Top Three
White House: Says it will make more high-quality masks available for kids.
Do Masks Really Harm Kids?: Via NatGeo.
How masks affect breathing
How masks affect language development
How masks affect social development
"While lifting mask mandates might make sense during times when local cases are low, Murray says that schools need to be willing to go back to masking if a harmful new variant emerges or if they start to see a new surge in cases. There’s no magic number to determine when to lift mandates, he says—it can differ based on a variety of factors that can mitigate transmission, such as whether schools have enough space for students to spread out or whether it’s warm enough to open classroom windows."
Daniel Buck with an opposing view over at Fordham.
Vaccine for Under 5s: Oped by Govind Persad, Alyssa Burgart, and Emily Largent: "Why the FDA was wrong to delay authorization of vaccines for kids under 5"
"The FDA’s reasoning seems dubious given omicron’s ability to evade protection against infection. The original two-dose series for adults is only about 10 percent effective against omicron infection after 20 weeks, but continues to offer far more protection against severe disease."
"Poorer reported efficacy against infection might just reflect the limitations of any tightly spaced two-dose series against omicron rather than anything unique to children under 5. If adult trials were rerun against omicron, the two-dose series might not meet the standards the FDA is applying to pediatric vaccines."
"What we can be certain of is that waiting for third-dose results before opening access will inevitably lead to thousands more children being infected with the coronavirus without the protection of a vaccine."
"Regulators should have focused on one question: Is a young child safer being vaccinated against the coronavirus now than waiting unprotected for two months? The answer is almost certainly yes. The FDA’s failure to clearly explain why this isn’t the case — if it isn’t — contravenes transparency."
"When pediatricians and parents agree together that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks, they should be allowed to give the Pfizer vaccine to children under 5. As city and state governments end mask mandates, children are at greater risk; the federal government could afford these children more protection by permitting off-label use. If regulators refuse to relent, it will be hard to fault a city, hospital or pediatrician for ignoring their roadblocks, as some have with boosters."
Federal
Bipartisan Resistance Against More Covid Funding: Via Politico:
“President Joe Biden’s cabinet members and public health experts say they are running out of money to battle Covid-19 and need tens of billions more dollars to continue vaccination, testing and medicine distribution efforts at home and abroad.”
“But the push for a Covid supplemental bill, which would ride alongside the package to fund the government through September that Congress is trying to pass by mid-March, is encountering bipartisan resistance.”
“GOP lawmakers argue more spending will exacerbate inflation and that the worst of the pandemic is in the past. And even Democrats who support the additional public health funds worry the effort could derail the fragile negotiations on the core bill to fund the government by injecting partisan disagreements about how to address the pandemic into discussions over funding the military and federal agencies.”
COVID-19 Research
BA.2: CNN reports on "new lab experiments from Japan show that BA.2 may have features that make it as capable of causing serious illness as older variants of Covid-19, including Delta."
"It might be, from a human's perspective, a worse virus than BA.1 and might be able to transmit better and cause worse disease," says Dr. Daniel Rhoads, section head of microbiology at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Rhoads reviewed the study but was not involved in the research."
"There is no evidence that the BA.2 lineage is more severe than the BA.1 lineage. CDC continues to monitor variants that are circulating both domestically and internationally," Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said Friday. "We will continue to monitor emerging data on disease severity in humans and findings from papers like this conducted in laboratory settings."
Ivermectin Futile for Mild to Moderate COVID-19: Via CIDRAP, "Early treatment with the antiparasitic drug ivermectin does not lower the risk of severe disease when given to patients with mild to moderate COVID-19, according to a study today in JAMA Internal Medicine."
"Five serious adverse events—four in the ivermectin group—were reported. Two patients had a heart attack, one had severe anemia, and one went into shock owing to fluid loss from severe diarrhea, while one in the control group had arterial bleeding in the abdomen"
"The study findings do not support the use of ivermectin for patients with COVID-19," the authors concluded.
What Can Actually Convince Vaccine Skeptics to Get Their Shots: Via Vox in a new NBER study.
