Category: Covid-19

The Terms of Reference for Ireland's inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic are expected to go to Cabinet very soon.

This will be an inquiry like no other, given that the issues at the heart of it have affected every single citizen here, young and old.

Lives were at stake - so it will be vital to learn about what Ireland got right and what we got wrong and why. There is also still a lot of trauma and hurt over those most difficult times and the hard decisions had to be made in the heat of the crisis.

For all these reasons, there will be intense interest in the terms of reference and the scope of the probe.

Transparency

There will be a demand for total openness and transparency in the inquiry proceedings. This is important because many of the decisions made by Government and informed by NPHET and others were done behind closed doors.

A key issue will be whether it will be a truly public inquiry - if it will be broadcast and will the media be invited to attend?

The public will want to be reassured, in public, that all questions are asked and answered, that all the necessary witnesses attend, that all the required documents are furnished, so that Ireland will be better prepared for any future pandemic.

This will include frontline health staff and families affected by events.

We owe nothing less to the current and future generations.

The choice of chairperson and the panel of experts on the inquiry teams will also be important to its task.

The lead department for preparing the terms of reference is the Department of the Taoiseach. It has been scoping out various options on the best type of inquiry.

Sinn Fin's health spokesperson David Cullinane has said that his party has not yet been consulted on the terms of reference. He said he wants the inquiry to establish the facts but not to be a "witch-hunt".

Stephen McMahon, Irish Patients Association, said that the inquiry must be televised. He also said that some key players who have been making statements about how the inquiry should operate should refrain from making such statements.

"When we compare well with international benchmarks, this should not minimise a key question - could we have done better?", he said.

Thankfully, the Covid-19 public health emergency is over, although Covid-19 is still in circulation here and currently at high levels, with 1,200 cases last week and 459 hospitalisations.

Deaths are still being recorded but at lower levels to the peaks.

We are at a good remove now from the unprecedented events that started here on 29 February 2020 and that distance may help in a more dispassionate, factual examination of all the issues.

Other countries like Sweden, have held their inquiries and the UK is going through a difficult full public inquiry, that may continue for years. The aim here is to avoid a UK adversarial type inquiry with its battery of lawyers and attendant high costs.

Getting the Irish inquiry model right will be crucial. An inquiry that does not have broad public and political confidence would be a significant problem.

Fact finding mission

From the Government comments to date, the aim appears to be to avoid a combative, legalistic, blame-game hearing and instead have a fact-finding inquiry. That will not be an easy task.

Whatever the format, the inquiry is likely to last a year or two or more, as there is so much ground to cover, so patience will be needed.

The inquiry must look at the public health response, the social impact of restrictions, the health impact on people physical and mental, the huge economic impact, the limitations of civil liberties through emergency measures, plus the ongoing impact in terms of Long Covid.

Government and NPHET

It will also be expected to examine the crucial relationship between the Government and the advisory body, the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) which was centre stage.

It is an often quoted phrase that Civil Servants and Advisors advise, and the Government decides - did that always happen in Ireland's experience?

The question will be asked whether the Government relied too heavily on a relatively small group of scientific and medical advisors and what measures did the political leadership take to interrogate the regular NPHET recommendations and include a wider context.

A fundamental question for the inquiry will be whether Ireland was guided by the science, at all times. We all remember so well the terms wet pubs, 9 meals, the two metre rule, cocooning and staying at home.

It will be important for the inquiry to hear from individual NPHET members who dissented from various recommendations. One member, Professor Martin Cormican has said that the Covid response "depended on fear".

He also believed that basic freedoms were excessively limited. He has particularly pointed to the ban on visits to relatives in private nursing homes and school closures as wrong.

Act fast

There was a major problem in the early stages of the pandemic with limited data about the very nature of coronavirus and how to deal with it.

There was a telling line during the pandemic from World Health Organization executive Dr Mike Ryan about the need to act fast and have no regrets. He said the greatest error is not to move. Speed trumps perfection, he added.

