Covid-19 Policy Update #645
Covid-19 Policy Update #645
Thursday 3/30
Top Three
Former President Trump Indicted by Manhattan Grand Jury: Via Axios, NYT, Fox, Politico.
"A grand jury in New York on Thursday indicted former President Trump on charges related to an illegal hush money payment in 2016 to adult film star Stormy Daniels who alleged they had an affair, according to multiple outlets."
President Biden Won’t Veto GOP Bill to End Covid Emergency: Associated Press: “It marks the second time in the new Congress that the Biden administration has signaled opposition to a Republican measure, rallying most Democrats in Congress to vote against it, only to soften its stance and let the legislation eventually become law.”
Wide Differences in How Americans View Federal Agencies: Via Pew.
"The partisan divisions in favorability are deepest for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC (80% favorable among Democrats vs. 31% among Republicans); the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA (74% vs. 36%); and the Department of Education (62% vs. 29%)."
Covid Research
Risk of Death Following COVID-19 Vaccination In Young People: New study.
"We show there is no significant increase in cardiac or all-cause mortality in the 12 weeks following COVID-19 vaccination compared to more than 12 weeks after any dose."
"However, for non-mRNA or unknown vaccine vectors (primarily consisting of the ChAdOx1 Oxford-AstraZeneca) for the first dose and all doses combined, there were significant increases in the incidence of cardiac death."
NYT: "Young women who received at least one dose of the Covid vaccine made by AstraZeneca might have been more likely to die of a heart problem in the 12 weeks after their vaccination, according to an analysis of immunization and death records in Britain released on Monday."
"Those findings carry a big caveat: Britain withdrew AstraZeneca’s vaccine use for young people under 30 in April 2021, citing the risk of rare but dangerous blood clots. By that time, the young women who were immunized would have been mainly health care workers or those who were medically vulnerable, because people at high risk of Covid from their age, health or employment were vaccinated first. So the results of the study may not apply to the general population."
COVID Widened Excess Death Gap Between US and European Countries: CIDRAP:"The United States has had substantially higher death rates than similar high-income countries in Europe in all but the oldest age groups, but the gap widened even more during the COVID-19 pandemic."
My 6-Year-Old Son Died. Then the Anti-vaxxers Found Out: Billy Ball in The Atlantic.
"My 6-year old boy died in January. We lost him after a household accident, one likely brought on by a rare cerebral-swelling condition. Paramedics got his heart beating, but it was too late to save his brain. I could hold his hand, look at the small birthmark on it, comb his hair, and call out for him, but if he could hear me or feel me, he gave no sign. He had been a child in perpetual motion, but now we couldn’t get him to wiggle a finger."
"But vaccine opponents on the internet, who somehow assumed that a COVID shot was responsible for my son’s death, thought my family’s pain was funny. “Lol. Yay for the jab. Right? Right?” wrote one person on Twitter. “Your decision to vaccinate your son resulted in his death,” wrote another. “This is all on YOU.” “Murder in the first.”
Study Identifies SARS-CoV-2 Variants With Antiviral Resistance Mutations: CIDRAP.
"The study, published yesterday in Science Advances, found that several naturally occurring variants of Mpro, the main protease of SARS-CoV-2 that is essential for virus replication and is the main target of antivirals, carry amino acid mutations that confer resistance to nirmatrelvir (the main component of Paxlovid) and ensitrelvir, which received regulatory approval in Japan in February."
How An Early-Warning Radar Could Prevent Future Pandemics: Via ARS Technica: “If metagenomic sequencing was done more routinely, maybe we would’ve known what it was when there were only 20 infections,” in the US, said Joe DeRisi, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California San Francisco and president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a nonprofit research center."
State
California: EdSource on a new literacy report: "Some districts with substantial numbers of low-income Latino students vastly outperform others when it comes to reading and writing. The results appear to have more to do with how schools are teaching students to read and less about their family’s income or their English proficiency."
Colorado: Denver failed to provide speech therapy to more than 1,000 young students, state decision says.
Michigan: Schools turn to COVID relief funds to upgrade aging buildings.
New York: Via The 74: "Hochul’s Proposal for Small-Group Tutoring Blocked by NY State Legislature."
"Both chambers rejected a clause devoting $250 million to tutoring, which experts say could be the best tactic for accelerating student learning."
