
7. Not even being stuck at home makes men do more housework.
During lockdowns, there was a lot more domestic labor to do. More dishes piled up, with more needy children underfoot. But even when men worked from home, women still handled more of the work. Eight in 10 mothers said they managed remote schooling (fathers overestimated their contribution). That could be a reason mothers’ antidepressant use increased when schools were closed, but not fathers’. Mothers were also more likely than men to cut back at work — though they returned as soon as they could. Only couples who really wanted egalitarian relationships, researchers wrote, could overcome “the stickiness of gender inequality in household work.”
8. Alcohol restrictions can save lives.
Many places had curfews or bans on selling alcohol during lockdowns — and it appeared to have saved lives. In South Africa, hospital admissions to trauma units and deaths declined. In Southern India, traumatic brain injuries decreased. In other parts of the world, however, alcohol use increased significantly — and, along with it, domestic violence and other problems.
9. Office workers don’t need to be chained to their desks.
Even without in-person meetings, work travel and days spent in cubicles, business continued on. The lesson, said Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist: “Work from home works.” Researchers are still studying how remote work affects productivity, collaboration and creativity. But some version of it seems here to stay: Just over a quarter of paid work days are now worked from home, compared with about 7 percent prepandemic. Remote work has downsides — for innovation, mentorship and service jobs in downtowns. But it also has benefits that workers aren’t eager to give up, like no commutes, more focused work time and making it easier for parents to juggle child care. As a result, it also improves retention.
10. Computers are no replacement for classrooms.
Five years later, the data is clear: When it came to learning, remote school wasn’t enough. Across the country, in rich and poor districts, and among students of different races, test scores in reading and math fell. Many students still haven’t caught up. There was learning loss even in countries with much shorter school closures than the United States. Other factors hampered students’ learning, including poverty and stress, but the importance of attending school in person is clear: The sooner children returned to classrooms, even part-time, the better they did.
11. There’s a simple way to bring children out of poverty.
The monthly checks that the U.S. government sent most parents during the pandemic were enormously successful in bringing children out of poverty, a variety of research has found. Families used the money to pay for food, child care, health care and housing. The benefits weren’t just financial — the checks improved parents’ mental health and family well-being. In 2022, when the checks ended, child poverty doubled. The expanded child credit was part of a rapid $5 trillion expansion of the social safety net.
12. Premature births might be prevented by taking care of moms.
The first reports came from Denmark and Ireland in 2020: The number of babies born premature or at a very low birth weight plummeted early in the pandemic. Soon it became clear that this trend was global: One study estimated that worldwide, 50,000 premature births — a leading cause of infant mortality — had been prevented in just the first month of the pandemic. Researchers aren’t sure exactly why, but a leading theory is that staying home benefited pregnant women — they could rest more, and were exposed to fewer stressors, pollutants and viruses. Perhaps giving pregnant women a break would make them, and their babies, healthier.
13. Dolphins talk more when people aren’t around.
When humans were less active — what scientists call the anthropause — animals began breeding more and traveling farther. Dolphins whistled longer, birds changed their songs, sea turtles laid more eggs. But the anthropause also revealed the ways in which animals have adapted to people, and humans’ disappearance disturbed delicate balances. In some places, predators or invasive species arrived. Urban wildlife that had become accustomed to coexisting with humans, like crows or raccoons, retreated. It revealed the ways in which humans both threaten and protect the natural world, scientists said.
14. Trees and plants make people happier.
Unable to spend time in indoor public spaces, people flocked to natural areas when they could, and were better off for it. A study in Hong Kong compared people who lived near urban green spaces with those who didn’t, and found that parks provided physical activity and a refuge. A study in nine countries found that access to nature — even a balcony or garden at home — buffered the stress of lockdowns and improved people’s moods. And a study in Taiwan analyzed the “window/wall ratio” in people’s quarantine rooms and found that more windows, especially if people could see vegetation, made them happier.
15. There’s no substitute for human contact.
Across the globe, when people didn’t see other people, their mental health — as measured by loneliness, depression and anxiety — got worse. Social media was not a substitute, and often made mental health deteriorate. The pandemic made clear that socializing is particularly important for two age groups, researchers said: young adults and older adults. The older group had better mental health, as well as cardiovascular and cognitive health, when they had structured socializing, like activities at community centers or weekly visits or phone calls.
NEW YORK — Scientists have unearthed communities of marine life — including jellyfish, tubeworms and brittle stars — thriving on a whale graveyard that is millions of years old.
These graveyards form when whale carcasses fall to the sea floor, becoming a sustaining snack for nearby critters. This one, located up to 23,000 feet below the surface of the southeastern Indian Ocean, spans the largest area and is so far the deepest and oldest found.
A whale’s sheer size and the unique chemistry of its bones are the keys to forming these unique underwater neighborhoods, said Xikun Song, a biologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering.
“At the same time, the very nature of the deep ocean makes these sites exceptionally difficult for scientists to locate,” Song, who was involved with the latest find, wrote in an email.
