COVID-19 Thread [V2.0]

[PeaveyFury]

And despite there being some improvements with it, elearning is once again proving to be a trainwreck when it comes to actually educating kids, particularly young children.

 

Is there any legitimate evidence of this at this point beyond personal assumptions and anecdotal experiences/opinions?

Here's a statement from AAP in August. I'm not sure one could consider it legitimate evidence, but it an informed opinion from a relevant professional organization. They don't describe e-learning as a 'trainwreck', but do highlight negative consequences.

https://services.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-infections/clinical-guidance/covid-19-planning-considerations-return-to-in-person-education-in-schools/

 

Sorry, my question was regarding the point of "elearning is once again proving to be a trainwreck when it comes to actually educating kids," which implies data/proof/measured results from the current school year. As your link is from August, it likely doesn't include such info from the fall 2020 school year, or factor in the changes/enhancements that likely have improved the experience for children relative to the haphazard way things were done in the spring on very short notice. When stating something as concrete as "proving", I'm curious to see the data supporting that proof.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

Sorry, my question was regarding the point of "elearning is once again proving to be a trainwreck when it comes to actually educating kids," which implies data/proof/measured results from the current school year. As your link is from August, it likely doesn't include such info from the fall 2020 school year, or factor in the changes/enhancements that likely have improved the experience for children relative to the haphazard way things were done in the spring on very short notice. When stating something as concrete as "proving", I'm curious to see the data supporting that proof.

 

Remote learning widens the achievement gap which is directly counterproductive to the entire purpose of public education. Everyone struggles when schools close but it is exacerbated by lower income areas which are predominantly students of color. They lack internet, quiet study spaces, parental assistance, etc., at a much higher rate than affluent areas. If people of access get frustrated, they can just say adios and go to private school as well.

 

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/covid-19-and-learning-loss-disparities-grow-and-students-need-help

 

You seem to be asking for something that couldn't exist as far as some peer reviewed, massive study on US education as we are sitting on Dec. 9 and the fall semester isn't even over yet. I guess we can wait for that study but I highly, highly doubt it's going to provide a glowing endorsement of remote learning. I know you don't want anecdotal evidence but I've yet to come across a first-grade family that says it's going incredibly well and is an adequate replacement for in-person school...and I live in an affluent suburb that has a huge advantage.

 

I will say that it was better than the spring but that isn't saying a whole lot because that really was a trainwreck.

[PeaveyFury]

You seem to be asking for something that couldn't exist as far as some peer reviewed, massive study on US education as we are sitting on Dec. 9 and the fall semester isn't even over yet.

 

I'm asking for proof because it was stated that proof was there. How about we let the poster who stated that there was proof respond to support his statement before we jump in and state that proof couldn't exist? It either does, or doesn't, right? If it does, he should be able to provide it. If it doesn't, he should also be able to acknowledge that.

 

Many of us are aware of the ongoing, lvalid concerns. But if it truly is "is once again proving to be a trainwreck when it comes to actually educating kids, particularly young children" , I think we'd all benefit from being able to review that data.

[Machu Peach]

Sorry, my question was regarding the point of "elearning is once again proving to be a trainwreck when it comes to actually educating kids," which implies data/proof/measured results from the current school year. As your link is from August, it likely doesn't include such info from the fall 2020 school year, or factor in the changes/enhancements that likely have improved the experience for children relative to the haphazard way things were done in the spring on very short notice. When stating something as concrete as "proving", I'm curious to see the data supporting that proof.

I see. It looks like most of the studies pertaining to the spring semester were published a couple months after that semester ended. I imagine that collecting and analyzing student achievement data in realtime is very difficult. Maybe we'll start to see more quantitative studies about the fall semester in Jan/Feb 2021?

[Fear The Chorizo]

And despite there being some improvements with it, elearning is once again proving to be a trainwreck when it comes to actually educating kids, particularly young children.

 

Is there any legitimate evidence of this at this point beyond personal assumptions and anecdotal experiences/opinions?

 

Sorry, but I can ask the same question asking for legitimate evidence that it is working well and I doubt there's going to be research proving that position at this point in time, too....An article I read about a month ago indicated the Saint Paul school district had 40% of its highschoolers failing at least one class over Q1 2020, up from ~20% in fall 2019. The superintendent then tried to assuage those concerns in the article by stating a good percentage of the kids failing classes were those that essentially weren't even participating despite tremendous efforts getting students equipped with iPads and other remote learning tech over the summer. So for engaged kids, it was only a little worse - but they basically have no chance at teaching a growing number of disengaged kids. Saint Paul is far from the only large school district faced with this problem, either.

