Top Three
President Biden Addresses The Nation:
Fact Sheet: President Biden Announces New Actions to Protect Americans and Help Communities and Hospitals Battle Omicron.
"If you’re not fully vaccinated, you have good reason to be concerned,” Mr. Biden said, adding that Americans have an obligation to their families and their country to get vaccinated."
"Mr. Biden noted that Mr. Trump recently said he had received a booster shot, and that “thanks to the prior administration and the scientific community, America is one of the first countries to get the vaccine.”
"The unvaccinated are responsible for their own choices,” Biden said, lamenting the resistance “fueled by dangerous misinformation on cable TV and social media."
The COVID Externalities Have Changed: Emily Oster in The Atlantic.
"An externality exists when something I do affects others; a negative externality exists when something I do affects others negatively. For example, if I smoke in a restaurant, I am creating a negative externality because other diners have no choice but to inhale my secondhand smoke."
"If my smoking harms or simply bothers others, society would like me to do less of it than I might choose to if I were thinking totally selfishly. The presence of negative externalities is often a cause for government intervention—hence smoking bans. The government tries to enforce choices that maximize the social good."
"The problem for society arises when an unvaccinated person contracts the virus and takes up hospital space—or passes the disease along to another person who then takes up hospital space. That’s the issue, the externality."
"But thinking about the puzzle this way can be clarifying. If the unvaccinated people are low-risk (because of age, or perhaps because of prior infection), the external cost is less significant. Being very explicit about these externalities will let us appropriately weigh them in our decisions."
"As I see it, closing schools falls into the same category: The negative externalities of in-person education are not as great as those associated with remote schooling, which in many districts means no schooling at all. The cost to children’s education and to their broader families’ ability to function is simply too large."
"Mask mandates for public events make more sense; the potential negative externality of a single person super-spreading to a large group outweighs the minor inconvenience of wearing a face covering."
Children and COVID-19: AAP State Data Report
Nearly 170,000 child cases were added the past week, an increase of nearly 28% over the last 2 weeks.
For the 19th week in a row child COVID-19 cases are above 100,000.
Since the first week of September, there have been over 2.3 million additional child cases.
Omicron
Omicron by the Numbers: Really great piece with visualizations from Stat.
Dr. Ashish Jha: We have the tools to keep schools open and safe
“We have all the tools to keep schools open and safe: Vaccinations, testing, improvements in ventilation, tens of billions of dollars have gone to schools … If I hear of a single school district that goes remote but keeps bars open what that says to me is: They don’t care about kids — and they don’t care about COVID. Because bars spread COVID. Schools generally don’t — not if you put in place mitigation efforts.”
Wellcome: Dr Jeremy Farrar statement:
"To bring Omicron under any form of control, it’s critical that transmission is slowed. If not, we could see profound impacts on health systems but also across sectors such as education, hospitality, public transport, police and essential national infrastructure as infections prevent people from working. No country can afford to think they are an exception."
"It is staggering and deeply frustrating that two years into this pandemic – when we have gathered so much evidence and made huge scientific progress – that governments are still not anticipating events and acting early or working together anywhere near the scale that is required."
America’s Mixed Response to the Omicron Variant Comes Down to Geography: Via WSJ.
Omicron and Schools:What we know now via Chalkbeat.
KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor: Early Omicron Update:
Half of adults, including 52% of vaccinated adults, say they are worried they personally will get seriously sick from the coronavirus, up from 30% in November prior to the news of the omicron variant."
"Unvaccinated adults remain less concerned with about four in ten (42%) saying they are worried about getting seriously sick from the coronavirus."
"Unvaccinated adults remain relatively unmoved by the recent news of the omicron variant with a large majority of unvaccinated adults (87%) saying the news about the omicron variant does not make them more likely to get vaccinated."
