TOP THREE
Daily Testing for Contacts of Individuals with SARS-CoV-2 Infection: New study out of the UK
"Infection rates in school-based contacts were low, with very few school contacts testing positive. Daily contact testing should be considered for implementation as a safe alternative to home isolation following school-based exposures."
"Overall, this study shows that in secondary schools and colleges of further education, student and staff infection following contact with an individual with COVID-19 at school occurs in only around 2% of contacts."
"We found switching from isolation at home to daily contact testing, at least in the settings of the schools studied, kept rates of symptomatic COVID-19 in students and staff at similar levels."
"Daily contact testing is a safe alternative to home isolation in school-based contacts and should be considered an alternative to routine isolation of close contacts following school-based exposures."
Boys Are More at Risk of Myocarditis After Vaccination Than of Hospital Admission for Covid: According to a new preprint.
"The risk of 12-15 year old healthy boys experiencing cardiac adverse events such as myocarditis after their second dose of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is around four times adolescents’ risk of being admitted to hospital as a result of infection with SARS-CoV-2."
"The researchers concluded that the rate of cardiac adverse events after the second dose exceeded the expected rate of 120 day covid-19 hospital admission at both a moderate (August 2021) and a high (January 2021) incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection."
But... Katelyn Jetelina argues caution when interpreting this study...
"Notice that this preprint leveraged VAERS data. We have to take VAERS with a grain of salt. While it’s very useful in finding safety signals and finding hypotheses, it’s a passive surveillance system... VAERS is not comprehensive and certainly not rigorous enough to make sweeping causal statements like the authors did."
"The authors did not have full, unlimited access to the raw VAERS data; they just used the publicly available data"
Why Covid Has Broken Parents’ Sense of Risk: Jessica Grose in the NYT
"As Paul Slovic, the president of Decision Research, a nonprofit institute that studies decision-making, and a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, explained: Assessing new information is difficult mental work, and “the brain is lazy.” It is particularly hard for people to assess risk and act with compassion when we are bombarded with numbers, or as Dr. Slovic put it: “Our feelings don’t do arithmetic very well.”
We think in two fundamentally different ways about risk: fast, and slow.
“Fast thinking is intuitive, relying on our gut feelings, which come to us very quickly when our attention is turned to some issue.” The feelings tend to be broadly positive or negative, but they boil down to: Should I be afraid of this thing or not? “When we have feelings that are validated through experience, then experience is a very sophisticated and reliable mechanism for helping us get through our day.”
Slow thinking is more analytical. “It’s a more deliberative process,” said Ellen Peters, the director of the Center for Science Communication Research... It involves reading, analyzing numbers and thinking hard. This can lead to better decisions in some scenarios, but sometimes, “The world is so complex, we end up spinning our intellectual wheels."
"Dr. Slovic offered a hypothetical situation to illustrate how our feelings don’t always line up with the onslaught of modern facts: We are likely to be quite upset if we hear about two Covid cases at our child’s school, but we probably won’t be doubly as upset if we hear that there are four cases."
"Since we have been dealing with the virus for 18 months, we may no longer react the way we typically do when we hear more bad news. In these scenarios, some parents will overestimate the risk to their children, Dr. Peters said. But others will experience a phenomenon called “psychic numbing,” which Delia O’Hara of the American Psychological Association described as the “indifference that sets in when we are confronted with overwhelming calamity.”
FEDERAL
Reconciliation: A lot of moving parts.
A key congressional committee rejected Democrats' signature drug pricing bill yesterday. That's significant because the savings were intended to help pay for other parts of the $3.5 trillion package.
Sen. Manchin “has drawn a hard line on not accepting a $3.5 trillion bill and urged his colleagues to hit ‘pause’ on the legislation altogether—a request he reiterated during a closed-door Democratic caucus meeting this week,” The Hill reports.
Washington Post: Joe Manchin gets all the attention. But Kyrsten Sinema could be an even bigger obstacle for Democrats’ spending plans.
"Senate Democrats had hoped to have their committees done drafting their bill by Wednesday, but they missed that deadline as they grappled with how to unite all 50 of their members."
COVID-19 RESEARCH
FDA Documents Suggest Skepticism About Boosters: Looks to be quite a meeting tomorrow based on the newly shared documents.
FDA staff indicated Pfizer's vaccine is "still effective at preventing important COVID-19-related outcomes, then the benefit of booster vaccination is likely to be more limited."
"The median interval between the booster dose and completion of a BNT162b2 primary series was 6.8 months (range 4.8-8.0) for Phase 2/3 participants and 8.3 months (range 7.9-8.5) for Phase 1 participants."
