Top Three
Administration to Distribute Masks: The Biden administration will make 400 million N95 masks available to Americans for free starting next week.
Latest COVID Surge Pushes Parents to Next-Level Stress: Via Scientific American.
"A key problem is that governments and schools are not responding to this wave at a level commensurate with the stress and fear parents are experiencing, Calarco says. There is a “huge mismatch” between the “business as usual” attitude of many policy makers, schools, and employers and parents’ fears and experiences, she explains."
"So the families who get tests are often those with more socioeconomic advantages, notes economist Gema Zamarro of the University of Arkansas. A December 2020 preprint study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, probed this issue. It surveyed 316 Americans who were part of a randomized, representative sample recruited from Florida, Illinois, and Maryland, and who said they had needed a Covid-19 test within the past two weeks. Among those sampled, Black people were significantly less likely than others to be able to obtain a test, the study authors reported."
"This unequal burden means mothers are often the ones most worried about what is to come; they are the parents expected to step in as primary caregiver if a child is sick, a testing requirement gets missed or school goes remote. “You’re thinking, ‘At any moment, we’ll need to figure this out,’” Zamarro says. “You send them to school, and you just say, ‘Well, for today, they go, and then we will see what happens.’ And you try to protect them as much as you can.”
Teachers and K12 Education: EdChoice/Morning Consult survey.
One out of five teachers have reported having to quarantine because of COVID-19 in the last month.
Also interesting - teachers report the pandemic being more disruptive to school, than their community, household, and personal routine.
Federal
White House Forms New Pandemic Task Force: The Pandemic Innovation Task Force, formed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will focus on developing vaccines, treatments, diagnostic testing and other tools, said officials familiar with the matter.
"Unlike the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force, the new group won’t focus on day-to-day pandemic response or the omicron variant, or issues like distribution of vaccines, testing and therapeutic treatments.”
“Instead, it will work on preparedness projects that could be used to manage waves of new variants that could emerge within six months to two years, as well as other threats. By building and exercising new capabilities, the U.S. will bolster its long-term biodefenses."
P-EBT: Via the Washington Post:
"At its peak, 18.5 million kids relied on Pandemic-EBT, which began under the Trump administration and continued under President Biden. The program gave families forced home a debit-card benefit to use at the grocery store, for some online food shopping or even at farmers markets."
"Now the program is flagging. Most states have not applied for the school year that began in September. Experts say the pandemic has changed in ways that make maintaining the program an impossible burden for already strapped administrators."
"With only eight states approved for this federal aid, and another 17 somewhere in the application process, the remaining states threaten to leave billions of dollars on the table in direct assistance to students and preschoolers who qualify for free or reduced-price school meals."
"This school year, with most American schools returning to the classroom in September, it became a nightmare. Administrators were forced to track which individual students were quarantining or out sick, with low-income kids mailed reimbursement just for the meals they missed on those days."
"Thus far, 15 blue states and 10 red states have applied or been approved. But the reluctance appears to be less ideological and more logistical."
IES: WWC reviews research on Growth Mindset and finds it had mixed effects on academic achievement and no discernible effects on college enrollment and progressing in college.
COVID-19 Research
After Omicron, This Pandemic Will Be Different: Thoughtful piece from William Hanage in the NYT.
"That said, Omicron’s extraordinary spread is likely to have important consequences for the future of the pandemic. By infecting large numbers of people quickly, it’s also generating immunity quickly. And that counts toward making Covid-19 a more manageable illness, since the layers of immunity may provide protection against future waves and variants."
"Every exposure, whether to the virus or a vaccine, reduces the likelihood of severe illness on subsequent ones. That’s because each time our immune systems “see” the spike proteins on the outside of the coronavirus, which is the target for all the vaccines in use, they get better at responding to them. Infections get less severe, on average, over time not just because the virus is changing, but because our bodies are getting better at handling it."
"For unvaccinated people with no immunity to the virus, Omicron can still cause severe disease. Too many people in the United States are unvaccinated. The number of Americans who have received booster shots is also far smaller than it should be, especially for older vulnerable people. This may be in part why the situation in the United States appears worse than in countries like Britain."
"To get a sense of this, compare Britain’s recent mortality data with that of Massachusetts. The population of Britain is about 10 times that of the state. Britain is reporting an average of about 260 deaths a day from Covid-19 and going up. Massachusetts is reporting about 50 deaths a day, which means the state has about twice as many deaths per capita as Britain."
