With widespread job loss in the U.S. during the pandemic, many state and local governments temporarily halted evictions last spring, and just as these protections were about to expire in September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared a national eviction ban.

However, the order is only extended a few months at a time and is under constant challenge in the court system, including debates about whether such measures control infection transmission.

The research team aimed to study if eviction bans help control the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, explains Alison Hill, Ph.D., an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins.

In a bid to document the potential impact, Hill and Michael Levy, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, teamed up with experts in housing policy from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Hill and Levy specialize in using mathematical models to study how infections spread.

A report on the research was published April 15 in Nature Communications.

In the new report, the investigators say they used simulations to predict the number of additional SARS-CoV-2 infections in major U.S. cities if evictions had been allowed to occur during the fall of last year.

They estimated, for example, that in a city of approximately 1 million residents with evictions occurring at a heightened rate of 1% of households per month, an additional 4% of the population could become infected with SARS-CoV-2, which corresponds to about 40,000 more cases. Even with a much lower eviction rate of 0.25% per month, which is similar to the pre-pandemic level in cities such as Atlanta, Detroit and Tucson, Arizona, estimates were for about 5,000 additional cases.

To make these predictions, the researchers first calibrated their math model to re-create the most common epidemic patterns seen in major U.S. cities in 2020. The model took into account changes in infection rates over time due to public health measures, and it was tailored to match reported COVID-19 cases and deaths. The researchers used the model to track the spread of infection in and out of households. Then, they ran another version of the model in which eviction bans were lifted, to estimate how the bans have affected transmission of the virus.

Hill and her colleagues found that without eviction bans, people who are evicted or who live in a household that hosts evictees have 1.5 to 2.5 times more risk of being infected with SARS-CoV-2 than if the eviction bans were in place.

“People who experience eviction often move in with other households, increasing the density of people living together,” says Hill. “Households are known to be an important setting for SARS-CoV-2 infection, so this can increase transmission rates.”

The researchers’ computer simulations also found that without eviction bans, the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection would rise for all residents of a city, not just those who are evicted.

Even when the researchers evaluated a different version of the model, in which a city is divided into neighborhoods of different socioeconomic status and evictions are restricted to certain districts, evictions still could cause increases in infections with the virus.

“Some opponents of eviction bans say that evictions only affect a narrow part of the population, but our simulations indicate that evictions not only put disadvantaged households at risk of infection, but entire communities as well,” says Hill. “When it comes to a transmissible disease like COVID-19, no neighborhood is entirely isolated.”

When the researchers used this data to examine how evictions would specifically impact Philadelphia residents, they found that people in all neighborhoods of the city would experience increased COVID-19 levels due to evictions.

Teaming up with researchers from Northeastern University who used de-identified information about how city residents travel throughout neighborhoods, the researchers estimated that, without eviction bans, there could have been approximately 5,000 more COVID-19 cases in Philadelphia if evictions occurred at pre-pandemic levels, and up to 50,000 additional cases if evictions were five times more frequent.

An early version of this research was cited in court cases challenging eviction bans in Philadelphia, and in the CDC’s national eviction order.

To alleviate infection risk and reduce economic burdens, the researchers say, governments should consider not only extended eviction bans but also financial assistance for both tenants and landlords, as well as resources for households to reduce transmission of the virus within the home.

Funding for the research was provided by the National Institutes of Health (DP5OD019851, R01AI146129), the CDC’s COVID Supplement, Google Cloud and Google Cloud research credits.

In addition to Hill and Levy, researchers who contributed to the study include co-first authors Anjalika Nande from Harvard University and Justin Sheen from Princeton University; Andrei Gheorghe and Ben Adlam at Harvard University; Julianna Shinnick and Maria Florencia Tejeda at the University of Pennsylvania; Emma Walters, Andrew Greenlee and Daniel Schneider at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and Brennan Klein, Matteo Chinazzi, Samuel Scarpino and Alessandro Vespignani at Northeastern University.

Their numbers appear to be increasing, following a long period of absence linked to population decline, according to research led by Cefas and the University of Exeter.

Marine scientists in the UK and Ireland have analysed multiple datasets, spanning a 16-year period, to document the increase in bluefin, which arrive into the waters of the Celtic Seas and off South West England, the Scilly Isles, and North West Ireland to feed in late summer and autumn.

The research is part of the Defra-funded “Thunnus UK” research project.

Thunnus UK was established to improve knowledge of this species, as an essential first step in ensuring a positive future for Atlantic bluefin tuna around the UK.

Central to the project’s success has been a concerted effort to share and combine important data on where people have observed Atlantic bluefin tuna.

This will help to identify where and when these fish are found in UK waters.

Nearly 1,000 unique observations were recorded between 2013 and 2018 by citizen scientists, scientists, fishers and eco-tour leaders.

Researchers found that Atlantic bluefin tuna begin to arrive in May and stay as late as January.

However, peak numbers were recorded between August and October each year.

The research draws on five key data sources:

• The general public: A total of 80 sightings recorded by the public and submitted to http://www.thunnusuk.org
• Eco-tourism: three eco-tourism vessels collecting data on more than 1600 boat tours off the SW coast of England between 2008 and 2018.
• Opportunistic scientific surveys: 40 days of surveys with >2500 km of effort conducted by Cefas and University of Exeter experts off the Northwest Coast of Ireland and SW England in 2016 and 2018.
• Fisheries independent surveys: (1) data collected by MarineLife during the Peltic survey by Cefas between 2013 and 2015, and (2) data collected by the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group during the Irish Marine Institute’s Celtic Sea Herring Acoustic Survey between 2014 and 2018
• Bycatch in commercial fisheries: Bluefin tuna were accidentally caught (bycatch) in the Irish commercial fishery for albacore tuna between 2003 and 2017.

