How UNLV is helping prepare for the human exploration of Mars, plus...

It's been five years since COVID struck and changed the world.

How it continues impacting the state, that's this week on Nevada Week.

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon, joining you from Nevada Public Radio.

What groundwork UNLV is doing to one day put people on Mars?

That's ahead, but we begin with COVID: Five years later.

After shutting down the Las Vegas Strip and straining local hospitals and educators, how is the pandemic that started in 2020 still impacting Nevadans?

There are many answers to that question, which is why we teamed up with KNPR, State of Nevada, for a special one-hour program right here in their studios.

In addition to hearing from people in the community through emails and phone calls, we also spoke with several experts, including UNLV Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics Brian Labus; UNLV Professor of Educational Policy Megan Rauch Griffard; Andrew Woods, Director of UNLV Center for Business and Economic Research; and Dan Ficalora, Clinical Director for Bridge Counseling Services.

"State of Nevada" Host Joe Schoenmann and I moderated this discussion, and here are some highlights from it.

Let's start with Brian Labus and the current state of COVID-19.

A novel virus in 2019, what's it look like in 2025?

(Brian Labus) We're still seeing the virus circulate.

It hasn't gone away, but we're experiencing it very differently than we did five years ago, because it's not a new virus anymore.

People have immunity, both from getting infected naturally and from the vaccine, and so that really changes the way that we interact with the virus.

Because of that immunity, the death rates that we see are lower.

We understand more about treatment.

We understand more about prevention.

So it's the same virus, but the way we interact with it is different these days, and we have a better understanding of how to protect ourselves.

But people are still getting sick with COVID, and people are still dying from COVID.

(Joe Schoenmann) So the severity of it, it's not as severe?

How would you put it on a scale of 1 to 10 versus what it was like when it began in 2020?

-It's hard to put a number on it.

Basically, it depends who you are, and it depends on what your prior experiences and your underlying health conditions.

People that have had been repeatedly vaccinated or have had the disease have some immunity to it now.

So even if they are exposed and they get sick, they're less likely to be hospitalized, they're less likely to die, because it's not the first time we've ever been exposed to it.

So the virus itself, like I said, hasn't changed.

And there's some viruses circulating that are worse than that original strain we dealt with, but really it's the fact that our population has some history with this virus now that gives us an advantage in dealing with it compared to where we were five years ago.

-Yeah, I guess people understand it more, and we did ask people, ahead of the show, to call in, as we do every week for our Wednesday program, to call in and leave a voicemail, which we may or may not include on the program.

And Gloria Farley of Logandale called our listener line, and she left this voicemail: (Gloria Farley) I'm a COVID widow.

My husband David Michael Farley passed away from the COVID on November 10, 2020.

He was in the hospital for two weeks in Mesquite, and the other 40 days he was in the hospital in Las Vegas.

And you never, ever really get over the suffering that you know they went through, sitting in the parking lot day after day and not being able to hold their hand or talk to them and just hoping that they can text because they can barely breathe.

So I don't believe everybody really realizes just what damage it did to a lot of families and how we still will grieve for the rest of our lives, not for ourselves, but for those who suffered so horribly.

And my husband got the COVID at the same time President Trump did, and it broke my heart when the President said that he beat COVID and it's not a big deal and he threw his mask off, and I cried.

I cried like a baby, because it was a big deal to a lot of us, and this is our life from now on, is to always remember that COVID was real and it pretty well destroyed a lot of lives.

-Dan, I want to go to you now with Bridge Counseling Services.

And when you hear a call like Gloria's, she lost her husband from COVID, what do you think?

(Dan Ficalora) The unimaginable grief and trauma that came from this experience on the individual level, but also as a society and as a culture, that collective trauma that we all experience, you know, watching the death toll count on the evening news every night kind of tick up slowly.

And you know, if we were going to create a lab experiment to figure out a way to increase anxiety and depression in a population, you would probably go with isolation and uncertainty and just turn up the volume on both of those.

