Covid-19 Policy Update #621
Tuesday 1/3/2023
Welcome back and happy 2023! I hope everyone had great holiday. My own was filled with cooking, including a standing rib roast, porchetta, and Grand Marnier soufflé, as well as some excellent wines and smoked Old Fashioneds. It was great to reconnect with friends and spend time with family, especially because we were able to celebrate my mom completing her final chemotherapy treatment.
I'm excited to have a bit more breathing room this year, now that a few projects have wrapped up. I am grateful for the space to explore and take on new challenges, and am particularly excited to have the opportunity to serve as an advisor for two AI start-ups.
As Ernest Hemingway said, “Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.” Happy New Year!
Top Three
XBB.1.5
Made up 40.5% of confirmed U.S. cases for the week ending on Dec. 31. That’s up about 20% from the week ending on Dec. 24.
WSJ: "It isn’t clear that XBB is any more lethal than other variants, but its mutations enable it to evade antibodies from prior infection and vaccines as well as existing monoclonal antibody treatments. Growing evidence also suggests that repeated vaccinations may make people more susceptible to XBB and could be fueling the virus’s rapid evolution... Under selective evolutionary pressures, the virus appears to have developed mutations that enable it to transmit more easily and escape antibodies elicited by vaccines and prior infection."
Eric Topol: "New York is the bellwether for what is happening with XBB.1.5 and it doesn’t look good with a marked rise in hospitalizations, especially among seniors, in recent weeks as this variant has been taking hold… But it is noteworthy that New York’s Covid hospital admission rate is the highest since late January (and also exceeds the summer 2021 Delta wave, but with some ambiguity as to how hospitalization were categorized then and now)."
The Guardian: "The variant has an unusual mutation known as F486P that is helping it spread. The mutation changes part of the Covid virus that many antibodies from vaccination or previous infection target. The change makes the antibodies less effective at neutralising the virus. The parent variant, XBB, has a different mutation at the same position. This makes XBB good at evading immune defences too, but the mutation comes with a cost: the virus cannot latch on to human cells as effectively, so the virus is actually less infectious."
Good summary of what is known about the variant.
In-Person Schooling and Youth Suicide: NBER paper.
"We document three key findings. First, using data from the National Vital Statistics System from 1990-2019, we document the historical association between teen suicides and the school calendar. We show that suicides among 12-to-18-year-olds are highest during months of the school year and lowest during summer months (June through August)."
"Second, we show that this seasonal pattern dramatically changed in 2020. Teen suicides plummeted in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began in the U.S. and remained low throughout the summer before rising in Fall 2020 when many K-12 schools returned to in-person instruction."
"Third, using county-level variation in school reopenings in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021—proxied by anonymized SafeGraph smartphone data on elementary and secondary school foot traffic—we find that returning from online to in-person schooling was associated with a 12-to-18 percent increase teen suicides."
"Auxiliary analyses using Google Trends queries and the Youth Risk Behavior Survey suggests that bullying victimization may be an important mechanism."
The Economic Cost of the Pandemic: State by state analysis by Eric Hanushek
Learning loss could shave $70,000 off the lifetime earnings of children who were in school during the pandemic.
WSJ: "If the learning losses aren’t recovered, K-12 students on average will grow into less educated, lower-skilled and less productive adults and will earn 5.6% less over the course of their lives than students educated just before the pandemic...the losses could total $28 trillion over the rest of this century."
Federal
House Adjourns Without Electing a Speaker: Punchbowl: "For the first time in 100 years, the House of Representatives ended the opening day of a new Congress without a speaker."
"After three rounds of fruitless balloting, Kevin McCarthy essentially has two choices now:
The California Republican can drop out of the race for speaker.
Or he can try somehow to cut a deal with the growing group of now 20 conservatives who oppose his candidacy and support Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) for speaker.
Covid-19 Research
SARS-CoV-2 Viral Mutations: FDA releases new analysis of the impact on different COVID-19 tests, including several that will fail to detect new variants.
Omicron Subvariant May Cause More Damage, Not Less: “New research on the Omicron subvariant of the coronavirus has suggested the pathogen could be changing how it attacks the human body —shifting from infecting respiratory systems to increasingly targeting the brain."
COVID Booster Prompts Good Immune Response, Except After Recent Infection: A study finds that a third COVID-19 vaccine dose triggered a robust immune response, regardless of whether recipients had been infected more than 3 months earlier, but it didn't significantly increase antibody levels in those infected less than 3 months before.