"The self-protection message had a small positive effect in increasing people’s vaccine intentions, but it was the smallest effect of the four and was not considered statistically significant. The altruistic messages — Protecting Others or Health or the Economy — had a more meaningful impact on people’s intentions immediately afterward."
"Our most striking result is that informational treatments provided in the first wave affected not only vaccination intentions expressed in the same survey but also actual vaccination rates recorded six months later. Our messages even increased vaccination among individuals who had initially expressed anti-vax attitudes. Overall, altruistic messages had the largest effect. The important differences in the relative effectiveness of our different treatments across countries indicate that future information campaigns should be tailored to the context to be most impactful."
State
Colorado: State public health officials say that soon they can start treating COVID more like other communicable diseases, such as flu and norovirus.
Georgia: Fulton County Schools to require summer learning for some students.
Hawaii: The Hawaii Board of Education rejected a proposal by the state education department to establish a statewide virtual school for students in grades K-12, citing a lack of specificity in how the plan would be implemented.
Illinois: Schools are no longer required to mandate masks for their students, according to a court ruling.
"An Illinois appellate court late Thursday evening dismissed Gov. JB Pritzker’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling which blocked his mask mandate in schools."
Massachusetts: Greater Commonwealth Virtual School remote learning enrollment cap increased to 1,200 students.
New York: Home schooling nearly doubled in NYC since pandemic’s start.
"This school year, roughly 14,800 children across the five boroughs have opted to learn outside of school walls, according to internal education department data obtained by Chalkbeat. That number jumped by nearly 7,000 — or 88% — since the pandemic hit with the biggest gain occurring this school year, as more than 4,000 new students registered to home-school."
Resources
America Is Facing a Great Talent Recession: Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg.
"The Covid pandemic provides both a timely warning and a spur: a warning of what happens to a historically rumbustious economy when workers become scarce, and a spur to fixing America’s long-term talent and labor-supply problems while there is still time."
"America’s triumphant educational story has taken a darker turn. High school graduation rates have stagnated: America is the only member country of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in which the graduation rate for those ages 24 to 34 is no higher than for those ages 55 to 64."
"America faces a growing problem with vocational education — that is, with the training of workers, particularly those who don’t complete four-year college degrees, in job-related skills. People who leave school at 16 can’t access a clear, well-designed training system as exists in many European countries. And if they are lucky enough to get a job, they don’t have access to continuing education: Whereas you could once be promoted from the shop floor to, eventually, the executive suite, almost all the top jobs now go to people with college degrees."
"Germany’s system provides a successful alternative to the U.S.’s college-first model: technical schools that enjoy “parity of esteem” with academic schools, and apprenticeships that give young people a chance to earn a living (and avoid accumulating debt) while at the same time learning a useful trade. Far from ignoring general principles, Germany’s vocational education provides a different way of teaching them, starting with the particular and working to the general — an approach that appeals to many practical-minded young people."
"This one-size-fits-all tradition is actually not very good at promoting its stated aim of equality."
"Parents of the middle class and higher can do everything in their power to stretch their (sometimes talented) children to the maximum — algebra classes in the evening, academic summer camps, weekend violin lessons... Though the one-size-fits-all approach might have been well-suited to the age of mass production and identikit managers, it is incompatible with one in which high ability drives a disproportionate amount of economic growth."
COVID is Forcing K-12 Schools to Rethink Testing: Via The Hill.
February Sucks: This local reporter keeps going viral for breaking that news. Video here.
"At one point, Killeen stands atop a parking garage in St Louis, gesturing at the dark office buildings behind him and says, “Something great happened here but it’s over with.”
Pointing to some trees: “It’s as if there is some awful truth out there in the trees. It’s hiding in the branches. Look at them. Something that’s been bothering you for a long time is out there. What is it? You can almost see the shape of it when all the color is gone and life is stripped down to the starkness of February."
"To hide the bleakness of February man invented Valentine's Day and Mardi Gras."
"But then February answered back with Ash Wednesday. What other month could host a holiday to remind us that we're going to die?"
"That's February for you. It's bleak. It's honest. And it just tells you the way it is."