That's what happened during the pandemic.

No one knew what was happening, and we were all isolated from each other, and that's the perfect recipe to increase substance abuse, depression, anxiety, self harm, suicide, all of them went up during the pandemic.

-We just got this email from Patricia who said, I just had my first baby in October of 2019 and had returned to work on the Strip in January of 2020.

The shutdown made me a stay-at-home mom that was isolated from friends and family.

I had an infant and suffered from postpartum depression.

The stress of the pandemic amplified all my anxiety.

I feel like I'm still working on my mental health and the impact the pandemic has had on my life.

And again, Dan Ficalora, how many people do you still talk to or talk to that still have issues or are still talking about the PTSD or the stress of the depression that they incurred during the pandemic.

It's pretty constant, both in those clients that were with us pre- and during the pandemic and those that have come to us afterwards.

The effects of that time period in those couple of years we were all dealing with this pandemic really impacted the collective psyche and mental health of the nation.

There's a couple studies out there that said about 1 in 5 adults have identified that the pandemic negatively impacted their mental health.

The the World Health Organization said there was a collective 25% spike in anxiety and depression from 2020 to 2022, and we haven't gone back to prepandemic levels of anxiety and depression.

It's still higher than it was pre-2020.

So it's everywhere.

And what we've been seeing most recently, a spike of people having to go back to work, going back to the office, that are just really anxious and people coming in for treatment and asking for, Can I get a letter for my employer to exempt me from going back to the office, because I really can't deal with going back to the office right now for a variety of personal reasons.

-Megan Rauch Griffard, Professor of Educational Policy at UNLV, we had spoke prior to this discussion on the phone, and you brought up the trauma that children have endured during the pandemic.

What was that, and how does it continue to impact them today?

(Megan Rauch Giffard) So for the kids, especially the kids in our state, going to school is an inherently social and developmentally important experience.

And what we saw during the pandemic is, like my colleague was saying, those opportunities were lost.

And when you have a young mind and a developing brain, it's super important to be able to interact with peers, to interact positively with adults, which is something that happens at school every day for kids.

And so not having those things and also dealing with the stress of living through a pandemic is really scary and really hard.

And when you don't necessarily have quite yet the developmental tools to process what you went through, we can see that manifest in schools today with certain behaviors that kids are displaying or with chronic absenteeism, so students either being not feeling comfortable coming to school or not feeling like school is a priority for them anymore.

And so there's just a lot going on for young people today, five years later.

-And why did you say, "particularly in Nevada"?

-I think what we saw in Nevada, which I'm sure my colleague with more expertise on the economy can talk about, is we are, we are a service driven economy; and so for a lot of families, it either meant that their income was lost or that they were still going back to work, you know, in the early days after things started to reopen in a very scary and uncertain environment.

And worrying that your parent or your caregiver is going to get sick is something that's really, really scary for a young person to have to try to grapple with.

And there's also the fear of losing your home or losing your job, for your parents.

And so food insecurity, home insecurity, all of those things are stressors that kids internalize and carry with them.

-And we have this testimonial from parent Elizabeth Galantuomini in Summerlin.

(Elizabeth Galantuomini) Hey there.

This is Elizabeth.

I am a listener in Summerlin.

I am a dental hygienist in town, and I think the thing that pulls at my heart strings, and I can get emotional thinking about it, is listening to my patients who were losing their parents, and their elderly parents were dying alone without being able to see their family's faces or the comfort or touch of their family.

As for my patients who were, when they started coming back, my performers, the ones on the Strip, they suffered the worst, because if both parents were performers, then there was absolutely no income coming into that family household.

But our artists, appreciate them, they are the ones that really suffered so much.

They were completely blindsided.

Anyway, for me and my kids, we loved having three months off together.

We went to the park every day.

We ate lunch outdoors.

We spent every day walking.

We did well as a family.