"There is some confusion about the CDC’s recommendation with 23% of adults (including 21% of vaccinated adults) saying they are unsure whether it is recommended for all adults to get a booster dose or incorrectly say the CDC has not recommended this. Three in ten Hispanic adults (31%), Black adults (28%), and four in ten younger adults 18-29 (39%) are unaware of the CDC’s recommendations around booster doses."
Federal
ED: Sec. Cardona urges schools to stay open:
"I don’t think we should be considering remote options,” Cardona said Tuesday in an interview with The 74. “Our students deserve more, not less, and our parents have done enough to help balance school closures the first year of the pandemic.”
IES: Grant notice: Improving Pandemic Recovery Efforts in Education Agencies.
COVID-19 Research
Why Did the Pfizer Young Kids Trial Fail?: Via Katelyn Jetelina
Facts Alone Aren’t Going to Win Over the Unvaccinated. This Might.: Via NYT
"In a study published on Dec. 13, we examined data from about 750,000 children who were eligible to receive the human papilloma virus vaccine to prevent cervical cancer."
"Since the HPV vaccine was approved in 2006, it has experienced resistance from parents and religious and conservative groups who see it as promoting sexual behavior. Its politicization was a preview for what has happened with the coronavirus vaccines in the United States."
"What we found surprised us: The girls and boys whose mothers had cervical cancer were no more likely to be vaccinated against HPV compared with children whose mothers had no history of cervical disease."
"Children whose mothers had a cancer “scare” — a biopsy of cervical cells that ended up not being cancerous — were only slightly more likely to be vaccinated. But having cervical cancer or a cervical cancer scare did not result in the large increase in vaccination rates that we were expecting."
"If personally having cervical cancer doesn’t seem to motivate mothers to vaccinate their children against HPV, we probably shouldn’t be surprised when hesitant Americans are not motivated to get vaccinated after a family member is hospitalized or even dies from Covid-19. Emergency room doctors sharing devastating stories from the hospital may, unfortunately, not meaningfully impact vaccination rates."
"What interventions might work? Behavioral science research suggests that one of the best ways to motivate behavior is through incentives, either positive or negative. Incentives work because they do not force people to change their beliefs."
"The incentive that seems to work especially well is the employer vaccine mandate, a negative incentive. “Get vaccinated or get fired” has shown to be an effective message. United Airlines, which mandated the coronavirus vaccination for its employees this past summer, reported in November that 100 percent of their customer-facing employees were vaccinated, and that only about 200 of their 67,000 employees had chosen termination over vaccination."
Diagnostics for COVID-19: New research in the Lancet exploring new detection methods.
What Can Masks Do? Good CIDRAP summary of the research behind masks.
What the President Could Have Done Today to Counter the Pandemic: Via Eric Topol
"Booster shots at 4 months after the 2nd dose, not 6 months. The data are overwhelming and many countries have already switched to 3 months."
"Redefine “fully vaccinated” as 3 shots, unless it is after J&J for which we do not have data for a 3rd shot, or Prior Covid with uncertainty as to whether more than 1 or 2 shots is necessary."
"No airplane passengers who are not fully vaccinated."
"500 million free rapid tests by request sometime in January is totally inadequate. We need several billion of these, and have needed them for over a year to help prevent spread, as validated and relied upon in many countries throughout the world."
"Distribute KN95 masks to all households."
"Rapidly scale the production of the anti-Covid pill Paxlovid."
"Fix the data mess. The CDC is apparently unable to track hospitalizations and deaths by vaccine status, timing, age of the patient and their relevant co-existing medical conditions. Secretary Xavier Becerra of HHS hasn’t yet shown up for the pandemic but has authority to mandate such data collection across the country."
Covid Panic is a Site of Inter-Elite Competition: Provocative piece from Freddie deBoer.
"Your risk calculus might be different, but that’s all it is, a little back-of-the-envelope math. Dealing with Covid is just acting as your own private actuary. That’s it. Your relationship towards Covid and the steps you take to mitigate its risks are fundamentally self-interested decisions that you should try to make as unemotionally as possible."