Covid-19 was not like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which resulted in a relatively small number of cases and deaths worldwide. Covid was a once-in-a-100-year event and nothing like it had been seen in living memory.

Ireland essentially battled with five strains of concern during the pandemic. The first coronavirus case was confirmed here in late February 2020. That is ground zero. Then came the Beta strain in December 2020.

That was followed by the Alpha (Kent variant) in February 2021, the Delta variant in April 2021 and the severe Omicron variant in December 2021.

Most restrictions were lifted in January-February 2022 and Ireland has returned to so-called normality but the after effects remain for many people. And with those, so many questions to be answered.

Modelling projections for cases and deaths was challenging, with long term forecasting especially difficult. We know so much more now about Covid-19 but the early days were frightening because so little was understood by both the experts and the public.

A recent article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) explored how inaccurate narratives, early in the pandemic about the way Covid-19 spread, shaped a flawed policy response.

There was an early belief that Covid-19 was transmitted by droplets, rather than being airborne.

In that BMJ article, Professor Trisha Greenhalgh and colleagues say that that measures aimed at an assumed droplet pathogen (handwashing, surface-cleansing, physical distancing) were over-emphasised.

The team's research found that measures to reduce airborne transmission, like improving indoor air-quality, reducing indoor crowding and high-grade respiratory protection were under-emphasised.

There were several experts here regularly pointing to the need for better air-quality measures like HEPA-filters, so that, for example, children could go to school. We know that children were badly affected by the pandemic, unable to attend school in person and all the other benefits that physical attendance with other kids provides.

PPE 'gold-dust'

Eventually, as we progressed through the pandemic, most people were wearing masks.

Early on the HSE said it was in a battle to secure PPE from outside of Ireland.

Its then CEO, Paul Reid, described PPE as like "gold dust" with competing countries willing to pay premium prices resulting in what he described as "modern day piracy".

Did the delays in securing PPE for health staff lead to avoidable infections of healthcare workers and patients?

No excess deaths

In the past week, a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) placed Ireland alongside eight other countries which it found had no excess deaths during the pandemic.

The excess death toll in the UK is estimated to be around 230,000 people. Excess deaths are the number of deaths from all causes during a period of time, above what would normally be expected.

One of the countries with no excess deaths was Sweden, which had light-touch restrictions. That is very interesting. It has been postulated that the Swedish people did what was needed voluntarily to protect themselves, without the need for heavy Government controls.

Some of the other key issues to be examined by the inquiry here will be:

Private nursing homes

How were private nursing homes treated and protected in the early stages of the pandemic? Was there timely personal protective equipment (PPE) as well as staffing supports provided?

Early in the pandemic, to free up hospital beds, patients who were asymptomatic were discharged from hospitals to nursing homes but this resulted in other vulnerable people in homes being infected. The belief that asymptomatic people did not transmit the virus proved to be mistaken.

Lockdowns

Lockdowns were one of the most controversial issues and there were significant tensions between the Government and NPHET at times. At the heart of these tensions is whether it is appropriate for any civil servant to publicly question government policy.

Were all the lockdowns necessary in terms of timing and length? Were they introduced at the correct time and were the projections of Covid cases and hospitalisations and deaths correct, in support of those restrictions.

Proportionality

People debate the question as to whether the public health response was proportionate to the risk?

In particular, were all the school closures necessary and what consideration was given to the length of these closures. For many older people, especially those living alone, Covid-19 was a terrible time of isolation and loneliness.

Mask wearing

During the early stages of the pandemic there were differing expert views about mask wearing.

Indeed, in April 2020, then minister for health Simon Harris told the Dil he did not envisage face masking being made mandatory and was awaiting advice from NPHET.

Initially, some NPHET members felt that mask wearing could give a false sense of protection and people may not wear masks properly. But as we know, eventually mask wearing became mandatory.

Similarly, there was much debate on the use and value of antigen tests. Late into the pandemic, after several reports, they were more widely used and made available by the HSE.

To date, there have been over 1.7 million PCR-confirmed cases of Covid-19 here and 9,366 people have died.

