TOP THREE
Covid and Age: Great David Leonhardt piece with Emily Oster:
"An unvaccinated child is at less risk of serious Covid illness than a vaccinated 70-year-old."
"Oster is the one who has largely been vindicated. If anything, subsequent data indicates she did not go far enough in describing the age skew of Covid. Today, an accurate version of her headline might be: “Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Much Safer Than a Vaccinated Grandma.”
"The annual risk of death for all vaccinated people over 65 in Seattle this year appears to be around 1 in 2,700. The annual average risk that an American dies in a vehicle crash is lower — about 1 in 8,500 — but not a different order of magnitude."
"There is not the scientific consensus about vaccinating children that there is about adults. It remains unclear how many countries will recommend the vaccine for young children. In the U.S., many vaccinated parents have decided not to vaccinate their eligible children yet."
"I hope we can be prepared to be a little bit gentle with each other,” she wrote. “Asking questions about vaccines for kids or being more cautious for kids than older adults — these are reasonable approaches."
Moderna: FDA scientists declined to take a stance on "whether to back booster shots of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, saying data shows two doses are still enough to protect against severe disease and death."
"But they also didn’t take a position on Pfizer Inc.’s booster request, later granted."
“Some real world effectiveness studies have suggested declining efficacy of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine over time against symptomatic infection or against the Delta variant, while others have not,” they wrote in a 45-page document published on the agency’s website. “However, overall, data indicate that currently US-licensed or authorized COVID-19 vaccines still afford protection against severe COVID-19 disease and death in the United States.”
"Data for Moderna's vaccine showed that a booster does increase protective antibodies, but the difference in antibody levels before and after the shot was not wide enough, particularly in those whose levels had remained high"
The FDA advisory group is scheduled to discuss data on the safety and effectiveness of Moderna’s booster shot in adults on Thursday and J&Js on Friday.
Student Monitoring: "Baltimore City student laptops are monitored for mentions of suicide. Sometimes, the police are called."
"In Baltimore City, on weekends and at night when school psychologists or social workers aren’t available, school police officers have been sent to students’ homes to check on them after alerts from the software, as first reported by The Real News Network."
"Davis said when a message comes in to school police, the agency’s dispatcher first tries to call a family. If they don’t get an answer, a school police officer is sent to the home to talk to the family — known as a “wellness check. School police Chief Akil Hamm said his officers go to the door of a home, show the parents a copy of the alert and what their child typed. Then, he said, “We ask the parents if we can lay eyes on the student. School police are trained in trauma-informed care, behavioral crisis response, and to recognize signs of mental health crisis and how to respond."
"Since March, the city schools have gotten 786 alerts from Beacon. Of those, clinicians responded 401 times, while school police went to homes 12 times. In addition to the nine students referred to an emergency room, 12 students were referred to a crisis response center. The races and ages of the affected children were unavailable."
FEDERAL
ED: Confirmations!
Lisa Brown as General Counsel
Roberto Rodríguez, as Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development
Gwen Graham, as Assistant Secretary for Legislation and Congressional Affairs
New Law Requires Federal Government to Identify K-12 Cyber Risks, Solutions: Via EdWeek
"By Feb. 5, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security must conduct a study on specific K-12 cybersecurity risks, including an evaluation of challenges that schools face in implementing cybersecurity protocols and securing sensitive student and employee records and information systems that they use."
Child Tax Credit: One of the emerging debates with making the CTC permanent is if it should include a work requirement.
New study from the Center on Poverty & Social Policy. "Early studies have established that the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), which provides monthly cash payments to most families with children in the United States, has substantially reduced poverty and food hardship since its introduction in July 2021. Some researchers posit, however, that the CTC payments may generate negative employment effects that could offset its potential poverty-reduction effects... we find very small, inconsistently signed, and statistically insignificant impacts of the CTC both on employment in the prior week and on active participation in the labor force among adults living in households with children."
But another analysis from the U. of Chicago "estimates that as many as 1.5 million parents could leave the workforce due to the payments, or about 2.6% of all working parents."
AEI's Scott Winship takes a deeper dive.
And Niskanen offer's 5 reasons there shouldn't be a work requirement.
COVID-19 RESEARCH
A Primer on What We Know About Mixing and Matching Covid Vaccines: Via Stat
STATE
Illinois: The Illinois Education Association filed a motion to intervene in the lawsuit by 10 teachers from Triad CUSD 2 and Edwardsville CUSD 7 that argued the two districts did not have the authority to require school employees either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or be tested weekly.
Texas: "Texas schools have reported more coronavirus cases in two months than they did in the entire 2020-21 school year."
Wisconsin: "Lawsuits filed this month in two Wisconsin federal courts blame the schools’ lax policies on masks, quarantining and contact tracing" for their children catching COVID.
ECONOMIC RECOVERY
A Record 4.3 Million Workers Quit Their Jobs in August: BLS JOLTS and CNBC
"The phenomenon is being driven in part by workers who are less willing to endure inconvenient hours and poor compensation, who are quitting instead to find better opportunities."
"Normally, churn in the labor market reflects workers feeling more confident in the economy, willing to risk the security of their current job for a new opportunity. But the scale of these new changes — and the larger economic transitions they signal — has added an element of unpredictability. Both workers and employers are reassessing their approaches amid a continually evolving public health threat."
Seeding Accounts for Kindergartners and Hoping to Grow College Graduates: Great NYT article on child savings accounts
Pennsylvania’s Keystone Scholars program automatically provides newborns with $100.
"Child savings accounts were conceived 30 years ago by Michael Sherraden, founder of the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, who proposed creating accounts for all children at birth."
"Since 2007, he has been the lead investigator in an experiment tracking 2,700 newborns in Oklahoma randomly assigned to two groups: Half received $1,000 accounts at birth; the other received nothing."
Many programs draw on the center’s research, which has found that the accounts raise both the parents’ and child’s expectations about the child’s future."
Halloween Stimulus: NRF reports the most popular Halloween costumes for adults this year include witches (4.6m), vampires, (1.6m), and ghosts (1.4m). Top pet costume: pumpkin.
RESOURCES
Kids' Mental Health Response to Pandemic: New report from the Child Mind Institute. More from Axios.
How A Virtual Classroom Company Made Millions On Software That Left Many Students Feeling Abandoned: Buzzfeed story on Edgenuity.
Voters in 36 States Will Elect a Governor Next Year: Politico has a cheat sheet.
Light Shows Are Infrastructure!: Driving past Rotherham's house leads one to believe that he's really into Halloween: Spooky, Matrix, Smells Like Teen Spirit, and Ghost Busters.