COVID-19 Policy Update #429
Monday 2/7
Top Three
New Jersey to End Mask Mandate: Governor Murphy announced that the statewide mask mandate for schools and child care settings will be lifted effective March 7th.
“This is not a declaration of victory as much as an acknowledgment that we can responsibly live with this thing,” Mr. Murphy, the vice chairman of the National Governors Association, said Monday in announcing the elimination of the mandate.
Delaware also announced it will end mask mandates for schools, indoor settings.
Decision Fatigue: KHN interviews Barry Schwartz, the author of one of my favorite books - The Paradox of Choice - and explores another reason why we feel so fatigued.
"Faced with a stream of difficult choices about health and safety during a global pandemic, Schwartz suggests, we may experience a unique kind of burnout that could deeply affect our brains and our mental health."
"When you overwhelm people with options, instead of liberating them, you paralyze them. They can’t pull the trigger. Or, if they do pull the trigger, they are less satisfied, because it’s so easy to imagine that some alternative that they didn’t choose would have been better than the one they did."
"What the pandemic did for a lot of people is to take routine decisions and make them non-routine. And that puts a kind of pressure on us that accumulates over the course of the day, and then here comes tomorrow, and you’re faced with them all again."
School Disruptions: Burbio reports this week the total number of schools that experienced at least one day of disruption dropped to 539, a drop of 74.7% versus last week's total of 2,128 and a drop of 92.8% from the yearly high of 7,462 the week of January 10th.
Federal
IRS: Will not use facial recognition for identity verification.
Build Back Committee-er: Sen. Manchin on Sunday said elements from the Democrats social spending and climate package must go through the committee process if the party wants to pass initiatives from the bill, The Hill reports.
“My biggest concern and my biggest opposition, it did not go through the process.”
“These are major changes. It is going to change society as we know it… And those changes, there should be a hearing. There should be a markup. And then you’re going to have a better product, whether your friends on the other side vote for it or not. But they have to have input.”
COVID-19 Research
The Kids' Vaccine Dilemma: Via Axios
Reinfections Among People With Previous COVID Were Rare Until Omicron: According to new UK data.
The Booster Problem: Via David Leonhardt:
“The United States has a vaccination problem. And it is not just about the relatively large share of Americans who have refused to get a shot. The U.S. also trails many other countries in the share of vaccinated people who have received a booster shot.”
“This is a different problem from outright skepticism of the vaccine. The unvaccinated skew heavily Republican… The vaccinated-but-unboosted more closely resemble the country as a whole. Millions of Americans who have already received two vaccine shots — eagerly, in many cases — have not yet received a follow-up. The unboosted include many Republicans, Democrats and independents and span racial groups.”
What Do Masks Do to Kids?: Melody Schreiber in TNR.
“Masks can interfere with young children’s brain development,” one recent article stated, citing no studies whose findings actually showed this. Others say masks cause “disruption to their social and emotional learning, to literacy and speech,” again with no studies or evidence. Even a piece titled “The downsides of masking young children are real” failed to offer research showing actual documented downsides."
"There really isn’t any research to back up that claim at all,” Dr. Ashley Ruba, a developmental psychology researcher at the University of Washington, told me, referring to the commonly repeated concern about masks affecting child development."
"One study Ruba co-authored, in fact, found 7-to-12-year-olds’ ability to recognize emotions persists, despite concerns that partially covered faces make kids unable to understand emotions or less empathetic. “Our study suggests that it’s not a founded concern,” she said. “Kids are able to determine from facial expressions alone the emotion that someone is likely to feel even when they’re wearing a face mask.”
It's Time to End Mandatory Masks in Schools: Via Jennifer Knipps in Time.
"As a physician, I’m well aware that medical knowledge is constantly changing. As our understanding grows, our practice changes. This should be a time to peel back layers of mitigation that we now know to be ineffective, yet many school districts are doubling down."
"It is important to acknowledge that the risk of severe disease from COVID-19 to healthy children has always been low. As of this writing, CDC data shows 863 total pediatric deaths related to COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, which is less than 0.001% of the COVID-19 deaths in the U.S, and this number does not specify “from COVID-19” vs “with COVID-19.” While any death is a tragedy, many if not most of these children had underlying medical conditions which made them exponentially more vulnerable to severe COVID-19 than the average child."
"Masking in schools was intended to be temporary, and there needs to be an exit ramp from these policies."
How Denmark Decided COVID Isn’t a Critical Threat to Society: Derek Thompson interviews Michael Bang Petersen, a Danish researcher who led a global survey of COVID attitudes and advises the Danish government.
"Our hospitals are not being overwhelmed. We have excellent data surveillance of our hospital system in Denmark, and when we look at the number of people in ICUs, it’s dropping."
"The decoupling of cases and hospitalizations comes from two things. First, Denmark has very high vaccine uptake, with 81 percent of the population having two doses and 61 percent having received a booster shot. Second, Omicron is a milder variant. That combination of high vaccine coverage plus a milder variant means this wave isn’t stressing our hospital systems as much."
"The latest extension was set to end in February. The government had a deadline. We had to decide: Can we really make the case that COVID is a threat, at this moment, to the critical functioning of society? This is a black-or-white decision for us—either COVID is critical or it’s not—and we couldn’t make the case that this poses a societal threat. That’s why we decided to lift all restrictions, including the mask mandate, effective February 1."
Listening to America: Parents Discuss Vaccinating Their Children: Via CBS Face the Nation
Politicians Still Getting Tripped Up Over Coronavirus Restrictions: Two years into the pandemic, politicians are still getting tripped up over face masks, lockdowns and other restrictions intended to curb the spread of the coronavirus — sometimes rules that were put in place by the politicians themselves,” via the Washington Post.
State
Colorado: "Young Coloradans visited Children's ER more than 6,500 times in 2021 for mental health reasons, the system said. The demand for services at Children's ERs — for both mental and physical problems — has been so high that the system has occasionally had to open a tent outside to make room."
Illinois: School mask mandate halted in nearly 170 Illinois districts, including Chicago Public Schools
Virginia:
The Supreme Court of Virginia dismissed a lawsuit from a group of parents who sued over Gov. Youngkin’s mask-optional executive order in schools, but the justices did not weigh in on whether the governor’s order is legal.
More than half of Virginia school districts are defying Youngkin’s mask-optional order
Loudoun County Public Schools has suspended 29 students after they refused to follow the schools’ mask mandate.
Resources
What Americans Think Schools Should Do When COVID Spikes? Via the McCourtney Institute for Democracy’s most recent Mood of the Nation Poll.
"Over 70% of Americans favor, at a minimum, masking in K-12 public schools as a response to increasing cases of COVID-19 in their local community."
Nearly 60% also support the continuation of in-person instruction, “even if some students might get sick.”
School Shootings Spike Amid Pandemic Stress: Via Reuters.
"Already, campuses have been the site of 141 shootings so far during the 2021-22 school year - more than at any point in the previous decade, according to Everytown for Gun Safety."
Girl Scout Cookies: Troop 6000 is a Girl Scout program specially designed to serve girls in the New York City Shelter System. Buy cookies.
Related: Girl Scout Cookie Beer Pairing Guide
Celebrating Becoming a Citizen: Just one day after being sworn in as a new U.S. citizen, a beloved custodian at an elementary school in Plainfield returned to work to find students and teachers lined the halls to celebrate his special milestone.
