This story was originally published in Issue Three Spring 2020 of the Grizzly Magazine, pgs. 12-13.
Story by: Madeline Reida
AUSTRALIAN BUSHFIRES
For a good part of this January, you couldn't go five YouTube channels or three social media posts without bumping into a fundraiser or awareness-booster for charities that would help Australia. The news would be giving updates every evening about the situation. Images of scorched wildlife and residents in boats watching the coast from the red-tinted ocean circulated online.
Their bushfires began far before their spring season, with major fires occurring back in September of 2019. According to BBC News, in the worst-hit state - New South Wales - fire affected more than five million hectares, or nearly 12,355,270 acres, and destroyed more than 2,000 homes. Twenty-nine people and an estimated 1.25 billion animals - many of them endangered species native exclusively to Australia - had died, according to Vox.com.
Hotter temperatures, high winds, and an extended drought season contributed to the fires; but what really set it apart was how bad the fires were in heavily populated areas like New South Wales. Economist Ross Garnaut predicted in his 2008 report "The Garnaut Climate Change Review" that "fire seasons will start earlier, and slightly later, and generally be more intense...This effect increases over time but should be directly observable by 2020." Plenty of news sources were quick to quote this.
Glimmers of hope rose out of the ashes. The event received an unprecedented amount of attention online with fundraisers from dozens of high-profile YouTubers making the rounds. Lists of items like joey and bat pouches that animal shelters needed were shared among the crafting communities. Firefighters volunteered around the world to fly out to Australia and help douse the flames; the bushfires were devastating, but Australia still pulled through.
IRANIAN AIR STRIKE
On Friday, December 27, the Iranian militia group Kataib Hezbollah attacked the American K1 military base near the Iraqi city of Kirkuk. They killed an American contractor and wounded several American and Iraqi personnel. In response, two days later, President Trump ordered an airstrike; this killed a high-profile commander of Iran's secretive Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, according to National Public Radio. The Pentagon tried to defend the decision by saying Soleimani was plotting against the lives of numerous American diplomats throughout the region of Iran, which led to more outrage from Iran and a lot of memes about World War III beginning.
The situation wasn't helped with the crashing of a Ukraine plane minutes after it took off on January 8. It later turned out to be due to an accidental Iranian missile misfire, as the plane had been mistaken for a cruise missile. But Iran didn't admit to this right away; 176 passengers perished, and tensions grew even tighter.
KOBE BRYANT
On January 26, the helicopter carrying famous basketball player Kobe Bryant and eight other people crashed in Calabasas, California. The other victims of the crash included his daughter, Gianna Bryant; her teammates, Payton Chester and Alyssa Altobelli; their parents, Sarah Chester, Keri Altobelli, and John Altobelli; an assistant coach to Gianna's basketball team, Christina Mauser; and the pilot, Ara Zobayan.
According to a report from the New York Times, the helicopter climbed to 2,300 feet before descending at a rate of more than 33 feet per second - about 23 miles per hour, too fast for a standard landing speed. It had also been going forward at upwards of 150 miles per hour. It was a high-impact crash that could have cleared the top of the hill it crashed on if there was 20 to 30 feet of difference.
It is nothing more than an unfortunate accident. Zobayan had logged 8,200 hours of flight time, 1,250 of which were in the same model that he had been piloting when it crashed. And the day before, he had made the exact same trip between John Wayne Airport in Orange County to Camarillo; the weather was a bit iffy, but that was possibly the only negative factor.
The crash shocked people, whether they were basketball fans or not. "Kobe" has been a famous phrase to score baskets since the early 2000s, according to the Washington Post - it's a lucky chant to guarantee accuracy. Basketball games across America had various memorials for Bryant, and his jersey number - 24 - was retired days after the crash.
CORONAVIRUS
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronaviruses are a large family of diseases that can cause symptoms anywhere on the scale between the common cold to severe respiratory diseases. They are zoonotic, meaning they can transfer between animals and people; an infected cat or dromedary camel, for instance, could infect a human with a coronavirus (and in case you're wondering, this coronavirus in China hasn't been seen in domestic cats or dogs). It's fairly common for people to be infected with some version of coronavirus throughout their lives, but the infection throughout China has put the entire world on edge.
The World Health Organization (WHO) was first notified of cases of a novel coronavirus ("novel" meaning that it is a strain of coronavirus that hasn't been seen in humans before) on December 31, 2019. Between December 31 and January 3, 44 cases of the bizarre pneumonia were reported, bringing in the new year on a sour note. Chinese authorities properly isolated and identified the virus on January 7, and it was determined on the 11th and 12th that the outbreak was from exposures in a single seafood market in Wuhan City in the Hubei Province of China, according to the World Health Organization.
As of March 9, the date of WHO's most recent situation report at the time of this writing, there have been 109,578 identified cases of this novel coronavirus. A total of 80, 904 of those cases have been within China, leaving 28,694 cases of it getting outside the country. That's a little over twice the number of students at Butler who were enrolled in the 2018 to 2019 school year, based on the Butler By the Numbers available on the Butler CC website. A total of 213 of those cases are in the United States, and 11 have died as of this writing.
But what is the toll that coronavirus has given us? In total, 3809 people. That sounds scary but consider: the CDC estimated that about 14,000 people have died this flu season. New diseases can be scary and unpredictable, but the coronavirus is not as devastating as all the drama thinks it is. Many organizations, including the CDC and WHO, are working towards finding this stran's causes and helping its victims, and we already know more about it than we did on the first day of this year.
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