Top Three
An Under-5 Vaccine Decision Framework: Via Emily Oster.
Screening and Vaccination Against COVID-19 to Minimize School Closure: A modeling study.
"Regular testing would also reduce student-days lost up to 80% compared with reactive class closures. Moderate vaccination coverage in students would still benefit from regular testing for additional control—ie, weekly testing 75% of unvaccinated students would reduce cases compared with symptom-based testing only, by 23% in primary schools when 50% of children are vaccinated."
"Using the estimated school-specific transmission rate for delta and a range of realistic epidemic conditions (with regard to introductions, seasonality, and vaccination coverage), we found that regular testing with large enough adherence provides an optimal balance in controlling school outbreaks while maintaining schools open."
"Reactive class closure is highly costly in terms of student-days lost, even though detecting a case is rarer in children than in adults. Countries adopting this strategy during the omicron wave registered record-high absenteeism from school (20% of students were in remote learning in Italy in January, 2022). It also has a limited value in epidemic control, as other classes might be already affected due to unobserved introductions from the community or silent spreading within the school."
New Ken Burns PBS Documentary Offers Raw Look at the Youth Mental Health Crisis: Via The 74.
"Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness, a two-part documentary that premieres Monday on PBS, presents the raw accounts of nearly two dozen young people from diverse backgrounds who open up about their excruciating life experiences."
"The project also includes a 34-event Well Beings Tour in partnership with public media stations across the county (virtual and/or in-person based on public health conditions). Each tour event will consist of a resource fair and information from local community organizations, art performances, and panel discussions with local youth and subject matter experts."
Covid-19 Research
Pfizer: Says Omicron-specific COVID vaccine generates a stronger response.
"The Omicron-adapted candidate given as a fourth booster dose increased neutralizing antibodies between 13.5 times and 19.6 times, depending on the dose administered.
"The "bivalent" vaccine candidate increased neutralizing antibodies between 9.1 times and 10.9 times against Omicron, depending on the dose administered."
CNN: "Preliminary results from studies in the lab also suggest the vaccines could neutralize the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5, the companies said."
BA.5 and BA.4 Omicron Lineages: Leading not only to more cases but also more hospitalizations, from South Africa, to Portugal, the UK, Israel and now the US. Good thread by John Burn-Murdoch.
How Many Lives Have Been Saved by Covid-19 Vaccines?: The Economist on a new study which "found that in the first year of vaccine rollout, jabs saved the lives of 19.1m-20.4m people. Without vaccines, the study estimates, roughly three times as many people would have died from covid in 2021 alone. And 6.8m-7.7m of the prevented deaths were in countries covered by covax, an initiative created to ensure vaccines were sent to poorer countries."
America Is in the 'Figure It Out Yourself' Era of the Pandemic: Ed Yong in The Atlantic:
"The White House and the CDC have framed COVID as a problem for individuals to act upon—but action is hard when cases and hospitalizations are underestimated, many testing sites have closed, and rose-tinted CDC guidelines downplay the coronavirus’s unchecked spread. Many policy makers have moved on: “We’re heading into the midterms, and I think there’s a real desire to show confidence that they’ve solved this,” Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease specialist and the editor at large for public health at Kaiser Health News, told me."
"For any disease, there is a moral case against neglecting those who are most vulnerable; for COVID, there’s also still a self-interested case for even the privileged and powerful to resist the pull of neglect. For more than a year, the U.S. has focused on using vaccines and drugs to avert severe disease and death, while deprioritizing other means of preventing infections, such as masks and ventilation."
"To a degree, this strategy is working: Cases and hospitalizations recently spiked again, while ICU admissions rose gently and deaths have remained stable. And yet, infections still matter, and are affecting all of American society, including the vaxxed-and-done. The coronavirus periodically takes waves of educators and health-care workers out of action."
"Building a stronger public-health system demands an unfettering of the moral imagination: Americans need to believe that their government should invest in systems that keep everyone safer from disease—and to trust that such systems are even possible. But throughout his decades-long career, Gonsalves has witnessed social safety nets being repeatedly shredded, leading to “a collapse of any faith in the state to do good,” he told me. That faith eroded further when public institutions buckled during the pandemic, and when two successive administrations failed to control the coronavirus. The resulting “pandemic fatigue” is not just a craving for the status quo, but a deep cynicism over the possibility of something better."
Age and Sex-specific Risks of Myocarditis and Pericarditis Following Covid-19 Messenger RNA Vaccines: Via Nature.
"In this nationwide study involving a population of 32 million people aged 12 to 50 years having received 46 million doses of mRNA vaccines, we provide detailed estimates of the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis by sex, age categories and vaccine type."
"We find that vaccination with both mRNA vaccines was associated with an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis within the first week after vaccination."
