COVID-19 Policy Update #288
COVID-19 Policy Update
THURSDAY 7/1
TOP THREE
Damage to Children’s Education — And Their Health — Could Last a Lifetime: Via KHN. Long, but well worth your time reading the whole piece.
Masks Can Prevent COVID Transmission in Schools: New study from Duke (also an interview)
"North Carolina schools did an outstanding job preventing within-school transmission of COVID‐19."
"Wearing masks is an effective strategy to prevent in-school COVID-19 transmission"
"Distance does not predict the spread of COVID-19 when students/staff/teachers are masked.
"Within‐school transmission of COVID‐19 in Plan A (full in-person instruction with minimal physical distancing) is similar to the within‐school transmission in Plan B (hybrid instruction to enable six feet of physical distancing)."
"Masking is adequate to prevent within-school COVID-19 transmission, with no difference between schools requiring greater than 3 feet of distance between students compared to those requiring less than 3 feet. Distance did not predict infection."
"Proper masking is the most effective mitigation strategy to prevent secondary transmission in schools when COVID-19 is circulating and when vaccination is unavailable, or there is insufficient uptake."
Students of Color Still Prefer Classes Online Than In-Person: Washington Post story on a RAND survey.
"But Black and Latino parents stood out in the results: The percentage who reported being uncertain about — or against — the fall return was just under 30 percent, nearly three times as high as the 10 percent for White parents, the study showed."
“The most common reason is, ‘My kids feel safer in remote school,’ ” said Heather Schwartz, the senior policy researcher at Rand who led the work."
"30 percent of parents who were unsure or opposed to sending children back worried about their children contracting or transmitting the virus."
"Rural parents and white parents are each much more likely to prefer that schools should reduce or discontinue their COVID-19 safety precautions. Black, Hispanic, Asian, and urban parents are each much more likely to prefer to keep them."
"As of May 2021, 52 percent of parents surveyed planned to vaccinate their children, and another 17 percent were unsure. Rural parents and those who were not vaccinated themselves were the least likely to intend to vaccinate their children."
"Similarly, research from the University of Southern California shows 30 percent of Black parents and 18 percent of Hispanic parents surveyed from mid-May through June 22 are planning for remote instruction or are unsure about returning to school for fall, compared with 12 percent of White and Asian parents."
"In Arlington, Va., the percentage of Black students in virtual learning was nearly double the percentage of White students. In Alexandria, 63 percent of Black students learned remotely, compared with 42 percent of White students. In Loudoun County, the gap was between Black and White students in all-virtual learning was 10 points."
FEDERAL
ED: Released more than $3 billion in ARP funds to states to support infants, toddlers, children, and youth with disabilities.
COVID-19 RESEARCH
Delta:
Via Vox: How the delta variant is altering the course of the pandemic
Delta variant raises new questions about boosters...
"And it'd be hard to justify giving Americans a third shot while much of the rest of the world waits for their first."
Confusion Over Masking Guidance: Via Axios
"Days after the World Health Organization recommended vaccinated people continue to wear their masks, the CDC reiterated its own guidance, which lets some people stay unmasked and leaves exceptions up to local authorities."
"Los Angeles County officials on Tuesday reinstated mask guidance until they can "better understand how and to who the Delta variant is spreading."
"Israel reinstated an indoor mask mandate that it dropped two weeks ago, and four major cities in Australia are under lockdown due to a resurgence of cases."
KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor: June 2021
"Three in ten unvaccinated adults, rising to about half of those in the “wait and see” group, say they would be more likely to get vaccinated if one of the vaccines currently authorized for emergency use were to receive full approval from the FDA."
"Reported vaccination rates continue to increase among children ages 12-17, with one-third of parents of children in this age range saying their child has received at least one vaccine dose, up from 24% in May."
"However, many parents are still waiting and one-quarter say they will “definitely not” vaccinate their child."
What the Media Gets Wrong About Red-State Vaccine Hesitancy: "Many poor, rural Whites have legitimate reasons to distrust the health care system — and real barriers to access."
"Narratives about politically conservative White populations commonly assert that belief in misinformation and conspiracy theories have led these groups to underestimate risk. Articles portray these populations as being anti-science while highlighting absurd examples, such as an individual motivated to reject the vaccine simply for the purpose of trolling the political left. This narrative reveals a remarkable lack of curiosity and empathy regarding the complexity underneath these beliefs."
"By contrast, articles about unvaccinated minority populations have rightly focused on underlying causes of hesitancy, exploring legitimate grievances such as historical and contemporary racism. Explanations beyond hesitancy are often mentioned, including economic factors, structural barriers, immigration status, and lack of health insurance."
"If we take this same nuanced approach with unvaccinated conservative White people — and scratch the surface beneath the conspiracy theory and anti-science explanation even a little — we find that their underlying characteristics are similar to those of unvaccinated minority groups."
