Top Three
Updated CDC Guidance for Schools: The CDC issued updated guidance (press release) today that eases previous recommendations:
Quarantines are no longer recommended for people exposed to Covid in schools, who instead are encouraged to follow broader community guidance to wear a well-fitting mask and get tested. As a result, the CDC no longer recommends Test to Stay (TTS) programs.
Indoor masking is still recommended in high risk areas.
"CDC no longer recommends routine screening testing in K-12 schools. However, at a high COVID-19 Community Level, K-12 schools and ECE programs can consider implementing screening testing for students and staff for high-risk activities (for example, close contact sports, band, choir, theater); at key times in the year, for example before/after large events (such as prom, tournaments, group travel); and when returning from breaks (such as, holidays, spring break, at the beginning of the school year)."
"Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, was sorry to see screening rolled back. “It is a useful tool for identifying outbreaks early and monitoring the burden of disease in a population,” she said in an email. “I understand that the expense can be a barrier, but absenteeism and losses in learning or productivity are also costly.”
Washington Post: "The CDC did not call for a negative test before exiting isolation. Some infectious-disease experts have argued that a negative test offers direct evidence of a person’s potential to spread the virus, unlike the one-size-fits-all timeline. And the five-days standard has been criticized as too short. A recent study found that people continue to test positive on antigen tests for eight days, on average, after becoming infected."
"The more relaxed guidelines are “a concession to realism, to the way that a lot of people are handling this,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He called the new guidelines “entirely reasonable,” but added, “My major concern is whether they will continue to be entirely reasonable given the unpredictable dynamics of the virus.”
Summary of Guidance for Minimizing the Impact of COVID-19 on Individual Persons, Communities, and Health Care Systems: Companion document released by the CDC.
"COVID-19 remains an ongoing public health threat; however, high levels of vaccine- and infection-induced immunity and the availability of medical and nonpharmaceutical interventions have substantially reduced the risk for medically significant illness, hospitalization, and death from COVID-19."
Interim Statement on COVID-19 Vaccination for Children: WHO
“Despite their lower risk of severe COVID-19 disease, children and adolescents have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 control measures. The most important indirect effects are related to school closures which have disrupted the provision of educational services and increased emotional distress and mental health problems.”
“At a societal level, the economic devastation wrought by COVID-19 may take years to overcome, exacerbating economic inequalities, poverty, unemployment, household financial insecurity, food insecurity, and malnutrition, all of which negatively impact children, often disproportionately.”
"Although benefit-risk assessments clearly underpin the benefit of vaccinating all age groups, including children and adolescents to reduce the number of infections, hospitalizations, deaths and long-COVID , the direct health benefit of vaccinating healthy children and adolescents is lower compared with vaccinating older adults due to the lower incidence of severe COVID-19 and deaths in younger persons."
"As children and adolescents tend to have milder disease compared to adults, unless they are in a group at higher risk of severe COVID-19, it is less urgent to vaccinate them than older people, and those with chronic health conditions and health workers."
"However, there are benefits of vaccinating children and adolescents that go beyond the direct health benefits. Minimizing disruptions to education for children and maintenance of their overall well-being, health and safety are important considerations."
"Vaccination that decreases SARS-CoV-2 transmission in this age group may reduce transmission from children and adolescents to older adults, and may help reduce the need for mitigation measures in schools. However, during the current Omicron dominant period, vaccine impact on transmission is only modest and short-lived."
Covid-19 Research
Guidance for Updated COVID-19 School Mitigation Plans for Academic Year 2022-23: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
"The strongest mitigation practice for reducing school outbreaks of any seasonal respiratory illness remains the expectation that students who are ill—particularly those with cough, muscle aches and fever—stay home to recuperate. Individuals should remain home until fever-free for at least 24 hours, and until symptoms are improving."
"Schools and early childhood programs in regions in which quarantine is no longer required by health departments should allow exposed individuals to remain in school and to participate in activities, provided they remain asymptomatic."
"Schools and early childhood programs in regions where quarantine of exposed individuals is required by the local health department may need to resume a “mask-to-stay” program that requires individuals who are known to be exposed to an individual with COVID-19 to mask for at least 5 days while attending school and participating in extracurricular activities."
"Unless required by health departments, schools and early childhood programs no longer need to enact masking requirements within school settings."
"Weekly assurance testing is no longer a necessary routine practice in school settings."
School-Based and Laboratory-Based Reporting of Positive COVID-19 Test Results Among School-Aged Children: CDC MMWR
"The changing relationship between school-reported and laboratory-reported data, during a period of stable school reporting, suggests a decline in the capture of positive laboratory test result data for children and adolescents aged 5–17 years following the expansion of at-home testing."
"Throughout the pandemic, public health programs have relied on laboratory-reported data to guide risk communication; underestimation of cases based on these data could affect interpretations of epidemic trends and metrics derived from them, including community COVID-19 incidence."
"This analysis suggests that methods of capturing data on results from self-administered, at-home tests can augment laboratory-reported data to provide a more complete picture of positive COVID-19 test results within communities."
A Failure to Respond: Public School Mask Mandates in the 2021–22 School Year: New report from AEI.
"Applying the current CDC guidance framework to the earlier weeks of the 2021–22 school year shows that the current guidance would have recommended mask mandates for 99 percent of students during the height of the omicron surge, when actual mandates covered 55 percent of students."
"The “back-mapped” guidance would have recommended mask mandates for just 40 percent of students during the lull between delta and omicron from October through mid-December 2021, when actual guidance held recommendations at 100 percent."
State
Colorado: Releases COVID-19 guidance for 2022-23 school year. More via Chalkbeat.
"There are no mask mandates and no quarantine rules in Colorado’s COVID guidance for the 2022-23 school year, but public health officials say they’re still tracking the disease and want school administrators to be open and honest with families about cases and clusters."
Michigan: MDHHS announces free COVID-19 tests available for all households through Rockefeller Foundation partnership.
Washington: State issues new COVID-19 guidelines for schools in Washington.
Resources
Is There a National Teacher Shortage? Via Chalkbeat.
Your Teacher Shortage Stories Are All Wrong; Here’s How to Improve Them: Sy Doan and Elizabeth D. Steiner in The Grade.
Field of Dreams Game:
"People will come, Ray. People will most definitely come." The legendary Vin Scully recites the famous scene from the Field of Dreams movie
Ken Griffey Jr and Sr have a catch at the Field of Dreams game.
The Reds and Cubs enter the Field of Dreams accompanied by legends.