Researchers explored the remains during multiple deep-sea submersible trips in 2023, collecting samples and mapping the extent of the necropolis. They found five carcass sites and fossils, including skulls belonging to beaked and baleen whales. The oldest bones date back 5.3 million years.
Feeding and living on the carcasses were myriad creatures, large and small, including sea cucumbers, squat lobsters and saltwater clams. Many of them are likely species that have never been documented, according to findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“The potential number of specimens is just astounding,” said paleontologist Stephen Godfrey with the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Many factors likely conspired to preserve the bones for millions of years, according to the study authors. They’re dense enough to outlast attacks from bone-eating worms, and located deep enough in the ocean to avoid getting buried by dust and loose particles. The bones also were coated with a light layer of minerals from the surrounding seawater, which may have prevented them from degrading.
Why did so many whales die here? Maybe they were already living in the area and died of natural causes. A few could have perished from exhaustion or illness caused by deep-sea diving. The area’s shape, akin to the letter V, could also have funneled the remains to their resting spot, the authors wrote.
Such discoveries are important because they clue scientists into the vibrant communities that find a way to live even in remote, hard-to-reach environments.
Studying the whale graveyards “is important for understanding how life can adapt to such extreme conditions, not only due to the lack of light and oxygen but also to the incredibly high pressure,” said study co-author and paleontologist Giovanni Bianucci with the University of Pisa in Italy in an email.
Ramakrishnan writes for The Associated Press.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Science
El Niño turns crumbling California pier into climate battleground over what to save — and who pays
As a historic El Niño supercharges the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco experiences record high seasonal sea levels, the latest structural casualty of intense wave action is prompting Bay Area politicians to call for help from the state and federal governments.
They want to rebuild a concrete pier shut down this month after officials deemed it unsafe because of cracking from decades of pounding surf and storms.
As waves crashed against the derelict structure Monday morning, U.S. Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-San José) held a news conference and asked the federal government to follow through on $50 million in climate resilience funding promised by the Biden administration but terminated by the Trump administration in 2025.
The city of Pacifica had been on the shortlist for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, managed through FEMA. California and 22 other states successfully sued to reinstate the program, but the funding has yet to be allocated.
Liccardo also asked for nearly $1 million in promised funds from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a handrail project on the pier and an additional $9 million to protect coastal bluffs.
Coastlines are already being buffeted and inundated by rising seas. With the closed-off Pacifica Municipal Pier in the background, local politicians and community members said they’re on the front lines and want to rebuild.
“Pacifica is ground zero for coastal resilience,” said state Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park), as he asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency and “help us fix this pier and help this community recover again.”
“This is very much a reminder that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he said, noting that previous attempts for funding went unheeded. “We cannot wait until infrastructure fails before we invest in protecting it.”
As climate change starts to become expensive, it prompts questions about what to protect and what to abandon.
Chad Nelson, chief executive of the Surfrider Foundation, a coastal environmental advocacy organization, said city piers provide coastal access to people who can’t swim or walk on the beach; they are often popular fishing spots and tend to serve a broad swath of their communities.
On the flip side, he said, they keep getting beat up by the ocean and costing taxpayers millions of dollars to repair or replace.
In Santa Cruz, a public wharf damaged by storms in 2024 recently reopened after $1.3 million in repairs. In Capitola, a storm-damaged wharf reopened earlier this year after $10 million had been sunk into repairs. The city is now considering building an open-air restaurant, public bathrooms, a bait shop and a boat launch.
“I think the larger question is: Are we subsidizing bad responses to problems that we know are going to persist?” he said, responding to a question about infrastructure that won’t last.
Charles Lester, director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Center at UC Santa Barbara, agreed with Nelson that it’s important to distinguish public from private benefits.
“There’s a bit of a difference between a public recreational pier, for example, and your private development that’s going to impact the beach,” he said.
And at some point, he said, we have to acknowledge things are only going to get worse.
In a white paper authored by Lester and Nelson, the two described the coming El Niño as a “reckoning” for the California coast.
El Niños result in larger waves, elevated sea levels and powerful storms — “predictable signature(s) of a climate pattern that returns every two to seven years and is expected, as the planet warms, to intensify,” they wrote.
Wave energy along the shore can run 50% above average during an El Niño, while sea levels can climb 6 to 12 inches — flooding coastal homes, roads and infrastructure. Coastal erosion increases by more than 69% during extreme El Niño events, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
During the 1997-98 El Niño, seven Pacifica seaside houses were condemned after powerful waves and storms made them unsafe and irreparable. Seventeen people in the state died as a result of the historic flooding and storms.
The funding requests for the pier also come as San Francisco sees its highest summer water levels ever. On Saturday, the National Weather Service recorded levels 1.83 feet above normal high tide. Early Monday morning, the popular Pier 14 along the city’s Embarcadero waterfront was submerged.
