Top Three
States To ‘Likely See a Doubling’ of Pre-Pandemic Chronic Absenteeism: An analysis in The 74:
"Compared to pre-pandemic rates in 2018-19, “we will likely see a doubling in chronic absence,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works, which teamed with researchers at Johns Hopkins University to analyze the federal data. Those numbers showed that 10.1 million students missed at least 10% of the 2020-21 school year."
"One reason Chang suspects the federal count to be too low is because of the leap in chronic absenteeism in those four states. For example, the federal count shows 15.3% of California students were chronically absent in 2020-21. But according to School Innovation and Achievement, a company that works with districts to improve attendance, 27.4% of students were in the chronic to severe range last year — a time when schools were mostly open."
New COVID Variant BQ.1 Now Makes Up 1 in 10 Cases Nationwide: CBS News reports.
"While BQ.1 and BQ.1.1. represent a small but fast-growing subset of the Omicron variant, BA.5 remains the dominant lineage in the United States," CDC spokesperson Kristen Nordlund said in a statement."
"BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 also appear on track to overtake the only other strain that still outnumbers them: BA.4.6, which currently makes up 12.2% of infections."
"Nordlund said the agency had not listed BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 separately in the agency's previous weekly variant reports because they "were circulating at less than 1% in the empiric data."
"Fauci also echoed worries that the variant's mutations might evade medications like Evusheld, which is a key antibody drug used to help protect immunocompromised Americans from the virus. That's the reason why people are concerned about BQ.1.1, for the double reason of its doubling time and the fact that it seems to elude important monoclonal antibodies," said Fauci. A spokesperson for AstraZeneca said they did not currently have data on how BQ.1 might impact its drug."
“Top Biden health officials are increasingly concerned about the rise of new Covid variants in the U.S. that appear to evade existing treatments used to protect immunocompromised people from severe illness,” Politico reports.
Uncertified Teachers Filling Holes in Schools: Via the Dallas Morning News.
"Texas allowed about 1 in 5 new teachers to sidestep certification last school year. Alabama administrators, meanwhile, increasingly hire educators with emergency certifications, often in low-income and majority Black neighborhoods."
"In Oklahoma, lawmakers expanded an “adjunct” program that enables schools to hire applicants without teacher training if they meet a local board’s qualifications. And then there’s Florida, where military veterans without a bachelor’s degree can teach for up to five years using temporary certificates."
"By 2030, as many as 16 million K-12 students in the region may be taught by an unprepared or inexperienced teacher, the Southern Regional Education Board projects."
"Texas’ reliance on uncertified new hires ballooned over the last decade. In the 2011-12 school year, fewer than 7% of the state’s new teachers — roughly 1,600 — didn’t have a certification. By last year, about 8,400 of the state’s nearly 43,000 new hires were uncertified."
Covid Research
Without a Nasa Vaccine, the U.S. Edge in Fighting Covid is On the Line: Via Politico:
"Biden administration officials are raising concerns that the slow pace of developing a nasal vaccine for Covid-19 in the U.S. could pose a security risk as China, Iran and Russia approve their own vaccines taken through the nose or mouth."
"Though nasal and oral vaccines are being studied in the U.S., none are close to coming on the market because Congress hasn’t approved more money to support research and development. Big pharmaceutical companies are also not investing in these next-generation vaccines because they don’t see much profit potential."
“Intranasal vaccines — vaccines that are variant-resistant — those are critical tools to have in the toolbox for protecting Americans, not just for Covid but also for future pandemics and also for future biosecurity threats,” Ashish Jha, the administration’s Covid-19 response coordinator, told POLITICO."
"Researchers working on nasal vaccines are hopeful that they could stop virus transmission by generating immunity against it in the nose and other parts of the upper respiratory system where the coronavirus enters the body. If that bears out in clinical trials, nasal vaccines would be superior to existing mRNA vaccines, which prevent severe disease but don’t stop transmission."
COVID-Related Stillbirths Didn’t Have to Happen: Via ProPublica.
