Two Years On

A country changed by Covid.

The number of global deaths is surging while cases seem to be falling. The pandemic’s true death toll is millions more than official counts.

Some Omicron recoverers deteriorate after about ten days, with severe problems not necessarily related to the airways. Omicron BA.2 is 30%-34% more infectious than BA.1.

Covid brain changes show parallels with Alzheimer’s. Long-term cardiovascular outcomes of Covid: risk and burden increase even in mild cases.

Covid can reawaken ancient virus remnants in human DNA. Past pandemics may have caused Parkinson’s. Is our pandemic the ghost of the 1889 Russian Flu?

Seriously, don’t put yourself at risk of Long Covid.

Some hopeful news: Tracking Long Covid in the blood. Antihistamines provide relief.

20 February 2022

One Month On

Why the Tongan eruption will go down in the history of volcanology.

Tonga’s underwater volcanic eruption triggered nearly 590,000 lightning strikes.

The eruption as seen from 73km away.

First-hand video of the tsunami.

“They didn’t think help was coming”: a month on from the tsunami.

Tonga’s PM counts the mental health cost of the tsunami.

How Tonga is trying to recover from the eruption.

Tonga needs over $90 million to start repairs from the volcano.

Tonga is a reminder that the laws governing undersea cables need modernising.

Tonga suffers its first Covid outbreak after receiving foreign aid.

20 February 2022

Aftershocks

Tonga is dropping out of the global news cycle, but it will be a slow road to recovery for the country.

28 January 2022

Too Loud to Hear

More first-hand accounts are emerging from Tonga.

23 January 2022

Shockwave

The news of a volcanic eruption in Tonga a week ago threatened to monopolize my attention during a typically busy start of semester; more than news of increasing Covid hospitalizations in the UK, Boris Johnson’s blatant attempts to distract attention from his political plight, Vladimir Putin’s imminent invasion of Ukraine, or Brexit-caused miles-long lorry queues at Dover and Calais. While I was engaging with new students on two different courses and marking and moderating assignments from two more, my mind kept returning to my own postgraduate years, which involved studying and writing about Tonga throughout the 1990s and spending two months there in 1993. Anyone knowing the country will have been taken aback at the sight of the satellite image of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai’s ash cloud.

Tonga volcano satellite image
Taken by the Japanese weather satellite Himawari-8, 15 January 2022.

22 January 2022 · 1 Comment