Lead author Tom Horton, of the University of Exeter, said: “Atlantic bluefin tuna are once again a feature in nearshore waters off the UK and Ireland.

“We’ve been able to document this story by using data from a wide variety of sources.

“We need to work together to ensure a future for Atlantic bluefin tuna, both in the UK and Ireland and more broadly throughout their range in the Atlantic Ocean.

“This is a really exciting study and the return of these fish suggest an important role in the UK’s ecosystem.”

Jeroen van der Kooij, Principal scientist and Peltic Survey Lead, Cefas, said: “The unique data collected during our annual pelagic ecosystem survey of SW English waters is fundamental to this research.

“Marine animal observers from MARINELife on board our research vessel recorded not only the arrival, but also a subsequent year-on-year increase in sightings of bluefin tuna in the area.

“We will continue to collect this information, which, in combination with data on their prey fish and habitat collected during the same survey, will hopefully increase our knowledge of these exciting yet enigmatic animals.”

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“Education is not the equalizer that many people think it is,” says Anna Manzoni, author of the study and an associate professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.

The study aimed to determine the extent to which a parent’s social status gives an advantage to their children. The research used the educational achievements of parents as a proxy for social status, and looked at the earnings of adult children as a proxy for professional success.

To address the research question, Manzoni examined data from people who were interviewed as part of the National Survey of College Graduates between 2010 and 2017. Specifically, Manzoni focused on United States citizens between 35 and 67 years old who reported on their wages and parental education. The final sample size was 56,819 individuals: 32,337 men and 24,482 women.

The analysis found that if a son gets a degree similar to the degree that a parent had, the son will earn more money than if his parent did not achieve the same level of education.

For example, imagine that Son A becomes a doctor, and he had a parent who was also a doctor. Meanwhile, Son B also becomes a doctor, but his parents only had bachelor’s degrees. The study found that, in general, Son A will earn more money than Son B, even though they have the same degree.

This effect also exists for daughters, but it is much weaker.

“The effect we see here essentially preserves social stratification for sons — less so for daughters,” Manzoni says. “We like to think that if someone makes it to college, becomes a lawyer, becomes a doctor, they have ‘made it.’ But what we see is that even earning an advanced degree is unlikely to put you on the same professional footing as someone who earned the same degree but started higher on the social ladder.

“One take-away is that expanding access to education is valuable, but education alone is not enough to resolve our society’s challenges in regard to inequality,” Manzoni says.

“This work shows that social origin matters, but it’s not clear what drives this structural inequality,” Manzoni adds. “Is it social capital? Access to networks? Differing financial resources? Is parental background becoming more important as a larger percentage of the population is getting a college degree? Is the advantage at the beginning of a child’s career? There is still a lot of room for additional research on this subject.”

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“We found that the interactions among the basic building blocks of the Spike protein become more symmetrical in the G form, and that gives it more opportunities to bind to the receptors in the host — in us,” said Gnana Gnanakaran, corresponding author of the paper published today in Science Advances. “But at the same time, that means antibodies can more easily neutralize it. In essence, the variant puts its head up to bind to the receptor, which gives antibodies the chance to attack it.”

Researchers knew that the variant, also known as D614G, was more infectious and could be neutralized by antibodies, but they didn’t know how. Simulating more than a million individual atoms and requiring about 24 million CPU hours of supercomputer time, the new work provides molecular-level detail about the behavior of this variant’s Spike.

Current vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are based on the original D614 form of the virus. This new understanding of the G variant — the most extensive supercomputer simulations of the G form at the atomic level — could mean it offers a backbone for future vaccines.

The team discovered the D614G variant in early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus was ramping up. These findings were published in Cell. Scientists had observed a mutation in the Spike protein. (In all variants, it is the Spike protein that gives the virus its characteristic corona.) This D614G mutation, named for the amino acid at position 614 on the SARS-CoV-2 genome that underwent a substitution from aspartic acid, prevailed globally within a matter of weeks.

The Spike proteins bind to a specific receptor found in many of our cells through the Spike’s receptor binding domain, ultimately leading to infection. That binding requires the receptor binding domain to transition structurally from a closed conformation, which cannot bind, to an open conformation, which can.

The simulations in this new research demonstrate that interactions among the building blocks of the Spike are more symmetrical in the new G-form variant than those in the original D-form strain. That symmetry leads to more viral Spikes in the open conformation, so it can more readily infect a person.

A team of postdoctoral fellows from Los Alamos — Rachael A. Mansbach (now assistant professor of Physics at Concordia University), Srirupa Chakraborty, and Kien Nguyen — led the study by running multiple microsecond-scale simulations of the two variants in both conformations of the receptor binding domain to illuminate how the Spike protein interacts with both the host receptor and with the neutralizing antibodies that can help protect the host from infection. The members of the research team also included Bette Korber of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and David C. Montefiori, of Duke Human Vaccine Institute.

The team thanks Paul Weber, head of Institutional Computing at Los Alamos, for providing access to the supercomputers at the Laboratory for this research.

The Paper: “The SARS-CoV-2 Spike variant D614G favors an open conformational state,” Science Advances. Rachael A. Mansbach, Srirupa Chakraborty, Kien Nguyen, David C. Montefiori, Bette Korber, S. Gnanakaran.

The Funding: The project was supported by Los Alamos Laboratory Directed Research and Development project 20200706ER, Director’s Postdoctoral fellowship, and the Center of Nonlinear Studies Postdoctoral Program at Los Alamos.