"Instead of the virus going away, the nature of the disease it causes changes to a point where people consider it a tolerable risk, and people will disagree over what that means. Right now in many states, the number of hospitalizations has exceeded the peak of last winter, and there are about 2,000 deaths every day. Is that acceptable?"
How the Administration Would Approach the Decision to Update Covid-19 Vaccines: Via Stat.
"A senior FDA official told STAT, the agency expects to take part in an internationally coordinated program aimed at deciding if, when, and how to update Covid-19 vaccines."
“We can’t have our manufacturers going willy-nilly [saying], ‘Oh well, the EMA decided they wanted this composition, but FDA wanted that composition,’” the official said, referring to the European Medicines Agency. “So we are very much of the mind that we would like to be part of a more global process in helping to come to what vaccine composition there should be now.”
School Closures During Social Lockdown and Mental Health, Health Behaviors, and Well-being Among Children and Adolescents During the First COVID-19 Wave: New study.
"In this systematic review of 36 studies from 11 countries, school closures and social lockdown during the first COVID-19 wave were associated with adverse mental health symptoms (such as distress and anxiety) and health behaviors (such as higher screen time and lower physical activity) among children and adolescents. The effects of school closures could not be assessed separately from broader social lockdown measures."
Halting Progress and Happy Accidents: How mRNA Vaccines Were Made: Via NYT.
CDC Backlog of Mask Approvals: The CDC oversees a backlog of 142 applications from manufacturers of air-filtering masks such as N95s, which the agency was criticized as being slow to recommend over cloth masks before updating its guidance Friday.
U.S. Has Unusually High Hospitalizations: Via Axios.
State
Alabama: Assistant health officer recommends masks in schools.
Colorado: Annual census shows Colorado schools are still missing students.
Michigan: Most-vaccinated counties have lowest COVID-19 death rates.
Economic Recovery
LinkedIn Data Reveals What Workers Want More Than Money: Via Protocol.
"Since 2019, LinkedIn has seen an 83% increase in job posts that mention flexibility, a term that’s also surfaced in 343% more company posts on the website."
"Company posts that use the word attract 35% more engagement, with more interest from Gen Z and millennial users, LinkedIn found."
"According to LinkedIn, 59% of workers said investment in professional development opportunities should be a primary way to improve company culture, while 48% chose flexible work support. Mental health and wellness was a top priority for 42%, and 35% said they wanted to see more attention paid to “training managers to lead remote and hybrid teams.” Diversity and inclusion was a top priority to 26% of respondents."
Why North Dakota, Not New York, May Be The Land of Opportunity: The Economist with a great piece and visualization of research from a recent paper by David Card (a newly minted Nobel laureate) and Jesse Rothstein of the University of California, Berkeley, and Moises Yi of the Census Bureau.
"Mr Card and his colleagues found that human capital—the calibre of skills of a given city’s employees—accounts for more than two-thirds of the variation in earnings across cities."
Resources
The Impact of School and Childcare Closures on Labor Market Outcomes during the COVID-19 Pandemic: NBER paper.
"Our results suggest that while closures have had little impact on whether parents work at all, they have had significant effects on whether parents work full time (at least 35 hours) and the number of hours worked per week. These effects are concentrated among low-educated parents, suggesting that such individuals had a more difficult time adjusting their work life to closures."
Schools, Job Flexibility, and Married Women's Labor Supply: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic: NBER paper.
"We proxy for in-person attendance at US K-12 schools using smartphone data from Safegraph and measure female employment, hours, and remote work using the Current Population Survey."
"Difference-in-differences estimates show that K-12 reopenings are associated with significant increases in employment and hours among married women with school-aged children, with no measurable effects on labor supply in comparison groups. Employment effects of school reopenings are concentrated among mothers of older school-aged children, while remote work may mitigate effects for mothers of younger children."
COVID Chaos Leaves Districts With Bus Driver Shortage: Via The 74.
Nothing But Net: A video recorded by a Conroe ISD teacher’s aide shows kids passing the ball to Andrew May six times before he makes a shot. When he does, the crowd goes wild.
“We all need a cheering squad like that,” Andrew's mother said. “That is what just touched us so much, was to see those boys in action when they didn’t even know they were being filmed.”