Top Three
Under 5s:
Pfizer says three doses of it COVID vaccine is more than 80% effective in kids under 5
The FDA set June 14-15 as the new meeting date to review Moderna and Pfizer's EUA.
Meg Tirrell with a comparison of what we know about Pfizer & Moderna young kids vaccines as of now:
Age: Pfizer 6mo-under 5 years; Moderna 6mo-under 6
Dose: Pfizer 3 x 3mcg; Moderna 2 x 25mcg
Efficacy: Pfizer 80% (prelim); Moderna 37-51%
FDA status: Pfizer filing this week; Moderna under review
Stat: "Assuming one or both are approved, that could mean parents of children under 5 who have been anxiously waiting to have their children vaccinated may finally be able to do so around the beginning of the fourth week of June."
Kids Are Far, Far Behind in School: Via Thomas Kane.
"The achievement loss is far greater than most educators and parents seem to realize. The only question now is whether state and local governments will recognize the magnitude of the educational damage and make students whole. Adults are free to disagree about whether school closures were justified or a mistake. But either way, children should not be stuck with the bill for a public-health measure taken on everyone’s behalf."
"One-fifth of American students, by our calculations, were enrolled in districts that remained remote for the majority of the 2020–21 school year. For these students, the effects were severe. Growth in student achievement slowed to the point that, even in low-poverty schools, students in fall 2021 had fallen well behind what pre-pandemic patterns would have predicted; in effect, students at low-poverty schools that stayed remote had lost the equivalent of 13 weeks of in-person instruction. At high-poverty schools that stayed remote, students lost the equivalent of 22 weeks. Racial gaps widened too: In the districts that stayed remote for most of last year, the outcome was as if Black and Hispanic students had lost four to five more weeks of instruction than white students had."
"By our calculations, about 50 percent of students nationally returned in person in the fall and spent less than a month remote during the 2020–21 school year. In these districts where classrooms reopened relatively quickly, student-achievement gaps by race and socioeconomic status widened a bit in reading but, fortunately, not in math. And overall student achievement fell only modestly. The average student in the quicker-to-reopen districts lost the equivalent of about seven to 10 weeks of in-person instruction."
"However, as a researcher, I did find the size of the losses startling—all the more so because I know that very few remedial interventions have ever been shown to produce benefits equivalent to 22 weeks of additional in-person instruction."
"To eliminate a 22-week instruction loss would require providing a tutor to every single student in a school. Yet Tennessee’s plan would serve just one out of 12 Tennessee students in the targeted grades."
"I fear that, in areas where classrooms remained closed for long periods, school officials are not doing the basic math. High-dosage tutoring may produce the equivalent of 19 weeks of instruction for students who receive it, but is a district prepared to offer it to everyone? Alternatively, suppose that a school offers double-dose math for every single student and somehow convinces them to attend summer school, too. That, educational research suggests, would help students make up a total of 15 weeks of lost instruction. Even if every single student in a high-poverty school received both interventions, they would still face a seven-week gap."
Pandemic School Reopenings Were Not Just About Politics: Via Vox.
Federal
White House: A White House Conversation on Mental Health.
Covid-19 Research
Carbon-Dioxide Monitors Can Help Track Covid Risk: Via Bloomberg, "Carbon-dioxide monitors can assess how Covid-risky a space is because they help tell you whether you’re breathing in clean air. They measure the concentration of carbon dioxide, which people exhale when they breathe, along with other things like, potentially, virus particles. The more well-ventilated a space, the lower the reading on my monitor's screen — meaning not only less carbon dioxide but also less of the stuff like Covid that might make people sick."
Vaccines Are Still Mostly Blocking Severe Disease: Via Katherine Wu in The Atlantic.
“We’re so much better off than where we were in 2020, when nobody had any immunity,” says Donna Farber, an immunologist at Columbia University. It feels, in some ways, like gazing down the side of a mountain we’ve been trekking up for a good 30 months: A nice, stubborn buffer of elevation now lies between us and the bottom, the sea-level status of no protection at all. The body’s defenses against severe disease are immunological bedrock—once cemented, they’re quite difficult to erode. Even as the fast-mutating virus pushes down from above, our footing has, for more than a year now, felt solid, and the ground beneath us unlikely to give."