"A stillbirth, the death of a fetus at 20 weeks or more of pregnancy. But that didn’t solve the mystery. Odronic had examined many placentas from pregnancies that ended in stillbirth. None looked like this — withered and scarred."
"Odronic kept reading. No chronic medical conditions. Good prenatal care. Then, buried in the middle of the report, she spotted something. Seven days before the stillbirth, the mother had tested positive for COVID-19. Odronic wondered if the virus could explain the damage to the placenta. In the world of placenta pathology, a new affliction is unusual, especially one so dramatic in presentation and so devastating in effect."
"Unvaccinated women who contracted COVID-19 during pregnancy were at a higher risk of stillbirths. They also were more likely to be admitted to the intensive care unit, give birth prematurely or die."
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contributed to the confusion with vague early messaging about whether pregnant people should get vaccinated. While Americans lined up at pharmacies and stalked vaccine websites in hopes of securing a shot last year, pregnant people had some of the lowest vaccination rates among adults, with only 35% fully vaccinated by last November."
"November also marked a key moment in the understanding of COVID-19’s impact on stillbirths. A CDC study looking at 1.2 million births in the first 18 months of the pandemic found that more than 8,000 pregnancies ended in stillbirths, including more than 270 of them in patients with a documented COVID-19 diagnosis at the time of delivery."
"Although stillbirths were rare overall, babies were dying. The risk of a stillbirth nearly doubled for those who had COVID-19 during pregnancy compared with those who didn’t. And during the spread of the delta variant, that risk was four times higher."
"The failure to include pregnant people early on in COVID-19 vaccine trials was, at least in part, a casualty of the tremendous urgency to respond to an intense public threat and develop the vaccine as quickly as possible, Faden said. But multiple groups had published road maps on how to ethically include pregnant people without slowing down that process."
"After a promising study showed that the vaccine was safe for pregnant people, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a White House briefing in late April that the CDC was recommending the vaccine for them. But the CDC did not update its website to reflect her comments and said the agency’s guidance had not changed: Pregnant people “may choose to be vaccinated.”
Booster Shots Can Help Against Future Variants: Via Nature.
“Booster shots against current SARS-CoV-2 variants can help the human immune system to fight variants that don’t exist yet."
“That’s the implication of two new studies analyzing how a booster shot or breakthrough infection affects antibody-producing cells: some of these cells evolve over time to exclusively create new antibodies that target new strains, whereas others produce antibodies against both new and old strains.”
Effective Therapeutics For COVID-19: Nature runs down the list of treatments and the corresponding research.
Fauci Recalls Highs and Lows of Trump Covid Response: Via Politico.
Via FOX: "Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of the government's response to the coronavirus pandemic over the last two-and-a-half years, deflected responsibility for school closures in an interview on Sunday while admitting to some negative effects for children.
Americans Slow to Get Booster Shots: Via the NYT: “Only about 15 million doses of the new shots have been administered nationally since their introduction at the beginning of September, representing less than one in 10 people who are eligible, and there are signs that many Americans are unaware of or simply uninterested in them.”
Why Did He Suspect a COVID Surge Was Coming? He Followed the Digital Breadcrumbs: NPR on how a researcher uncovered an "interesting trend in the review section for Yankee candles on Amazon.
“Whenever there was an influx of negative reviews citing no smell, there was usually a spike in COVID cases to go along with it."
Tragic Fallout from the Politicization of Science in the US: Via the FT.
State
Florida: Allysia Finley defends Joseph Ladapo: "If You’re Hunting for Heresy, You Aren’t a Scientist." “Joseph Ladapo is being condemned for something so-called public-health experts do all the time."
Washington: Sad news: Eclipse the dog, known for riding the bus alone to the dog park, has died.
International
Covid-19 Learning Loss and Recovery: Panel Data Evidence from India: NBER paper.
"We use a panel survey of ~19,000 primary-school-aged children in rural Tamil Nadu to study ‘learning loss’ after COVID-19-induced school closures, and the pace of recovery after schools reopened."
