The covid bug’s spread didn’t even spare faraway Antarctica
How it reached there is a lesson in humility for humanity at large
is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. undergo daily testing. Once vaccines became available to the general public, the US programmes and others required everyone to be up-to-date on their shots.
Despite all this, disease found a way to sneak in and spread. It doesn’t mean Antarctica’s policy was a failure. (I couldn’t find a record of any deaths.) It showed the futility of going for total containment or elimination by cancelling activities and using quarantines, testing and masks. But rejecting all those measures would have increased the number of cases and the odds that people would die. Before the vaccines became available, it wasn’t that rare for seemingly healthy people to get a severe case. Such cases could turn more deadly in a remote outpost far from a hospital.
The decision to resume Antarctic research activity struck a balance between risks of disease and the benefits of conducting research that cannot be done elsewhere. The Antarctic regions not covered in ice are full of lakes where scientists have found improbable life forms, giving them clues to the way life might survive on other worlds. Some scientists are monitoring the effects of global warming on the ice sheets and others are monitoring the accumulation of microplastics and PFAS (forever chemicals) on the Antarctic ice and in surrounding seas.
Shutting down everything even for part of one season had consequences. Careers were derailed, said Liggett, because researchers couldn’t get to the continent to finish field studies or experiments. For young investigators in competitive fields, that could make the difference between getting established and starting over.
Now, she said, researchers in Antarctica don’t spend all that much time worrying about covid. They’ve moved on. And doing research in such extreme conditions has always required some appetite for balancing risk and reward.
Today, fact checkers try to argue that the virus is ‘under control’ in the US despite a continued weekly death toll in the hundreds. But what counts as ‘under control’ is inherently subjective and often politically malleable.
We cannot really control what’s already unleashed. The best we can hope for is finding a balance, imposing precautions but also accepting some risk.