Economic Recovery
Do We Know How Many People Are Working From Home?: Via NYT
"Outside research, including a monthly survey of workers from researchers at Stanford University and the Census Bureau’s household survey, indicate that remote work remains prevalent, with Stanford’s finding that it accounts for over a quarter of paid full-time workdays in the United States, just slightly down from 33 percent in 2021."
"Some scholars suggested that the Labor Department’s survey may overcount fully in-person work, though the comparisons among the various surveys aren’t direct."
"This particular Labor Department figure on telework also combines fully remote work with hybrid arrangements. But hybrid work has eclipsed fully remote policies, with just over half of the workers who can do their jobs from home combining in-person and remote work, according to Gallup."
"Stanford’s monthly study on working from home, which surveys 10,000 workers across cities and industries, found that 27 percent of paid full-time days were worked from home in early 2023."
"Much of that remote work came from hybrid setups. Last month, the survey found that 12 percent of workers were fully remote, roughly 60 percent fully in person and 28 percent hybrid."
The Class of 2023 Faces a Jittery Job Market: Via WSJ.
"The Class of 2023 is getting ready to enter a job market that is suddenly less eager to hire new grads."
"Nearly all—97%—of the 1,000 college seniors surveyed by recruiting-software firm iCIMS in March said they have considered alternative options in the uncertain job market, weighing graduate school, gig work or taking a job outside their major."
"In February, the most recent month available, the unemployment rate for college graduates aged 20 to 24 was 4.6%. That’s double the 2.3% from December 2021, when the rate for that cohort hit a five-year low."
"Jim Fish, chief executive of Waste Management Inc., described the situation this way: “We can’t hire a truck driver to drive a trash truck for $90,000 in Houston, Texas, but I can hire an M.B.A. from a small school for $60,000, and I can get them all day long."
Resources
A Hidden Pandemic: The Orphans Covid Has Left Behind: Via CNN.
"Joshua, his younger brother, Zachary, 14, and sister, Maddie, 10, are among the estimated 238,500 Covid orphans in the United States whose lives have been upended in the past three years by the loss of a parent or primary caregiver."
The Future of Data, Assessments, and Accountability in K-12 Education: New report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Rewrite Attendance Laws to Promote Learning, Not Seat Time: Checker Finn at EdNext.
"The first development is evidence that lots of students are not availing themselves of high-dose tutoring when it’s available, no matter how much they need and would benefit from it, and they’re not signing up for summer school, either."
"Reasons abound. Too often, schools aren’t offering these learning boosts or aren’t offering them at times and in places that work for families, especially the low-income families whose children are most in need of additional learning."
"The second depressing development is the growing number of districts and schools that are moving to four-day weeks, ostensibly to deal with budget woes and teacher shortages, ease burn-out, and forestall quitting."
"Maybe, finally, today we’ve reached an inflection point where, with the help of better assessments, lots of 24/7 technology, and much greater concern with “readiness,” we should ease off the focus on time and refocus instead on mastery."
"Yet most of American K–12 schooling is still based on age attained and time spent. State “compulsory attendance” laws are invariably framed in terms of birthdays. They start as young as age five and go as high as nineteen, requiring from as little as ten to as much as thirteen years of compulsory schooling."
"Let’s finally face the truth: Since kids move at different speeds, the amount of instruction that student Q needs in pursuit of mastery of a lesson, a unit, a “grade level,” etc. will differ from the amount that student R needs, which means that, yes, they’ll face different quantities of schooling. That’s the alternative to the batch-processing of today’s age-based attendance-and-promotion systems. It means treating kids differently."
AI:
Michael Horn: Putting ChatGPT to the Test
I have a piece up over at AEI Ideas: From Automation to Reinvention: How AI Is Shifting the Nature of Work
Ethan Mollick: "GPT-4 is so close to creating a universal educational simulator based on just a paragraph prompt. Take a look at this simulated negotiation, with grading and feedback."
HAI: AI Will Transform Teaching and Learning. Let’s Get it Right.
OpenAI's Greg Brockman with a great thread about what they're learning around alignment.
Mathematicians Find a New Shape: Researchers proved the existence of a kind of shape that'd only been predicted to exist by theory.
"Researchers identified a shape that was previously only theoretical: a 13-sided configuration called “the hat” that can tile a surface without repeating."
"The hat is what’s known as an aperiodic monotile, which means that a single shape can tile a surface without any translational symmetry, or without its pattern ever repeating."
Dancing Queen: You can dance. You can jive.