"Does anyone think that the problem with the vaccine-hesitant is that they just haven’t been told loudly enough that Covid is bad? No. I do think that this worry is a performance, but I don’t think the unvaccinated are the audience. I think the audience is, as for so much of what these people do, their peers, other people in the broad world of the educated, the liberal, the upwardly-mobile if not affluent, the very online. These people compete against each other relentlessly, habitually, ritualistically."
"So our striving castes have developed all manner of other signals through which they subtly assert their superior virtue, their superior lives. Covid now fills such a role. With Covid, you never need an excuse to assert your superior seriousness, never need to wait for the right moment to insist that you’re doing it better than all of your peers. You can just openly tell the world “I am more responsible than you,” and the circumstances seem to justify it, even if the behavior is not in fact justified by The Science"
"The danger is far from over. But when we got the vaccines case rates decoupled from the rate of hospitalization and death. Therefore if you are breathlessly reporting increases in case rates without reference to those other metrics, you are engaged in, yes, misinformation. For you normal people out there? Get vaccinated. Get boosted. Be smart. Then live your life. Defy the virus. Defy it."
State
California: Judge rules against San Diego Unified’s COVID vaccine mandate.
"In a four-page decision, Superior Court Judge John S. Meyer concluded that California school systems did not have the authority under state law to establish their own vaccine mandates."
New York: Attorney General James issues warning to LabQ Diagnostics to stop misrepresenting turnaround times for COVID-19 test results.
Pennsylvania: About 21% of Philadelphia’s eligible children have received a COVID-19 vaccine more than a month after the 5-11 age group was approved. Percent that have received 1 dose:
8% of Black children
12% of Hispanic children
24% of white children
31% of Asian children
Economic Recovery
The Geography of U.S. Inflation: Prices are Rising Faster in Lower-Cost States: New report from EIG.
American Workers Are Burned Out, and Bosses Are Struggling to Respond: Via WSJ.
Minimum Wage: 21 states and 35 cities and counties are set to raise their minimum wages on or about New Year’s Day, according to a report provided exclusively to USA TODAY by the National Employment Law Project (NELP).
Base hourly pay will climb from $11 to $12 in Illinois; from $9.25 to $10.50 in Delaware; from $9.50 to $11 in Virginia; from $12 to $13 for most workers in New Jersey; and from $10.50 to $11.50 in New Mexico.
Resources
Are Schools Ready for the Next Big Surge?: Asks the NYT
"This time, union leaders in New York, Boston and Philadelphia said they were not asking for districtwide remote learning, and were instead focused on pushing administrators to enforce virus mitigation measures."
How State Grants Support Broadband Deployment: Via Pew.
Homemade Air Filters: Via CBS Evening News:
"One group at the University of California, San Diego, is building 250 homemade air purifiers for classrooms and labs around campus, and they say their box-style purifier filters at least 90% of the particles that carry the virus."
"The Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, named for the two men who created the purifiers, are made up of four air filters on the sides. As air flows in, an electric fan on top draws out the purified air."
Education Has Been Hammering the Wrong Nail. We Have to Focus on the Early Years: Via Isabelle Hau.
“It’s Not Rocket Science” and “It’s Not Brain Surgery”: Comparative study published in BMJ.
"The neurosurgeons showed significantly higher scores than the aerospace engineers in semantic problem solving (difference 0.33, 95% confidence interval 0.13 to 0.52)."
"Aerospace engineers showed significantly higher scores in mental manipulation and attention (−0.29, −0.48 to −0.09)."
"No difference was found between groups in domain scores for memory."
Conclusion, "In situations that do not require rapid problem solving, it might be more correct to use the phrase “It’s not brain surgery.”
Warning: 2022 is pronounced 2020 too.
It's Beginning to Look: A lot like Christmas.