 

The legitimate evidence of this will be coming out over the next 1-2 years in the form of diminished standardized test scores, graduation/dropout rates, and/or less-aggressive curriculum plans to try and make up for the learning gap caused by this disruption.

 

I'll end with a personal anecdote, even though it means little in the grand scheme of things - my 7 yr old daughter has an anxiety disorder (selective mutism) she's worked through and gotten therapy with, and it's a tremendous benefit to her to interact with her peers to keep building confidence. She has grown leaps and bounds over the last 1.5 years, and she has actually benefitted by the way our district's in-person school option has been set up (reduced class sizes at elementary level because middle and highschoolers are elearning heavily, opening those buildings up to space out elementary classes). This has been a stepping stone for her to catch up academically to her peers and develop skills necessary for coping with typical in-person school, which will be more crowded schools and resuming a more aggressive learning plan. The district has essentially repeated the last semester of her previous grade this fall, because they realized based on their May standardized test scores that the kids didn't learn anything from March-May and a decent percentage of her grade were going to be doing the elearning option this fall as well. Those test scores this fall overall show that engaged kids as a group are treading water in terms of learning progression, but there is regression/inconsistency in those scores with the group of kids who haven't been in-person at all since March. 2020 has been a year where it's been hard to find silver linings, and personally seeing my daughter's progress has been the brightest one by far - but looking at her peer student group collectively in a very reputable school district, the conditions that allowed her to make this progress haven't been beneficial overall in terms of learning and developing socially.

[PeaveyFury]

Sorry, but I can ask the same question asking for legitimate evidence that it is working well and I doubt there's going to be research proving that position at this point in time, too....

 

Very likely accurate. The difference is that no one here has made a statement that e-learning is proving to work well.

 

Regardless, best wishes to your daughter as you navigate these tough times.

[nodakfan17]

Green Bay has had 53 shootings this year, which is apparently more than 2018 and 2019 combined. The police have partially attributed the uptick to pandemic-related stress. My younger brother is a carpenter who has been very comfortable living in fixer-uppers the past 10 years. He finally caved last week and bought a nicer place in the suburbs.

[homer]

Let's make sure any additional crime discussion is tied to Covid. (nodakfan, your post is fine. Just being pre-emptive)

[nodakfan17]

Let's make sure any additional crime discussion is tied to Covid. (nodakfan, your post is fine. Just being pre-emptive)

Fair enough. Yeah, that jump is staggering (double?). I’m sure we’ll discover all sorts of ancillary COVID impacts as the months roll on.

[igor67]

I regrettably don't have direct data to share, but we have multiple MN schools of data in our family to compare against and from a learning standpoint most of the schools that have done hybrid (very few in MN could do true in person for very long this year) are claiming great learning outcomes, most have shared with us that they wished they had just done distance the entire time. This very much includes all K-12 grades. There is no question that older students can do distance somewhat better, but the circus of quarantining students and staff for weeks at a time to do in person responsibly has eroded the effectiveness substantially for in person whether hybrid or not. To the point I read Faucci's message on schools and I think he was only considering the issues from the perspective of transmission risk and disease risk. The logistics or trying to keep the low reported spread at schools low has a lot more to do with school decisions then beliefs that it is all fear driven. We also now that when a school switches from one model to another in MN that costs them about 10% of their staff. To be clear that applies to any switch, so jumping around is highly disruptive to any kind of continuity (which there is a large body of research on its one of the modest number of things that consistently makes a difference in education.

[jerichoholicninja]

The results of the study, for which Lee and other epidemiologists enlisted the help of an engineer who specializes in aerodynamics, were published last week in the Journal of Korean Medical Science. The conclusions raised concerns that the widely accepted standard of six feet of social distance may not be far enough to keep people safe.

 

...

 

“In this outbreak, the distances between infector and infected persons were ... farther than the generally accepted 2 meter [6.6-foot] droplet transmission range,” the study’s authors wrote. “The guidelines on quarantine and epidemiological investigation must be updated to reflect these factors for control and prevention of COVID-19.”

 

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-12-09/five-minutes-from-20-feet-away-south-korean-study-shows-perils-of-indoor-dining-for-covid-19

 

6 feet is no longer the magic number.

[Machu Peach]

For what it's worth, we were taught one meter for respiratory diseases in grad school (of course it's all probability). I've never figured out how that got adjusted to 6 feet for COVID.

[DuWayne Steurer]

For what it's worth, we were taught one meter for respiratory diseases in grad school (of course it's all probability). I've never figured out how that got adjusted to 6 feet for COVID.

