“Earlier this year, schools around the country received more than a hundred billion dollars from the federal government—American taxpayers, in truth—in order to recover from the pandemic and finally get back to the task of teaching kids.
The feds stipulated that 20 percent of that money be put toward addressing learning losses during the pandemic, but the bulk of it can be spent at schools’ discretion. Which means, of course, that many schools are using this sudden injection of cash to make improvements that have nothing to do with keeping COVID-19 at bay.
“Some districts are investing big money in initiatives that don’t appear at first glance strictly COVID-related,” notes Education Week. “Miami-Dade schools plan to spend $30 million, or $86 per student, on cybersecurity. Raleigh County schools in West Virginia lists a $9 million effort—more than $800 per student—to expand an elementary school, adding nine classrooms, upgrading the library, expanding the kitchen, and separating the cafeteria and the gym. The Newport News school district in Virginia is spending $840,000 for a new student information system to help teachers catalog students’ academic progress.”
An unnamed school district will use some of its COVID-19 relief funds to install vape detection devices, purchase new student ID cards, and build a tennis court.
Indeed, many districts seem to be spending significant chunks of money on upgrading athletic facilities and expanding stadiums, according to Education Week. Athletics can be an important part of many students’ lives, and letting kids get back to sports was a good reason (among many) to move away from the soul-crushing farce of virtual learning and get everybody back in school. But a slightly nicer football field probably isn’t going to improve students’ test scores or make them safer from COVID-19, which after all are the two primary justifications for all the spending.”
“Data from the Kauffman Foundation indicate that the percent of new entrepreneurs who created a business by choice instead of necessity dropped from 86.86 percent in 2019 to 69.75 percent last year. Many people happy to work for somebody else were pushed into starting a business by pandemic-era chaos.
But a lot of those people seem to have discovered that they actually like working for themselves, and that may be causing a cultural shift. At the end of November, The Wall Street Journal reported that at least part of the “Great Resignation” phenomenon of Americans quitting jobs involved people starting businesses.”
“The omicron variant, the latest curveball in the pandemic, may lead to less severe cases of Covid-19 than earlier strains of the coronavirus, according to one of the largest real-world studies of omicron released so far.
That’s good news, but it could be overshadowed by other data showing that the variant is far more contagious than any version of the virus to date — and that it can evade some immune protection from vaccines and prior infection.
Taken together, these traits make for a counterintuitive situation: Omicron poses a lower risk to most individuals, at least for those who are vaccinated, but the threat to the overall population is high. The question now is whether omicron will infect so many people that it overwhelms the health care system and drives up hospitalizations and deaths — in spite of the smaller percentage of people who come down with severe disease.
The answer is partly in our hands. The strategies that have contained Covid-19 throughout the pandemic still work against omicron, but governments, institutions, and individuals have to be willing to use them.”
“Preliminary laboratory research by Pfizer/BioNTech finds that a third booster shot of its COVID-19 vaccine successfully neutralizes—that is, blocks—the omicron variant of the virus from entering and infecting cells. The researchers tested the new variant against antibodies produced by people one month after they had been inoculated with a third booster dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. They report that the boosted level of antibodies “provides a similar level of neutralizing antibodies to Omicron as is observed after two doses against wild-type and other variants that emerged before Omicron. These antibody levels are associated with high efficacy against both the wild-type virus and these variants.””
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“Keep firmly in mind that these are very preliminary laboratory results that need to be confirmed by real-world epidemiological evidence with respect to breakthrough infections and disease severity. Nevertheless, these results corroborate that people who have already gotten two doses of COVID-19 vaccines or have already recovered from a prior COVID-19 infection should go get a booster shot and that people who are not yet fully vaccinated should delay no further.
In case these lab results don’t hold up in the real world, vaccine makers are already working on tweaks to their inoculations that specifically target the omicron variant. The updated vaccines could become available as early as March 2022.”
