Top Three
"We just didn't feel that the 2 doses... the results, I don't think we found them adequate."
"Notes in kids 5-11, 3rd dose boosted immune response by 36x. "I don't have any reason to believe it will be lesser in kids younger than 5, although we'll have to see.
Another executive said "We expect to analyze and submit the three-dose data by late May/early June."
How Coronavirus is Getting Closer to the Flu: Via Stat:
"But as more infectious variants have emerged, Oshitani’s team has observed changing transmission patterns in Japan. Rural areas that avoided SARS-CoV-2 surges in earlier waves have been inundated with Omicron, he told STAT via email. Clusters are also showing up more in schools and nursing homes. And some data indicate that secondary attack rates in households are higher for Omicron — meaning if someone brings the virus home, more people they share a roof with are likely to contract it."
"It’s not that superspreaders have become less super in their spreading; it’s that with Omicron, everyone else may be catching up with them."
"Most people, through prior infection, vaccination, or a combination of the two now have immune systems capable of fending off the deadliest outcomes of contracting SARS-CoV-2. And that’s starting to look a lot like what happened when pandemic flu transitioned to seasonal flu."
“Gatherings are less likely to be as significant a component of spread at this point, but superspreading events will continue to be possible,” he said. “That’s what we’re seeing in D.C. at the moment. People who have avoided Covid thus far are making contacts they weren’t making six months ago, and so the virus is just making hay with all those contacts.”
"But since Omicron has spread around the world, the new variants that have emerged and outpaced it — BA.2, BA.1, BA.4, and others — have all splintered off from the same starting point. This sort of ladder-like accumulation of mutations is something much more characteristic of how influenza evolves. In general, there’s one major lineage that “drifts” year to year, inching toward more immune escape and higher transmissibility, rather than leaping out of nowhere."
"This could be good news, because more stable, predictable evolution would make it easier to develop meaningful Covid-19 vaccines and boosters, better tuned to handle whichever version of the virus will be circulating six to 12 months from now, as Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center pointed out in a recent Twitter thread."
Massachusetts Poll: New poll from MassINC Polling Group.
22% of parents believe their children are still behind grade level. That’s unchanged since an October 2021
74% of parents who see their children as behind grade level also reported mental health concerns, far higher than parents of those with fewer academic challenges (41%).
Black parents are most concerned about infection at school, with 69% somewhat or very concerned compared to 45% of white parents.
80% of Black parents support a mask mandate, compared to 50% of white parents. Asian American parents support the full range of mitigation measures, with at least 70% support for each. Two thirds or more of Latino parents are on board with each measure other than a student vaccine mandate.
Federal
Title 42: U.S. preparing 19,000 beds for migrant children in case of spike in border arrivals, officials say.
SCOTUS: Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows.
Covid-19 Research
BA.4, BA.5, and BA.2.12.1 May Escape Antibodies Generated by BA.1 Infection: New study.
Masks: CDC says travelers should still wear masks on airplanes.
You Were Right About COVID, and Then You Weren’t: Olga Khazan in The Atlantic.
"Dylan Smith watched in dismay. Was everyone else ignoring reality? That March, New York City hesitated to close its schools during the city’s first COVID wave. Smith was horrified. A major pandemic was arriving, and softening its blow would require closing schools, which he believed was the best way to protect kids. “There were a lot of suggestions that kids would be these super–carrier vectors,” he says, “where they would come home and they would infect Mom and Dad and Grandma and Grandpa, and they would infect teachers at school.”
"Now, two years later, Smith has changed his mind. He thinks schools should’ve reopened much sooner—by early 2021 at the latest. In other words, Smith admits to rethinking one of his positions on COVID-19, an act that sometimes feels as risky as telling 17th-century Florentines that Earth revolves around the sun. Not everyone will agree with Smith’s reassessment. But maybe we can learn something from his willingness to do it."
