A Bay Area man says he tested positive for COVID-19 and was diagnosed with monkeypox at the same time.
Mitcho Thompson of Sebastopol said shortly after he tested positive for COVID-19 at the end of June and was feeling wiped out, he noticed red lesions on his back, legs, arms and neck.
"The doctor was very certain that I have monkeypox and that I had both," Thompson said. "That was the question. Could I get them at the same time? And he said, 'Yes, yes, yes.'"
Thompson said the one-two punch of viruses led to weeks of misery. He said he felt like he had a horrible flu.
"Really sick," he said. "And the worst of it was honestly where I just could barely get out of bed and you could barely even get a drink of water."
Dr. Dean Winslow, professor of medicine and infectious disease specialist at Stanford, said while it is rare, it is possible for someone to get both monkeypox and COVID-19 at the same time.
"It's certainly not impossible for that to occur," he said. "It's just incredibly bad luck. They are very different viruses."
Surveillance is a core tool of public health, fundamental to capturing the course of disease and the consequences of interventions. Alexander Langmuir, who founded the CDCs renowned Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), offered the still widely used definition of surveillance in a 1963 New England Journal of Medicine article: The continued watchfulness over the distribution and trends of incidence [of a disease] through the systematic collection, consolidation, and evaluation of morbidity and mortality reports and other relevant data.
Since its start, we have tracked the COVID-19 pandemic with indicators of infection, disease, and death. Case reports and outbreaks, like that on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, signaled the pandemics start. Surveillance mechanisms were quickly implemented, following the established paradigm of monitoring positive tests, cases and outbreaks, hospitalizations, and deaths. With this pandemic, advances in data sciences supported the successful implementation of valuable, encompassing national and global databases, such as the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. The tracking of virus concentration in wastewater has proved to be an informative addition to the surveillance toolbox.
An article in Fridays Denver Post addressed the decision by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) to stop publicly reporting outbreaks in schools. The article quotes school officials who were surprised by the announcement and concerns about the implications of the change. CDPHE made the change to bring reporting of COVID-19 into alignment with how reporting for other respiratory pathogens is handled, part of the states plan for a return to normalcy. A change was made earlier to no longer post daily hospitalization count.
Langmuirs definition did not directly acknowledge that the relationships of indicators with the underlying public health problem may change over time. For COVID-19, that is certainly the case, complicating interpretation of trends over longer periods of time. The Los Angeles Times commented on this topic on Saturday. The case-fatality rate fell as clinical care improved over the pandemics first months; vaccination reduced the risk of severe disease and death as did the arrival of therapeutic agents, e.g., paxlovid; and the availability of home testing has undoubtedly affected reported case numbers and test positivity, as ascertained by public health agencies. The Colorado Modeling Group has used hospitalization count in its model to describe the pandemics course in Colorado and project where the epidemic curve is heading. Beginning around March of this year, the states hospitals stopped routine testing of all persons admitted. The hospitalization count had included persons admitted because of COVID-19 and persons incidentally found positive because of testing on admission. The modeling team now makes an adjustment for this change.
Surveillance remains critical for tracking the pandemic and trends in the established indicators in the shorter-term. The response to the change in reporting described by the Denver Post is reflective of how intertwined the pandemic has become in our lives. I still track CDPHEs dashboard, but no longer on a daily basis. And what does surveillance show for Colorado? Remarkably, the plateau at 300+ hospitalized Coloradans continues into its fifth week.
During the Lance Armstrong era, my wife and I became avid watchers of the Tour de France, which is in progress through this month. COVID-19 is affecting the race, sending some important riders home. So far, eight test-positive riders have left the tour, but two have been allowed to remain. Fellow tour afficionados are aware that the prospects of 2021 winner, Tadej Pogaar, have likely been harmed by the departure of two key team members.
What is the most sensitive way to track COVID-19 among riders and their support crews at the Tour? Testing protocols come from the Union Cycliste Internationale or UCI. They require pre-race testing and testing on rest days, and teams may do additional testing. A rule has been dropped that required any team with two or more riders testing positive by PCR in seven days to abandon the tour. The handling of riders (or other personnel) offers the possibility of keeping riders testing positive in the tour, as with two riders judged to have viral titers low enough to make them non-infectious and were allowed to remain in the race. This decision is left to the team physician, the tour COVID physician, and the UCI Medical Director. I am unaware of criteria for making such a decision, but I know that the race must go on.
