Congrats! We all made it to Friday. And good news! 2021 is 94% complete.
Top Three
Vaccine Skepticism is Healthy. Cynicism is Not: Argues Geeta Nayyar in Stat.
"Skeptics demand evidence. They question and probe new information. They assess its strengths and weaknesses. And they arrive at conclusions that adapt, just like they do, as evidence emerges."
"Skepticism is a strength. It is an engine of positive progress. And it’s foundational to science. It drives great leaps forward, like when scientists across the globe worked to develop safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines. And it’s behind baby steps, too, like when the CDC changes its recommendations as our knowledge compounds."
"Cynicism, on the other hand, is a weakness. It often masquerades as skepticism, but it’s an engine of decay, not progress. Cynics arrive at conclusions despite the evidence. They ignore whatever counters their beliefs and cherry-pick supporting evidence, no matter its quality."
"In the book “UnSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation,” authors Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson put it eloquently: “Cynicism is a form of gullibility — the cynic rejects facts without evidence, just as the naïve person accepts facts without evidence.”
Covid Malaise: Via NYT's David Leonhardt
"Offices remain eerily empty. Airlines have canceled thousands of flights. Subways and buses are running less often. Schools sometimes call off entire days of class. Consumers waste time waiting in store lines. Annual inflation has reached its highest level in three decades."
"Does this sound like a healthy economy to you?"
"And school operations are still not back to normal. Students are sometimes forbidden to sit or talk with one another during lunch — or to eat indoors. Masks make communication harder, especially for students with learning disabilities. Positive Covid tests or worker shortages can cause schools to close temporarily. After Jennifer Reesman’s local school in Maryland closed for a day recently, she told NPR, “Our community can no longer count on the public schools.”
"In Republican-leaning communities, the biggest Covid problem remains a widespread refusal to take the pandemic seriously. About 40 percent of Republican adults have not received a vaccine shot, according to the most recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll."
"Blue America, by contrast, has taken Covid seriously. Fewer than 10 percent of Democratic voters have not received a vaccine shot."
"Yet many Democrats, both voters and politicians, have been almost blasé about the costs of Covid precautions — the isolation, unhappiness, health damage, lost learning, inflation, public-transit disruptions and more. Democrats have sometimes focused on minimizing the spread of Covid, regardless of the downsides: Closing schools, for example, almost certainly harms children more than it protects them, given the minuscule rate of severe childhood Covid, even lower than that of severe childhood flu."
The School Staffing Crisis Won’t End Any Time Soon: Via EdWeek
"52% of 497 principals and district leaders who answered a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey between Nov. 17 and Dec. 1 said staff shortages in their district are getting worse compared with the start of the school year."
"Another 37 percent said the shortage challenges have remained the same since the school year began."
The most common approach to addressing staffing issues, according to the survey results, is finding money in the district’s existing budget.
Omicron
Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines Against Omicron: New UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) preprint:
Drop in protection against symptomatic infection by 2 doses (AstraZeneca fell to 0 and Pfizer fell to 40%) but it was restored to around 70-75% with a third shot of Pfizer.
"Our findings show that vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic disease with the Omicron variant is significantly lower than with the Delta variant."
"We are unable to determine protection against severe forms of disease due to the small number of Omicron cases so far and the natural lag between infection and more severe outcomes."
"Despite the low effectiveness in the longer intervals after primary vaccination shown here, moderate to high vaccine effectiveness against mild infection of 70-75% was seen in the early period after a booster dose."
Freja Kirsebom has a good thread breaking it all down.
More UKHSA Research: Over to Meaghan Kall to break it down:
"After adjustment, this equals a 3- to 8-fold increased risk of re-infection with Omicron"
"19% of Omicron cases resulted in household outbreaks vs 8.5% of Delta cases."
"Household SAR 2-fold higher for Omicron (21.6%) vs Delta (10.7%)"
"Good news so far is there are no hospitalisations or deaths associated with Omicron. This is encouraging news, probably largely due to vaccines and high levels of immunity. But also, it is also very early days.
South Africa Update:
South African scientists see no sign that the Omicron coronavirus variant is causing more severe illness, reports Reuters.
The FT visualizes some of the increases of the recent data:
United States: New CDC data shows first-known omicron Covid patient in U.S. had symptoms starting Nov. 15.
Scotland: New government paper estimates a 2.3 day doubling time and Omicron comprising 90% of cases in approximately 7 days.
Omicron-Specific Version of Vaccines May Not Be Necessary: Fauci says.
"Rather, the long-time director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases suggested to STAT in an interview Thursday, it’s possible the current vaccines will provide enough protection against the new variant for most vaccinated and boosted individuals."
"Fauci stressed that he was hypothesizing, based on how the vaccines have held up against other SARS-CoV-2 variants."
Federal
Build Back Better:
President Biden tells CNN he "doesn’t know if he can get Sen. Manchin’s vote for Build Back Better with inflation numbers this high but he will be speaking to him early next week."
A CBO score found BBB would increase the cost of the deficit by $3 trillion over 10 years if all of its provisions were made permanent.
Comparatively, the CBO determined that the bill, as it passed the House, would add $200 billion to the deficit in the same time period.
