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Beryl Bears Down on Texas, Where It Is Expected to Hit after Regaining Hurricane Strength

A drone view shows homes near the sea as tropical storm Beryl continues to move through the Gulf of Mexico, in Playa Bagdad, Mexico July 6, 2024. (Reuters)
A drone view shows homes near the sea as tropical storm Beryl continues to move through the Gulf of Mexico, in Playa Bagdad, Mexico July 6, 2024. (Reuters)
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Beryl Bears Down on Texas, Where It Is Expected to Hit after Regaining Hurricane Strength

A drone view shows homes near the sea as tropical storm Beryl continues to move through the Gulf of Mexico, in Playa Bagdad, Mexico July 6, 2024. (Reuters)
A drone view shows homes near the sea as tropical storm Beryl continues to move through the Gulf of Mexico, in Playa Bagdad, Mexico July 6, 2024. (Reuters)

Beryl was hurtling across the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico on a collision course with Texas, forecast to pick up strength and regain hurricane status before nearing the coast Sunday and making landfall the following day with heavy rains, howling winds and dangerous storm surge.

A hurricane warning was declared for a large stretch of the coast from Baffin Bay, south of Corpus Christi, to Sargent, south of Houston, and storm surge warnings were also in effect. Other parts were under tropical storm warnings.

“We’re expecting the storm to make landfall somewhere on the Texas coast sometime Monday, if the current forecast is correct,” said Jack Beven, a senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. “Should that happen, it’ll most likely be a Category 1 hurricane.”

As of Saturday night, Beryl was about 330 miles (535 kilometers) southeast of Corpus Christi and had top sustained winds of 60 mph (95 kph), according to the National Hurricane Center. It was moving northwest at 13 mph (20 kph).

The earliest storm to develop into a Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic, Beryl caused at least 11 deaths as it passed through the Caribbean earlier in the week. It then battered Mexico as a Category 2 hurricane, toppling trees but causing no injuries or deaths before weakening to a tropical storm as it moved across the Yucatan Peninsula.

Texas officials warned people along the entire coastline to prepare for possible flooding, heavy rain and wind.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who is acting governor while Gov. Greg Abbott is traveling in Taiwan, issued a preemptive disaster declaration for 121 counties.

“Beryl is a determined storm, and incoming winds and potential flooding will pose a serious threat to Texans who are in Beryl’s path at landfall and as it makes its way across the state for the following 24 hours,” Patrick said Saturday in a statement.

Some coastal cities called for voluntary evacuations in low-lying areas that are prone to flooding, banned beach camping and urged tourists traveling on the Fourth of July holiday weekend to move recreational vehicles from coastal parks.

Mitch Thames, a spokesman for Matagorda County, said officials issued a voluntary evacuation request for the coastal areas of the county about 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of Houston.

“Our No. 1 goal is the health and safety of all our visitors and of course our residents. I’m not so much worried about our residents. Those folks that live down there, they’re used to this, they get it,” Thames said.

In Corpus Christi, officials asked visitors to cut their trips short and return home early if possible. Residents were advised to secure homes by boarding up windows if necessary and using sandbags to guard against possible flooding.

Traffic has been nonstop for the past three days at an Ace Hardware in the city as customers buy tarps, rope, duct tape, sandbags and generators, employee Elizabeth Landry said Saturday.

“They’re just worried about the wind, the rain,” she said. “They’re wanting to prepare just in case.”

Ben Koutsoumbaris, general manager of Island Market on Corpus Christi’s Padre Island, said there has been “definitely a lot of buzz about the incoming storm,” with customers stocking up on food and drinks.

In Refugio County, north of Corpus Christi, officials issued a mandatory evacuation order for its 6,700 residents.

Before hitting Mexico, Beryl wrought destruction in Jamaica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Barbados. Three people were reported dead in Grenada, three in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, three in Venezuela and two in Jamaica.

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5 Things We Know and Still Don’t Know about COVID, 5 Years after It Appeared

A medical worker takes a swab sample from a worker of the China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT) company during a round of COVID-19 tests in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province, Aug. 5, 2021. (Chinatopix via AP, File)
A medical worker takes a swab sample from a worker of the China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT) company during a round of COVID-19 tests in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province, Aug. 5, 2021. (Chinatopix via AP, File)
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5 Things We Know and Still Don’t Know about COVID, 5 Years after It Appeared

A medical worker takes a swab sample from a worker of the China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT) company during a round of COVID-19 tests in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province, Aug. 5, 2021. (Chinatopix via AP, File)
A medical worker takes a swab sample from a worker of the China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT) company during a round of COVID-19 tests in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province, Aug. 5, 2021. (Chinatopix via AP, File)

Five years ago, a cluster of people in Wuhan, China, fell sick with a virus never before seen in the world.

The germ didn't have a name, nor did the illness it would cause. It wound up setting off a pandemic that exposed deep inequities in the global health system and reshaped public opinion about how to control deadly emerging viruses.