Jonathan Samet, MD, MSDean, Colorado School of Public Health
Categories: Colorado School of Public Health | Tags: ColoradoSPH COVID-19 Dean's Notes ColoradoSPH Dean's Notes
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Nearly 9 in 10 Californians now live in counties with a high COVID-19 community level, in which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends universal masking in indoor public spaces.
The new developments underscore the increasing concerns about super-infectious subvariants of Omicron that have fueled a summer coronavirus wave.
With the coronavirus resurgent and cases and hospitalizations on the rise, Los Angeles is poised to become the first Southern California county to reinstate mandatory public indoor masking.
L.A. County officially entered the high community level Thursday. Should it remain there for the next two weeks, the county will reissue an indoor mask mandate with an effective date of July 29.
No other California county has publicly tied its placement on the CDCs community level scale to a renewal of masking orders. Along with L.A., 41 other counties are in the high level as of this week.
Most places recommend, but do not require, masking indoors while in public.
Besides Los Angeles County, the other counties that on Thursday entered the high COVID-19 community level category for the first time since mid-March are San Diego, Orange, Santa Barbara, Imperial and Tehama.
A total of 42 of Californias 58 counties are now in the high COVID-19 community level, in which 87% of Californias residents live. Just a week earlier, 41% of Californians lived in the 34 counties with a high COVID-19 community level.
Ventura County was the first Southern California county to enter the high COVID-19 community level, which it did on June 30.
With case rates high, counties are generally entering the high COVID-19 community level when hospitalizations are exceeding a threshold of 10 new weekly coronavirus-positive hospitalizations for every 100,000 residents.
(There is also another threshold to enter the high COVID-19 community level based on the percentage of staffed hospital inpatient beds occupied by COVID-19 patients but counties are generally hitting the other threshold first.)
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in February said it chose these measures as a threshold to enter the high COVID-19 community level because it provided a good predictor of deaths, new hospital admissions and use of intensive care units.
The system was set up as a way to help inform people when it was relatively more important to mask up in indoor public settings. Layered prevention strategies like staying up to date on vaccines and wearing masks can help prevent severe disease and reduce strain on the healthcare system, the CDC said in February.
The California Department of Public Health has strongly recommended universal masking in indoor public spaces for those age 2 and above ever since the state lifted a two-month-old mask order in February.
Coronavirus case rates in Los Angeles County are continuing to rise at a fast pace.
L.A. County is now averaging about 6,800 new coronavirus cases a day, representing a 35% week-over-week increase. Thats the highest week-over-week increase seen since the days leading up to the Memorial Day weekend.
The latest rate is higher than the peak seen in last summers Delta wave, which rose to 3,500 cases a day. Last winters Omicron wave peaked at 42,000 cases a day.
On a per capita basis, L.A. County as of Friday was reporting 469 coronavirus cases a week for every 100,000 residents; a rate of 100 or more is considered high. The coronavirus case rate hasnt been this high since early February.
A renewed mandate for Los Angeles County would apply indoors for those 2 and older at a familiar host of establishments and venues including shared office space, manufacturing and retail settings, event spaces, restaurants and bars, gyms and yoga studios, educational settings and childrens programs.
Importantly, though, masks would not be required for those using outdoor spaces, as the risk of transmission in those settings is significantly lower than it is indoors.
Patrons also would be able to take off their masks indoors when actively eating or drinking.
We are not closing anything down. We are not asking people not to gather with the people they love. We are not asking you to forgo activities you love, Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said last week. Were asking you to take a sensible step when theres this much transmission, with a highly transmissible variant, to go ahead and put back on a well-fitting, high-filtration mask when youre indoors around others. And I think thats the prudent thing to do.
The new wave has been fueled by BA.5, a super-infectious subvariant that has shown the ability to reinfect even those who recently contracted an earlier Omicron subvariant.
Fourth of July gatherings and travel are associated with a rise in COVID-19 numbers in Hidalgo County, according to Health Authority Dr. Ivan Melendez.
Dr. Melendez believes most of the cases are caused by mutations of the omicron variant known as B.A.4 and B.A.5.
The reason that we believe that its this particular variant is because of the pattern of which it follows, Dr. Melendez said. So, it follows the pattern of easy infectability, not as many people in the hospital as before.
