COVID-19 Policy Update #281
COVID-19 Policy Update
TUESDAY 6/22
TOP THREE
COVID Disrupting Schools in the UK: A quarter of a million children in England missed school last week because of Covid infections, self-isolation or school closures, making it the most disrupted week since schools fully reopened in March.
That's a tripling of cases in just a week.
"Teacher unions have called on government for improved safety measures and more freedom to respond to outbreaks, warning that the interruption to learning could deteriorate further to levels of last winter, when up to 9-11 per cent of pupils were off for Covid-related reasons as the second wave peaked."
Why This Matters: Trends in Europe and the UK have often foreshadowed what we end up dealing with in the U.S. This could suggest we're in for a rocky school reopening this fall, particularly in states with lower vaccination rates.
Study Finds Low Risk for Teachers: New study that finds school staff are no more likely to contract COVID-19 at work than they are in day-to-day life in their communities
"Despite high reported COVID-19 cases among students and staff, and frequent within-school exposures, we found no detectable increase in seroprevalence among school staff above the community seroprevalence. These findings corroborate claims that, with appropriate mitigation strategies, in-person schooling is not associated with significantly increased risk for school staff."
Florida Assessment results: FLDOE released assessment results which showed that districts with higher rates of in-person instruction had more consistent learning outcomes between 2019 and 2022.
Achievement gaps also narrowed for Florida’s African American and Hispanic students, who experienced less of a decline (3%) than White students (4%).
COVID-19 RESEARCH
Delta:
Fauci declares Delta variant ‘greatest threat’ to the nation’s efforts to eliminate Covid
Delta variant appears to be behind Missouri case surge.
"Low vaccination rates are dangerous when combined with the spread of variants such as Delta, which is believed to be more transmissible and cause more serious illness. Steve Edwards, CEO of CoxHealth, a healthcare system in Springfield, Missouri, told CNN the combination is to blame for a six-fold increase in hospitalizations in his system."
Predictor of COVID Deaths: According to Youyang Gu - income inequality is the single best predictor of total COVID deaths in the US. Not income, but income inequality. More here (along with data and charts)
Moral Judgments Impact Perceived Risks from COVID-19 Exposure: Fascinating paper that might give us a bit more understanding of how people assess risk with activities during COVID.
"The results indicate that risk judgments are sensitive to factors unrelated to the objective risks of infection. In particular, activities that are morally justified are perceived as safer while those that might subject people to blame, or culpability, are seen as riskier."
"As we show here, moral judgments may play a role in shaping risk judgments, and thus in shaping choices during a pandemic."
The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill: Via Wired. Long piece but worth your time as this has implications for the 3ft vs 6ft debate in schools.
"According to the medical canon, nearly all respiratory infections transmit through coughs or sneezes: Whenever a sick person hacks, bacteria and viruses spray out like bullets from a gun, quickly falling and sticking to any surface within a blast radius of 3 to 6 feet."
"The distinction between droplet and airborne transmission has enormous consequences. To combat droplets, a leading precaution is to wash hands frequently with soap and water. To fight infectious aerosols, the air itself is the enemy. In hospitals, that means expensive isolation wards and N95 masks for all medical staff."
"The WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also listed 5 microns as the fulcrum on which the droplet-aerosol dichotomy toggled."
"There was just one literally tiny problem: “The physics of it is all wrong,” Marr says. That much seemed obvious to her from everything she knew about how things move through air. Reality is far messier, with particles much larger than 5 microns staying afloat and behaving like aerosols, depending on heat, humidity, and airspeed. “I’d see the wrong number over and over again, and I just found that disturbing,” she says. The error meant that the medical community had a distorted picture of how people might get sick."
"He’d become fixated on the WHO recommendation that people stay 3 to 6 feet apart from one another. As far as he could tell, that social distancing guideline seemed to be based on a few studies from the 1930s and ’40s. But the authors of those experiments actually argued for the possibility of airborne transmission, which by definition would involve distances over 6 feet. None of it seemed to add up."
"Marr told him about her concerns with the 5-micron boundary and suggested that their two issues might be linked. If the 6-foot guideline was built off of an incorrect definition of droplets, the 5-micron error wasn’t just some arcane detail. It seemed to sit at the heart of the WHO’s and the CDC’s flawed guidance."
"Days later, the WHO released an updated scientific brief, acknowledging that aerosols couldn’t be ruled out, especially in poorly ventilated places. But it stuck to the 3- to 6-foot rule, advising people to wear masks indoors only if they couldn’t keep that distance. Jimenez was incensed. “It is misinformation, and it is making it difficult for ppl to protect themselves,” he tweeted about the update. “E.g. 50+ reports of schools, offices forbidding portable HEPA units because of @CDCgov and @WHO downplaying aerosols.”
"On Friday, APRIL 30, the WHO quietly updated a page on its website. In a section on how the coronavirus gets transmitted, the text now states that the virus can spread via aerosols as well as larger droplets. As Zeynep Tufekci noted in The New York Times, perhaps the biggest news of the pandemic passed with no news conference, no big declaration. If you weren’t paying attention, it was easy to miss."
"In early May, the CDC made similar changes to its Covid-19 guidance, now placing the inhalation of aerosols at the top of its list of how the disease spreads. Again though, no news conference, no press release."
One crazy postscript: The WHO tweet is still up.
STATE
Illinois: Chicago Public high school graduates would be guaranteed three more months of free, high-speed internet service — and those going on to City Colleges would get the benefit for up to three years due to a large philanthropic consortium.
Indiana: Counseling helps students cope with pandemic trauma at Indianapolis summer program.
Michigan: Grand Rapids Public Schools approves $231 million budget that which includes a reduction in $8 million state revenue from the loss of over 1,000 student enrollments.
Nevada: Senate Bill 249 becomes law to give Nevada students mental health days
INTERNATIONAL
Israel: School COVID-19 cases spur Israeli parents to vaccinate kids
RESOURCES
The Remote Learning Paradox: Some Educators, Parents Want to Keep Online Classes Option Even Though Instruction Suffered: Via The 74
She Fought to Reopen Schools, Becoming a Hero and a Villain: A NYT piece on Emily Oster's work.
Not terribly balanced (particularly when compared to Dana's profile of Randi) but still covers Emily's work and the broad contours of the debate.
Building a Learning Culture: Lessons from X, The Moonshot Factory: Great piece from Grant Russell.
Lesson 1. Make learning a part of your organization’s strategy: At X, we learn our way to moonshots
Lesson 2. Institutionalize and reward the learning that matters: At X, we reward the failure that leads to learning
Lesson 3. Create a supportive learning environment: At X, we embrace failure (and each other)
Lesson 4. Model what it means to learn: At X, we're all continuously growing
Burritos Blanket: Andy Rotherham was very excited about this Prime Day deal.
This is 2.0 which means they have the bugs worked out from V1.0 (which to be fair, was just a Minimally Viable Burrito)
I'm Here for the Dolphins: Diver captures amazing moment a playful dolphin performs underwater spins and backflips