-During that call, a lot of discussions, a lot of topics were covered.

But let's bring in Andrew Woods right now with the UNLV Center for Business and Economic Research.

She touched a little bit on the economic situation that COVID left a lot of us in.

What do you remember, early memories of COVID's impact on the economy, and what are we continuing to face as a result of the pandemic?

(Andrew Woods) Well, Joe and Amber, thanks for having me on today.

And going off of what Brian originally said about how COVID, So here we're just experiencing it differently, it's the same is true for the economy.

When we go back and think about, you know, those early days in March of 2020, you know, at first we thought it might be a few days, a few weeks, and then it turned into months.

And we saw that our, just here in Nevada, our unemployment rate skyrocketed up to 29% statewide.

If you go to Southern Nevada, it was 34%.

So 1 in 3 workers was unemployed.

The Las Vegas Strip was shut down, right?

We had no, basically no visitors coming through the airport or driving in from Southern California, and our economy came pretty close to a screeching halt, which is, as an economist, something terrifying to see.

It's not something you dream of, except maybe in the movies.

So it was, at the time, very scary to see.

Fortunately, since then, we've rebounded much faster than I think we anticipated, but we still see the scars in the economy since then.

You know, the fastest growing industries we've seen since the pandemic in terms of employment have been transportation, warehousing, healthcare, as well as construction.

For leisure and hospitality, they only regained their full employment levels from 2019 just early last year.

Now, what's interesting about especially leisure and hospitality is that food and accommodation-type jobs, so those are starting kitchens or running hotels, they actually decreased.

They're lower than they were in 2019.

But entertainment jobs have backfilled it.

So this switch to the sports economy, we can see, is an effect in our workforce, which, here in Southern Nevada, 1 in 4 jobs is tied to leisure and hospitality.

For the state, it's 1 in 5.

And we've seen also a burst of entrepreneurial-type activity since the pandemic.

So, yes, people, it was it was awful what happened, and there are definitely scars still in the economy.

We can talk about inflation, right, and all those concerns, but just also it's interesting, we've been doing some research on 1 in 5 businesses that are operating today started during the pandemic too.

-Well, and you did bring up inflation.

You say we've rebounded, but I think a lot of listeners out there are thinking, everything is still so expensive.

How can the economy be good when I can't afford groceries I used to easily be able to afford?

How do you respond to that?

Is it hard to get that message through to people?

-Well, look, I experience it too.

I go to the grocery store and I see the price of eggs right now, which is not necessarily due to the pandemic, because of bird flu, but another type of virus that's out there.

You know, it is-- certainly it is a huge concern.

We saw that inflation at one point in 2022 peaked at 9%.

We had the inflation numbers today that were much cooler.

A lot of the concerns we see less now, inflation.

Affordability is the concern.

So it's not so much about price increases.

It's about whether we can afford, kind of, the lifestyle and also our-- can we just afford the basics now?

Can we afford homes, cars, food, taking care of our families?

And some of that has been mitigated more recently.

It takes time to feel it in the economy, because real wages have gone up in most industries.

Particularly leisure and hospitality has seen the largest increase in wages because it was hard to get people.

People didn't want to go back and work in leisure and hospitality, so they had to raise wages, and we can see that they've outpaced inflation, but the cost of living is still much higher.

There's also a lot of things about Nevada's market in terms of costs that make it very unique.

For example, we get a lot of the population increases come from California, and they have a very much-- they have a very different kind of willingness to pay for things versus the average Nevadan and the average Nevada family.

And that's kind of created two economies for especially Southern Nevada.

So for some, this seems like a discount.

For the others that have been living here before the pandemic, things seem much more expensive.

-Dan Ficalora, I want to bring in you now with Bridge Counseling Services, and we've talked about the grief that people have experienced as a result of COVID, but what about the anger that people have felt over businesses being closed, over the impact to their businesses?