"The latest CBO score is a Republican-led effort to show that the bill costs more than Democrats say it does, but Democrats are arguing that many provisions in their proposal sunset and therefore the true cost is not what Republicans say it is," says CNN.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sent a memo "urging Democratic lawmakers not to be spooked by Friday’s inflation numbers and a new analysis of President Joe Biden’s social spending bill designed to portray it as exceedingly costly." Politico reports.
Here is Jason Furman's take.
How Federal Stimulus Funds Have Been Spent: Via CNBC, "Nearly two years and six relief bills into the pandemic, the U.S. has spent the majority of its available Covid rescue funding. But billions of dollars across a handful of categories have not gone out the door."
"Education, health care and disaster relief are among the areas where the government has underspent the funds, according to a CNBC analysis."
"More money is available for education than any other category. Agencies obligated some $263 billion for elementary, secondary and vocational education, and nearly $60 billion has been spent to date, the data show."
"The more than $200 billion in total education funding remains on the table in part because schools have until 2025 to spend it. Congress set aside the cash largely to help restart in-person learning, but schools across the country have reopened their doors while using only a fraction of the funding."
COVID-19 Research
CDC Says Real-World Monitoring Finds Vaccines Are Safe for Young Children: With nearly 5 million children getting COVID vaccines, no safety problems have been seen, CDC director says.
Study Shows Benefit of Regular Classroom Ventilation: A Swiss study has found that poorly ventilated school classrooms record up to six times as many Covid-19 cases compared with those which are regularly aired.
Will Covid Evolve to Be Milder?: Asks Dr. Andrew Pekosz in the NYT.
"But what is really important is how efficiently the virus spreads. Does making a person very ill provide the virus with some advantage that makes transmission more effective? If the answer to that question is yes, then the virus may continue to make people severely ill because that strategy works."
"Every once in a while, the virus will acquire a mutation that gives it an advantage. Those mutations can affect many different things, but in the end, if this mutated virus can transmit better than the starting virus, there is a good chance that it will go on to become the dominant variant. This is essentially Darwinian evolution by natural selection, performed over weeks or months instead of thousands of years."
"In December 2019, SARS-CoV-2 entered a human population that had no immunity to it. In December 2021, the Omicron variant is entering a human population that has a large amount of immunity to SARS-CoV-2. That immunity in and of itself will lessen the disease severity of the variant. But in people with limited or compromised immunity, such as the unvaccinated, the elderly or the immune compromised, SARS-CoV-2 may still be able to cause severe disease because they don’t have protection conferred by pre-existing immunity."
What Data Shows About Vaccine Supply and Demand in the Most Vulnerable Places: Via NYT.
State
California:
LAUSD officials announced they intend to suspend enforcement of the district’s COVID vaccination mandate for students 12 and older until Fall 2022.
LAUSD names Miami's Alberto Carvalho as next superintendent.
A UC San Diego data science undergrads help keep K-12 students safe during COVID. One project was the e-Decision Tree.
Colorado: "Colorado kids are acting out in classrooms while struggling to cope."
Mississippi: There’s an exodus of Mississippi school leaders.
"More superintendents are saying this has become so difficult and overwhelming that now they’ve reached retirement, they’re probably going to speed up the process and get out now rather than later,” said Jim Keith, a school board attorney for more than 20 Mississippi school districts. “It’s impossible to deal with all the issues — COVID, the accountability model, parents, student behavior. And it’s not just limited to the superintendents.”
"In the 2020-21 school year, 17 superintendents retired...another eight who plan to retire this school year."
Missouri: Missouri AG sends cease and desist letters to Kansas City school districts over masking rules.
Nevada: Governor Sisolak, Department of Health and Human Services announce $660,000 to address children’s mental health.
New Jersey:
Federal judge upholds New Jersey's school mask mandate.
Newark teachers stretched thin by staff shortages, Chalkbeat survey finds.
New York: Masks will be required as of Monday in all indoor public spaces in New York State that do not require vaccination for entry.
Texas: Texas has millions for school COVID-19 testing that has largely gone untouched.
Economic Recovery
Inflation Hits Highest Level Since 1982: Inflation rose 6.8% from a year ago in November, slightly higher than estimates. More via CNBC and Axios.
Energy prices have risen 33.3% since November 2020, including a 3.5% jump in November. Gasoline is up 58.1%.
Resources
Over 1 Million High School Grads Skipped College in 2020. Only a Tiny Fraction Re-Enrolled in 2021: Via The 74.
Schools Confront a Wave of Student Misbehavior, Driven by Months of Remote Learning: Via WSJ.
How Tech Is Helping Poor People Get Government Aid: Via the NYT
"Code for America, a nonprofit group, spent years devising a portal that makes it easier for Californians to apply for food stamps. Civilla, a Detroit-based nonprofit, helped Michigan shrink its 42-page application by 60 percent."
"Michael Brennan, Civilla’s co-founder, emphasized that the Michigan work was bipartisan — it began under a Republican governor and continued under a Democrat — and saves time for the client and the state."
States wanting help should reach out to Code for America, Lincoln Network, Propel, USDR, or The Tech Talent Project.
It’s Friday!: You like to move it so have a great weekend.