Top Three
Biden Covid Case Highlights Confusing CDC Guidance on Ending Isolation: Via the Washington Post.
"Before President Biden emerged from coronavirus isolation Wednesday, he made double-sure he was no longer contagious. He received negative tests Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. To test at all meant Biden was going above and beyond the guidance from the CDC for exiting isolation."
"More than 2½ years into the pandemic, and with a highly contagious version of the virus circulating, the CDC guidelines for what to do when falling ill — and when to return to public life — continue to stoke as much confusion as clarity. That’s a reflection of the changing nature of the virus, the inherent unpredictability of an infection, and the demands and expectations of work and home life."
"With new research showing that people are often infectious for more than five days, the CDC guidance has drawn criticism from some infectious-disease experts. The Biden protocol strikes many of them as the right way to go — because it’s empirical evidence that a person isn’t shedding virus."
“Given that a substantial portion of people do have a rapid positive test after 5 days, I think an updated recommendation should include people having a negative rapid test before coming out of isolation for COVID,” said Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, who was the Biden administration’s senior adviser on testing from December until April."
"People who are being required to go back to their workplaces after five days of being sick with covid even if they still have a positive test result “shouldn’t do that,” Inglesby said. “It’s exposing others in the work environment to the risk of COVID spread. CDC guidance on that would be valuable.”
"The CDC’s guidance has been under internal review in recent months. A revamped set of recommendations is expected to be rolled out in coming weeks, according to three administration officials and advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions. A draft of the updated guidance at the moment does not include a requirement to test negative before exiting isolation, they said."
"The CDC guidance “doesn’t make sense,” said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Irvine. “They’re telling people to go back to work while they’re still contagious, essentially.”
"Walensky said during a Washington Post Live interview that “I think we can all agree that the president’s protocols likely go above and beyond and have the resources to go above and beyond what every American is able and has the capacity to do.”
Related from the Washington Post: When You Have Covid, Here’s How You Know You Are No Longer Contagious.
L.A. Unified Estimates Up to 20,000 Students Are Not Enrolled and Nearly Half Were Chronically Absent Last Year: Via LA Times:
"Two weeks before school starts, Los Angeles Unified Supt. Alberto M. Carvalho estimates that between 10,000 and 20,000 students are not enrolled or stopped attending last year, with the problem most pronounced in the youngest grades."
"The district also is scrambling to fill about 900 classroom teaching positions and to find more than 200 bus drivers."
"The district is also confronting a worsening daily attendance problem. Data in March 2022 showed that nearly half of LAUSD students — more than 200,000 children — were chronically absent during the last school year."
"Much of the absenteeism was related to COVID-19 quarantines and infections. In the coming year, there will be no at-home quarantines for close contacts without symptoms, although students and staff will have to remain masked during the quarantine period."
40% of DC Black Students May Be At Rick of Not Complying With Vaccine Mandate D.C. schools expand covid vaccine mandate, unlike most other districts.
"The youth vaccine mandate in D.C. is among the strictest in the nation, according to health experts, and is being enacted in a city with wide disparities in vaccination rates between its White and Black children."
"Overall, about 85 percent of students between the ages of 12 and 15 have been vaccinated against the virus, but the rate drops to 60 percent among Black children in this age range."
"If the city does not close this gap but does strictly enforce the vaccine mandate this fall, students of color — who experienced disproportionately large academic setbacks during the pandemic — could be at home in significant numbers next academic year."
Federal
President Biden: Tests positive for Covid again in "rebound" case
ED: "The cost of direct student loans made over the past 25 years is likely $311 billion higher than what the U.S. Department of Education estimated, the Government Accountability Office said in a new bombshell report released Friday," Higher Ed Dive reports.
"The congressional watchdog said the Ed Department forecasted the program would earn the federal government $114 billion, when in reality it has cost an estimated $197 billion as of fiscal 2021."
Covid-19 Research
Baricitinib in Patients Admitted to Hospital With COVID-19: New study which finds, "In patients hospitalized with COVID-19, baricitinib significantly reduced the risk of death but the size of benefit was somewhat smaller than that suggested by previous trials. The total randomized evidence to date suggests that JAK inhibitors (chiefly baricitinib) reduce mortality in patients hospitalized for COVID-19 by about one-fifth."
State
Georgia: Teachers get Back-to-School Supplement to offset school costs.
Michigan: Private schools get COVID relief funds, too. Here’s how they’re spending them.
International
Israel: Begins vaccinating children under 5.
Taiwan: Grants EUA to Pfizer vaccine for children under 5.
Resources
Vast New Study Shows a Key to Reducing Poverty: More Friendships Between Rich and Poor: The NYT on a new Opportunity Insights study leveraging data from Meta.
"Over the last four decades, the financial circumstances into which children have been born have increasingly determined where they have ended up as adults. But an expansive new study, based on billions of social media connections, has uncovered a powerful exception to that pattern that helps explain why certain places offer a path out of poverty."
"The study analyzed the Facebook friendships of 72 million people, amounting to 84 percent of U.S. adults aged 25 to 44."
"The effect was profound. The study found that if poor children grew up in neighborhoods where 70 percent of their friends were wealthy — the typical rate of friendship for higher-income children — it would increase their future incomes by 20 percent, on average."
"Each analysis had the same result: The more connections between the rich and poor, the better the neighborhood was at lifting children from poverty. After accounting for these connections, other characteristics that the researchers analyzed — including the neighborhood’s racial composition, poverty level and school quality — mattered less for upward mobility, or not at all."