Pfizer says data suggests COVID vaccine boosters are warranted
Here's the Israeli data. Kavita Patel breaks it down...
More via Stat News
"Depending on the experts’ response, the F.D.A. could decide to scale back an authorization. According to people familiar with the discussions, even if the agency approves the application as it stands, the C.D.C. might recommend boosters only for populations that are particularly at risk.
Moderna: Submitted it's paperwork making the case for a booster.
Their data suggest that protection wanes by 36% after 12 months.
“We’ve been saying that we are going to have to have a variant booster, and that booster is going to have to be multivalent [and able to recognize different variants],” says Dr. Stephen Hoge, president of Moderna. “Then the clinical trial data came in … and we see a small benefit when we match a variant strain with the booster. But it’s not dramatic, and it’s not overwhelming benefit. In fact the [original] vaccine does really well against Delta.”
Long Covid: Great data coming out of ONS that is reassuring. After 12 weeks, children showed extremely low (0% to 1.7%) symptoms compared to controls
Alasdair Munro has more...
COVID Cases Are Falling, but Deaths Are Rising: Via Axios
700,000 Deaths: Forecasts IHME.
This represents 118,000 additional deaths from September 13 to January 1.
Racial Disparities in COVID-19 Impacts and Vaccinations for Children: Via KFF
"White children had higher vaccination rates than Black children in all seven reporting states, although the size of these differences varied widely across states"
"KFF COVID Vaccine Monitor data show that Hispanic and Black parents are more likely than White parents to report potential access barriers to vaccination."
STATE
Illinois: Former CPS teacher opens Chicago’s first mobile school
"Cowley quit her 17-year teaching job last year to open Urban Explorers of Chicago, a STEAM mobile microschool that serves students from preschool to fifth grade, with a mission of bringing STEAM to kids throughout all of Chicago’s neighborhoods."
"To date, Urban Explorers of Chicago has served more than 600 families in 12 states. Cowley plans on expanding in the next few months by getting more RV fleets."
Louisiana: At least 29 school buildings in New Orleans are unfit for students due to hurricane damage. 6 of the 29 schools are pivoting to online learning.
New York:
Governor Hochul announces series of universal mask requirements
New York Comptroller: NYC DOE Faces Significant Challenges in Closing COVID Achievement Gap
"The DOE will use more than 40% of the federal aid ($3.3 billion) to pay for new programs or expansions of existing ones over the next four years, including $2 billion to complete the citywide expansion of the city’s 3-K program."
"However, new programming will create more than $1 billion a year in recurring costs that have no identified source of funding when federal aid expires in FY 2025, forcing the city to find other sources of revenue or cut programs."
Plan includes "3,800 pedagogical positions funded by emergency federal funding that is expected to run out that year"
Oregon: Oregon’s second-largest high school temporarily closes due to COVID-19 spread
Pennsylvania: Missed learning In Pittsburgh:
"From the winter of 2020 to the winter earlier this year, students from grades 2 to 7 had an average growth of about three-quarters of a typical year in reading and about two-thirds of a typical year in math."
"Mr. Gill called the increases in course failures last year “pretty dramatic.” The percentage of students who failed courses grew by more than 5 percentage points in grades 5-12 from fall 2019 to fall 2020."
"The percentage of students who failed a course increased by 22% for those who were chronically absent in first semester 2020-21 compared to those chronically absent in 2019-20. In comparison, there was only a 4% increase in course failure by students who were not chronically absent."
INTERNATIONAL
UNICEF Calls for Schools to Reopen: With a new report and campaign.
For nearly 77 million children, the pandemic has taken away their classrooms for the past 18 months.
At least 1 in 3 schoolchildren had no access to remote learning during school closures.
RESOURCES
OneTen: April Chou has been named Chief Strategic Growth Officer
Tutoring Quality Improvement System: Via the National Student Support Accelerator
Future of Testing in Education: Artificial Intelligence: Great report from CAP
Congress Must Extend This Critical Measure to Keep Kids Connected to Learning: Argues Sal Khan and Jim Steyer
"Congress must use the budget reconciliation package to extend funding for the Emergency Connectivity Fund to keep kids learning, support equitable access to education, and ensure communities are resilient in the face of crisis."
Blinding Ourselves to America’s Achievement Woes: Via Checker Finn
Will the Bus Driver Ever Come? Or the Substitute Teacher or Cafeteria Worker?: Via NYT
This Is What Happens: When her big brothers come home from school.