Covid-19 Policy Update #654
Covid-19 Policy Update #654
Thursday, May 4th Be With You
Top Three
Teen Survey: Via EdChoice / Morning Consult (Report / Crosstabs)
Teens indicate their lives have improved in many areas since the height of the pandemic. They continue to feel better about their relationships with their close friends and immediate family since the pandemic. Stress and anxiety remain challenges for this group.
Over 40% of teens have heard either a lot or some about ChatGPT. Less than 30% of teens say they have used ChatGPT either in their free time, at school, or both.Three out of five say they have never used the program at all.
One-third of teens have changed schools in the last three years. Among that group, most have changed schools once. Two in five teens have changed schools more than twice.
Compared to last Fall, teens are feeling less prepared for an education beyond high school.
Less than one in three teens feel their school is handling mental health effectively.
How Well Does Masking Work? And Other Pandemic Questions We Need to Answer: Jennifer Nuzzo in the NYT.
"We should be systematically studying pandemic mitigation efforts in order to learn which interventions are effective and how best to employ them. Just as important: We should do so with the understanding that the absence of evidence of effectiveness is not the same as having evidence of ineffectiveness."
"Questions about masking, for example, were recently revived by a Cochrane study reporting that masking (with surgical ones or respirators like N95) makes “little or no difference” in reducing infection at the population level, such as among health care workers or in communities. Some mask opponents claim this validates their assertions that masks don’t work. Some mask supporters are raising questions about the study’s authors and attempting to discredit their conclusions. Which side is right?"
"The confusion occurs when we shift from showing that masks work in a laboratory or for individual people to finding evidence that masking works at the population level and what interventions work to encourage it."
"There have been only a few randomized trials specific to masking, and most of the ones included in the Cochrane review were not conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic or in the United States. Many of the studies that the Cochrane review included looked at the spread of influenza."
"But we should have put into place efforts to rapidly collect and assess high-quality data to understand whether masks were having optimal effectiveness and, if not, how to increase that effectiveness. We should have done this for other mitigations, too, like school and business closings and policies that required exposed contacts of cases to quarantine."
How States Can Support Ongoing Academic Recovery: Via ECS
Give parents clear, accessible information on their children’s progress and needs.
Support the development of individualized learning plans for students.
Provide individualized catch-up opportunities.
Federal
White House: US to end COVID vaccine requirement for international arrivals on May 11.
"While I believe that these vaccine mandates had a tremendous beneficial impact, we are now at a point where we think that it makes a lot of sense to pull these requirements down,” White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha told The Associated Press on Monday."
NCES: NAEP Report Card: 2022 NAEP Civics Assessment. (NYT/ The 74 / Chalkbeat)
Eighth graders’ knowledge of both history and civics fell significantly between 2018 and 2022, according to the latest NAEP scores.
Average civics scores fell by two points, the first-ever decline in the 25-year history of the test.
Nearly 40% of eighth graders scored ‘below basic’ in U.S. history last year, compared with 34% in 2018 and 29% in 2014.
ED: Released new guidance for evaluating ed tech — a move that speaks to the demand for more research around the digital tools and products in classrooms.
Surgeon General: Released a Surgeon General's Advisory on the epidemic of loneliness and isolation facing our country, the destructive impacts it has on our collective health, and the extraordinary healing power of our relationships. (Video / NYT oped)
Not a Headline from the Onion: CDC opens probe after 35 test positive for covid following CDC conference
Covid Research
Original COVID Vaccines Protected Against Severe Disease, Death During Omicron: CIDRAP on a new study. "The 3-dose vaccination series was 42% effective against infection and 82% effective against hospitalization or death during Omicron."
Large Study Shows No Changes to Menstrual Cycles After COVID Vaccination: CIDRAP on a new study.
"For women with menstrual disturbances, researchers noted which vaccine was used (Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, or Oxford-AstraZeneca), which dose (unvaccinated and first, second, and third dose) was connected to a menstrual disturbance, and over which of two time windows (1 to 7 days, considered the control period, and 8 to 90 days) the menstrual disturbance took place."
"For menstrual disturbance, adjustment for covariates almost completely removed the associations found after vaccination in the crude estimates, and only a weak association remained after the first dose, limited to the one to seven days risk window, " the authors concluded. "Considering the characteristics of this condition, and that the change is measured based on encounters with specialist healthcare in this study, a causal effect limited to this risk window is unlikely."
COVID Caused 6% of Deaths in 2022, Down from 12% in 2021: CDC
Therapeutics for COVID-19: Via Nature. A comprehensive review of Covid therapies and the challenges that remain.
Bivalent COVID Vaccine Shows Good Omicron Protection While Older Version Wanes: CIDRAP on two studies.
Biden’s Vaccine Project Needs to Be More Like Operation Warp Speed: Alec Stapp and Arielle D'Souza in the Washington Post.
"To ensure Next Gen’s success, the Biden administration will need to streamline regulatory processes and unblock the development pipeline, even if it means slaughtering a few sacred cows. Pharmaceutical companies will probably make a profit, and some well-meaning regulations will need to be curtailed, but this is what it will take to prioritize accelerated production of vaccines and treatments."
