The pandemic haze has been difficult to dispel for a long time, and the COVID-19 virus has not only disrupted the familiar life of many people, but is also silently changing the whole world…
Flu viruses disappearing because of COVID-19
A review article published in a subjournal of Nature in September this year pointed out that no more strains of influenza B virus B/Yamagata spectrum have been isolated worldwide from April 2020 to August 2021, which means that virulent strains of this spectrum may have become extinct.
Human influenza viruses can be classified into three types: A (A), B (B) and C (C). During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an overall decreasing trend of influenza A and B virus infections. In contrast, influenza B virus B/Yamagata spectrum infections have not been seen since April 2020.
The investigators attribute this phenomenon in large part to a series of preventive and control measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic, mainly including changes in lifestyle behaviors (e.g., increased social distance, wearing masks) and restrictions on travel and outings. These measures were equally effective in preventing and controlling influenza-like respiratory infections.
Waste from masks into the ocean
According to a study published in PNAS in November, from the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic to mid-August this year, a total of about 9.2 million tons of COVID-19-related plastic waste was generated worldwide, of which about 28,000 tons of plastic waste, including that contained in gloves and masks, went directly into the ocean.
About 87.4% of this plastic waste originates from hospitals, while 7.6% is caused by personal use, with sources of waste including bags and waste left over from COVID-19 testing.
But don’t think that this trash will stay in the ocean forever, according to models given by the study predict that most of the plastic trash debris will be transferred from the ocean surface to the beaches and the seafloor. 3 years later, about 70% of this trash generated during the pandemic will wash up on the beaches.
The rest of the trash will accumulate in the ocean, potentially forming aggregations in the northeastern Pacific Ocean and the southeastern Indian Ocean, while the plastic washed into the Arctic Circle will enter a dead-end cycle, most likely forming a circumpolar plastic aggregation zone in 2025.
Wildlife invades the human world
In the wake of the arrival of the COVID-19 virus, city closures or travel bans were declared in many places, which served to limit human activities to some extent. According to a study given in Current Biology, the number of local travelers in Santa Cruz, California decreased by 50% after the arrival of the COVID-19 virus. However, this change was also noticed by the cougars that inhabited the neighborhood.
Cougars were originally more afraid of human sounds, so when tourism was prevalent, they would try to stay away when they heard human voices, and in the researchers’ past observations, cougars would try to stay away from places where houses existed, because these places often had cars and human noise.
Now with humans rarely present, cougars’ fear of housing areas seems to be decreasing. According to the GPS data installed on them, cougars have begun to move toward the edges of cities, roaming in areas with low housing density. This phenomenon has also been seen in other parts of the world, such as cougars entering downtown Santiago, Chile, or golden jackals heading to the Tel Aviv-Jaffa urban area in Israel in broad daylight to feed.
Student performance regression
At the beginning of the pandemic, scientists spent an average of seven fewer hours a week on research. A study in Nature Communications this October found that in the second year of the pandemic, the reduction in the number of hours scientists worked per week shrank from seven to two.
Excluding research related to COVID-19 pneumonia, 36 percent fewer new projects were initiated in 2020 than in 2019. The number of papers published by these scientists fell by 9% and the number of papers submitted to academic journals fell by 15%. Typically, it takes at least 3 years from the conception of a research idea to the final publication of a paper. So in a few years, we are likely to see a decrease in the number of scientific papers due to this pandemic.
And for students, the shift from offline to online education seems to have affected their performance as well. Reuters, US Today, and several other media outlets have conducted surveys on student performance, and in Clark County, Florida, the percentage of students with F (failing) grades in all grades reached 13% in the 2020-2021 school year, compared to 6% in the previous year.
The percentage of Broward County students who received an F grade on the fall exam rose from 6 percent to 12 percent over the same period. The same thing happened in Texas, where failure rates at all schools in Austin skyrocketed during the outbreak, with nearly 12,000 students failing at least one course, a 70 percent increase over the same period last year.
Increased time spent on the Internet
During the pandemic, many people were forced to stay at home and go out less often. This also allowed many to spend more time in the online world. And according to a study by the University of Pennsylvania, advertising content on many live platforms began to increase substantially after COVID-19 hit.
Occupying the largest proportion is energy drinks, with 74 percent of the content placed in ads going to be related to it, with other more heavily placed high-calorie snacks, candy and alcohol. On the live gaming platforms analyzed by the researchers, more than 30 million people log on every day, which means that there are many people who are also influenced by ads while watching games.
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In addition to the above, there are actually many familiar things that are slowly changing, such as many large conferences moving to the web to carry out reducing carbon emissions, changes in the number of people drinking alcohol during the pandemic making more people waiting for liver transplants related to alcoholic hepatitis, and even breastfeeding rates are slipping…
As the familiarity of life is disrupted, we realize that the days without the virus are ordinary but beautiful and nostalgic… As we approach 2022, we also hope that the pandemic haze will soon lift and allow us to return to normal life soon. Source