COVID-19 Policy Update #478
Monday 4/18
Top Three
A Federal Judge Strikes Down the Mask Mandate on Planes and Public Transit: “A federal judge in Florida has voided the national mask mandate covering airports, planes and other public travel,” the AP reports.
“The decision Monday by U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle in Tampa also said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention improperly failed to justify its decision and did not follow proper rulemaking.”
Via Politico: “It is indisputable that the public has a strong interest in combating the spread of Covid-19,” Mizelle wrote. “In pursuit of that end, the CDC issued the mask mandate. But the mandate exceeded the CDC statutory authority, improperly invoked the good cause exception to notice and comment rulemaking, and failed to adequately explain its decisions. Because our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in the pursuit of desirable ends, the court declares unlawful and vacates the mask mandate.”
“This is obviously a disappointing decision. The CDC continues recommending wearing a mask in public transit,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a White House briefing. She said the CDC and DHS are “reviewing the decision and of course the Department of Justice would be making any determinations about any litigation.”
New ESSER Expenditure Dashboard: From Edunomics that tracks actual federal relief spending by district.
Related: Another great resource in addition to Burbio's ESSER tracker and AEI’s Return to Learn ESSER tracker.
Chronic Absenteeism in New Jersey: Chronic absenteeism plagued N.J. schools during pandemic. Includes a database of district data.
"The number of students in the Camden City School District who missed 10 or more school days — the definition of chronically absent — jumped to 57% that year, up from 34% during the 2018-19 school year."
Covid-19 Research
Boosters: "Americans over 60 should get a second booster shot of a coronavirus vaccine, Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the new White House Covid-19 response coordinator, said on Sunday, citing “pretty compelling” new data from Israel indicating that a fourth shot significantly reduced infections and deaths among older people there."
New Disease Outbreak News from the WHO: Acute hepatitis of unknown aetiology – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
"Laboratory testing has excluded hepatitis type A, B, C, and E viruses (and D where applicable) in these cases while Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and/or adenovirus have been detected in several cases."
"The United Kingdom has recently observed an increase in adenovirus activity, which is co-circulating with SARS-CoV-2, though the role of these viruses in the pathogenesis (mechanism by which disease develops) is not yet clear."
The Case for Testing Pfizer's Paxlovid for Treating Long COVID: Via Reuters.
"Reports of two patients who found relief from long COVID after taking Pfizer Inc's antiviral Paxlovid, including a researcher who tested it on herself, provide intriguing evidence for clinical trials to help those suffering from the debilitating condition, experts and advocates say."
"Scientists caution that these cases are "hypothesis-generating only" and not proof that the drug caused relief of lingering symptoms. But they lend support to a leading theory that long COVID may be caused by the virus persisting in parts of the body for months, affecting patients' daily lives long after acute symptoms disappear."
"In one of the case reports, published as a preprint ahead of peer review, a previously healthy and vaccinated 47-year-old woman became infected with COVID in the summer of 2021. Most of her acute symptoms dissipated within 48 hours, but she continued to have severe fatigue, brain fog, exhaustion after exercise, insomnia, racing heartbeat and body aches severe enough that she could no longer work. About six months after her initial infection, she was reinfected, likely with COVID, and many of her acute symptoms also returned. Her doctor prescribed a five-day course of Paxlovid. On day 3, she noticed a rapid improvement of long COVID symptoms. "She's back to normal," said Dr. Linda Geng, co-director of Stanford Health Care's long COVID clinic and author of the case report posted on Research Square."
In the second case, Lavanya Visvabharathy, 37, an immunologist working at Northwestern Medicine's long COVID clinic, was infected in December 2021. Her initial symptoms were mild, but she later experienced chronic fatigue, headaches and sleep disturbances for four months after infection. She also kept testing positive on rapid antigen tests, a sign of viral persistence Visvabharathy was aware of the NIH study and the Stanford case, and decided to try Paxlovid to see if it could clear any lingering virus. Toward the end of the five-day course, her fatigue and insomnia had improved, and her headaches were less frequent. Two weeks after treatment ended, her fatigue was gone. "That's 100% fixed," she said."
Upper Airway Infections in Kids With COVID-19 Rose with Omicron Surge: "Rates of upper airway infections (UAIs) such as croup and bacterial tracheitis among pediatric COVID-19 patients, though low, rose after the Omicron variant became dominant in December 2021, with more than one fifth of hospitalized children with both conditions developing severe illness, estimates a study in JAMA Pediatrics."
The Link Between Transit Use and Early COVID Cases: Georgia Institute of Technology study.
"The study found that cities with high-usage public transportation systems displayed higher per capita Covid incidence. This was true when other factors, such as education, poverty levels, and household crowding, were accounted for. The association continued to be statistically significant even when the model was run without data from transit-friendly New York City."
Is Covid More Dangerous Than Driving? How Scientists Parse Covid Risks: Via the NYT:
“We’re doing a really terrible job of communicating risk,” said Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “I think that’s also why people are throwing their hands up in the air and saying, ‘Screw it.’ They’re desperate for some sort of guidance.”
"While Covid is far from America’s only health threat, it remains one of its most significant. In March, even as deaths from the first Omicron surge plummeted, the virus was still the third-leading cause of death in the United States, behind only heart disease and cancer."