Melendez explains that mutations of the B.A.4 and B.A.5 variants cause the virus to spread rapidly.
The variants have one, the ability to penetrate the host cell much better because they're easier to attach to it, Dr. Melendez said. Two, theyre able to hide from the immune system because theyve changed so much that the immune system doesnt recognize it.
Health experts say while it spreads easier, it doesn't appear to cause serious illness. Dr. Melendez says most of the people whove been hospitalized have either never been vaccinated or are not up-to-date on their vaccinations.
So, if youve not been updated in six months and you have risk factors, absolutely, that's what we're seeing in the hospitals."
Dr. Melendez says this wont be the last time the county sees an increase.
We expect a continued increase as we get closer to the winter months, so the only thing that you can do to keep you out of the hospital and to keep you from dying is pay attention and be vaccinated, Dr. Melendez said.
Dr. Melendez said a lot of hospitalized COVID-19 patients aren't coming in because of the virus. Rather, they're coming in for underlying issues and are not getting better because they have COVID-19.
The county's next COVID-19 report is expected to be released on Tuesday.
COVID-19 vaccines were more effective during the winter omicron surge, when BA.1 accounted for most cases, than they were this spring, when BA.2/BA.2.12.1 prevailed, according to a CDC study.
The results bolster the case for vaccine-makers to tweak their formulas and issue omicron-targeted doses, which are expected to debut this fall pending FDA and CDC approval.
Before patients received any boosters, vaccine effectiveness was 61 percent between December 2021 and March 2022 when omicron BA.1 accounted for more than 75 percent of cases. Between March and June, when BA.2/BA.2.12.1 was dominant, that same measure fell to 24 percent, according to the study.
To determine efficacy, the researchers evaluated emergency care visits and hospitalization rates among those with Pfizer and Moderna's two-dose vaccines and subsequent booster shots.
Boosters helped bridge the gap but still shrunk in efficacy over time. Among patients with a booster when BA.1 made up the majority of cases, vaccine efficacy was 92 percent. When BA.2.12.1 surpassed BA.1, vaccine efficacy was 69 percent among those with a booster dose.
When fourth booster doses for adults over 50 rolled out in late March, the study found they also improved vaccine efficacy up to 80 percent.
The overall decrease in efficacy isn't too surprising, since the vaccines were more effective during delta's reign before omicron entered the scene, according to the study. But as omicron subvariant BA.5 now sweeps the nation and COVID-19-related hospital admissions rise, eyes are on vaccine manufacturers to reverse this trend.
The raceto develop a vaccine against covid-19 was a matter of life and death. A recent study found that in 2021,20m lives were saved by the jabs. Researchers at Airfinity, a life-sciences data firm, have used those numbersalong with data on which shots were most widely administered in each countryto estimate which one averted the most deaths.
Airfinity found that more than half of lives saved around the world could be attributed to just two vaccines.
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A nurse fills up syringes with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccines for residents who are over 50 years old and immunocompromised and are eligible to receive their second booster shots in Waterford, Michigan, U.S., April 8, 2022. REUTERS/Emily Elconin
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July 18 (Reuters) - The following is a summary of some recent studies on COVID-19. They include research that warrants further study to corroborate the findings and that has yet to be certified by peer review.
Blood thickness linked with death risk in severe COVID-19
Patients hospitalized with COVID-19 whose blood flows less freely than normal are at higher risk of death from complications, a U.S. study showed. The findings indicate that measurement of blood viscosity, or blood thickness, should be a regular part of these patients' medical work-up, the researchers said.
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High blood viscosity impairs flow to small vessels and increases the risk of blood clots, the researchers noted in the study published on Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Data on 5,621 COVID-19 patients treated at six New York City-area hospitals between February 2020 and November 2021 showed that patients with high viscosity had death rates 38% to 60% higher than those with low blood viscosity. The inflammation associated with COVID-19 likely contributes to high viscosity, which in turn can lead to damage to blood vessel linings and clogging of arteries, according to the researchers.
"This study demonstrates the importance of checking for blood viscosity in COVID-19 patients early in hospital admission, which is easily obtained through routine lab work," Dr. Robert Rosenson of the Mount Sinai Health System said in a statement. His team called for further studies to see whether measures to reduce blood viscosity, such as treatment with blood thinning drugs, would be helpful.