Some of those deeply affected by the pandemic will want to share their experiences and no doubt the inquiry will facilitate that.

Hospital capacity

On several occasions, the hospital system had great difficult coping and cancer screening and other services were paused.

Some healthcare was put on hold and some people delayed going to a doctor for a variety of reasons, including the fear of entering a healthcare environment.

The inquiry will also be expected to look at HSE bed capacity and ICU capacity, how this was managed during the pandemic and how the health system can better prepare for the future.

The inquiry will want to examine what plans the Department of Health had for a pandemic, prior to anyone ever hearing about coronavirus. It was known that a pandemic would come at some point and that preparedness was needed.

Vaccination

The first Covid-19 vaccination here was given in December 2020. This was the beginning of new hope.

Most people view the vaccination campaign as one of the successes and there has been significant uptake here. Doctors say that this helped save many lives as well as serious hospitalisations.

But there was also some opposition to vaccination and many questions raised about it. Was it properly explained to people who had concerns?

Social media

The inquiry may also wish to look at the role of misinformation, disinformation and official communications to the public, as well as the role of conspiracy theories and social media and how this may be better handled in the future.

There have been a number of very good books on the pandemic but the full story has yet to be told.

Indeed, it will likely be historians of the future who should be able to convey the complete picture, removed from events, especially when all State papers are available.

For now, lessons need to be learned. Collectively, Ireland needs to understand why we went through what we did and the difficult decisions that had to be made.

For all these reasons, the forthcoming inquiry is of huge national significance and one which many members of the public will want the opportunity to follow in detail, in public.

See original here:

Questions for Ireland's forthcoming Covid-19 inquiry - RTE.ie

Vegans and vegetarians may be 39% less likely to catch COVID-19, according to a recent study published in BMJ Nutrition Prevention & Health.

According to researchers, plant-based diets, which emphasize the consumption of nuts, fruits, vegetables, and plant-based proteins while avoiding meat and dairy, may offer numerous nutritional benefits.

Previous studies have also indicated that diet plays a significant role in both the likelihood of catching COVID-19 and the infection's severity. To further explore this connection, Brazilian researchers investigated the influence of dietary patterns on COVID-19 prevalence, severity, and duration among 702 elderly volunteers. Participants were questioned about their typical diets, lifestyle, medical history, and COVID-19 vaccination status.

The volunteers were divided into two dietary groups: omnivores (424 participants) and those who subscribe to plant-based diets (278 participants). Within the plant-based group, there were flexitarians or semi-vegetarians who ate meat no more than three times a week (87 participants), as well as vegetarians, including vegans (191 participants).

While there were no significant differences in gender, age, or vaccination rates between the two groups, a higher proportion of vegetarians had a higher level of education. The omnivorous group reported more medical conditions, lower physical activity levels, and a higher prevalence of overweight or obesity factors associated with an increased risk of COVID-19 infection.

Out of all participants, 330 (47%) reported contracting COVID-19. Among them, 224 (32%) experienced mild symptoms, and 106 (15%) suffered from moderate to severe symptoms. The prevalence of COVID-19 was significantly higher in the omnivorous group (52%) compared to the vegetarian groups (40%), and the omnivores were more prone to moderate or severe infections. However, there was no difference in the duration of symptoms between the two groups.

After adjusting for factors such as weight, existing medical conditions, and physical activity levels, the researchers did not find an overall difference in the severity of symptoms between the two diet groups. However, those following a primarily plant-based, vegetarian, or vegan diet had a 39% lower chance of infection compared to their omnivorous counterparts.

The researchers believe that a plant-based diet may provide more nutrients that strengthen the immune system and exhibit direct antiviral properties. However, they caution that further rigorous research is needed before definitive conclusions can be drawn about the impact of specific dietary patterns on COVID-19 infection risk.

See the original post:

Vegans are less likely to catch COVID - study - The Jerusalem Post

Coronavirus levels are high and rising throughout California amid a post-holiday spike in infections.