 

 

Simple. Americans hate metric.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

For what it's worth, we were taught one meter for respiratory diseases in grad school (of course it's all probability). I've never figured out how that got adjusted to 6 feet for COVID.

 

Nothing to do with this but wondering if you have any insight as a Google search turns up nobody asking this question:

 

Why were expected CDC estimates for deaths so low for 2020?

 

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Excess-Deaths-Associated-with-COVID-19/xkkf-xrst/?fbclid=IwAR1e1oWLHcnxjsizAJWxB4hV-5P_qVW_LFkOXLII3EehBGWyM3vJ2t4MzMQ

 

The CDC's estimated death toll, before Covid, was lower than 2017, 2018 and 2019. The actual "excess death" compared to a reasonable estimate that's in line with those years currently stands around 108,000. In other words the "excess death" figure the news keeps reporting appears, to me, to be a bloated figure based on a weird, and low, estimate of expected death for 2020. I haven't found one news article that explains why the estimate was so low. There was a bad flu season in 2018 but that doesn't really help explaining it. I don't doubt that the CDC had a reason for that initial low figure, I just haven't seen it explained anywhere what the reason is.

[igor67]

I dug into the technical notes and the short answer appears to be that they decreased the estimated death total expected so far to account for the known lag effect of reporting the true number of deaths (which ends up often taking a full 12 months to achieve in other years). I copied the most relevant description from the technical notes.

 

Completeness

Methods to address reporting lags (i.e. underreporting) were updated as of September 9, 2020. Generally, these updates resulted in estimates of the total number of excess deaths that were approximately 5% smaller than the previous method, as weights in some jurisdictions with improved timeliness were reduced. While these adjustments likely reduce potential overestimation for those jurisdictions with improved timeliness, estimates for the most recent weeks for the US overall are likely underestimated to a larger extent than in previous releases. Some jurisdictions have little to no provisional data available in the most recent week(s) (CT, NC, WV); together, these jurisdictions represent approximately 5% of US deaths. In previous releases, some of the underestimation or lack of provisional data from certain jurisdictions was offset by the overestimation in other jurisdictions with improved timeliness when considering trends for the US overall. Because the updated weighting methods mitigate the impact of the previous overestimation for some jurisdictions with improved timeliness but provide no additional adjustments for underestimation or a lack of recent provisional data in other jurisdictions, the excess death estimates for the US overall are expected to result in a larger degree of underestimation than in previous releases.

 

To account for potential underreporting in the most recent weeks, counts were weighted by the inverse of completeness. Completeness was estimated as follows. Using provisional data from 2018-2019, weekly provisional counts were compared to final data (with final data for 2019 approximated by the data available as of April, 9, 2020), at various lag times (e.g., 1 week following the death, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, up to 26 weeks) by reporting jurisdiction. Completeness by week, lag, and jurisdiction was modeled using zero-inflated binomial hierarchical Bayesian models with state-level and temporal random effects.

[CheezWizHed]

For what it's worth, we were taught one meter for respiratory diseases in grad school (of course it's all probability). I've never figured out how that got adjusted to 6 feet for COVID.

 

 

Simple. Americans hate metric.

 

I just had a meeting with a co-worker and a U-Michigan student project team. My co-worker is nearing retirement age. Most of the students are international (China, Korea, Kenya, India, Switzerland, and one US student). I was the only one that could handle C to F conversions int their head without googling it.

[Machu Peach]

For what it's worth, we were taught one meter for respiratory diseases in grad school (of course it's all probability). I've never figured out how that got adjusted to 6 feet for COVID.

 

Nothing to do with this but wondering if you have any insight as a Google search turns up nobody asking this question:

 

Why were expected CDC estimates for deaths so low for 2020?

 

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Excess-Deaths-Associated-with-COVID-19/xkkf-xrst/?fbclid=IwAR1e1oWLHcnxjsizAJWxB4hV-5P_qVW_LFkOXLII3EehBGWyM3vJ2t4MzMQ

 

The CDC's estimated death toll, before Covid, was lower than 2017, 2018 and 2019. The actual "excess death" compared to a reasonable estimate that's in line with those years currently stands around 108,000. In other words the "excess death" figure the news keeps reporting appears, to me, to be a bloated figure based on a weird, and low, estimate of expected death for 2020. I haven't found one news article that explains why the estimate was so low. There was a bad flu season in 2018 but that doesn't really help explaining it. I don't doubt that the CDC had a reason for that initial low figure, I just haven't seen it explained anywhere what the reason is.

 

Are you asking about the orange line or the blue bars?

[reillymcshane]

The drop in COVID cases has been very welcome. Let's hope it keeps trending down and the surge that was predicted doesn't happen.