Joe, you told me a story about going to a local bar, and instead of that person being happy that the bar was back open, they were really mad that it had been shut down in the first place.

-The bartender, infuriated, screaming about the governor and the closure of businesses.

-There's a lot of anger, I think, post-COVID.

-Irritability, fear, avoidance, hypervigilance, these can all be attributed to trauma and anxiety.

These are common symptoms that people experience.

When they're dealing with that uncertainty, when they have this perception of something bad is going to happen in the future, we feel that in a physical form, but also mentally.

And it comes out in that fear, anger, irritability, and that really hypervigilance and sometimes paranoia about what's going on.

And, yeah, you have people getting in fights at Costco about having to wear a mask.

We have a lot of people that have anxiety about wearing a mask in the first place and then feel like they're isolated from society, and then that can make them feel angry as well.

So a very common occurrence experienced during the pandemic, and people are just now starting to get back to their new normal.

But some of them hold a grudge and are still experiencing that anxiety and that irritability of, I was mistreated during this period of time, and it really impacts how they participate in society.

-Megan Rauch Griffard, let's bring you back in now, the Professor of Educational Policy at UNLV, and I want to know what you have been nodding your head in agreement about when we've heard from various callers, as well as from the experts on this panel.

-Yeah.

So I think one of the things that's really stood out to me is like we had the call from the mom in Summerlin who said it was a really good experience to bond with her kids because they were home for three months.

I would say that in our extremely diverse Southern Nevada population, both in terms of demographics, but also in terms of socioeconomics, I would say that probably their experience was more of the exception rather than the rule, especially in our urban centers.

We know that there were people living in very close quarters and limited access to green spaces, so those opportunities to get outside and go for walks weren't necessarily there for everyone.

And when school was closed, particularly if you didn't have a parent who was still working, who was home, who either had to go to work or was maybe out looking for work or just not able to access the online education that was available to students at that time could be really stressful.

We had a lot of students who were responsible for younger siblings.

And we know that for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, learning loss when school is not in session, just even typically over the summer is much higher than for those families in more affluent areas.

And so that's just something to be mindful of, is that, that for a lot of families, it was not a good time, it was a scary time, and just being mindful that we're all still carrying that with us.

-Yeah.

And how long does it take for these students to catch up?

Is that going to happen?

I see a lot of sadness in parents' faces when I talk to them about COVID and the loss that these children experienced by being out of school.

What do you say to them?

Do they ever get these years back, they catch up?

-It's hard for me to give a definitive answer.

I think, like when we talked on the phone last week, Amber, I had mentioned that this is sort of like the lost generation that came back after World War I.

We're in that shell shock, especially if you're a young kid and suddenly, you know, you're not in school, you're not around your friends, you're not around your teachers, you're maybe not learning anything.

Your parents are stressed.

You may have family members who are getting sick.

There's concerns about being able to afford food, afford your home.

All of those things, they don't just go away.

It may lessen over time, but we also see that children who-- our especially younger kids lost really crucial developmental opportunities from not being in school for that time.

So I think we're going to be dealing with the impact of COVID on education for a long time.

I would anticipate that dropout rates in the future are also going to increase.

So that's something to keep in mind.

We'll be seeing this for a long time.

-To hear the rest of this edition of "State of Nevada," go to vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek.

We move now to Mars.

At his inauguration, when laying out his plans for his next four years in office, President Donald Trump said astronauts will plant the American flag on the Red Planet, but is that enough time to properly prepare?

It's a question we asked UNLV Professor Libby Hausrath, a past guest here on "State of Nevada," and now a guest on Nevada Week.

She's also the lead author of a new research article that shares what scientists have learned from the rock samples that the Perseverance rover has been collecting ever since it landed on Mars in 2021.

These are the rock samples that NASA's Perseverance Mars rover team selected to bring to Earth.

(Libby Hausrath) It's a mixture of nitrogen and hydrogen.