Few excess effects of COVID-19 booster, flu shot together
People who get a flu shot at the same time as a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine booster are only slightly more likely to report side effects than people who get the booster by itself, U.S. researchers found. Earlier studies found that giving flu shots and COVID-19 vaccines at the same time did not make either one less effective and may be more convenient. As reported on Friday in the journal JAMA Network Open, researchers tracked 981,099 American teens and adults who got vaccine boosters with or without flu shots in September or October 2021. In the following week, reports by study participants of a "systemic" reaction such as fatigue, headache or body aches were 8% higher for those who simultaneously received the flu shot and the Pfizer-BioNTech booster and 11% higher for those who got the flu shot and a Moderna booster, compared to the risk in people who received only an mRNA vaccine booster. Based on the results, "clinicians can confidently inform patients that concurrent administration of the COVID-19 booster and seasonal influenza vaccine is both safe and associated with only a slight increase in adverse events compared with the COVID-19 booster alone," a separate team of researchers wrote in an accompanying editorial.
Kids with vaccine allergies safely receive Pfizer shots
The Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 vaccine can be safely given to children even after a suspected allergic reaction to the first dose or a suspected allergy to vaccine ingredients polyethylene glycol (PEG) or polysorbate, according to immunologists. Other allergists previously reported that second doses can be given to adults with suspected reactions to the first dose. Study results involving a small number of children were published on Wednesday in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice. At a specialized vaccine clinic, nine children were evaluated after having an allergic reaction to the first dose of the vaccine, including three who experienced potentially life-threatening anaphylaxis. All nine children - including one who was premedicated - eventually received the second dose "with minimal or no symptoms," the researchers said. Another three children with histories of potential PEG/polysorbate reactions opted to receive the vaccine at the clinic and tolerated both doses without allergic symptoms.
"Any child who experiences potential anaphylaxis following vaccination should absolutely be evaluated," study leader Dr. Joel Brooks of Children's National Hospital in Washington said in a news release. "The benefits and risks must be weighed carefully when it comes to a second dose. However, we have demonstrated that for this study, most of the initial allergic reactions did not meet the criteria of anaphylaxis and our participants were able to tolerate a second dose of the vaccine."
Click for a Reuters Global COVID-19 Tracker and for a Reuters COVID-19 Vaccination Tracker.
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Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Will Dunham
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
CURRENT ACTIVE CASES PER COUNTY: Barbour (21), Berkeley (147), Boone (51), Braxton (19), Brooke (14), Cabell (173), Calhoun (6), Clay (12), Doddridge (7), Fayette (93), Gilmer (9), Grant (19), Greenbrier (62), Hampshire (42), Hancock (18), Hardy (23), Harrison (128), Jackson (20), Jefferson (64), Kanawha (271), Lewis (29), Lincoln (36), Logan (50), Marion (100), Marshall (47), Mason (47), McDowell (43), Mercer (160), Mineral (32), Mingo (41), Monongalia (152), Monroe (24), Morgan (13), Nicholas (51), Ohio (57), Pendleton (4), Pleasants (17), Pocahontas (17), Preston (21), Putnam (99), Raleigh (189), Randolph (12), Ritchie (15), Roane (38), Summers (9), Taylor (22), Tucker (11), Tyler (14), Upshur (35), Wayne (33), Webster (16), Wetzel (35), Wirt (0), Wood (133), Wyoming (58). To find the cumulative cases per county, please visit coronavirus.wv.gov and look on the Cumulative Summary tab which is sortable by county.
West Virginians ages 6 months and older are recommended to get vaccinated against the virus that causes COVID-19. Those 5 years and older should receive a booster shot when due. Second booster shots for those age 50 and over who are 4 months or greater from their first booster are recommended, as well as for younger individuals over 12 years old with serious and chronic health conditions that lead to being considered moderately to severely immunocompromised.
Visit the WV COVID-19 Vaccination Due Date Calculator, a free, online tool that helps individuals figure out when they may be due for a COVID-19 shot, making it easier to stay up-to-date on COVID-19 vaccination. To learn more about COVID-19 vaccines, or to find a vaccine site near you, visit vaccinate.wv.gov or call 1-833-734-0965.
To locate COVID-19 testing near you, please visit https://dhhr.wv.gov/COVID-19/pages/testing.aspx.