Overall, the study demonstrated a clear benefit from a third vaccine dose, regardless of previous infection status, the authors said. "Only those with infection close to the time of dose-3 receipt demonstrated a minimal response," they wrote. "These data support previous studies that suggest waiting at least three months post-infection to maximize the boost in antibody titers."
The Case for Wearing Masks Forever: Emma Green in the New Yorker: "A ragtag coalition of public-health activists believe that America’s pandemic restrictions are too lax—and they say they have the science to prove it."
State
Florida:
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) petition for a grand jury investigation into COVID-19 vaccines, in which he decries the ongoing vaccine campaign as ‘propaganda’ by the Biden administration, is drawing fierce criticism from health experts,” The Hill reports.
“Physicians and public health experts say his request betrays decades of established procedure designed to ensure the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, and only serves to stoke further immunization fears.”
Massachusetts: Boston Public Schools ask students, staff to wear masks on return from holiday break.
New York: "New York City students and teachers can no longer access ChatGPT — the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that generates stunningly cogent and lifelike writing — on education department devices or internet networks, agency officials confirmed Tuesday."
International
U.S. to Require Negative Covid Tests for Travelers Coming From China: Via NYT.
Economic Recovery
Top Risks: Eurasia Group's annual forecast of the political risks that are most likely to play out over the course of the year. Good list touching on Russia, China, AI, and TikTok.
Opportunity Zones: "Five years in, Opportunity Zones are boosting communities."
"Since the inception of the program, these low- to moderate–income communities have attracted over an estimated $100 billion in investment capital, bringing forth new real estate development, small and large businesses, and infrastructure revitalization."
"In the fourth quarter of 2022 alone, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority has allocated more than $40 million in grant funding to support projects and businesses located within Opportunity Zones. Their Main Street Lenders Grant Program, which consisted of $11 million distributed between eight lenders and financial institutions, supported minority-owned small businesses within Opportunity Zones."
Resources
Broadband: All states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia have received Digital Equity and Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) planning funds.
How the Pandemic Ushered in a New Era of Hybrid Homeschooling: Greg Toppo in Fast Company.
How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate: David Zweig in The Free Press.
To Fight Learning Loss, Give Students the Help They Need: Washington Post editorial.
"By those standards, Biden’s plan falls short. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has pledged to recruit 250,000 people for the effort over the next three years. Yet that number includes not just tutors but “mentors,” “integrated student support coordinators,” and “post-secondary transition coaches” — hardly signaling a rigorous focus on academic recovery. Even if the administration hits its goal, it won’t be nearly enough; by one estimate, merely meeting the need in the country’s worst-performing K-12 schools would require 2.7 million tutors."
"A more coherent strategy is needed. States should require that districts devote all unspent federal relief dollars to academic recovery and focus on those schools where students are struggling most."
How School Closures Made Me Question My Progressive Politics: Rebecca Bodenheimer in Politico.
"Parents who advocated for school reopening were repeatedly demonized on social media as racist and mischaracterized as Trump supporters. Members of the parent group I helped lead were consistently attacked on Twitter and Facebook by two Oakland moms with ties to the teachers union. They labelled advocates’ calls for schools reopening “white supremacy” called us “Karens,” and even bizarrely claimed we had allied ourselves with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s transphobic agenda."
"It’s thus not surprising that high-profile progressives who dared call out teachers unions quickly backed off. 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones was mildly critical of unions in spring 2020, noting that some teachers were saying their contracts didn’t require them to teach remotely (the same argument my son’s teacher was making). She ended up issuing an apology. However, she also defended her right to criticize public servants regardless of their political leanings: “I will no more act as if teachers are above criticism because of the profession they chose than I would police.” Last week, she tweeted again about the Omicron-related school closures, pointing to the harms of remote learning, and was once more subjected to contempt and called a teacher-hating corporate shill."
The Locus of K–12 Coverage During the Pandemic, and After: Via Rick Hess and Ilana Ovental.
Bracing for a Tidal Wave of Unnecessary Special Education Referrals: Via The 74: "Students pegged for evaluation may be struggling due to disrupted learning or show trauma-related behaviors — and may not have disabilities at all."
Burbio: Is now on Substack. Subscribe here.
Heroes Everywhere:
Police in New York are praising a man for his "heroic actions" during the holiday weekend blizzard after he forced his way into a school to help two dozen people escape the storm.
A Denver mom heard about the mess with luggage at the Denver airport. She took her daughters and a family friend to the airport to help strangers reunite with bags. They found phone numbers on luggage tags - texted 100+ people to tell them where their bag was.
Auld Lang Syne: As we say goodbye to 2022, The King’s Piper plays ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at Buckingham Palace.
