Opinion: New York City has a Homelessness ProblemâBut it’s Not What You Think
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Iâm scattered, worried and tired. And even though weâre all socially isolated, Iâm not alone. The pandemic â and its social and economic upheavals â has left people around the world feeling like they canât string two thoughts together. Stress has really done a number on us.
The author is expressing her feelings about covid and connecting it to others emotions.Â
Thatâs no surprise to scientists who study stress. Our brains are not built to do complex thinking, planning and remembering in times of massive upheaval. Feeling impaired is âa natural biological response,â says Amy Arnsten, a neuroscientist at Yale School of Medicine. âThis is how our brains are wired.â
The author is giving a brief psychological explanation of our brain.
Decades of research have chronicled the ways stress can disrupt business as usual in our brains. Recent studies have made even more clear how stress saps our ability to plan ahead and have pointed to one way that stress changes how certain brain cells operate.
The author is giving more information about the research.
Scientists recognize the pandemic as an opportunity for a massive, real-time experiment on stress. COVID-19 foisted on us a heavy mix of health, economic and social stressors. And the end date is nowhere in sight. Scientists have begun collecting data to answer a range of questions. But one thing is clear: This  pandemic has thrown all of us into uncharted territory.
The author is talking about an interesting experiment about the topic and because of it the readers keep reading to know more.
Short-circuited
The human brainâs astonishing abilities rely on a web of nerve cell connections. One hub of activity is the prefrontal cortex, which is important for some of our fanciest forms of thinking. These âexecutive functionsâ include abstract thinking, planning, focusing, juggling multiple bits of information and even practicing patience. Stress can muffle that hubâs signals, studies of lab animals and humans have shown.
The author is giving more information about how our brain works.
âEven relatively mild stress can impair the prefrontal cortex,â says Elizabeth Phelps, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Harvard University. âThatâs one of the most robust effects of stress on the brain.â
The author is giving a quote from other papers as evidence.
That impairment has been described in lots of studies. One memorable example comes from 20 panicky medical students facing licensing exams. After a month of high-stress test prep, the students performed worse on an attention test than they did after exams were over. Functional MRI scans showed that under stress, the studentsâ prefrontal connections to other brain areas were diminished, scientists reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009.
The author is explaining the quote.
Normally, an alert personâs brain has moderate amounts of chemical messengers that lead the prefrontal cortex to take charge and perform high-level thinking (left). But with stress, those chemical signals can flood the brain, activating amygdala-linked brain networks involved in sensing and responding to threats (right).A. ARNSTENÂ
The author is explaining how a stressed brain works.
When the prefrontal cortex goes quiet, more reactionary brain networks take over. Some of these âprimitiveâ circuits, as Arnsten calls them, center on the amygdalae, two almond-shaped structures buried deep inside the brain that help us sense and respond to threats. Those fast, instinctual reactions âare helpful if youâre being faced with a snake,â Arnsten says, âbut not helpful if youâre being faced with a complex medical decision.â
The author is explaining more how a stressed brain works.
A more recent experiment, published online April 2 in Current Biology, illustrates how stress can shift people away from thoughtful planning. When people were threatened with electric shocks, their abilities to plan ahead flew out the window. Anthony Wagner, a cognitive neuroscientist at Stanford University, and colleagues asked 38 people to learn a familiar route through virtual towns. With practice, people learned these routes, as well as the locations of recognizable objects, such as a zebra, an apple, a stapler or Taylor Swiftâs face, along the way.
The author is talking about another experiment on the same topic.
âOur question was, âWhat are the effects of stress?â â Wagner says. To find out, the researchers used âmoderately painfulâ electric zaps to induce stress in some participants, who returned to familiar virtual towns and were asked to find their way to the zebra, for instance. Subjects didnât know when they would be shocked, and they couldnât control any aspect of itAfter the training, the participants â some under stress from the expectation of further shocks and some not â were sent back into the virtual town and asked to find their way to a specific item.But there was a trick: Participants could reach the stapler, for example, faster and more efficiently by taking a shortcut. The shortcut, however, required more planning, more initiative and a heavier reliance on previously learned relationships among streets.Stressed people were less inclined to take the shortcut, the researchers found. People who were stressed by the possibility of a shock took the shortcut 31 percent of the time, compared with 47 percent for those who werenât stressed. The stressed people still reached the object they were after, but in a roundabout way.
The author is talking about another experiment on the same topic.
DAY ONE END HERE. COMPLETE THE REST BY TUESDAY, MARCH 16Â
Where to?