Via OI: "Chetty, Theresa Kuchler and Johannes Stroebel of NYU, Matthew O. Jackson of Stanford and the Santa Fe Institute, and collaborators use data on 21 billion friendships from Facebook to construct a Social Capital Atlas containing measures of social capital for each ZIP code, high school and college in the United States. The researchers measure three types of social capital: connectedness between different types of people, social cohesion, and civic engagement. They find that children who grow up in communities where people of low and high socio-economic status interact is one of the strongest predictors of upward income mobility identified to date, whereas other measures of social capital are not."
"The authors find that about half the social disconnection along class lines in the US is driven by exposure (segregation), while the other half is driven by friending bias. The authors provide evidence that friending bias, like exposure, can be reduced through changes in institutional structures and policies, suggesting fruitful paths for increasing interaction across class lines going forward in the US and beyond."
"The fraction of high-SES friends among low-SES individuals—which we term economic connectedness—is among the strongest predictors of upward income mobility identified to date, whereas other social capital measures are not strongly associated with economic mobility. If children with low-SES parents were to grow up in counties with economic connectedness comparable to that of the average child with high-SES parents, their incomes in adulthood would increase by 20% on average.”
Check out more at the Social Capital Atlas
Stop Classroom Learning, Lose Students: WSJ Editorial Board
"K-12 enrollment nation-wide declined by nearly 3%, or about 1.3 million students, over the past two school years, according to the report by the American Enterprise Institute. Notably, enrollment dropped more in 2020-2021 in districts with the most remote learning (3.2%) than those with the most in-person learning (2.1%). Many parents decided to home-school their children rather than have them stare at screens all day."
"Districts that returned to in-person instruction sooner saw enrollments rebound faster, while those that stayed remote longest saw further declines. Those that remained remote longest suffered a net decline of 4.4% since the start of the pandemic, while districts that were most in-person recovered about 1% in the second year and declined only 1.2% overall."
Some Parents Changed Their Politics in the Pandemic: Via the NYT:
“Nearly half of Americans oppose masking and a similar share is against vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, polls show. But what is obscured in those numbers is the intensity with which some parents have embraced these views. While they once described themselves as Republicans or Democrats, they now identify as independents who plan to vote based solely on vaccine policies.”
“Their transformation injects an unpredictable element into November’s midterm elections. Fueled by a sense of righteousness after Covid vaccine and mask mandates ended, many of these parents have become increasingly dogmatic, convinced that unless they act, new mandates will be passed after the midterms."
"In interviews, 27 parents who called themselves anti-vaccine and anti-mask voters described strikingly similar paths to their new views. They said they had experienced alarm about their children during pandemic quarantines. They pushed to reopen schools and craved normalcy. They became angry, blaming lawmakers for the disruption to their children’s lives."
States Boost Child Care Funding: The AP: “Democrats in Washington had big ambitions this year to boost child care subsidies nationally as part of a broad domestic spending bill. But with those plans stalled because of a lack of bipartisan support, some states moved ahead with plans of their own.”
Students’ Physical and Mental Health Declined During the Pandemic. Could a New Telehealth Initiative Help?: Via EdSurge.
As Fewer Kids Enroll, Big Cities Face a Small Schools Crisis: Via Chalkbeat:
"More than 1 in 5 New York City elementary schools had fewer than 300 students last school year. In Los Angeles, that figure was over 1 in 4. In Chicago it has grown to nearly 1 in 3, and in Boston it’s approaching 1 in 2, according to a Chalkbeat/AP analysis."
"Many districts like Chicago give schools money for each student. That means small schools sometimes struggle to pay for fixed costs — the principal, a counselor and building upkeep."
"To address that, many allocate extra money to small schools, diverting dollars from larger schools. In Chicago, the district spends an average of $19,000 annually per student at small high schools, while students at larger ones get $10,000, according to the Chalkbeat/AP analysis."
"Chicago will use about $140 million of the $2.8 billion in COVID-19 relief it got to help prop up small schools this school year, officials said."
"In Los Angeles and New York City, officials say they’re focused on luring students back into the system, not school closures."
Staffing Disruptions: Burbio with an incredible blog post of staffing disruptions across the country and how some districts are responding.
Building, Sustaining and Improving: Using Federal Funds for Summer Learning and Afterschool: Via Wallace Foundation and Ed Counsel.
122 Teachers Speak: Surviving Student Learning Loss, Behavior Challenges: Via The 74.
Schools Fight to Catch Up: Via Axios:
"At the current rate, it may take years for some students to recover from pandemic-era learning loss, according to a report by NWEA."
"School districts across the country are still facing widespread teaching shortages. Some are also bracing for continued staffing shortages among bus drivers, cafeteria workers and other academic support positions."
England Rejoices at Women’s Historic Euro 2022 Triumph: "The England Lionesses' victory is a historic one, the Women's National Team is bringing home the first major soccer trophy for the country in 56 years. Also worth noting, when England last won the 1966 World Cup, women’s professional soccer was banned in the country -- a fact that makes today's win for England even more momentous."
World Ranger Day: Was celebrated yesterday. Some great posts from Saving Gorillas, the incredible Ami Vitale, Sheldrick elephant orphanage, the good folks at VetPaw, and Londolozi.
Related: Brutal hippo attack caught on camera.