"As SARS-CoV-2’s shape-shifting shenanigans continue, though, widening the evolutionary chasm between its current iteration and the version that inspired 2020’s vaccines, our position is starting to feel more precarious. Say our immune defenses weaken, and cause us to slip; say the virus ups the ante again, and delivers a particularly powerful blow. A rapid tumble down to the trailhead—a total immunological reset—still seems very, very unlikely. The further away we stay from that juncture, though, the better off we’ll be."
"As SARS-CoV-2’s shape-shifting shenanigans continue, though, widening the evolutionary chasm between its current iteration and the version that inspired 2020’s vaccines, our position is starting to feel more precarious. Say our immune defenses weaken, and cause us to slip; say the virus ups the ante again, and delivers a particularly powerful blow. A rapid tumble down to the trailhead—a total immunological reset—still seems very, very unlikely. The further away we stay from that juncture, though, the better off we’ll be."
"Scientists are used to strategizing against other viruses, such as the ones that cause seasonal flus: Scientists reformulate and readminister those shots every year, in an attempt to counteract both waning immunity and viral mutations before most people hit a winter surge. By comparison, this coronavirus’s spread is still too haphazard, too unpredictable. If we can barely gauge which mile marker we’re at, it’s hard to know how often we’ll need to update our approach."
"None of this means our vaccines have been a bust. “Protection against severe disease and death is what you want out of a vaccine in a public emergency—that’s the most important thing, and that’s what the vaccines have done,” Farber, the Columbia immunologist, told me. And the shots continue to trim down symptoms, transmission, and infection, even if they do not completely stave off those outcomes; the illnesses that do occur among the vaccinated also tend, on average, to be notedly less severe, Branch-Elliman points out. But our current crop of immunizations has its limits; shots won’t be enough to end the pandemic on their own, especially not with uptake lagging, and global vaccine equity still in a disastrous state. “I feel worried, just looking ahead,” Farber told me. “As long as the virus can infect, it’s going to change and adapt.” The virus could get more chances to transform into something more troubling; it may become even tougher to hold our ground against it, should we grow complacent now."
MIS-C Less Severe in Omicron: COVID-19–related multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) was milder amid the Omicron variant surge than during the Alpha and Delta waves in Israel, concludes a research letter published late last week in JAMA.
New Minnesota Breakthrough COVID-19 Data Backs Boosters' Protection: "COVID-19 vaccine boosters have lowered rates of hospitalizations and deaths in Minnesota, according to new state breakthrough infection data that for the first time compared pandemic outcomes by detailed vaccination status."
13 Final Texts From Loved Ones Lost to Covid: Heartbreaking series from the NYT.
State
California: Sacramento City Unified School District will not extend its academic year to make up for class time lost during an eight-day teacher strike, district officials announcing on Thursday, dropping a proposal that could have kept classrooms open until late June.
Illinois: Ransomware on Battelle for Kids resulted in a data breach of 500,000 Chicago students.
Indiana: The Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) released the second phase of the statewide COVID-19 relief school spending dashboard. The newest update to the dashboard reflects the categories of spending that are budgeted and then reimbursed for all local districts.
Kentucky: A new survey finds 8 in 10 Kentucky parents say afterschool programs could help their child combat social and mental-health struggles by reducing unproductive screen time.
Michigan: Gov. Whitmer wants to spend $280 million of the state’s projected $3 billion surplus on learning loss recovery.
New Hampshire: Governor vetoes bill prohibiting school mask mandates.
Texas: Dallas ISD provides update on their tutoring program:
"The district plans to invest $95 million of the available ESSER funds into high-quality tutoring over the three stages of ESSER program implementation. The Office of Tutoring Services has $35 million encumbered for the current school year, which is being used to purchase software, secure curriculum, hire tutors, provide assessments and otherwise help the outside vendors meet their instructional goals."