In a virtual town, people devised a shortcut (left map, red dotted line) to reach a target object. But under the threat of a moderate electric shock, people were more likely to fall back on a familiar route (right map, green dotted line), even though it was longer.
The author is explaining more about the same experiment.
Functional MRI brain scans hinted at what the added stress did to the volunteersâ thinking. The objects planted around town evoked recognizable patterns of brain activity when a person was seeing one of the previously seen objects, or even just thinking about it. By spotting these neural signposts, researchers could tell when people were thinking of a particular path â or of no path at all.
The author shows how the stress affects our thinking from the experiment.
Participants were given eight seconds to plan their approach to reach the target object. Unstressed people generally had a plan; their brain activity contained patterns that signaled these volunteers were thinking about the objects along the shortcut route. Neural signals of a plan even showed up among those who chose to take the familiar route.
The author is explaining more about the same experiment.
Those awaiting a shock appeared to use little foresight. âThe stressed people didnât seem to be thinking about the familiar route when they took it,â says study coauthor Thackery Brown, a cognitive neuroscientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. âThey were on this fight-or-flight autopilot type behavior.â
Again the author is showing how stressed people’s decision making is different from usual.
Whatâs more, stress quieted the activity of brain areas needed to make a good plan, including a part of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, a structure important for memory. Those findings suggest that under stress, we are less able to call up our previously learned knowledge and memories. We are working with a deficit.
The author shows how the stress affects our thinking from the experiment.
âIn some sense, weâre privileged when weâre not stressed, able to fully harness our cognitive machinery,â Wagner says. âThat allows us to behave in more strategic, more efficient, more goal-directed ways.â
The author gives a quote about how privileged we are when we are not stressed.
Brown sees parallels between these lab-based stressors and the complex and longer-lasting stresses of real life. The participants were attempting to do something complicated while worrying about something else. The stressor is âoperating in the background while youâre trying to plan your daily life,â Brown says. âThereâs a connection there with the type of thing people are experiencing right now in the context of the pandemic.â
The author is saying covid gives people a long lasting stress.
Shrunken cells
Zooming in to individual cells provides a view of stressâs physical destruction in the brain. Stress can shrink nerve cells and cull their connections, and the prefrontal cortex is particularly vulnerable, studies in both humans and other animals suggest. Other kinds of brain cells are affected too, new research on mice shows.
The author is showing how stress affects us for example it shrinks our nerve cells.Â
Big, arboreal cells called astrocytes have many jobs in the brain. Specialized astrocytes called Bergmann glia extend into synapses, the space between nerve cells where chemical messages flow, and slurp up extra chemical signals. This helps keep nerve cells communicating clearly with one another (SN Online: 8/4/15).
The author is giving more examples of stress affecting us in a bad way.Â
But in a test of mice stressed by the ominous smell of a predatory fox, these astrocytes retracted from synapses, neuroscientist Siqiong June Liu of Louisiana State University School of Medicine in New Orleans and colleagues found. That pulling away occurred with a single exposure to that stressful fox odor, and the cells were still retracted 24 hours later, the researchers reported in the April 22 Journal of Neuroscience.
The author is talking about stress tests that were done on mice.
Stress sends a âshrinkâ message to these astrocytes by reducing the levels of a protein called GluA1. Itâs not known whether a similar process, and the resulting changes in how brain cells communicate under stress, happens in the brains of people.
Some stress signals may travel certain neural highways. Physiologist Kazuhiro Nakamura of Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan and colleagues studied rats that had just been through the stressful experience of losing a fight, a defeat that is meant to mimic human social stress. A somewhat mysterious region inside the ratâs prefrontal cortex, called the DPC/DTT for dorsal peduncular cortex and dorsal tenia tecta, is important for sending stressed-out signals, the researchers reported in the March 6 Science.
From there, the signals shoot to the hypothalamus, a brain structure that can spark some of stressâs most obvious effects in the body, including a racing heart and sweating. Itâs possible that similar brain areas in humans might have roles in sparking stress signals.
These clues are giving scientists a more precise understanding of how stress moves through and affects the brain. But lab studies on stress, by design, have to be somewhat short-lived, with relatively mild stress. Applying lab findings to peopleâs experiences in life comes with caveats. Huge questions remain about how the crushing and varied stresses of a pandemic might influence people.
The author is giving us more examples of how stress affects life and how it damages us.Â
A natural experiment
Psychologists and brain scientists are on it. As of mid-May, a database tracking COVID-19 social science projects had 294 research projects related to the current pandemic.