"Then, he began to see kids come into the hospital with mental-health emergencies at alarming rates. Kids were having panic attacks and trying to kill themselves; some were saying they were stressed out because they couldn’t see their friends. What he saw mirrors national trends: 37 percent of high schoolers have experienced poor mental health during the pandemic, according to a CDC survey."
"But Smith noticed that movie theaters and restaurants were opening back up. Schools seemed more important. After vaccines became widely available in 2021, Smith didn’t see any further justification for school closures. When people expressed doubts about school reopenings, he made his opinion clear: The science supported it."
"Confessing that we’ve changed our opinion is hard, and not only because we don’t like feeling stupid, or looking stupid, or being exiled from certain circles of Twitter. “If I admit I’m wrong, then I have a harder time relying on my own judgment every time I make a decision or have an opinion,” says Adam Grant."
"One thing that allows people like Smith to talk so openly about changing their mind is a loose attachment to their opinions. “Don’t let your ideas become part of your identity,” said Grant."
"According to Grant, the best way to keep an open mind in an unclear situation is to do just this: Think like a scientist. (The other, lesser ways to think are like a “preacher, prosecutor, and politician,” which are what they sound like.) The writer Julia Galef calls this “the scout mindset,” as opposed to the “soldier mindset.” The scout and scientist mindsets are approximately the same thing: “The motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were,” she writes in her eponymous book."
COVID Vaccine Uptake at Minnesota Workplace Rose After $1,000 Incentive: Study.
"Before the incentive was offered, 75.7% of employees were fully vaccinated against COVID-19, a figure that rose to 86.1% after, for a 10.4 percentage-point increase. Of 500 employees who had received one or no vaccine doses before, 42.8% were fully vaccinated by study end."
Children and COVID-19: AAP State-Level Data Report
"For the week ending April 28th, over 53,000 additional child COVID-19 cases were reported, an increase of about 61% from two weeks ago. This marks the third consecutive weekly increase in reported child cases."
Queen Latifah: Is doing commercials for Pfizer. "Covid-19 moves fast, and now you can too."
State
Alabama: More than half of first-time teachers in Alabama leave within 3 years.
New Jersey: Newark keeps face mask requirement in schools.
New York: New York City entered a higher risk level for the coronavirus on Monday. "The city moved into the medium, or yellow, risk category for virus transmission as cases continued their steady rise, a development that could trigger the return of public health restrictions, although they are not required to be reinstated at this point."
North Carolina: "An expanded virtual school-based therapy program unites guidance counselors, therapists, parents and students, like Ameenah Mbaye, to bring children the mental health resources they need in the Kannapolis and Lincolnton area."
Texas: New Texas 2036 report on broadband.
Washington: "Pasco School District is partnering with Hazel Health to provide mental health services for students in grades K-12."
International
China:
Beijing to postpone school reopening for at least one week after labour day holiday.
Reuters reports that some Shanghai residents were briefly allowed to leave their homes for walks and to buy groceries.
Economic Recovery
Skills, Not Degrees: Gary Cohn, Vice Chair of IBM
“Today, we (Americans) post all these job ads, and the first question is: Where'd you go to school? We've got to change the social norm in this country: to skills not degrees. If you know how to program, you know how to program.”
“In many respects, it doesn't matter what degree you have. I think about my days back at Goldman Sachs: How many liberal arts majors did we hire? And we made them bankers! The kids that came out of business schools, sometimes we had to deprogram them."
Global Chip Shortage’s Latest Worry: Too Few Chips for Chip-Making: Via WSJ.
“Tools aren’t the only headache. Chip makers point to the challenge of hiring people to work in new factories, supply-chain hiccups in essential chemicals and a shortage of so-called substrates that connect chips to circuit boards as compounding the relative dearth of semiconductors.”
Resources
Rocket Lab: Launched and then the returning Electron rocket booster was caught using a helicopter. Here's the moment.
Hispanic Federation and Comcast NBCUniversal Telemundo: Announce partnership to advance digital equity among Latino communities.
9-11 Isn't a Homework Hotline: But an operator helped this boy with his takeaways.