DALLAS -- Ashley Archer, a pregnant, 33-year-old Texas financial adviser, and her husband have been cautious about the coronavirus. They work from home, go out mostly just to get groceries and wear masks whenever they are in public.
But when a friend lost power amid the winter storms that have left millions of Texans without heat in bitter cold, the couple had to make a decision about taking on additional risk so they could help someone in need.
Archer said they didn't hesitate. They took her husband's best friend into their suburban Dallas home.
"He's like family," she said. "We weren't going to let him freeze at his place. We figured, 'OK, we're willing to accept a little bit of risk because you're not in our little pandemic group.'"
Weighing the risks in the pandemic era is fraught enough. But the storms and outages that have hit a big swath of the U.S. over the past several days have added a whole new layer of complexity.
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Should people open their doors to neighbors? Should they stay in hotels or go to shelters? What should they do about hand-washing, the most basic of precautions, when there is no running water?
The past few months have been challenging enough for Jonathan Callahan. He lost his job cleaning mail trucks in Jackson, Miss., and soon found himself homeless, sleeping in an abandoned church at night. Then the storm hit Mississippi this week, producing bouts of snow and freezing cold.
Callahan, 40, was one of 14 people staying at a warming shelter at a community center in Jackson, with cots spread around the gym. He said the space has been comfortable, meals have been provided, and he and some others played a game of pickup basketball, which "warmed us right up."
He said he felt comfortable with the precautions being taken. He and most everyone else were wearing masks, and there was room for distancing.
"I'm grateful they let us be here," he said. "If we weren't here, where would we be?"
Public health experts say crowding people into shelters can contribute to the spread of covid-19, but there are ways to lower the risks, through masks and distancing.
"The ethics of the situation are simple enough," said Dr. Stefan Kertesz, a University of Alabama at Birmingham professor of medicine and a homeless health researcher who runs a clinic for homeless veterans. "We can't protect people tomorrow if they die today. Warming stations are needed."
The storms that have disrupted social distancing precautions and thrown people from different households together have also undermined the nation's vaccination drive, with tens of thousands of vaccine doses stranded and inoculations canceled. Concern is mounting in some places.
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Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said Thursday that he is thinking of sending the National Guard into the South to bring back held-up shipments of vaccine earmarked for his state. He said the state can't afford to go a week without getting any new doses.
And North Carolina vaccine providers have yet to receive tens of thousands of doses that the federal government was to deliver this week, state officials said.
Like Archer, Ella Ewart-Pierce, a public health analyst, said her family has been especially cautious about the coronavirus because her husband is in a vulnerable group. The Dallas couple has been working from home, avoiding places where people gather and getting groceries delivered.
But when they lost power, the risk calculation shifted. Ewart-Pierce said they decided to take their young kids to a hotel Monday after their home became so cold that they had to shut off the water to keep the pipes from bursting.
"It was 13 degrees outside, and our house was 38 degrees inside," Ewart-Pierce said. "The kids were already crying because they were cold even though they were wearing all their clothes."
When the family arrived at the hotel, "it was a scene," said Ewart-Pierce.
"There was one lady trying to figure out where to buy formula for her baby. There are families and a lady in a wheelchair with a blanket. It's a hotel that has pets, so there were dogs," she said.
They're taking precautions while there, she said, including wearing two masks each and keeping their distance from other people. With the hotel's restaurant open but dining in prohibited, they're eating on the floor of their room.
In Austin, Anissa Ryland also was forced to move her family to a hotel. She, her husband and their five children lost power at their 115-year-old home about 2 a.m. Monday and left after spending a frigid night.
When they returned Tuesday to pick up supplies, the indoor thermostat read 39 degrees, and icicles had begun forming.
Under normal circumstances, the family could stay with neighbors or relatives, but the pandemic has made that harder. For one thing, one of her children has a compromised immune system, she said.
"You have to weigh the risks and say, 'Danger now versus a theoretical risk,'" Ryland said. "How do you do that? It's a hard discussion."
VARIANT WORRIES
Also, three worrisome covid-19 variants are now circulating in the U.S., and the federal government needs significant resources to track their progress, according to the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The variants, which emerged initially in the U.K., South Africa and Brazil, have all now been seen in the U.S., said Rochelle Walensky, the CDC chief, in a question-and-answer session hosted by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The agency has already warned that the highly contagious mutant strain that emerged in the U.K. could become dominant among Americans in the next two months. There are now 19 cases of the mutation first reported in South Africa in the U.S., she said, and two cases of a variant initially detected in Brazil in two states.
One priority for fighting the variants in the U.S. is to put strong public health surveillance in place that can track changes in the virus, Walensky said. The CDC is partnering with state laboratories to get 750 samples a week to sequence, she said, and has arranged with private and academic laboratories to contribute data as well.
Additionally, the CDC is working with makers of current vaccines to see if they can tweak their shots to work better against the variants, Walensky said. "So that if down the line we need a bivalent vaccine or a booster vaccine, we're ready to go," she said.
Information for this article was contributed by Jake Bleiberg, Leah Willingham, Jocelyn Noveck, Carla K. Johnson, Bryan Anderson, Acacia Coronado, Andrew Dalton and Mark Pratt of The Associated Press; and by Jill R. Shah of Bloomberg News (TNS).