In a typical spring, breeding seabirds and human seabird-watchers flock to Stora Karls, an island off the coast of Sweden.
But in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic canceled the tourist season, reducing human presence on the island by more than 90 percent. With people out of the picture, white-tailed eagles moved in, becoming much more abundant than usual, researchers found.
That might seem like a tidy parable about how nature recovers when people disappear from the landscape if not for the fact that ecosystems are complex. The newly numerous eagles repeatedly soared past the cliffs where a protected population of common murres laid its eggs, flushing the smaller birds from their ledges.
In the commotion, some eggs tumbled from the cliffs; others were snatched by predators while the murres were away. The murres breeding performance dropped 26 percent, Jonas Hentati-Sundberg, a marine ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, found. They were flying out in panic, and they lost their eggs, he said.
The pandemic was, and remains, a global human tragedy. But for ecologists, it has also been an unparalleled opportunity to learn more about how people affect the natural world by documenting what happened when we abruptly stepped back from it.
A growing body of literature paints a complex portrait of the slowdown of human activity that has become known as the anthropause. Some species clearly benefited from our absence, consistent with early media narratives that nature, without people bumbling about, was finally healing. But other species struggled without human protection or resources.
Human beings are playing this dual role, said Amanda Bates, an ocean conservation scientist at the University of Victoria in Canada. We are, she said, acting as threats to wildlife but also being custodians for our environment.
The research has actionable lessons for conservation, scientists say, suggesting that even modest changes in human behavior can have outsize benefits for other species. Those shifts could be especially important to consider as the human world roars back to life and summer travel surges, potentially generating an anthropulse of intense activity.
A lot of people will feel like they want to catch up on holiday travel, work travel, catch up on life, said Christian Rutz, a behavioral ecologist at the University of St Andrews who introduced the concept of an anthropulse in a recent paper. (He and Dr. Bates were also part of the team that coined anthropause.)
Humans will and should travel and should enjoy nature, he added. But I think it can be quite subtle tweaks to how we do things that can still have a huge impact.
When the pandemic hit, many human routines came to a sudden halt. On April 5, 2020 the peak of the pandemic lockdowns 4.4 billion people, or 57 percent of the planet, were under some sort of movement restriction, scientists estimated. Driving decreased by more than 40 percent, while air traffic declined by 75 percent.
These sudden shifts allowed researchers to tease apart the effects of human travel from the many other ways we shape the lives of other species.
We know that humans impact ecosystems by changing the climate, we know that they have dramatic impacts by changing land use, like razing down habitat and building shopping malls, said Christopher Wilmers, a wildlife ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. But this sort of strips all that away, and says, Oh, well, what are the impacts of human mobility itself?
With humans holed up in their homes cars stuck in garages, airplanes in hangars, ships in docks air and water quality improved in some places, scientists found. Noise pollution abated on land and under the sea. Human-disturbed habitats began to recover.
In March 2020, Hawaiis Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve, a popular snorkeling destination, closed and remained shuttered for nearly nine months. The pandemic reset the visitor impacts to zero, said Kuulei Rodgers, a coral reef ecologist at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.
Without swimmers kicking up sediment, water clarity improved by 56 percent, Dr. Rodgers and her colleagues found. Fish density, biomass and diversity increased in waters that had previously been thick with snorkelers.
Indeed, scientists found that many species had moved into new habitats as pandemic lockdowns changed what ecologists have sometimes called the landscape of fear.
All animals are, you know, trying not to die, said Kaitlyn Gaynor, an ecologist at the University of British Columbia. That drive to survive prompts them to keep their distance from potential predators, including humans. We are noisy and novel and resemble their predators and in many cases are their predators, Dr. Gaynor said.
For instance, the mountain lions that live in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California typically stay away from cities. But after local shelter-in-place orders took effect in 2020, the animals became more likely to select habitats near the urban edge, Dr. Wilmers and his colleagues found.
Dr. Wilmers speculated that the mountain lions were responding to changes in the urban soundscape, which might typically be filled with human chatter and the rumble of passing cars. But as soon as those audio stimuli are gone, then the animals are, like, Well, might as well go see if theres anything to eat here, he said.
Just north, in a newly hushed San Francisco, white-crowned sparrows began singing more quietly, yet the distance across which they could communicate more than doubled, researchers found.