"Next Gen could improve on Warp Speed’s strategy by giving the Department of Health and Human Services expanded contracting authorities to procure products without relying on the Defense Department. This would enable HHS to deal flexibly with the drug industry and work with more diverse partners than it has been able to attract in the past."
"One of Operation Warp Speed’s most effective strategies was to speed up the regulatory process involved in developing, testing and distributing vaccines. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, for example, allowed clinical trial phases to be conducted concurrently. In some cases, Phase 1 trials were allowed to start before certain animal safety and efficacy studies were finished. This was an extraordinary departure from normal procedure."
Hype or Hope? Nasal COVID-19 Vaccines: Via Katelyn Jetelina
Study Finds School-Household Network Key to Understanding Disease Transmission in Children: Study
"To confirm transmission over a school-household network, SARS-CoV-2 transmission pairs in children aged 4–17 years were analyzed by study year and primary/secondary school. Cases with symptom onset between 1 March 2021 and 4 April 2021 identified by source and contact-tracing in the Netherlands were included. In this period, primary schools were open and secondary school students attended class at least once per week."
"The results provide evidence of transmission on a bipartite school-household network. Schools play an important role in transmission within study years, and households play an important role in transmission between study years and between primary and secondary schools."
"Firstly, the largest fraction of the transmission between children of school-age happened in the home or school setting. Secondly, transmission within the same school year mostly happens at school (especially for primary school children) and transmission between school years mostly at home."
State
Kansas: The Kansas Legislature passed a bill that would limit the power of the state and local health leaders regarding infectious and contagious diseases.
New York: Via Chalkbeat: "How Well Does Your Child's School Support Student Mental Health?" Longer article here.
Virginia: The K-12 Learning Acceleration Grants program will provide $1,500 grants to parents of school-age children for tutoring in different subjects.
Economic Recovery
Pandemic Graduates Struggle With Teamwork: Deloitte and PwC are giving extra coaching to their youngest UK staff after noticing recruits whose education was disrupted by lockdowns have weaker teamwork and communication skills than previous cohorts.
Banking Crisis:
Almost half of US adults are worried about the safety of their deposits in banks and other financial institutions—levels of concern as high or higher than during the 2008 global financial crisis.
"Emergency lending to the domestic banking system remains elevated," analysts with BofA Securities wrote late last week. "Regional bank stress may not be getting worse, but it may not be getting better either."
Axios: The mini banking crisis of 2023 really is pretty small, as banking crises go.
Resources
A Vision to Transform State Data Systems to Inform People’s Pathways through Education and the Workforce: Via DQC.
Principal Perspectives on School Staffing Struggles: Via RAND.
"Principals overwhelmingly attributed teacher staffing challenges to insufficient availability of substitute teachers."
"Most principals — both those with and without teaching vacancies in their schools—expressed that their hiring efforts had been impeded by low applicant counts, low compensation, and underqualified candidates"
Celebrating the Life of Meredith Liu: Via Priscilla Chan:
"Earlier this month, we lost my long-time friend and partner in co-founding The Primary School, Meredith Liu. Meredith was the rare and amazing combination of dreamer and doer. At The Primary School, we shared a big dream -- to rethink school as a system of care that considered the full needs of every child. Where others might be overwhelmed by the challenges that come with all big dreams, Meredith was undaunted. She was fiercely passionate and endlessly hopeful -- and it was contagious. Working alongside her pushed me to dream bigger and work harder. She taught me how to keep going when things felt hard. The Primary School is filled with so much love, joy, care -- and hope -- because she was a part of it. She did the work because she loved each little soul in our school, and she lives on in the laughter that fills our halls. I count myself lucky to have known her, and I deeply miss her."
AI:
Roughly 7,800 IBM jobs could be replaced by AI, automation. CEO Krishna says IBM to pause hiring for replaceable roles.
White House: "Biden-Harris Administration Announces New Actions to Promote Responsible AI Innovation that Protects Americans’ Rights and Safety"
Peter Coy: "A.I. Could Actually Be a Boon to Education"
Bing with ChatGPT is now available to anyone with a Microsoft account.
Edtech Chegg tumbles as ChatGPT threat prompts revenue warning. This is also likely the first instance of a public company warning that ChatGPT was negatively impact its business. (Chegg)
I have a piece up at The 74: "The Promise of Personalized Learning Never Delivered. Today’s AI Is Different"
Sal Khan speaks at TED showing how they're using GPT4 for Khanmingo.
National Park Service: Wins the May4thBeWithYou
I Still Don't Know: How Pandas survive in the wild.
MidJourney 5.1: Dropped this week. It does amazing things when giving camera models, lenses, and settings as part of the prompt: "Photo, Candid Shot, Baby Yoda. Shot on a Hasselblad medium format camera. Carl Zeiss Distagon t* 15 mm f/ 2. 8 ze, Ricoh r1. --ar 21:9 --q 2 --v 5.1 "