The virus is still with us, though humanity has built up immunity through vaccinations and infections. It's less deadly than it was in the pandemic's early days and it no longer tops the list of leading causes of death. But the virus is evolving, meaning scientists must track it closely.

Where did the SARS-CoV-2 virus come from? We don’t know. Scientists think the most likely scenario is that it circulated in bats, like many coronaviruses. They think it then infected another species, probably racoon dogs, civet cats or bamboo rats, which in turn infected humans handling or butchering those animals at a market in Wuhan, where the first human cases appeared in late November 2019.

That's a known pathway for disease transmission and likely triggered the first epidemic of a similar virus, known as SARS. But this theory has not been proven for the virus that causes COVID-19. Wuhan is home to several research labs involved in collecting and studying coronaviruses, fueling debate over whether the virus instead may have leaked from one.

It's a difficult scientific puzzle to crack in the best of circumstances. The effort has been made even more challenging by political sniping around the virus' origins and by what international researchers say are moves by China to withhold evidence that could help.

The true origin of the pandemic may not be known for many years — if ever.

People attend an exhibition on the city's fight against the coronavirus in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province, Jan. 23, 2021. (AP)

How many people died from COVID-19? Probably more than 20 million. The World Health Organization has said member countries reported more than 7 million deaths from COVID-19, but the true death toll is estimated to be at least three times higher.

In the US, an average of about 900 people a week have died of COVID-19 over the past year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The coronavirus continues to affect older adults the most. Last winter in the US, people aged 75 and older accounted for about half the nation’s COVID-19 hospitalizations and in-hospital deaths, according to the CDC.

"We cannot talk about COVID in the past, since it’s still with us," WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

What vaccines were made available? Scientists and vaccine-makers broke speed records developing COVID-19 vaccines that have saved tens of millions of lives worldwide – and were the critical step to getting life back to normal.

Less than a year after China identified the virus, health authorities in the US and Britain cleared vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna. Years of earlier research — including Nobel-winning discoveries that were key to making the new technology work — gave a head start for so-called mRNA vaccines.

Today, there’s also a more traditional vaccine made by Novavax, and some countries have tried additional options. Rollout to poorer countries was slow but the WHO estimates more than 13 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally since 2021.

The vaccines aren't perfect. They do a good job of preventing severe disease, hospitalization and death, and have proven very safe, with only rare serious side effects. But protection against milder infection begins to wane after a few months.

Like flu vaccines, COVID-19 shots must be updated regularly to match the ever-evolving virus — contributing to public frustration at the need for repeated vaccinations. Efforts to develop next-generation vaccines are underway, such as nasal vaccines that researchers hope might do a better job of blocking infection.

This undated electron microscope image made available by the US National Institutes of Health in February 2020 shows the Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, yellow, emerging from the surface of cells, pink, cultured in the lab. (NIAID-RML via AP, File)

Which variant is dominating now? Genetic changes called mutations happen as viruses make copies of themselves. And this virus has proven to be no different.

Scientists named these variants after Greek letters: alpha, beta, gamma, delta and omicron. Delta, which became dominant in the US in June 2021, raised a lot of concerns because it was twice as likely to lead to hospitalization as the first version of the virus.

Then in late November 2021, a new variant came on the scene: omicron.

"It spread very rapidly," dominating within weeks, said Dr. Wesley Long, a pathologist at Houston Methodist in Texas. "It drove a huge spike in cases compared to anything we had seen previously."

But on average, the WHO said, it caused less severe disease than delta. Scientists believe that may be partly because immunity had been building due to vaccination and infections.

"Ever since then, we just sort of keep seeing these different subvariants of omicron accumulating more different mutations," Long said. "Right now, everything seems to locked on this omicron branch of the tree."

The omicron relative now dominant in the US is called XEC, which accounted for 45% of variants circulating nationally in the two-week period ending Dec. 21, the CDC said. Existing COVID-19 medications and the latest vaccine booster should be effective against it, Long said, since "it’s really sort of a remixing of variants already circulating."

Employees disinfect streets and shops inside Istanbul's famous Grand Bazaar to prevent the spread of coronavirus. (EPA)

What do we know about long COVID? Millions of people remain in limbo with a sometimes disabling, often invisible, legacy of the pandemic called long COVID.

It can take several weeks to bounce back after a bout of COVID-19, but some people develop more persistent problems. The symptoms that last at least three months, sometimes for years, include fatigue, cognitive trouble known as "brain fog," pain and cardiovascular problems, among others.

Doctors don’t know why only some people get long COVID. It can happen even after a mild case and at any age, although rates have declined since the pandemic's early years. Studies show vaccination can lower the risk.

It also isn't clear what causes long COVID, which complicates the search for treatments. One important clue: Increasingly researchers are discovering that remnants of the coronavirus can persist in some patients’ bodies long after their initial infection, although that can’t explain all cases.