COVID-19 Policy Update #481
Thursday 4/21
Top Three
Moderna for Under 5s: Moderna plans to submit an application for EUA of its COVID-19 vaccine among kids between the ages of six months to five years by end of the month. More on the timing and issues via Politico:
"Administration health officials had once hoped to authorize first shots for young children at the beginning of this year. But scientific setbacks and broader practical concerns within the Food and Drug Administration have slowed progress, the people with knowledge of the matter said."
"Now, regulators are leaning toward postponing any action until the early summer, arguing that it would be simpler and less confusing to simultaneously authorize and promote two vaccines to the public, rather than green-lighting one on a faster timetable and the other down the road."
"The administration is also under rising pressure to move on a vaccine for the youngest children from members of its own party, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who on Tuesday called for “more urgency and action” on the issue. "It is immoral to wait any longer,” he wrote in a letter sent to Biden. “Many parents of young children feel left behind, and are rightfully displeased that the FDA’s lack of action and urgency has left them unable to protect their children and loved ones like everyone else.”
"Inside some quarters of the administration, there is similar uneasiness about the appearance of the FDA sitting on a vaccine that it otherwise expects to authorize, particularly if cases continue to increase, two of the people with knowledge of the matter said."
"Yet FDA officials have argued it’s a more complicated calculation. They worry that authorizing a single vaccine and then, soon thereafter, another one might make it harder for the administration to promote the shots and undermine confidence in their effectiveness."
"That leaves the FDA with the prospect of green-lighting Moderna’s vaccine, only to potentially find out several weeks later that Pfizer’s vaccine performs far better."
"Health officials worry that scenario would spark backlash from parents who had rushed out to get the Moderna shot — compounding the existing confusion inherent in explaining why one vaccine is two shots and the other is three, and worsening the misinformation swirling around the broader vaccination campaign."
Meg Tirrell sums up the dilemma, "The question may be: how would you feel as a parent if you got the first vaccine authorized, but then weeks later another vaccine was authorized that had better data? With Pfizer data perhaps a few weeks away that could be the situation (but we don’t know bc we haven’t seen it)."
Inflation Will Put Districts in a Pickle: Warns Marguerite Roza in EdNext.
"For most districts, the much larger inflationary wallop will come as districts adjust their salaries. Schooling is a notoriously labor-intensive industry. But still, most districts tend not to think about salaries until the current labor contract ends and the negotiating starts. And since teacher attrition is lower than attrition in other industries and tends to happen between school years, the effects of inflation only emerge as contract talks begin."
"That time is imminent. Scanning the 44 larger districts that are members of the Edunomics Lab’s district finance network, which meets regularly about finance strategy, we found that more than half have contracts expiring this spring or are operating under an already-expired contract."
"Federal relief funds are further complicating labor markets. It’s not just existing employees creating the salary pressure. In fact, the push to raise pay comes while many districts are deep into a hiring spree brought on by the mammoth infusion of temporary federal relief funds. With a use-it-or-lose-it spending deadline of September 2024, districts know they need to move quickly to spend down these funds, and many still have spots they haven’t filled."
"This is where things will get tricky down the road. The compensation districts agree to in these inflationary times will tend to become permanent. A 5-percent raise gets enshrined in every cell on the traditional step-and-lane pay scale. It becomes the new baseline against which any future raises are awarded. This means that districts must accept the newer and higher cost structure going forward."
"But how will a district with limited funds make ends meet when costs rise? Districts can’t pass off higher costs to the customer, as grocery stores do, or move quickly to lay off labor when the economy shrinks, as organizations in other industries do, because layoffs in education are politically difficult and enormously disruptive for students and staff alike. Therein lies the problem: Locking in permanent pay increases now may exacerbate the financial ticking time bomb for districts."
‘I’m Not All Better’: How long COVID upended the life of an L.A. teen
"More than a year later, Ami has regained his physical strength and is back to playing baseball, rebuilding his endurance on the field. He and his parents credit his work in cardiopulmonary rehab, along with acupuncture, medication, vitamins and other therapies. But at school, he is still grappling with brain fog and struggling with his faltering memory."
"He once prided himself on his recall but now comes up empty when asked about things that came up in class just days before. “I could remember that I went to math class on Monday,” he said. “But I couldn’t remember what I learned.”
"Here is how the teen explains it: He can sit attentively in English class on Monday and learn about independent clauses, but when he returns to the same class on Wednesday to learn about complex clauses, he has forgotten what makes up an independent clause. He can learn how to do a math problem one day, then struggle to remember it a few days afterward."
Federal
ED: Sec. Cardona laid out his priorities via a post in EdSurge of all places: This Is Our Moment to Improve Education. Here’s Our Plan.
NTIA: Broadband Resources for State and Local Governments
Broadband Network Deployment Engineering: Provides an overview of broadband deployment engineering and looks at network architecture, infrastructure elements, business models, and technologies.
Economics of Broadband Networks: Provides an overview of the challenges of deploying broadband, the economics of networks and important considerations.
Planning a Stakeholder Engagement Strategy: Designed to help states and localities develop a stakeholder engagement strategy and focuses on identifying who should be engaged, processes and relationships that currently exist, and how the work will be done.
Setting Up Initial Stakeholder Engagement: Designed to help states and localities develop a stakeholder engagement strategy and focuses on objectives for each stakeholder that is engagement, various engagement approaches, and what to discuss.