The uptick, documented through wastewater surveillance, is coinciding with a sharp rise in flu activity a one-two punch for what's proving to be a busy respiratory virus season.

"We are certainly in some high levels of viral transmission. Flu is one of the bigger drivers of that right now," state epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan said in a recent briefing. "We are seeing some increases in COVID-19 activity, especially often after the travel and gatherings of the holiday season."

Read more: COVID-19 intensifies across California, with the worst probably still to come

Around Christmas, flu was responsible for 4% of weekly emergency room visits statewide, up from about 1% a month earlier. COVID-19 was responsible for about 2%, up from about 1%.

For the week that ended Dec. 30 in Los Angeles County, the wastewater concentration of SARS-CoV-2 the virus that causes COVID-19 reached 60% of last winter's peak, up from the prior week's reading of 49%.

Statewide, the rates at which tests for COVID-19 and flu are coming back positive continue to rise. California continues to show "very high" flu-like activity, which includes non-flu illnesses such as COVID-19, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While COVID-19 is no longer exerting the dangerous and devastating pressure seen earlier in the pandemic, it has not been defanged. Officials from the World Health Organization noted that 10,000 deaths were reported globally from COVID-19 in December, based on data from fewer than 50 countries, mostly in the Americas and Europe.

"Although 10,000 deaths a month is far less than the peak of the pandemic, this level of preventable death is not acceptable," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, said at a recent briefing. "We continue to call on individuals to be vaccinated, to test, to wear masks where needed and to ensure crowded indoor spaces are well ventilated."

Read more: Nearly 10,000 COVID deaths reported globally last month, fueled by holiday gatherings and new variant

The CDC reported more than 6,000 COVID-19 deaths nationally in December, a toll that is expected to rise.

Health officials noted that many deaths could have been avoided with higher rates of vaccination.

"The vaccines may not stop you being infected, but the vaccines are certainly reducing significantly your chance of being hospitalized or dying," Dr. Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO's health emergencies program, said at the briefing. "And it really means that those people in vulnerable age groups with underlying conditions ... taking the opportunity to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 and against influenza is the best investment you can make."

Uptake in COVID and flu vaccinations has been lackluster. Statewide, 31% of residents age 65 and older have received the updated COVID-19 vaccination since September, Pan said.

At nursing homes in California that report such data, 33% of residents and 10% of staff have received the updated COVID-19 vaccines well below typical uptake of the flu shot, which is about 50%.

"This is where we see outbreaks. This is where we have the most deaths and, certainly, the most hospitalizations," Pan said.

Read more: With COVID on the rise, your at-home test may be taking longer to show a positive result

California is doing worse than other states in terms of getting residents of nursing homes vaccinated against not only COVID-19, but flu and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, Pan said.

However, health officials are closely watching to see whether there are early indications that the winter respiratory viral season may be plateauing.

In California, there were 3,716 new coronavirus-positive hospitalizations for the week to Jan. 6, versus the prior week's 3,720, which was the highest tally this winter, according to CDC data.

By contrast, last winter peaked at 5,260 coronavirus-positive hospitalizations for the week that ended Dec. 31, 2022. That was well shy of the heights seen during the devastating first two winters of the pandemic, when weekly hospital admissions topped out at more than 14,600.

Read more: When should I get vaccinated for COVID-19? Flu? RSV?

Nationwide, coronavirus-positive hospitalizations are still rising. There were 35,801 for the week that ended Jan. 6, up 3% from the prior week. Last winter's peak was 44,545, during the final week of 2022.

It's noteworthy that while national wastewater data suggest that this winter may be spawning the most coronavirus infections in any given week since the first Omicron wave in the winter of 2021-22, hospitalizations have remained lower than in any winter of the COVID-19 era.

"Is this ... that we're actually seeing more mild infection in people that are not getting tested, or reporting tests or seeking healthcare? Or are there are other reasons is there more shedding of the currently circulating variants?" Pan said.

Hospitalizations remain elevated in L.A. County, public health officials say. But on Friday, the county moved out of the "medium" COVID-19 hospitalization level and back into "low," according to the CDC. Orange County is still at medium.