"Reassuringly, these cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, although requiring hospitalization, did not result in more severe outcomes than those unrelated to vaccination."
"By differentiating the risk between adolescent (aged 12 to 17 years) and young men or women (18–25 years), we estimate that the number of excess cases after the second dose of BNT162b2 vaccine is lower in adolescents compared to young adults."
The Biden Administration Has Dropped the Ball on Vaccine Development: Argues Noah Smith.
"I admit that I was totally surprised at how amazingly successful Operation Warp Speed was, for several reasons. First, given the Trump administration’s incompetence with respect to restoring U.S. manufacturing, and its general attitude of belligerence and empty self-aggrandizement, I expected OWS to be a boondoggle. Never have I been happier to be proven wrong."
"Second, given the supply chain failures in mask and ventilator production early in the pandemic, I expected similar holdups in mRNA vaccine production — but instead, it was manufacturing powerhouse China that had difficulties while we sailed through."
"Third, given the extreme dysfunction of the CDC with regards to Covid testing and masking early in the pandemic, I expected the FDA to hold up release of even a fully safe and effective vaccine for far longer than it did. The early pandemic contributed to a narrative of American decline and dysfunction that I bought into, and fortunately my negative expectations proved unfounded."
"Novavax is also easier to store, which helps with distribution. But after rushing through approval of the first batch of vaccines, the FDA has slow-walked the approval of Novavax."
"Our current vaccines have proven very effective at preventing severe disease and death, but are not very effective at preventing actual infection. So lots of people are still being put at risk for long Covid, and immunocompromised people are still in mortal danger. Nasal vaccines, which you spray into your nose instead of get injected into your shoulder, will probably be much better at preventing transmission than current vaccines. They also might offer more robust protection against future variants."
"This brings me to my fourth candidate explanation: Simple inertia and distraction. The percent of Americans naming the coronavirus as the country’s top problem has faded into insignificance, replaced by concerns like inflation and crime (and, after this week, possibly abortion rights). Even though many Americans are still dying or being afflicted with long Covid, the Biden administration may have simply concluded that the disease is no longer an issue worth spending political capital or attention on (not that they’re doing much about inflation either, but that’s a topic for another post)."
School Disruption from January to June 2022: Via Burbio
State
Maryland: The Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) announced the online publication of school spending of federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) pandemic resources.
Tennessee: "More than half of all second graders who attend Memphis-Shelby County Schools finished the recent school year at risk of being retained and not promoted to the third grade under a new policy aimed at increasing literacy skills for students."
"Of the 8,153 second graders in the district, 4,545 students, or 56%, are not reading at the grade-level metrics the district requires, MSCS said in a press release issued late Friday afternoon."
"Most of those 4,545 MSCS students are attending classes this summer, making up about a third of the 12,000 students registered to attend. So long as the second graders attend 90% of the camp, they likely can go to the third grade next year. Whether the students will need to participate in additional interventions will depend on their final grade in reading."
International
China:
"Beijing on Saturday said it would allow primary and secondary schools to resume in-person classes and Shanghai’s top party boss declared victory over COVID-19 after the city reported zero new local cases for the first time in two months."
"Authorities in Beijing have sparked confusion and alarm after announcing the strict zero-Covid policy could be in place for the next five years, including mass mandatory testing and travel restrictions."
Latin America's Kids: Slid into education black hole during pandemic.
UK: Hospitals beds in England taken up by Covid-19 patients have surged by 37%, as experts warned UK has entered its fifth wave.
Economic Recovery
Inflation: "Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank President Loretta Mester said it will take two years for inflation to fall to the central bank’s 2% target."
Americans Are Embracing Flexible Work—And They Want More of It: New McKinsey survey and research.
"87% of workers offered at least some remote work embrace the opportunity and spend an average of three days a week working from home. People offered full-time flexible work spent a bit more time working remotely, on average, at 3.3 days a week."
Resources
Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth: Via the Washington Post:
"Many teenagers had already packed for the three-week academic program. Some were en route. Sunny Chanel’s 16-year-old daughter was on a flight to the East Coast when Chanel noticed an email from Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth."
"The email Chanel and other parents received Friday attributed the problem to lack of staffing. “The nationwide labor shortage affecting many industries has created conditions that make it impossible to deliver an experience that rises to the level of quality we expect for our families and programs,” it said."
"Program officials said Sunday they were examining the reasons for the staffing issues and the belated notice to families. About 870 of the nearly 2,900 students enrolled in commuter or residential programs for CTY’s first summer session were affected, they said."
Some Money Pouring into ‘High-Dose’ Tutoring Is Going to Less-Researched Models. Is That a Problem?: Via EdSurge.
Atari: Turns 50 today. Play the games here.
Appa the Husky and Arlo the German Shepherd: Have an argument.