Top Three
Closing Schools in the Pandemic Was Bad. Keeping Them All Open Would Have Been Worse: Michael Hiltzi in the LA Times.
"Yet there’s much more to consider. The question that never gets raised, much less answered, when the conversation turns to how bad the school closures were, is: “Compared to what?”
"The number of deaths among children younger than 18, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pegs at 1,853, “would have been higher had 60-70 million unvaccinated children contracted the virus over several months’ time in 2020. It’s reasonable to assume that several thousand children would have died.”
"Those findings might explain what happened when Florida opened its schools in August 2021 and banned remote teaching: Child COVID deaths in the state more than doubled by the first week of September. One month into the reopenings, districts across the state were being forced to shut down schools and impose quarantines affecting thousands of pupils."
"More than 1 in 5 children hospitalized with acute COVID infections suffered lasting neurological conditions, according to a 2021 study. Thousands may have suffered severe neurological conditions, even including stroke."
NTIA Announces Timeline for National High-Speed Internet Deployment: Announcement.
November 18, 2022: FCC releases draft National Broadband Map, a location-by-location view of high-speed Internet availability in America (Press Release)
November 18, 2022-January 13, 2023: Best opportunity for eligible entities to submit challenges in time for the FCC to include corrections in the final version of the map that will be used to allocate Internet for All funding in the summer of 2023.
By June 30, 2023: NTIA plans to announce BEAD allocations, using the most up-to-date version of the FCC maps as a guide.
COVID-19 School Data Hub: Launched new visual updates to the website that allow users to explore each state's learning model and assessment data.
Visuals to compare test score recovery on state assessments from 2019 to 2021 and 2022, by level of access to full in-person instruction. The visuals are included as part of the state snapshots presented in the Pandemic Schooling Mode and Assessment Outcomes Data Series.
An interactive tab to compare modes of instruction in 2020-21 for up to 3 districts per state, compared to the state average.
Visuals that compare how access to different modes of instruction varied for students in each state by race/ethnicity, free and reduced price lunch (FRPL) eligibility, and district locale, based on NCES data.
An overview of the percentage of students in each state that had access to primarily in-person, hybrid, or virtual instruction during the 2020-21 school year.
Covid Research
FDA Panel Votes Against Veru's COVID-19 Treatment: “An FDA advisory panel voted 5-to-8 to recommend rejecting Veru's new drug for patients hospitalized with Covid-19, ruling that a glimmer of potential life-saving benefit couldn’t make up for a long list of questions around the company’s main trial.”
Covid Hospitalizations Are Rising in Kids Under 6 Months: CDC Director Walensky says.
Post-COVID-19-associated Morbidity in Children, Adolescents, and Adults: Study
"This large matched cohort study used routine healthcare data to examine the incidence of 96 prespecified diagnoses potentially associated with post-COVID-19 condition among 157,134 individuals (11,950 children/adolescents and 145,184 adults."
"Our study extends existing evidence on post-COVID-19 syndrome among children and adolescents. We observed relevant post-COVID-19 healthcare utilization and new-onset morbidity patterns documented by physicians in children and adolescents following SARS-CoV-2 infection in a large sample of patients with confirmed COVID-19 compared with a matched control group."
"We found that COVID-19 diagnosis was associated with higher long-term demand for healthcare services as reflected in outpatient and inpatient diagnoses of a broad set of outcomes more than 3 months after confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. While children and adolescents appear to be less affected than adults, these findings are statistically significant for all age groups."
Covid Reinfections: Study
"Whether reinfection adds to risks incurred after first infection is unclear. Here we used the US Department of Veterans Affairs’ national healthcare database to build a cohort of individuals with one SARS-CoV-2 infection (n = 443,588), reinfection (two or more infections, n = 40,947) and a noninfected control (n = 5,334,729)."
"Compared to no reinfection, reinfection contributed additional risks of death (hazard ratio (HR) = 2.17, 95% confidence intervals (CI) 1.93–2.45), hospitalization (HR = 3.32, 95% CI 3.13–3.51) and sequelae including pulmonary, cardiovascular, hematological, diabetes, gastrointestinal, kidney, mental health, musculoskeletal and neurological disorders."
"The risks were evident regardless of vaccination status."
Worry About Catching COVID-19 Lowest Since June 2021: Gallup
State
Illinois: Chicago schools attendance continued to decline last year.
"The average attendance rate for Chicago Public Schools stood at about 85% last school year, more than 6 percentage points below the 2018-19 school year, the last before the pandemic upended learning."
"Meanwhile, chronic absenteeism — the share of students who missed 18 or more days — rose to 45% districtwide last year, compared with 24% on the cusp of the COVID outbreak."
Economic Recovery
Inflation: Grew at a 7.7% annual pace in October. Still high, but it’s the first month below 8% since February.
WSJ: "Thursday’s inflation report likely leaves the central bank on course to raise rates by a half-point next month and raises questions over how much higher it will lift them next year.
“This morning’s CPI data were a welcome relief, but there is still a long way to go,” said Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan in a speech Thursday in Houston."
Resources
Broadband:
Benton: "Heartland Forward Helps Accelerate Community-Driven Broadband Infrastructure Planning"
"Broadband industry pushes Congress for tax exemption on grants." I wrote about this back in April and have been surprised Congress hasn't moved more aggressively to fix it.
Youngest Students Show Achievement Declines Post-Pandemic: K12 Dive on new NWEA data.
"Students in grades 1-2 showed lower reading and math achievement in spring 2022 compared to pre-pandemic trends. Reading scores fell 6 to 7 percentile points behind spring 2019 results, while math scores dropped 3 to 8 percentile points"
"By honing in on children in the earliest grades, researchers found the pandemic didn’t just impact children whose normal school routines got disrupted. The results emphasize the need for targeted investments in early literacy and math programs to help the youngest students gain essential academic skills."
Along Earns Spot on 2022 Best Inventions List: Along – the first-of-its-kind teacher-student connection builder offered by Gradient Learning – was selected for a "Special Mention" on the Best Inventions of 2022 list by TIME.
Big Heart: Lamar Jackson meeting a young fan with a heart condition will make your day.
Just Some Penguins: Marching along.
These reports continue to be incredibly useful. However, reporting studies that do not consider confounders as though they are adding to the knowledge set is misleading. If you report them, please add that context. TIA!