Top Three
CDC Reports Fewer COVID-19 Pediatric Deaths After Data Correction:
"The health agency, in a statement to Reuters, said it made adjustments to its COVID Data Tracker's mortality data on March 14 because its algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related."
"The reduction cut the CDC's estimate of deaths in children by 24% to 1,341 as of March 18."
BA.2
Scott Gottlieb: "If I were a governor right now, I would be making a very hard push to make sure people in nursing homes are up to date with their vaccines and have been boosted recently heading into what I think is going to be a spike heading into the spring"
Another Covid Surge May Be Coming. Are We Ready for It? asks Benjamin Mueller.
"There are so many things we could be doing, yet the United States has time and time again chosen to be reactive, rather than proactive, and that has cost us dearly,” said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A. “We’ve been wearing rose-colored glasses instead of correcting our vision.”
Covid and the ‘Very Liberal’: David Leonhardt in the NYT.
"The key dividing line appears to be ideology. Americans who identify as “very liberal” are much more worried about Covid than Americans who identify as “somewhat liberal” or “liberal.” Increasingly, the very liberal look like outliers on Covid: The merely liberal are sometimes closer to moderates than to the very liberal."
"Nearly 50 percent of very liberal Americans say that they believe Covid presents a “great risk” to their personal health. Other liberals, moderates and conservatives tend to be less worried."
Federal
ED: President Biden announced his intent to nominate Dr. Nasser Paydar for Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education.
COVID-19 Research
Neutralizing Immunity in Vaccine Breakthrough Infections from the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron and Delta Variants: Omicron breakthrough infections induce a weak neutralizing antibody response, ~1/10 that of Delta, 1/3 of a booster shot, "suggesting reduced protection vs infection or a future variant"
COVID Has Been Detected in 29 Species: "Scientists have now found the coronavirus in 29 kinds of animals, a list that has been steadily growing almost since the start of the pandemic and includes cats, dogs, ferrets, hamsters, tigers, mice, otters, and hippos. In most cases, the animals have not been shown to transmit the virus back to humans. But in at least two cases, it looks as if they can. Minks have spread the virus to people, and in a new Canadian study, scientists identified one person who tested positive after unspecified "close contact" with infected white-tailed deer."
Healthy Children Don’t Need Covid Vaccines: Allysia Finley in the WSJ."Florida is right. Especially for kids under 12, the risks are trivial. And most have natural antibodies."
"Start with the exceedingly low likelihood of severe illness or death. A recent study in the Lancet estimated the infection fatality rate for those under 18 at between 0.0023% and 0.0085%—meaning 2.3 to 8.5 of every 100,000 children who get infected will die. Rates are lowest among those 5 to 11."
"Hospitalizations among children did increase during the Omicron wave relative to previous surges, but they still remained very low—80% lower than among young adults—and it’s not known how many children tested positive during admission for other maladies such as broken bones."
"Vaccine efficacy against infection, meanwhile, turned negative during the Omicron surge a month after kids were inoculated (minus 10%) and declined even more after six weeks (minus 41%). This means vaccinated children were significantly more likely to catch Covid than the unvaccinated. How can that be? One possible explanation is that the unvaccinated may have been more likely to have been previously infected, and natural immunity is more protective than vaccines."
"Antibodies have probably faded in those who were infected earlier in the pandemic, and a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found 63% of children under 18 who tested positive for the virus on PCR tests didn’t generate antibodies in their blood. Unlike the current crop of vaccines, prior infection stimulates mucosal immunity—including antibodies in the saliva and nasal passages—that can provide a strong barrier to infection."
Fact Check: Via Reuters: "Nine pages of adverse event reports from Pfizer-BioNTech in relation to its COVID-19 vaccine are not confirmed adverse events to the shot. They “may not have any causal relationship” to each other, the pharmaceutical company has told Reuters. The statement comes in response to claims online that the list is definitive."
State
California:
Los Angeles schools will stop requiring masks in an agreement with the teachers’ union.
Students record 18,000 tardies in one semester at Stockton school. "Students returning from distance learning were struggling to get to class on time," Lincoln Unified School District said in a statement to ABC10. "We recently initiated the Tardy Sweep program at Lincoln High School to address a back-to-school problem of students showing up late for their classes."
Massachusetts: COVID cases see uptick at K-12 public schools, but still less than half of reports from last month.
Minnesota: Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) will remain closed Monday, with classes canceled for more than 30,000 students for the tenth day, as teachers continue a strike over wages and class sizes, a district spokesperson said.
New York: New NYC health commissioner: Kids under 5 still have to wear masks.
Pennsylvania: Philadelphia health department clarifies incorrect COVID-19 vaccine data resulted from a staff error.
"The health department previously attributed the mistake to a recent merging of state and city data, but Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the inaccuracy has since been found to be the product of a staff error."
Tennessee: Johnson City Virtual Academy prepares for year two.
International
Canada: Ontario lifts mask mandates in most public spaces including schools, retail settings.
Hong Kong: Will open schools, lift flight ban, cut quarantine time and suspend mass testing.