These kinds of natural experiments â studying people who had experienced uncontrollable, intense stress in their lives â have happened before. Phelps and colleagues studied how people remember the events of 9/11. People who were in downtown Manhattan at the time of the attacks seemed to rely more heavily on their amygdalae to call up memories of the shocking event than people who were farther away, the researchers reported in 2007 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Other researchers have identified thinking problems in people who lived through Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters.
The author is showing how brain scientists and psychologists are researching on people in real life By tracking database.Â
Stress from the COVID-19 pandemic might influence decision making, Phelps suspects. How do you respond to positive and negative feedback when youâre stressed? Does your desire to do hard work change? She and colleagues are hoping to get answers by surveying people across the United States. Participants will describe their stress reactions and complete online tasks that test decision making and memory.
The author is asking questions like how should you behave because of this pandemic stress.Â
Other long-term studies will examine how autobiographical memories of the pandemic change over time, how the pandemic affects stress during pregnancy and how mind-set might influence how people cope.
 The author shows how the pandemic stress affects our memory and asks how it would affect pregnancy.
As this chaotic period rolls on, stressors will change and accumulate. Sustained crisis, scientists suspect, can change our brains and their capabilities in even more profound ways than temporary stress.Â
The author is finishing off the topic and summarizing everything the author states in this article.
For now, each of us is left to manage our own personalized stress cocktails. Mine grows more potent with an expanding backlog of tasks, both domestic and job-related, the cumulative sorrow of seeing my kids isolated from their friends and a steady drip of small losses. And I worry for the many people who are worse off, facing illness and financial strain. Itâs a lot.
As we all grapple with this reality, scientists have a message for us, one that I find comforting: âForgive yourself,â Phelps says. âIf youâre finding it challenging right now to focus, forgive yourself.â
The author is writing the conclusion and showing all the stress we have in our life and what can we do to make it a little batter.
When I get one of the many Covid-19 vaccines available in the US â and I will surely be jumping at the first opportunity â I am not going to tell anyone. I will make my difficult-to-procure appointment, wait for the day to come, probably take an Uber to the glass mountain called the Jacob Javits Center, get my little jab, and keep my vaccination a secret between me and the volunteer who injected me.
I wonât tell anyone because, frankly, people are ruthless.
-The author begins with cautious eye-catching statement that can be relatable or helpful to people who plans to or already has taken a COVID vaccine. He plans to not disclose his vaccination plans due to the inevitable negative reception.
On social media, various users are screaming into the ether about the people they feel have âcheatedâ to get vaccines. While eligibility varies from state to state, allegations of cheating the system usually manifest when someone sees â usually also on social media â a person getting a vaccine who they donât believe fulfills the requirements.
People have scammed. A certain semi-famous cycling class instructor made national news, including on this website, last month when she obtained a vaccine by saying she was an educator. But while Stacey Griffith was fudging the rules in plain sight, the discourse has exploded in all directions: into allegations that people might be lying about underlying health conditions; into anecdotes about people going to different states entirely to obtain injections; into interrogations about how much a person weighs, since body mass index (BMI) is a vaccine qualifier in states like New York. A newscaster in DC was suspended because he ranted vociferously online about how fat people donât deserve the vaccine.
-The author points out some reasons of vaccine inequity that people have complained about. One example is cheating the eligibility system through lying. Another way is using discrimination towards a group of people.
While this entire rollout feels like the Hunger Games with a vicious peanut gallery, one of the things that keeps getting bandied about is the idea that more vaccines in more arms is better. While public health officials and bioethicists say those who qualify should not hesitate to get it, the equation might not be as simple as âthe more, the betterâ either.
The vaccine, weâve been assured over and over, is the light at the end of the tunnel. But the rollout has also awakened American fears of inequity and sharpened them into shame and blame. Itâs coaxed ugly behavior that, it turns out, really does nothing when it comes to equity or access or eliminating âcheating.â
-The author is pointing out the common reception by people when vaccines. When a vaccine rolls out, Americans scrutinize and ridicules those who takes the vaccine or seeks to get it.
Shaming people, especially when it comes to disease, is something Americans have proven themselves to be really good at. The US has a history and culture of associating disease with blame, shame, and personal failure. One of the big reasons we scapegoat people who get sick is that it helps us rationalize our own fears about a disease.
The pandemic has been no exception.
-This paragraph points out America’s historical problem of shaming diseases vaccines. It reveals that we stigmatize pandemics due to our fear of them as well as glorifying anti-vaccine trends.
Weâve seen shaming of people who werenât wearing masks. Then the shaming of people who flout social distancing rules and post on social media. Now the shaming Eye of Sauron has spotlit people who might be skipping the vaccination line. The targets have changed over time, but the shame is constant.