Students tested in December 2021 (18 months after school closures) displayed learning deficits of ~0.7σ standard deviations in math and ~0.34σ standard deviations in language compared to identically-aged students in the same villages in 2019. Two-thirds of this deficit was made up within 6 months after school reopening."
"Further, while learning loss was regressive, the recovery was progressive. A government-run after-school remediation program contributed ~24% of the cohort-level recovery, and likely aided the progressive recovery."
Global Universal Basic Skills: Current Deficits and Implications for World Development: NBER paper.
"Based on the micro data of international and regional achievement tests, we map achievement onto a common (PISA) scale. We then estimate the share of children not achieving basic skills for 159 countries that cover 98.1% of world population and 99.4% of world GDP."
"We find that at least two-thirds of the world’s youth do not reach basic skill levels, ranging from 24% in North America to 89% in South Asia and 94% in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our economic analysis suggests that the present value of lost world economic output due to missing the goal of global universal basic skills amounts to over $700 trillion over the remaining century, or 11% of discounted GDP."
Economic Recovery
Recession:
WSJ: “The U.S. will enter a recession in the coming 12 months as the Federal Reserve battles to bring down persistently high inflation, the economy contracts and employers cut jobs in response, according to The Wall Street Journal’s latest survey of economists.”
“On average, economists put the probability of a recession in the next 12 months at 63%, up from 49% in July’s survey. It is the first time the survey pegged the probability above 50% since July 2020, in the wake of the last short but sharp recession.”
"The latest recession probability models by Bloomberg economists Anna Wong and Eliza Winger forecast a higher recession probability across all timeframes, with the 12-month estimate of a downturn by October 2023 hitting 100%, up from 65% for the comparable period in the previous update."
"The model is more certain of a recession than other forecasts. A separate Bloomberg survey of 42 economists predicts the probability of a recession over the next 12 months now stands at 60%, up from 50% a month earlier."
"The model forecasts the likelihood of a recession within 11 months at 73%, up from 30%, and the 10-month probability rose to 25% from 0%."
WSJ: “The worst is yet to come,” said International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva at a Thursday briefing, as finance officials gathered in Washington for meetings hosted by the IMF and the World Bank. “Across many economies, recession risks are rising.”
"Economies representing more than a third of global output will contract next year, while the world’s three largest economies—the U.S., the European Union and China—will essentially stall, the IMF forecasts. Overall, the fund projects 2.7% growth in 2023, down from 3.2% this year."
Inflation: Goldman Sachs in new research: “We forecast that year-on-year CPI rent and owners’ equivalent rent inflation will rise from 6.8% currently to peak at 7.5% next spring before gradually decelerating to just under 6% at end-2023.”
China's Xi Spoke for Nearly Two Hours at the Party Congress:No signs of backing down from his Zero Covid strategy or Taiwan.
"We have resolutely fought against separatism and counterinterference, demonstrating our resolve and ability to safeguard China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and oppose Taiwan independence."
NYT: "China Delays Indefinitely the Release of G.D.P. and Other Economic Statistics"
Resources
Education Data Legislation Review 2022: Via DQC, "131 data-related bills were introduced in 35 states. 42 of these bills were signed into law in 17 states."
How One School Is Beating the Odds in Math, the Pandemic’s Hardest-Hit Subject: Via the NYT.
"The groundwork was laid before the pandemic, when Franklin overhauled how math was taught."
"It added as much as 30 minutes of math instruction a day. Students in second grade and above now have more than an hour, and fourth and fifth graders have a full 90 minutes, longer than is typical for many schools. Students no longer have lessons dominated by a teacher writing problems on a white board in front of the class. Instead, they spend more time wrestling with problems in small groups. And, for the first time, children who are behind receive math tutoring during the school day."
"Any one of the changes may seem small. But pulling them off required an almost herculean effort and cultural shifts at every level. District officials needed to shake up teaching methods and the school day to maximize instruction time; principals needed to enforce the changes and teachers had to accept having less autonomy."
Nothing Like College Football: Tennessee beats Alabama, ending their 15-year losing streak and the fans storm the field.
Apex Predator: Derek.