"Taking such a vaccine requires trust in the medical system and in society more broadly. Most unvaccinated groups have been let down by both, and a connection can easily be traced between vaccine hesitancy and those failures. That dynamic deserves to be approached with empathy, not ridicule. Unfortunately, the mainstream media seems to be treating some groups as worthy of humanizing contextualization, while implying that the others are motivated by rank buffoonery."
Doctors Are Puzzled by Heart Inflammation in the Young and Vaccinated: Via Katherine Wu in The Atlantic.
"These events are, so far, not matching the most terrifying versions of the condition, which have been observed with coronavirus infections"
"Rather, compared with more typical cases of myocarditis, the ones linked to the vaccines, on average, involve briefer symptoms and speedier recoveries, even with less invasive treatments. Still, the incidents are showing up in the few days that follow each vaccine’s second dose at higher-than-expected rates, especially in boys and young men, and no one is yet sure why."
"For more than a year now, the pandemic has forced people to pit a pile of risky unknowns against another pile of risky unknowns, but anything that concerns kids’ health is bound to make tensions run particularly high."
"But vaccine-induced heart inflammation of any severity still warrants concern, especially without a known root cause. Myocarditis and pericarditis, which mysteriously skew young and male, can arise from an array of triggers, including bacteria and fungi as well as medications and autoimmune disease, but many cases go entirely unexplained. There’s no curative, or even standard, treatment for either condition; doctors try to manage symptoms and tamp down inflammation, said John Jarcho, a cardiovascular-medicine specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston."
"All of these factors make the risk of this complication tough to quantify, and several researchers have criticized the CDC’s recent evaluation. But most of the experts I spoke with said that the calculations still come out strongly in favor of vaccination, in part because of another set of disconcerting ambiguities, this time on the side of the virus."
Students of Color Still Got Less In-Person Instruction as School Buildings Reopened: A good EdWeek piece on the CDC report we shared earlier this week.
“What we are seeing here is a movement generally into more in-person for all groups, but the increases for students of color tend to be from virtual to hybrid, and for white students, into full in-person,” said Emily Oster, a Brown University researcher and lead author of the study. “The result is a widening of the full, in-person gap.”
"The percentage of white students with access to in-person, full-time classes rose from 38 percent to nearly 75 percent from January to April, with Black students’ access rising from about 32 percent to more than 63 percent during that time, and Hispanic students’ access rising from just under 36 percent to close to 60 percent."
"Yet over the same period, access to hybrid schooling rose 9.5 percentage points for white students, but 23 percentage points for Hispanic students and close to 22 percentage points for Black students. As of April, 30 percent of Black students and nearly a third of Hispanic students attended a school using hybrid instruction, compared to less than a quarter of white students."
STATE
Connecticut: Governor announces program allowing children to receive free admission at museums this summer.
Florida: FLVS: full-time enrollment was up between July and September by 5,644 – a 98% increase – while the flexible virtual program saw course requests increase by 231,128, or 57% from the same time in 2019.
INTERNATIONAL
UK: ONS survey: Almost nine in 10 parents in England say they favor giving their children a Covid vaccine if they are offered it.
ECONOMIC RECOVERY
United Airlines: Making big bets:
Will spend $30 billion to purchase 200 Boeing 737 MAX jets and 70 Airbus SE A321neos
Made a $1 billion investment in Archer Aviation, a startup that makes electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircrafts.
Ordered 15 supersonic aircrafts from Boom Supersonic
RESOURCES
Learning Engineering Tools Competition: Will award $3 million in prizes this year. Key themes for this year’s competition will include accelerated learning, assessment, adult learning, and research-driven experimentation. Launches July 7.
The Homeschooling Boom Is Just Beginning: Marc Andreessen said the pandemic has been a catalyst for parent-driven, technology-enabled educational change that will have a large and lasting impact on the education sector.
"Most parents, if you're in your thirties or forties and your kids are in sixth grade or eighth grade, you were taught in the classroom 30 years ago, it turns out some things have changed. So the current curricula is quite a bit different at a lot of schools. I know a lot of parents were just shocked, absolutely shocked at the stuff that was coming across.” He added that “some set of parents are like, I'm not sending my kids back to that.”
"New education startups should be ready to come under just withering assault from Washington or from Sacramento because all of the teacher unions, and all of the universities, and all of the people who are basically wired into those systems are going to just try to kill it.”
‘How Many Kids Are We Going to Lose?’ Four Principals Speak About the Past Year: Via NYT
Three Chicago Teens, One Pandemic Year: How COVID-19 widened education gaps for boys of color
EdTech:
DuoLingo headed for an IPO.
40 languages / 500m+ downloads / ~40m monthly active users
While the company’s MAUs rose 34% from 2019 to 2020, the company’s paying users rose from 900,000 at the end of 2019 to 1.6 million at the end of 2020. That is a far sharper gain of 84% on a year-over-year basis.
CodeX Academy secures $10 million to grow its Income Share Agreement Program.
Articulate raises $1.5 billion in Series A round. One of the largest Series A rounds in history.
GV leads $72 million investment in Brightline which offers virtual behavioral healthcare for kids
This Dad: Has his hands full.