[Fear The Chorizo]

The drop in COVID cases has been very welcome. Let's hope it keeps trending down and the surge that was predicted doesn't happen.

 

Pretty much the entire midwest hit their fall/early winter peak in terms of daily case counts in the same week just before Thanksgiving - regardless of what specific states were doing in terms of attempting to limit spread. Many will say the effort to "cancel" Thanksgiving had a big impact on reducing spread, but things were trending lower before many of the states' efforts to shut more things down really would have had a significant impact. For a state like WI, which really didn't change behavior much at all or shut anything significant down, to be showing basically the same case trends as states like MN and MI during this period points to the virus reaching a hurdle where it just can't go from spreading really fast to spreading like wildfire exponentially. Some of that undoubtedly is mitigation measures and even a moderate improvement in personal awareness living in an area where COVID is actively spreading - but we've repeatedly seen areas creep up to the verge of a true community-wide disaster only to watch the virus kind of peter out every time.

 

Seeing how this has happened across the globe on a regional basis, in both developed and undeveloped countries, should give us alot of optimism now that vaccines are going to start getting distributed to the most vulnerable groups of people - hopefully the next spike of cases winds up leading to far fewer people actually getting really sick and dying. I know medical workers across the board would welcome that, particularly wherever the next surge in cases surfaces...which appears to be California / west coast states right now.

[adambr2]

Are there major differences between the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines? Assuming Moderna also gets the final okay, will people have a choice between the two?

[FVBrewerFan]

Are there major differences between the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines? Assuming Moderna also gets the final okay, will people have a choice between the two?

 

Moderna is only one dose instead of two, and doesn't need to be stored at extremely low temperatures. Effectiveness is about the same as Pfizer at roughly 95%. I don't see how people will have a choice, at least not initially. It's going to be a matter of what's available in your town by the time you're eligible.

 

EDIT: Sorry for the misinformation! Both vaccines are two doses. I was thinking of the single dose J&J vaccine in phase 3 trials.

[Machu Peach]

Both the Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine are two doses. The vaccines are extremely similar in most respects. They do differ in the type of delivery system, though that is also conceptually similar. That difference allows the Moderna vaccine to be more stable at standard freezer temperatures.

 

There's also a slightly different in schedule with the two doses of the Pfizer vaccine given 21 days apart and the two doses of the Moderna vaccine given 28 days apart. I suspect that this is due to a difference in protocols during testing and that the timing difference is mostly nonconsequential.

 

Patients pretty much get a choice to refuse whatever treatment they receive, so I'm sure you'll have to right to refuse (though it might be required by other organizations). I suspect the receiving the alternative vaccine would depend on availability, so getting it in a reasonable timeline might not be possible. I would bet that over 99% of primary care physicians would not be able to tell you the mechanistic differences between the two vaccines and would have no reason to recommend one over the other at this time.

 

Edit: Found another difference. Pfizer's vaccine is authorized for those 16 and up and it looks like Moderna's vaccine will be for those 18 and up. ...again, I think this is a result of trial design (who was enrolled in the trials) and not any mechanistic difference.

[Fear The Chorizo]

I think by the time most of us on this board are actually at the front of the line to get the covid vaccine the first time, it may be advised for the most vulnerable/med workers to get revaccinated based on initial antibodies wearing off. Not the second dose of their initial vaccine, but reactivated altogether.

 

They still need more research done to determine efficacy/dosage for younger children, and frankly if it's even beneficial to give it to them at all considering their limited risk of adverse effects from covid 19 and their limited ability to infect adults.

[PeaveyFury]

I think by the time most of us on this board are actually at the front of the line to get the covid vaccine the first time, it may be advised for the most vulnerable/med workers to get revaccinated based on initial antibodies wearing off. Not the second dose of their initial vaccine, but reactivated altogether.

 

Obviously this is certainly possible, but I think it's far to early to think this with ANY degree of certainty. I'm not an expert in the area by any stretch nor do I claim to be, but I have to think/hope that if natural post-infection 'immunity' is present for at least 90-days, that vaccine immunity would be for longer. To your point though, more to come on that, as that length of time isn't known currently.

[Machu Peach]

I think by the time most of us on this board are actually at the front of the line to get the covid vaccine the first time, it may be advised for the most vulnerable/med workers to get revaccinated based on initial antibodies wearing off. Not the second dose of their initial vaccine, but reactivated altogether.

As far as I am aware the first and second dose are an identical product. Any sort of longer term boost would very likely be just a 3rd dose of the exact same vaccine (though getting the FDA to agree to using it like this would require an additional or modified EUA). There's no immunological reason to think you'd have to prime/boost again.