-UNLV Astrobiologist Libby Hausrath is a member of that team.

-From the data that the rover has already collected, it does seem like these could be habitable environments.

Of course, we won't really know until they come back, but it's really exciting that that could be the case.

-Despite the rover's state-of-the-art science instruments, which reportedly helped scientists find phosphate in the rock samples... -Phosphate is a really important nutrient for life, and so the fact that it has been found in these interesting samples is really exciting for possible ancient life on Mars.

- ...Hausrath says scientists can only truly answer whether life existed on Mars by studying the rock samples in person.

In a January teleconference call with the media, NASA said it aims to bring those samples to Earth in the mid-2030s, but we'll need immediate funding of about $300 million to stay on track.

(male voice) A good reason of why it could get extended out is if the Congress and the new administration do not respond.

We're talking about this fiscal year getting the money to get this thing going.

-But with federal spending under Elon Musk's microscope, the Department of Government Efficiency leader may propose that the US spend this money on his passion project, getting humans to Mars.

It's a goal President Trump himself said he plans to accomplish in his next four years.

(President Donald Trump) And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.

[cheers and applause] -Does that make sense to you, to get humans there before you even get these samples back?

-You know, I think that we can learn so much from the samples that will help with humans, and particularly the samples that we just published the paper on are of regolith or soil.

And this is particularly important because Mars is covered with dust, and right now we don't know the particle size or the composition or the shape of the dust.

And so getting that information will really help with, you know, how that might interact with, you know, equipment, machinery on Mars.

It also has material that seems to be very representative of large areas of Mars, so the fine grained soil or sediment.

And that's really important, because that's what most of the surface of Mars is covered in.

So that's what astronauts will be walking on.

It'll likely, you know, it's a potential resource for use in, you know, potentially building materials.

And, you know, these are potential resources.

The soil is a potential resource.

And there's also, you know, potential hazards.

So on the moon, for example, the lunar regolith, actually, the lunar soil, turned out to be much sharper than anybody had anticipated.

So it was actually cutting holes in people's space suits.

So, you know, we don't-- that's probably, it's probably sharper on the moon than on Mars, but it would be really helpful to have these samples back to know more about Mars before humans go there.

I'm very prohumans on Mars.

I think the samples are a really important step in that direction.

-And Hausrath has a head start, should humans go to Mars.

Hausrath is already researching how to make human exploration of Mars possible, and she thinks one answer may be algae.

-We've been growing algae in the lab and under low pressure conditions, and this is relevant to human exploration of Mars, because the atmospheric pressure on Mars is very much lower than on Earth.

And we were able to see that the algae can grow under these pressures that are relevant to potential flexible greenhouses.

So they can produce oxygen, and some algae are edible.

-So potentially, people may be eating algae on Mars?

-That's possible.

So yeah, well, yeah, that could potentially be possible in the future, yeah.

-As a potential food source?

-Yeah.

Yeah, and oxygen source, and taking up of CO2 from the atmosphere.

-The atmosphere at UNLV, one of awe and excitement, as even graduate students are taking part in the out-of-this-world work.

-Being able to have been accepted to a program and work under people who are, you know, principal investigators in these missions is really something that I find impressive and motivating and, yeah, and I love it.

-And so does Hausrath, who says, if given the chance, she'd go to Mars herself... -You know, there's so much more to be learned from future exploration.

- ...but hopes the rock samples she helped choose will make their way to Earth as well.

If these rock samples do reach Earth, they will be the only hand-picked samples from Mars to physically be on Earth.

Right now, the only objects from Mars here for scientists to work with in person are meteorites that crash landed here.

Meanwhile, in response to President Trump's request that federal agencies prepare for mass layoffs, NASA is reportedly closing three of its offices and laying off its chief scientist.

It's unknown how these actions will impact NASA's missions.

For any of the resources discussed on this show, go to vegas.pbs.org/nevadaweek.

And I'll see you next week on Nevada Week.

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