“By many accounts, teachers have been particularly unhappy and stressed out about their jobs since the pandemic hit, first struggling to adjust to difficult remote-learning requirements and then returning to sometimes unsafe working environments. A nationally representative survey of teachers by RAND Education and Labor in late January and early February found that educators were feeling depressed and burned out from their jobs at higher rates than the general population. These rates were higher for female teachers, with 82 percent reporting frequent job-related stress compared with 66 percent of male teachers.
In the survey, 1 in 4 teachers — particularly Black teachers — reported that they were considering leaving their jobs at the end of the school year. Only 1 in 6 said the same before the pandemic.
Yet the data on teacher employment shows a system that is stretched, not shattered. In an EdWeek Research Center report released in October, a significant number of district leaders and principals surveyed — a little less than half — said that their district had struggled to hire a sufficient number of full-time teachers. This number paled in comparison, though, with the nearly 80 percent of school leaders who said they were struggling to find substitute teachers, the nearly 70 percent who said they were struggling to find bus drivers and the 55 percent who said they were struggling to find paraprofessionals.
More concrete jobs data suggests that school employees have largely stayed put. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer public-education professionals quit their jobs between the months of April and August the past two years than did so during that same time immediately before the pandemic.”
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“Still, plenty of teachers are quitting — and they’re quitting at least in part because of the pandemic. According to a survey by the RAND Corporation, almost half of former public school teachers who left the field since March 2020 cited COVID-19 as the driving factor.”
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“some local districts are hurting. Sasha Pudelski, the assistant director for policy and advocacy for the School Superintendents Association, has spoken to school leaders around the country who are facing teacher shortages, sometimes at crisis levels. But her sense is that these shortages are uneven depending on a district’s resource level and how well they’re able to pay. Based on what she’s heard from school-district leaders, she suspects shortages are more acute in low-income communities with a lower tax base for teacher salaries, potentially causing a further shortage of educators from underrepresented groups, who disproportionately teach in these areas.
Indeed, a fall 2021 study of school-staffing shortages throughout the state of Washington shows that high-poverty districts are facing significantly more staffing challenges than their more affluent counterparts. In some places, there are significant numbers of unfilled positions.”
“On November 4, the United Kingdom’s regulatory authorities approved molnupiravir as a treatment for COVID-19 infections. Meanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continues to dawdle over approving medications that were so effective that independent Data Monitoring Committees ruled that it would be unethical to continue giving placebos to study participants.
Speaking of dawdling, the FDA has long stymied the development and roll out of another vital component for the effective use of these antiviral medications: namely, at-home COVID-19 testing. Both pills must be taken by people within 3 to 5 days of exposure or symptom onset to be most effective at preventing hospitalization and death. That means that people need to be able to test themselves quickly, easily, and cheaply.
Up until mid-October, the FDA had approved only two over-the-counter at-home COVID-19 diagnostic tests, one of which has now had to be recalled. In the last month and a half, agency regulators have finally gotten around to authorizing nine more.”
“Vaccines aren’t distributed equally: Rich countries have about twice the population of low-income countries, yet they have received about 50 times as many Covid-19 vaccine doses”
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“Hoarding and production constraints are part of the story, but so are less-appreciated obstacles like clogged supply chains and breakdowns in communication between vaccine makers, donors, and recipients. These problems are solvable, however, and countries like the United States are uniquely positioned to contribute.”
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“Countries that are counting on Covid-19 vaccine imports, whether through donations or purchases, are often in the dark about when and where rich countries and pharmaceutical companies will ship their doses”
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“the United Kingdom donated 9 million Covid-19 vaccine doses to low-income countries this summer, but several of the countries receiving them warned that they would not be able to distribute most of them in time. Many vaccines have a limited shelf life, and donated vaccines are often close to expiration. In May, Malawi was forced to discard 20,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccines because the country’s health system could not administer them before the shots expired.”