Broadband Policies & Mechanisms: Looks at right-of-way access, dig once for burial deployments, and pole attachment policies and one-touch make-ready for aerial deployments as policies that could reduce construction costs and accelerate project deployment.
Broadband Asset Mapping & Management: Looks at the process of collecting, organizing, and tracking data on relevant infrastructure assets that can be utilized for broadband deployment.
Covid-19 Research
Natural Immunity: Via Stat: A research letter in JAMA Network Open tested the concept of natural immunity by analyzing data from more than 121,000 patients receiving health care in the western U.S. from October 2020 through November 2021, before the Omicron variant took hold.
"Unvaccinated people who’d been sick with Covid had an 85% lower risk of acquiring Covid again compared to unvaccinated individuals without prior Covid. That level is similar to what mRNA vaccines deliver."
"Previous infection conferred 88% protection against hospitalization after reinfection and 83% protection against reinfection that did not require hospitalization."
"The authors conclude natural immunity works as well against both mild and severe illness. One difference: Natural immunity didn't wane, but mRNA vaccines' protection did. “This study may have important implications for vaccine policy and public health,” they write."
We Have the Technology to Stop Superspreading Without Masks: Via Dr. Milton, Dr. Nardell and Dr. Michaels in the NYT.
"Instead, there are ways that building owners can make indoor environments safer by disinfecting indoor air. One of the best technologies to do so — germicidal ultraviolet light — has been studied for decades and can now be used safely."
"The White House recently embraced improving indoor air quality as critical to stemming the pandemic. This includes three methods that can bring clean air into rooms or clean the air already in them: ventilation, air filtration and air disinfection. Of these three, the last may be the most powerful, even as it’s the least utilized."
"Ventilation and filtration can remove germs floating indoors either by blowing them out of the building and replacing the air with fresh outdoor air or by capturing them while moving the indoor air through a filter. At two air changes per hour, which is commonly provided in large buildings, a little more than half of the existing germs are removed every 30 minutes. At six air changes per hour, which is common in hospital rooms and classrooms with multiple portable HEPA air filters, a little more than half of the germs are removed every 10 minutes."
"GUV can easily and silently kill half of the germs floating in indoor air every two minutes or less."
"There are three types of ultraviolet light rays: UVA, UVB and UVC. GUV uses UVC, which, unlike the UVA and UVB in sunlight, doesn’t cause skin cancer because it cannot sufficiently penetrate the skin."
"As experts who study the ways viruses can spread indoors, we believe that air disinfection using GUV could have prevented the Gridiron superspreader event. The technology should become the norm for large indoor gatherings where meals are served and masks cannot be worn."
AstraZeneca's Evusheld: Slashes risk of symptomatic COVID-19 up to 83%.
Do I Still Need to Wear a Mask?: The Washington Post tries to break down the decision and provide a guide to help you decide.
Quarter of U.S. Covid Deaths Were Preventable: Via the Washington Post, “New analysis from the Peterson Center on Healthcare and Kaiser Family Foundation quantifies the effects of vaccination. Since June 2021, the point at which every American adult had access to coronavirus vaccines, they estimate that just over 234,000 unvaccinated Americans died who could have lived had they been immunized against the virus.”
State
Florida: Via The 74: The Growing Mystery Surrounding Florida’s Rejected Math Textbooks.
Hawaii: Schools are struggling to hire special education teachers. Hawaii may have found a fix.
Economic Recovery
College Degree: A record 37.9% of adult population in the United States has a bachelor’s degree or higher.
States Forecast Weaker Revenue Growth Ahead of Growing Uncertainties: Via the Tax Policy Center.
"State revenue growth was strong in fiscal year 2021, despite widespread economic disruptions caused by the global pandemic. But it appears the current fiscal year 2022 (July-June for 46 of the 50 states) may end up with weaker revenue growth, and forecasters are now projecting a gloomier outlook for fiscal 2023."
"While many states still have to finalize revenue forecasts in the next few weeks, risks to the forecasts are skewed to the downside due to an elevated probability of recession on the horizon."
Supply Side Inflation: Freight traffic for foreign trade in China is already down by more than 5% and the lockdowns began in late March. April will be worse.
More via Bloomberg: "China Port Congestion Leaves Everything From Grains to Metals Stranded"
Resources
Can Supplemental Academic Service Providers Bridge the Teacher Hiring Gap?: Via Tyton Partners. One finding:
Welcome.US: Announces goal to mobilize 100,000 Americans to sponsor Ukrainians seeking refuge in the United States. More via Axios. Five key actions:
Learn more about directly sponsoring people fleeing the war in Ukraine and seeking refuge at ukraine.welcome.us.
Be a Welcomer by signing up to get updates and connecting to volunteer opportunities and other ways to help.
Make a donation to the Welcome Fund, which allows Americans to easily donate to the nonprofit organizations working directly to address the most urgent needs of newcomers rebuilding their lives in communities across the country. 100 percent of Welcome Fund donations support frontline organizations responding to Ukrainians, Afghans, and others fleeing their homelands as they build new lives in the United States.
Offer to temporarily open your home to newcomers through Airbnb.org. You can also donate to Airbnb.org to help cover the costs of temporary housing for newcomers.
Donate airline miles through Miles4Migrants so newcomers seeking refuge can access a free flight to their new home.
Students Need More Counseling—and More Than Counseling: Via Inside Higher Ed.