Top Three
Education Recovery After COVID-19: Via OECD
"Children have been the least vulnerable to COVID-19 but no group has been harder hit by public policy responses to contain this virus. Emerging evidence shows how long schools closures have had devastating effects on many children’s cognitive, social and emotional well-being."
"Besides the sheer cognitive and socio-emotional loss to each child of missing so much time to learn and interact with teachers and friends, lost learning itself generates long-term consequences for each person and society as a whole: poorer job opportunities and lower income for individuals, and lower productivity for the economy."
"Importantly, the data from the OECD, UNESCO, UNICEF & World Bank survey show no relationship between the extent of school closures and COVID-19 infection rates across countries. This shows that school closures were not inevitable but, rather, a policy choice, often framed by a lack of institutional capacity to reconcile educational provision with health and safety."
Covid Learning Loss Has Been a Global Disaster: Via the Economist:
"When covid-19 first began to spread around the world, pausing normal lessons was a forgivable precaution. No one knew how transmissible the virus was in classrooms; how sick youngsters would become; or how likely they would be to infect their grandparents. But disruptions to education lasted long after encouraging answers to these questions emerged."
"Locking kids out of school has prevented many of them from learning how to read properly. Before the pandemic 57% of ten-year-olds in low and middle-income countries could not read a simple story, says the World Bank. That figure may have risen to 70%, it now estimates. The share of ten-year-olds who cannot read in Latin America, probably the worst-affected region, could rocket from around 50% to 80%."
"In many parts of the world, schools were closed for far too long."
"A paper published in May by analysts at the World Bank, Harvard and the Brookings Institution looks at 35 studies of learning loss from 20 mostly rich countries. It finds that the average loss across these studies was equivalent to what would usually be learned in one-third to one-half of a year of normal schooling."
"In England test scores at the start of the 2021-22 school year suggest that primary-school kids were almost two months behind where they should be in maths, and one month in reading. Similar research in America found that children were on average between 8-19 weeks behind."
"Their results suggest that globally schoolchildren may be eight months behind where they would normally be. The damage may be massive in many middle-income countries, which are together home to about 75% of all school-age children. The lag in lots of those places could be 9-15 months. These countries generally kept school buildings closed longer than rich ones, and probably did a worse job of teaching remotely."
"Schools in a quarter of countries still have no plans for catch-up, says unicef. Fewer than half of governments have scribbled strategies that are national in scale. Poor children are clawing back time more slowly than wealthier ones."
"Mr Saavedra says school closures have caused perhaps “the worst educational crisis for a century, and certainly since the world wars”. He worries that too few countries have recognised the scale of the disaster, and that the true cost will not be visible for years. “My fear is that 15 years from now people will be writing papers documenting consistently lower earnings, productivity and well-being for people who are now between six and 20 years old,” he says. “I don’t see societies taking this seriously.”
White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator: Dr. Ashish K. Jha gives an update on the state of the pandemic in the US as BA.5 becomes dominant.
Federal
That Was Fast: The folks from The National Partnership for Student Success reached out over the weekend. They've updated the website with a privacy policy and also clarified that the website was developed and maintained by the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University.
Related: For those who are involved with philanthropy on this list - if you want to learn more about ways of supporting the Partnership, email me and I’ll connect you with the team over there.
Covid-19 Resources
Moderna: Will advance two Omicron vaccine candidates, one designed against the BA.1 variant and another against the BA.4 and BA.5.
Novavax: The U.S. government ordered 3.2 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine developed by Novavax once the vaccine has been authorized by the regulators.
Boosters: European regulators, ECDC and EMA recommend that second boosters of mRNA COVID19 vaccines be considered for people above 60 years and vulnerable persons.
BA.2.75: Via Bloomberg:
"Scientists say the variant – called BA.2.75 – may be able to spread rapidly and get around immunity from vaccines and previous infection. It’s unclear whether it could cause more serious disease than other omicron variants, including the globally prominent BA.5."
“It’s still really early on for us to draw too many conclusions,” said Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “But it does look like, especially in India, the rates of transmission are showing kind of that exponential increase." Whether it will outcompete BA.5, he said, is yet to be determined."
"Fueling experts’ concerns are a large number of mutations separating this new variant from omicron predecessors. Some of those mutations are in areas that relate to the spike protein and could allow the virus to bind onto cells more efficiently, Binnicker said."
"Another concern is that the genetic tweaks may make it easier for the virus to skirt past antibodies — protective proteins made by the body in response to a vaccine or infection from an earlier variant."
"But experts say vaccines and boosters are still the best defense against severe COVID-19. In the fall it’s likely the U.S. will see updated formulations of the vaccine being developed that target more recent omicron strains."
“Some may say, ‘Well, vaccination and boosting hasn’t prevented people from getting infected.’ And, yes, that is true,” he said. “But what we have seen is that the rates of people ending up in the hospital and dying have significantly decreased. As more people have been vaccinated, boosted or naturally infected, we are starting to see the background levels of immunity worldwide creep up.”
Omicron Sub-variants Push up Covid Hospitalizations in Europe and US: Via the FT.
"The number of new Covid admissions has grown by 40% in the last week in France, 34% in England and more than 20% in several other European countries. The wave has been fuelled by the BA.5 Omicron sub-variant."
Brain Imaging and Neuropsychological Assessment of Individuals Recovered from Covid: Study: "In this case-control study, individuals recovered from SARS-CoV-2 showed significant alterations of the cerebral white matter identified by diffusion weighted imaging, such as global increases in extracellular free-water and mean diffusivity compared to healthy controls. No differences in performance in neuropsychological tests were detected."
State
Arizona: Saddle Mountain Unified School District is operating their high school from 7:00 AM to 3:00 PM due to a shortage of bus drivers.
International
China: At least three Chinese cities put in place partial lockdowns and the gambling hub of Macau shut its casinos for the second time since the start of the pandemic, as authorities tried to stamp out the latest coronavirus outbreaks, reports the NYT.
Economic Recovery
Falling Gas Prices: The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline is now $4.68, according to AAA, down from $5 a month ago.
Historic Cascade of Defaults Is Coming for Emerging Markets: Number of developing nations trading distressed has doubled, with El Salvador, Ghana, Egypt, Tunisia and Pakistan appearing particularly vulnerable.
Resources
The Parties in Our Heads: Misperceptions about Party Composition and Their Consequences: Fascinating study.
"We document a large and consequential bias in how Americans perceive the major political parties: people tend to considerably overestimate the extent to which party supporters belong to party-stereotypical groups."
"For instance, people think that 32% of Democrats are LGBT (vs. 6% in reality) and 38% of Republicans earn over $250,000 per year (vs. 2% in reality)."
"Experimental data suggest that these misperceptions are genuine and party specific, not artifacts of expressive responding, innumeracy, or ignorance of base rates."
Lunch With the FT: The FT sits down for lunch with Emily Oster.
"During the pandemic, Oster emerged as one of America’s most vocal advocates for school reopenings and looser restrictions for children, particularly as many US classrooms remained closed even as restaurants and bars reopened, and children in the UK and Europe resumed in-person learning."
"She later launched the Covid-19 School Data Hub, a database of information about school reopenings, Covid cases and mask-wearing in classrooms across the country."
First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope: Via NASA today with more to come tomorrow morning. Just incredible.
"Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view"
This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.
A Blessing Cake: Boy adopted from Sierra Leone experiences his first birthday celebration
"Abraham had never celebrated his birthday before he was adopted and moved to the U.S. So when his mom appeared with a cake for his most recent birthday, he became overwhelmed with emotion."