February 5, 2025: It's been a bad winter for the flu, a sofa math problem is solved, and how to avoid outrage fatigue. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | • The U.S. National Science Foundation has unfrozen grant funding, but it continues to scour research projects to remove language that violates Trump's orders, causing turmoil. | 5 min read | | | Winter in the U.S. is the season of sickness. Multiple respiratory viruses peak concurrently. In cold weather people spend more time indoors in close contact with one another—the perfect conditions for transmission. This winter has been particularly bad for flu. Here's an overview of the state of respiratory viruses. | | | Amanda Montañez; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (data) | | | COVID: Levels of weekly COVID hospitalizations are the lowest this winter they have been since 2020. That's likely due to widespread immunity from vaccination or infection, or both. Immunity in the U.S. is also hanging around from a COVID spike in late summer 2024. The virus doesn't seem to exactly follow seasonality; COVID appears to variably peak about twice per year. Flu: The flu virus got off to a late start this winter. And while rates of flu this year resemble most past seasons', the latest positive test rate data (some of which was delayed) shows a slight rebound in infections after declining from a peak. The CDC said the current vaccine cut the risk of hospitalization by 35 percent during South American winter (Northerners' summer). Comparatively, last flu season, the vaccine had a 51.9 percent effectiveness in those countries, so much stronger protection. Health agencies track South American hospitalization rates as an indication of what might happen when winter comes to the Northern Hemisphere.
RSV: The latest data suggest that RSV has peaked and rates will continue to decline in the coming weeks. This year's RSV was relatively calm, likely thanks to the vaccine that was released in 2023, protecting more individuals.
Other viruses: Another illness came on strong this winter: norovirus. Between August 1, 2024, and January 15, 2025, there were more than 1,000 norovirus outbreaks reported in the U.S. By contrast, last season there were only about 550 over those same days. "Outbreaks usually happen when the virus has evolved and population immunity is low," Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist. This season nearly 70 percent of norovirus outbreaks have been caused by an atypical variant of norovirus, she says. | | | • Under DOGE, Musk has said that he will trim $2 trillion from the federal budget. "Luckily for him, there is one big, fat target with just that price tag already sitting in Uncle Sam's shopping cart, and it's ripe for cutting: nuclear weapons," writes Dan Vergano, senior opinion editor at Scientific American. An ambitious scheme to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal in the coming years will cost taxpayers nearly $2 trillion. Cutting the plan "would be much more real, and smarter, than the imaginary trillions that Trump's budget director paused in January to sniff for 'woke gender ideology, and the green new deal,' among other targets, on the federal books," he says. | 4 min read | | | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | P.S. I can always count on you, my readers, to catch my typos and (occasional) factual blunders. On Monday I erroneously said that Barry the Bear (who animal rescuers relocated back to the wild from under an Altadena, Calif., home) was a grizzly bear. Several of you pointed out the error, and correctly noted that Barry is in fact a black bear (I confirmed with a spokesperson for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife), the only species of wild bear in California.
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