High surf along the coast killed a young girl in Laguna Beach, and hundreds of people have been rescued at Newport Beach. Water stranded a hiker along the cliffs of San Francisco’s Presidio — requiring a seven-hour rescue mission that ultimately left the hiker and a rescuer injured as the waves crashed them into the rocks.
“This stretch of coast has been a continuous coastal emergency declaration for almost 10 years due to the repeat damage of storms in recent El Niño years,” the mayor of Pacifica, Christine Boles, said.
Pacifica has been planning for climate change for years, she said. But climate change is outstripping those efforts, and without financial and regulatory support from the federal and state governments, the battle will be all but lost.
Science
Californian is infected with rare tick-borne illness. What to know about the deadly bacteria
A Northern Californian has been confirmed as the fourth-ever person diagnosed with a newly recognized and rare tick-borne disease that causes symptoms similar to Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
The California Department of Public Health confirmed the latest case of Rickettsia lanei bacteria in a patient who was diagnosed in April of this year. Two other California cases were reported in 2004 and 2023.
Public health officials told The Times that the infected person “was seriously ill, hospitalized and has since been discharged and is recovering.”
It is unclear how long the person was in the hospital or what their symptoms were. The state agency said it could not disclose the home county of the person but confirmed the infected person lived and worked in Northern California.
Rickettsia lanei comes from the spotted fever group Rickettsia, bacteria transmitted to humans from the bite of an infected tick.
In California three types of ticks — the American dog tick (Dermacentor similis), the Pacific Coast tick (Dermacentor occidentalis) and the brown dog tick (Rhipicephalus sanguineus) — can transmit the bacteria that cause Rocky Mountain spotted fever in humans and dogs, according to the California Department of Public Health.
Symptoms of Rocky Mountain spotted fever can range from fever and a rash to long-term effects that include damage to internal organs or neurological disorders.
The tick-borne disease has been spreading globally since the early 2000s, most notably in Mexico and Brazil, with reported fatality rates that can exceed 50%, according to a study published by UC Davis.
What is Rickettsia lanei?
Rickettsia lanei bacteria were identified this year in a few Pacific Coast ticks, including a tick in Contra Costa County, according to SFGate, where the latest case was first reported in April.
The new bacterium was added to the list of potentially transmittable pathogens in 2024 by the state public health department after its severe symptoms were studied in two cases of infected men nearly 20 years apart, according to a report published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Emerging and Infectious Diseases journal.
“Sustained investment in public health has enabled development of the advanced molecular tools that detected these infections,” the California Department of Public Health said in a statement to The Times.
According to the report, both men fell ill after spending time outdoors, one playing golf at five courses in Alameda and Contra Costa counties within 14 days of the onset of his symptoms. This first patient had fever, headaches, muscle pain, malaise, loss of appetite, diarrhea and abdominal pain, among other symptoms. His condition worsened on his third day in the hospital, according to the report. The man was ultimately in the hospital for 22 days, including 11 in the intensive care unit with a primary diagnosis of rocky mountain spotted fever and a secondary diagnosis of acute kidney injury.
The other infected person had visited and camped at a county park and state beach in San Mateo and Marin counties. The second man reported a five-day history of headaches, vomiting, light sensitivity, neck pain and confusion, according to the report. On the third day of hospitalization, the man became comatose and was intubated, the report stated. After 13 days, he was discharged with a primary diagnosis of severe Rickettsia.
Researchers have known about Rickettsia lanei since 2018 when it was detected in rabbit ticks in Sonoma County, but they didn’t know its potential harm to humans because the rabbit tick rarely bites people.
“The Pacific Coast tick, which bites humans more frequently, may occasionally acquire the organism from an infected rabbit, which is the most likely route for the rare human infections that have been identified,” the state health agency said.
Should I be worried about contracting Rickettsia lanei?
Human infections are rare but could be underreported because Rickettsia lanei symptoms are very similar to those of rocky mountain spotted fever, said Janet Foley, veterinarian and disease ecologist at UC Davis.
“I think it’s so new that I don’t know if anybody’s really gotten a grant to study it or put it under a microscope,” Foley said.
Rickettsia lanei bacteria cases could also have gone undetected for so long because some cases were not severe, she said.
Foley said Californians should be aware of Rickettsia lanei and take precautions against tick bites.
How to keep disease-carrying ticks at bay
The best way to avoid ticks and tick bites is to be vigilant in your surroundings, Foley said, noting that ticks can transmit other diseases such as Lyme disease.
To keep a disease-carrying tick at bay, Foley recommends:
- Covering up your arms and legs when outdoors by wearing pants and long-sleeved shirts.
- Staying out of the grass where a tick can latch onto your clothing. Instead stay on a cleared path.
- Wearing light-colored clothing so it’s easier to spot a tick if one jumps on you.
- After an outdoor activity, take off your clothes, toss them in the wash and take a shower.
- If your dog goes with you for outdoor activities, give it a bath and then apply tick medication.
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