The birds also began singing at lower frequencies, a shift that is associated with better performance and an improved ability to defend territory and woo mates. Their songs were much more sexy, said Elizabeth Derryberry, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and an author of the study.
And it was overnight, she added. Which kind of gives you hope that if you reduce noise levels in an area, you can have immediate positive impact.
But the effects of human absence were nuanced, varying by species, location and time.
Multiple studies found that as traffic eased in the spring of 2020, the number of wild animals that were struck and killed by cars declined. But the number of wildlife-vehicle collisions soon crept back up, even as traffic remained below normal levels, one team of researchers reported.
Per mile driven, there were more accidents happening during the pandemic, which we interpreted as changes in animal space use, said Joel Abraham, a graduate student studying ecology at Princeton University and an author of the study. Animals started using roads. And it was difficult for them to stop, even when traffic started to rebound.
The lockdowns seemed to embolden some invasive species, increasing the daytime activity of Eastern cottontail rabbits in Italy, where their rapid expansion may threaten native hares, while disrupting efforts to control others. For instance, the pandemic delayed a long-planned project to cull giant, predatory mice from Gough Island, a critical habitat for threatened sea birds in the South Atlantic Ocean.
The mice, which likely arrived with 19th-century sailors, attack and feed on live bird chicks, often leaving large open wounds. I nicknamed them vampire mice, said Stephanie Martin, the environmental and conservation policy officer for Tristan da Cunha, the archipelago of which Gough Island is a part. Many chicks succumb to their injuries.
Scientists were set to begin an ambitious mouse-eradication effort when the pandemic hit, delaying the project for a year. In the intervening breeding season, with the vampire mice still running rampant, not one MacGillivrays prion chick an endangered bird that breeds almost exclusively on Gough survived. We lost a whole other breeding season, Ms. Martin said. It meant yet another year with no fledglings.
It is another illustration of humanitys dual roles: The mice are only on Gough because humans took them there. But now we absolutely need humans to cull them, Dr. Bates said.
These kinds of impacts added up all over the world, she said, as local conservation, education and monitoring programs were disrupted or deprived of funding. Spikes in wildlife poaching and persecution, as well as illegal logging and mining, were reported in multiple countries.
Economic insecurity might have driven some of this activity, but experts believe that it was also made possible by lapses in human protection, including reduced staffing in parks and preserves and even an absence of tourists, whose presence might typically discourage illegal activity.
Were not entirely the bad guys, said Mitra Nikoo, a research assistant at the University of Victoria. Were actually doing a lot more good than weve been giving ourselves credit for.
As people resume their normal routines, researchers will continue monitoring wildlife and ecosystems. If an ecosystem that appeared to benefit from humanitys disappearance suffers when people come flooding back, that will provide stronger evidence of our impact.
Its this reversal of the experimental or semi-experimental intervention that scientifically allows really robust insights into how environmental processes work, Dr. Rutz said.
Understanding these mechanisms can help experts design programs and policies that channel our influence more thoughtfully.
If we then strengthen the role as custodians and then continue to regulate pressures, then we can really tilt the role of humans in the environment to an overwhelmingly positive role, said Carlos Duarte, a marine ecologist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.
For example, one team of researchers found that with vacationers not traveling to the Greek island of Zakynthos in the summer of 2020, the loggerhead sea turtles that nest there spent more time close to shore in the warmer waters that are optimal for female egg development than they had in previous years.
The results suggest that tourists are driving sea turtles into cooler waters, slowing egg development and potentially reducing the number of clutches, or batches of eggs, the animals lay during the short nesting season, said Gail Schofield, a conservation ecologist at Queen Mary University of London and an author of the study.
Its a very narrow window of opportunity, she said.
Halting all tourism is not possible, she acknowledged. But designating a stretch of the shoreline as a protected turtle habitat and prohibiting swimming there in the early summer could provide an important refuge for the animals, she said.
When the Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve reopened in December 2020, it instituted a strict new cap on daily visitors. It is now closed two days a week, up from one before the pandemic, Dr. Rodgers said.
Other changes could pay dividends, too, experts said: Building wildlife crossings over highways could keep some animals from becoming road kill, while mandating quieter car engines and boat propellers could curb noise pollution on land and at sea.
No one can say anymore that we cant change the whole world in a year, because we can, Dr. Bates said. We did.