-In this paragraph, the author gives multiple examples of ways people have shamed the COVID-19 pandemic. The author also jokes making a Lord of the Rings reference.
Vaccine shaming is very different from the other two examples. Someone getting vaccinated doesnât visibly put anyone else in danger of getting the virus the way a maskless person or quarantine traveler does. But the perception is that because this person is getting the vaccine before others who still need it, theyâre somehow pulling the ladder up behind them â especially since the vaccine is so scarce.
-The author brings up a point on why some people, for example, workers or first responders, shame vaccinators. The point depicted is some individuals believe it is important they get it first while shaming those that arguably do not need it initially.
Thatâs a narrative underscored by fear.
âThis is speaking from my personal opinion, but I think those fears are normal and are very understandable,â Jen Balkus, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Washington, told me.
-The author gives an example that professionals also have these fears, not just regular civilians.
She points out that doctors, health experts, and the general public have, essentially, been learning as we go along. There was no guidebook or road map for the pandemic and no timetable for when it will end, and weâve all been trying to survive, all while dealing with the looming threat of disease hanging over us.
Fears and frustration are high. So is the demand for the vaccine. Because of the vaccineâs scarcity, and because the rollouts have been clunky and difficult for some people to navigate, those feelings have been amplified.
-The author uses a statement that is highly relatable.
âBecause we still are in this trauma, I think we still donât fully comprehend how incredibly difficult our lives have been. Itâs been so hard and now thereâs something that can drastically reduce the likelihood of infection, which is vaccination,â she said. âI think our feelings about this might be a little bit different if people had more faith in the rollout and had it been a smoother process.â
-The author makes a point that if the public was more optimistic about vaccination rather than reverting to the contrary, this process would be easier. This touches the articles point on why vaccine shaming is dangerous.
The rollout has relied on vaccinating people who meet a certain set of requirements, based on things like age, occupation, and health. This leads to its own debates of worthiness.
-This paragraph touches the grey area that causes turmoil amongst people.
James Delaney, a professor at Niagara University who specializes in the philosophy of medicine, explained that what weâre seeing happen with the rollout isnât unlike the way the US determines someoneâs place on an organ donation list. Those lists, similarly, are cultivated and created by experts to determine who needs what most. Those discussions are usually rife with rigorous philosophical and ethical debates.
-This paragraph reveals America historically gives a mixed reaction of who needs medicinal help more.
For example, who do you give a new liver to, the person with liver disease caused by alcoholism or the one caused by genetics? Is a 30-year-old or an 80-year-old a better candidate for a heart transplant? If youâre going to say no to one person, why did you say yes to the other?
-The author uses humor in this paragraph on the complications of medical ethics.
The same scenario is happening with vaccine allocation and distribution. Experts have determined the order in which people get the immunization. And while that looks great on paper, that doesnât eliminate the human impulse to question it.
âThe hard thing is, for almost anybody, you can make the argument, âHereâs why this person really should get or really needs a vaccine,ââ Delaney told me. âBut hereâs the catch. Whenever you ask that question, you also have to ask, âOkay, then who do you want to take it away from?ââ
-This paragraph gives a further complicated argument on who should get what and why it sparks shaming.
Seeing how weâre all living in a state of fear and frustration and being told to adhere to this tiered determination of need, people lashing out at âcheatersâ who they believe skirted the system makes a lot of sense. What doesnât help the situation is, say, semi-famous SoulCycle instructors getting the vaccine by claiming they are educators, or anecdotes about various people obtaining the vaccine through unseemly means.
-The author gives an example of ways people “cheat” to get a vaccine.
Young and healthy people who arenât essential workers getting the vaccine âfeels like fucking cheating and I hate it,â a public health expert who spoke on condition of anonymity because theyâre working on a stateâs vaccine rollout told me. They explained one bright side, though: âHonestly, probably a lot of the people who are cheating are the ones who are fucking stupid and going out anyway. And you know what? Fine, vaccinate them.â
-This paragraph makes you feel the animosity some vaccine shamers hold towards others who received a vaccine.
The problem is that if you start thinking everyone is cheating around you, itâs tempting to start judging, based on a personâs appearance, whether they âdeserveâ to get the vaccine.
-The author gives a reason on why the previous paragraphs’ reasoning is dangerous during the COVID pandemic.
Caught in the crossfire are people living with disabilities or underlying health concerns who now have to justify their vaccine appointments. Those people, incorrectly shamed, likely outnumber the actual line jumpers. That shame may inhibit people from getting an appointment. All the public health experts I spoke to said that if you fulfill the requirements honestly, you should make an appointment.