Economic Recovery
How the Great American Jobs Reshuffle Enables a New Opportunity Agenda: Bruno Manno:
There’s a great American jobs reshuffle underway that, while wrenching, has a potential upside for education.
This upside is an opportunity to expand two promising and related approaches to education, training, and hiring: skills-based hiring and K–12 career pathways programs.
These new approaches create workers skilled through alternative routes (STARs).
A new opportunity agenda that looks to STARs and is grounded in opportunity pluralism increases the avenues individuals can pursue throughout their life by offering them multiple education, training, and credentialing pathways to work and a career.
Accelerating Recovery: Where Are We Now?: Matt Gandal
Accelerate pathways to postsecondary credentials.
Build stronger bridges from postsecondary education to careers.
Embed advising and relationships at the heart of education.
Skilled Trade Programs Are Booming After College Enrollment Dropped in the Pandemic: Via NPR.
Related: Sam Altman,"I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears."
Resources
NewSchools Venture Fund Names First CEO of Color: Via Philanthropy, "Frances Messano will be promoted from president to CEO of the NewSchools Venture Fund in January. She will be the first woman of color to lead the $80 million venture philanthropy group."
USA Today --> CRPE: Erin Richards is leaving USA Today and becoming Editorial Director at CRPE.
Polish Schools Expect as Many Ukrainian Refugees as There Are Students in Los Angeles: Via Washington Post.
"Three weeks into the largest refugee flight in Europe since World War II, more than 75,000 new students have registered in the Polish education system. Warsaw has taken in more than 9,000 students from Ukraine, increasing by 1,000 a day. More than 3,200 students have enrolled in Krakow — the equivalent of adding six additional school buildings."
Learning How to Blend Online and Offline Teaching: Robert Ubell in Edsurge.
On This Day: In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. kicked off a historic march, leading 3.2k civil rights demonstrators from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Understaffing Leaves After-School Programs With Unmet Demand: Reports the AP.
"Before the pandemic, the San Antonio district's after-school program had 1,000 staff members serving more than 7,000 students at its roughly 100 elementary and middle schools. Today, there are less than half that number of employees supervising about 3,300 students. More than 1,100 students are on waiting lists for the program, called Learning Tree, which provides academic, recreational and social enrichment until 6:30 p.m. each school day."
"There's no doubt really that these after-school programs — the lack of after-school programs at this stage — are limiting women in particular being able to reenter the workforce," said Jen Rinehart, vice president for strategy and programming at the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance, which works to increase programming."
"An Afterschool Alliance survey found an all-time high of 24.6 million children were unable to access a program at the end of 2021, though cost as well as availability was a barrier. Of more than 1,000 program providers surveyed, 54% had waiting lists, a significantly greater percentage than in the past."
Learning Loss and Student Dropouts during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Review of the Evidence Two Years after Schools Shut Down: Center for Global Development report.
"We identify 40 empirical studies directly estimating student learning loss (29 studies) or dropout rates (15 studies) for students in pre-primary, primary, or secondary school in countries at any income level."
"Most estimates of average learning loss are negative, although–especially in low- and middle-income countries–this is not always the case, and average losses are not as significant as some models predicted."
"Furthermore, learning loss was consistently much higher among students with lower socioeconomic status in high-, middle-, and low-income countries, even in contexts with little or no average learning loss."
"Dropout rates ranged dramatically, from under 1 percent to more than 35 percent, with much higher rates for older students, suggesting that pandemic school closures–together with other pandemic-related shocks–may have curtailed many adolescents’ schooling careers. In some countries (e.g., Kenya and Nigeria), girls are at higher risk of dropping out"
Who’s Unhappy With Schools? The Answer Surprised Me: Jessica Grose in the NYT
Districts Face Difficulty Luring Covid-Cautious Parents Back to School: Via the Washington Post.
"Vladimir Kogan, an associate professor of political science at Ohio State University, said parents become more willing to send their children to school when districts are open for full-time, in-person instruction — and remove other options. The continuing reluctance represents a broader failure to explain risks clearly to parents, including the risks of missing in-person school, he said."
“The parents who are demanding the virtual options — I don’t think that’s a reasonable position at this point to have, and it’s been a societal failure of risk communication. Parents don’t get to withhold education from their kids, just like parents don’t get to withhold food or medical care,” Kogan said."
“We have normalized something that before the pandemic seemed crazy,” he added, “which is that parent anxiety is a justification to opt out of compulsory education.”
"Other Prince George’s parents also wanted to see virtual learning remain. Danielle Wood, whose son is in fifth grade, said she collected 1,500 signatures on a petition to keep the choice of virtual learning in the district for the rest of this school year, and also organized a small but noisy caravan of parents to encircle the school board headquarters, honking in support of remote school."
Remember The Girl Who Sang Frozen in a Ukrainian Bomb Shelter? She just sang on stage at a charity concert in Poland.
A Special Friendship: "Your heart will melt and your spirit will soar when you come to understand the lovely friendship between a 95-year-old Dutch woman named Sally and a 2-year-old St. Bernard named Brody," says Eric Johnson.