Top Three
U.S. May Wait Until Summer to Authorize Covid Vaccine for Under 5s: Politico reports.
"Officials want to make Pfizer’s and Moderna’s products available simultaneously to minimize confusion."
"Authorizing the vaccine by Moderna, which plans to complete its emergency use authorization submission by the end of the month, weeks before Pfizer-BioNTech’s would make it harder for the government to promote the shots. It could also undermine confidence in their effectiveness, especially if Pfizer’s vaccine appears to perform better than Moderna’s."
"But on the flip side, sitting on data for a vaccine FDA expects to authorize is likely to further enrage the parents of young children who have spoken out for months about their frustration as cases have ebbed and flowed thanks to the highly transmissible Omicron variant."
Moderna "plans to complete its submission for children under 6 by the end of April, spokesperson Colleen Hussey said. It’s also updated its submission for teens 12 to 17 with six months’ worth of safety data, and it’s provided FDA with the submission for 6- to 11-year-olds “that has been approved in 32 other countries."
Mask Mandate: The U.S. has not asked for a stay in the mask mandate case. Why?
"Legal specialists raised another possibility: The administration may instead be buying time and thinking about trying to erase the ruling — a move that would allow it to protect the powers of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to respond to a future crisis — but without reviving a mask mandate."
“Basically, it is giving up on the mask mandate,” said Lawrence O. Gostin, a Georgetown University professor of global health law who advised the White House on the case. “The administration’s goal is a legal principle, which is to ensure that the C.D.C. has strong public health powers to fight Covid and to fight future pandemics. And it appears much less important to them to quickly reinstate the mask mandate.”
"But Mr. Vladeck contended that the failure to seek a stay may make sense if the Biden legal team was instead trying to protect the C.D.C.’s power with no real intention of trying to get a higher court to reinstate the mask mandate."
Related from KHN: "Judge’s Ruling on the CDC Mask Mandate Highlights the Limits of the Agency’s Power"
Impact Officer in Chief: The state infrastructure coordinator’s role via McKinsey.
Axios reports, "Unless they appoint infrastructure coordinators — or czars — state and local governments risk squandering their shares of the trillions in public works money coming their way under the landmark Bipartisan Infrastructure Law."
"McKinsey says each state needs a centralized and highly coordinated effort to manage the massive amount of money headed its way — and to grab as much of the unassigned pie as possible.”
“While 60% of the funds will be allotted to states through set formulas, the rest will come through competitive grants, loans and federal programs."
Federal
Title 42:
“Facing a growing rebellion from within the Democratic Party, the White House is standing behind its decision to end on May 23 a Trump-era deportation policy for migrants encountered at the southern border,” Politico reports.
“That decision to end the use of the public health order known as Title 42 has placed President Joe Biden in a political bind. The president is attempting to balance his long-standing promise to revoke the policy — which, under the banner of fighting the Covid pandemic, justified the immediate expulsion of migrants without due process — right as Republicans weaponize immigration before the midterms and as a growing number of Democratic senators want restrictions to remain in place for fear that the administration is not prepared for a summer surge of migrants to the border.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has privately told members of Congress he's concerned with the Biden administration’s handling of its plans to lift Title 42 on May 23, sources familiar with the conversations tell Axios.
Covid-19 Research
WHO Backs Paxlovid for High-risk COVID Patients: The WHO strongly recommended Pfizer's Paxlovid drug for mild to moderately sick COVID-19 patients who are part of high-risk groups, but also called for efforts to boost access to the treatment for low- to middle-income countries.
Related: “The WHO also updated its recommendation for Remdesivir, after previously recommending against its use in COVID-19 patients regardless of severity. Earlier evidence showed little or no impact on deaths, but new clinical data found that the drug speeded recovery in hospitalized patients, which the WHO said prompted its updated recommendation. The WHO now recommends its use in mild or moderate COVID-19 infections among those at high risk for hospitalization. It said a recommendation for Remdesivir in severe or critical cases is currently under review.”
“The global health agency’s guidance, published yesterday in BMJ, relies on new data from two randomized clinical trials including more than 3,000 patients. Those studies concluded Pfizer’s antiviral combination of nirmatrelvir and ritonavir led to 84 fewer hospitalizations per 1,000 high-risk people, but called benefits negligible in low-risk people.”
Pfizer Booster: European Medicines Agency (EMA) committee recommended approving the use of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine as a booster for adults who have previously been inoculated with other vaccines.