"Dr. Jetelina, who has published a set of comparisons in her newsletter, Your Local Epidemiologist, said that the exercise highlighted how tricky risk calculations remained for everybody, epidemiologists included. For example, she estimated that the average vaccinated and boosted person who was at least 65 years old had a risk of dying after a Covid infection slightly higher than the risk of dying during a year of military service in Afghanistan in 2011. She used a standard unit of risk known as a micromort, which represents a one-in-a-million chance of dying."
"For children under 5, she found, the risk of dying after a Covid infection was about the same as the risk of mothers dying in childbirth in the United States. That comparison, though, highlights other difficulties in describing risk: Average numbers can hide large differences between groups. Black women, for example, are almost three times as likely as white women to die in childbirth, a reflection in part of differences in the quality of medical care and of racial bias within the health system."
Covid Vaccine Concerns Are Starting to Spill Over Into Routine Immunizations: Via Politico.
"Public health experts, pediatricians, school nurses, immunization advocates and state officials in 10 states told POLITICO they are worried that an increasing number of families are projecting their attitudes toward the Covid-19 vaccine onto shots for measles, chickenpox, meningitis and other diseases."
"In Florida, where the surgeon general last month announced that healthy children may not benefit from Covid vaccines, 2-year-old routine rates for all immunizations in county-run facilities plummeted from 92.1 percent in 2019 to 79.3 percent in 2021."
"In Tennessee, nearly 14 percent fewer vaccine doses were given to children under 2 in 2020 and 2021 than before the pandemic."
The CDC’s Isolation Guidance is Not Based on Data: Via the Covid-19 Data Dispatch.
It’s Time to Think Outside the Mask Mandate: Via a Vox interview with Jennifer Nuzzo who outlined four areas where our thinking on the pandemic could use a reset. She calls for a better understanding of what masks can and cannot do; clarity on what testing really tells us; a pivot away from emergency measures and toward longer-term efforts to ensure equitable testing, vaccination, and treatment; and renewed focus on locally relevant data gathering.
States Address School Vaccine Mandates and Mask Mandates: Via NASHP.
State
California: New Los Angeles Unified school superintendent Alberto Carvalho plans to fill hundreds of teaching vacancies by reassigning school staff to classrooms for the remainder of the year.
Florida: Substitute teacher shortage continues as recruitment picks up in Tampa Bay.
Massachusetts: Survey finds widespread grief among children from COVID-19 losses.
New York: Michael Bloomberg announces $50 million for NYC charter schools to spin up summer programs.
International
China:
“The Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper called on the nation to support President Xi Jinping’s Covid Zero strategy, showing any shift in policy is unlikely even as lockdowns in Shanghai and elsewhere threaten to hurt the economy,” Bloomberg reports.
“Dozens of elderly patients at a hospital in Shanghai have died after contracting Covid-19, but official government figures claim no deaths in the city have been caused by the disease since 2020," reports the BBC.
UK: Covid continues to disrupt schools.
"Upwards of one in 10 teachers in the London-area’s two largest school boards have been off sick simultaneously in recent weeks, creating “a perfect storm” that has officials taking unprecedented steps to keep classes open."
"In the 23,000-student London District Catholic school board: 10-12% of teachers, or 100 to 150, have called in sick daily for the past two weeks. Altogether, about 300 employees are out of action."
"In the 75,000-student Thames Valley District school board: About 10% of total staff, or roughly 1,000 people, were absent last week."
Economic Recovery
Goldman Sachs Puts Odds of Recession at 35%: Via Bloomberg: “History suggests that the Federal Reserve will face a difficult task in tightening monetary policy enough to cool inflation without causing a U.S. recession, with the odds of a contraction at about 35% over the next two years, according to Goldman Sachs.
Unemployment: 12 states set new record series low unemployment rates.
Several Million Seen Staying Out of Labor Force
“Several million workers who dropped out of the U.S. workforce during the Covid-19 pandemic plan to stay out indefinitely because of persistent illness fears or physical impairments, potentially exacerbating the labor shortage for years,” the WSJ reports.
“About three million workforce dropouts say they don’t plan to return to pre-Covid activities—whether that includes going to work, shopping in person or dining out—even after the pandemic ends, according to a monthly survey conducted over the past year by a team of researchers. The workforce dropouts tend to be women, lack a college degree and have worked in low-paying fields.”
“Our evidence is the labor force isn’t going to magically bounce back,” said Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who oversees the survey along with José María Barrero of Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago. “We still don’t see any change in these long social distancing numbers, which suggests this drop in labor-force participation may be quite enduring.”
Resources
VELA Micro Grants: New competition is open.
Dubious Research, Vexing Guidance: CDC Struggles to Help Schools During Pandemic: Via Matt Barnum in Chalkbeat.
As Teen Mental Health Worsens, Schools Learn How to Help: Via Pew.
"Last year, 38 states enacted nearly 100 laws providing additional resources to support mental wellbeing in K-12 schools, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy, a Portland, Maine-based policy research group. Dozens of additional school mental health bills became law this year in at least 22 states, according to the group."
"At least 16 states, from Alaska to Massachusetts, plus the District of Columbia, now require K-12 teachers and other school staff to take training courses on how to recognize mental distress in students and what to do when they see it."
"California, Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington enacted new laws recommending high school students take mental health training courses so they can help their friends, family and classmates."
Microsoft Security Patch: "Microsoft released updates to fix roughly 120 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. Two of the flaws have been publicly detailed prior to this week, and one is already seeing active exploitation, according to a report from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)."
Some Bunny Loves You: Via a Chinchilla.