-This paragraph detests shaming people with disabilities and underlying health conditions who seek a vaccine.
âIf you qualify for the vaccine, absolutely get the vaccine,â the angry anonymous public health expert told me. âEveryone who is eligible should be trying to get appointments.â
Lashing out at someone is fun and satisfying because you could ostensibly ruin their day. Yelling at structural inequality does not, unfortunately, have the same payoff.
Vaccine cheating urban legends, and the shaming they inspire, are actually symptoms of a very big, much tougher problem of vaccine inequity.
Balkus, Delaney, and my very frustrated and angry anonymous epidemiologist, all pointed out that the communities disproportionately affected by the virus â Black and brown people, and people living under the poverty line â arenât the people who are getting the vaccine.
-This paragraph reveals vaccine shaming is part of a larger problem: poverty stricken people are not likely to get the vaccine.
âWhat youâre seeing on social media is outrage at privilege,â Balkus told me. âBut there isnât a comparable level of outrage at the real issue that needs to be addressed. We need to get back to work with poor communities and communities of color to be able to provide vaccines to those individuals that need it. In many areas, that process has not gone smoothly. And that is a massive issue.â
An example of that happened in New York City, where a vaccination site was set up in Washington Heights to service a hard-hit Latino community. Instead of the Latino community getting the appointments, the vaccines went to a large number of white people who came in from neighboring areas.
-This paragraph depicts what is arguably white privilege. A white person is more likely to get vaccinated.
In New York City and beyond, getting a vaccine in most places requires participating in a process that resembles trying to get tickets for your favorite pop starâs concert. Itâs endless refreshing, clicking, and checking websites throughout the day â a process that favors someone whoâs able to work from home, and has resources, and possibly friends and family to help them get a vaccine. That process doesnât favor someone who has to work a job all day, commute back and forth, and live paycheck to paycheck with a limited schedule.
-This paragraph uses a little humor to touch on a relatable situation that is similar, but more crucial.
The current system, quite simply, isnât built to tend to people who need the most help.
âThat kind of âif you build it, they will comeâ model of vaccine distribution is just not terribly effective. And thatâs not because of vaccines, thatâs just because of the way that public health crisis functions,â Nicholas Evans, a bioethicist at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, told me. Part of Evansâs research includes Ebola outbreaks, which he cited as examples of how to get care to people who donât have means and resources.
âIf you want public health to be equitable and effective, you need to go to people in their communities and spend the resources to meet them on their own terms, and make sure that youâre giving these scarce resources to the people that need them, and not expecting those people to come to you,â he said. âIt would be more costly to do so. But wars take a lot of money; why shouldnât public health?â
-This paragraph brings a point in how public health can be equal and fix an economic-social gap among people.
I asked Evans about a popular refrain Iâve been hearing, that thereâs a greater good to be had if everyone gets vaccinated â that more shots in arms means weâre all safer, regardless of how deserving you may think someone is.
-The author gives a solution to end vaccine shaming to make this pandemic more smooth: encourage and support any who seeks vaccines or has been vaccinated, regardless of circumstances.
Evans challenged me to think beyond that idea.
He argued that the goal with the Covid-19 vaccines was to determine who is at risk and protect the people who are most at risk of landing in an ICU. Prioritizing speed and numbers isnât exactly congruous with that if those vaccines arenât going to the most vulnerable people.
âYou donât get to say you care about equity and then just throw it out the second a bit of speed is involved,â Evans said. âSpeed doesnât matter if youâre only vaccinating people who are never going to end up in the ICU in the first place. I think that people who say itâs about shots in arms are not taking the function that equity plays in health care seriously. Equity isnât just about protecting individuals, itâs about protecting society in general by stopping ICUs from overflowing and stopping people from crashing health care systems.â
-This paragraph opposes the author’s solution thus revealing the different views people have.
That said, Evans, and all the public health experts I spoke to, said that if youâre available to receive a vaccine, get one. One can both be incensed about vaccine inequity and not waste time trying to guess who deserves it on an individual basis. The key is to direct that energy toward calling public health officials and lawmakers and voicing concerns about inequality. We can ask the system to be better, instead of individuals.
âPeople have the fights that are close to them; some can only fight the battle thatâs in front of you,â Evans said. âAnd for most people, the battle that is in front of them, it is the yoga instructor whoâs getting the vaccine ahead of the homeless person or the prison inmate. But if you step back, there are looming threats and systemic issues that are much harder to deal with and require us to act together collectively.â
-This paragraph is calling for unity and awareness. Regardless of who gets vaccinated, there are other threats that requires people to be together
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