The Challenge of Accurate Covid Counts and at Home Testing: Researchers surveyed 474,000 people to assess testing habits and extrapolated to US population. They now estimate that starting this week more people are receiving positive Covid results from at-home tests than from other types tests (eg PCR). Methods / Time story / Tweet.
"Official counts are increasingly misleading. More Americans than ever are testing positive on at-home tests—the results of which are rarely reported to public-health authorities, and are thus missing from official tallies. Public-health experts worry that case numbers are now an unreliable way to judge the state of the pandemic, and that there are countless more infections than statistics show."
"Two years into the pandemic, states still don’t have a standardized way of collecting and assessing the test results they get from testing sites, which means federal case and testing data is flawed even before considering the missing data from unlogged rapid tests."
COVID-19 Third Leading Cause of Death in US in 2021: According to data from the National Vital Statistics System released today by the CDC.
Only heart disease and cancer killed more Americans than COVID-19, with provisional death tolls from each cause totaling 693,000, 605,000, and 415,000, respectively. Those were also the three leading killers in 2020.
Guns became the leading cause of death among children and teens in 2020, killing more people ages 1 to 19 in the U.S. than vehicle crashes, drugs overdoses or cancer.
Covid Drugs Save Lives, but Americans Can’t Get Them: Zeynep Tufekci in the NYT
"Almost two months after President Biden promised to make lifesaving drugs against Covid widely available to Americans, the medications remain hard to get for many, despite supplies, leaving large numbers of Americans to face increased risks of avoidable death and serious illness."
"That’s largely because, once again, a dysfunctional health care system that costs more and often delivers less than that of any other developed country has hindered our pandemic response."
"Paxlovid, an antiviral treatment developed by Pfizer, an American pharmaceutical company, is highly effective for reducing hospitalizations and deaths in high-risk patients, as long as it is started early."
"The national map of participating pharmacies in test to treat shows large parts of the country with none."
"The greater difficulty is that the drug can be prescribed only by a medical doctor, advanced practice registered nurse or physician assistant, especially because it can interact harmfully with many other drugs. It cannot be prescribed by a pharmacist. Many pharmacies aren’t participating in the national program because they don’t have a clinic on site where a health practitioner can assess a person’s eligibility. Even if they have one, managing prescriptions for high-risk people is best done by a patient’s regular doctor, not in a one-off encounter at a pharmacy."
Weighing the Cost of the Pandemic: Via the Institute for Progress.
"We find that the total harms of COVID-19 to the U.S. are still about $16 trillion (with a range of $10 trillion and $22 trillion) but the components of harm are significantly different than those estimated by Cutler & Summers. The pandemic caused less economic damage than they projected, but more mental health damage."
State
California: Nearly 90 San Mateo High School students have tested positive for COVID-19 after attending prom earlier this month, according to school officials.
DC: Regional schools reported post-spring break coronavirus case numbers this week that were mostly lower in comparison to previous returns from breaks during the school year.
Michigan: Kalamazoo Public Schools board votes to extend mask mandate.
Mississippi: Gov. Reeves signs bill banning COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
New Jersey: Newark schools may go mask-optional in May if COVID case numbers remain low.
Oklahoma: Virtual learning "here to stay" in Oklahoma education.
Pennsylvania: “Just [two] days after re-imposing the indoor mask mandate in Philadelphia, city officials confirmed Thursday night that they will end the requirement, citing improving numbers for Covid-19 hospitalizations and confirmed infections,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
Washington: Seattle schools to relax physical distancing requirements for students, staff.
Wisconsin: "The mask mandate for students and teachers will stay in place indefinitely at Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS)."
International
Australia: West Australian Premier Mark McGowan's child hospitalized with COVID-19.
Korea: The Ministry of Education and the Korea Student Aid Foundation jointly announced the launch of the full-scale operation of a tutoring program designed to address the educational loss of elementary and middle school students in the areas of learning, psychology and emotions, starting from May.
Resources
Inequities Persist In Hiring And Pay Equity For Women Superintendents: New ILO report.
Reading Rainbow: She sang the iconic ‘Reading Rainbow’ theme. Decades later, her voice is going viral on TikTok.
“Fabrique's voice crooning the catchy lyric "Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high" in the theme song of PBS’s “Reading Rainbow” has brought joy and prompted nostalgia in nearly anyone born after the show's debut in 1983.”
“In recent weeks, the song has found new life on TikTok as a new generation of young people has turned it into a trend.”
“The song is often used in videos in which people try to figure out something that seems impossible. The song is typically paired with a filter called “Space,” which takes a person's face and superimposes it gliding over images of the sun, math equations, planets and galaxies.”
Still Wondering: How pandas survive in the wild...