More via EdWeek.
International
UK: More than 400,000 children and young people a month are being treated for mental health problems – the highest number on record – prompting warnings of an unprecedented crisis in the wellbeing of under-18s.
Resources
37% of the Top 20 Skills Requested for the Average US Job Have Changed Since 2016: BCG, The Burning Glass Institute, and Emsi Burning Glass analyzed more than 15 million job postings to understand how skill requests changed from 2016 to 2021.
"In reviewing the five-year data, we detected an acceleration in the pace of change. Nearly three-quarters of jobs changed more from 2019 through 2021 (a CAGR of 22%) than they did from 2016 through 2018 (19%)."
"We attribute this increase to the pandemic, which forced businesses to rethink operations and people in all kinds of occupations to embrace new ways of working and new skills."
"But the main driver of change in requested skills is technology. Technology is reshaping many, if not most, jobs. Sometimes this is dramatic, as in the explosion of phone apps in e-commerce. Sometimes, it is subtle: the replacement of the clipboard by the tablet in fields from trucking to health care or the price gun by the barcode in the supermarket."
Recession Worries:
Citi CEO Jane Fraser is convinced Europe will fall into a recession.
"The world economy has 'buffer' against recession, says IMF's Gopinath."
Small businesses are flashing warning signs on the U.S. economy as inflation, supply-chain snarls, a shortage of workers and rising interest rates darken the outlook for entrepreneurs. Fifty-seven percent of small-business owners expect economic conditions in the U.S. to worsen in the next year, up from 42% in April and equal to the all-time low recorded in April 2020.
New Geopolitical Risk: "President Biden indicated on Monday that he would use military force to defend Taiwan if it were ever attacked by China, dispensing with the “strategic ambiguity” traditionally favored by American presidents and repeating even more unequivocally statements that his staff tried to walk back in the past." Video of the answer. A number of us expected this to be walked back more aggressively than what it has so far.
Resources
Time's List of 100 Most Influential People: Includes Emily Oster. A well deserved recognition.
Nothing Can Bring Peace To Your Mind Quite Like Living With Purpose: Strayer held a virtual commencement this past weekend. Our good friend Brian Jones delivered the commencement address which included these reflections:
"But what I learned that morning would change the course of my life, and would challenge everything I thought I knew about happiness, faith, and purpose. The doctor had run some tests, and then sat me down to tell me what he thought might be my problem. He told me he thought I had ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease..."
"But, soon enough, the time for crying stopped. As ALS does to all who suffer from it, it eventually took my voice. It stopped the movement of my body. And it ended my capacity to swallow, or to breathe without a ventilator. It took a lot from my family and me. Yet the lesson in living with ALS is not what it takes, but what it gives, including insight about the life already lived."
"It sounds like a cliché to say, life is short. I urge you to put a different spin on this. Rather, life as we expect it to be, is short."
"First, live and work with a sense of urgency. Today, you have earned a credential that enables you to make the world around you richer, smarter, fairer, more just. Don't wait for some later time to be an active, vocal, contributing citizen. The needs are great, and our opportunity to impact them, tenuous. So leave here today, and roll up your sleeves."
"Second, be willing to take risks, to take on unexpected roles."
"Third, start building your network today. My relationships with people of diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and professional experience benefited my perspective and career immeasurably, but as my failing body forced me into retirement, the support and affection of my diverse set of friends and colleagues has, most importantly, sustained my mind and spirit."
"No matter what fortune awaits you, nothing can bring peace to your mind quite like living with purpose."
"As a young man, I admired an important treatise of Martin Luther King Jr, called Why We Can't Wait. It's a call for urgency in the pursuit of justice. I learned as an adult, after being told one quiet morning that my life will likely be much shorter than I had once expected, that Doctor King's sense of urgency should apply to us all, in all things that give meaning to our lives."
A Polar Bear Cub Waking Up: A bit how I felt trying to get out of bed this morning...