The waning impact of COVID-19 has prompted public health officials for both California and L.A. County to relax guidance on isolation time after infection.

Read more: Everyone in California seems to be sick with respiratory illness. Here's why

"Previous isolation recommendations were implemented to reduce the spread of a virus to which the population had little immunity and had led to large numbers of hospitalizations and deaths that overwhelmed our healthcare systems during the pandemic," the California Department of Public Health said in a statement Tuesday. "We are now at a different point in time with reduced impacts from COVID-19 compared to prior years, due to broad immunity from vaccination and/or natural infection and readily available treatments for infected people."

State and L.A. County officials say those who test positive need to isolate and stay home only while they have symptoms; they can end isolation once their symptoms are mild and improving and when they haven't had a fever for 24 hours without using medication. Those who test positive yet are asymptomatic need not stay home, according to the guidance.

Previous guidance stated that those infected should stay home for at least five days.

Read more: Sick with COVID and the flu: Double infections hit California hard

Anyone with COVID-19 should wear a mask around others for 10 days after the beginning of symptoms or, if asymptomatic, after first testing positive. Infected people can stop masking sooner if they test negative on two consecutive rapid tests taken at least one day apart.

Still, anyone who has COVID-19 should stay away from people at higher risk for severe illness for 10 days, officials say. They should speak with a healthcare provider as soon as possible to learn whether they may be eligible for treatment, such as a prescription for Paxlovid or other antiviral medication.

The CDC, which most recently updated its guidance last spring, still recommends isolating for at least five days following the onset of symptoms or your first positive test if you have no symptoms.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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One-two punch of COVID and flu is hitting L.A. County hard - Yahoo News

Cases of COVID-19 and flu have risen sharply in Georgia since the Christmas holidays, State Epidemiologist Dr. Cherie Drenzek reported Tuesday.

COVID cases have increased by about 50% since last week, hospitalizations are up 75%, and deaths have risen by 10%, Drenzek told members of the Georgia Board of Public Health. However, cases still remain well below levels experienced during the pandemic, she said.

Cases involving a new COVID variant - JN.1 - that surfaced recently have jumped 62% in the last month, Drenzek said. It is not thought to be as severe as some previous variants, she said.

"The most recent booster is thought to provide protection," she said.

Drenzek said cases of flu in Georgia have more than doubled during the last month, accounting for more than 10% of all health-care visits. Hospitalizations have increased 50% since last week, while flu has caused 10 deaths in Georgia, she said.

Most of the flu cases involve the H1N1 strain, which typically peaks in January, she said.

The good news is that cases of RSV, another respiratory virus the public health agency tracks, have declined dramatically since an October peak, Drenzek said. Severe outcomes from RSV are most likely in children from birth to 6 months of age, while the RSV vaccine is targeted primarily for infants and pregnant women.

Drenzek said it's not too late for Georgians to get the latest COVID booster or a flu shot, despite the lateness of respiratory illness season.

"Everyone over the age of 6 months should have a flu vaccine," she said.

Read more here:

COVID, flu up sharply in Georgia - Grice Connect

New York and other states in the Northeast had the highest rates of COVID-19 test positivity in the week in the week through January 6, according to the latest data.

Some 15.8 percent of COVID-19 tests in the U.S. were positive that week, up slightly from the week before, according to the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The CDC's map shows New Jersey, along with Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, also had higher test positivity than anywhere else in the country, with 15.8 percent of tests coming back positive in the first week of 2024.

They were followed by Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine and Connecticut, with test positivity rates of15.5 percent.

Meanwhile, California, the most populous state in the country, was among those with the lowest test positivity rate. California, Nevada, Hawaii and Arizona all had 8.3 percent test positivity rates.

Four percent of deaths were due to COVID-19 in the week through January 6, a 14.3 percent increase from the previous seven days, the CDC said.

There were 35,801 hospitalizations due to COVID-19 in the week through January 6, up 3.2 percent on the previous week. Hospitalizations due to the virus are considered low in about half the country, according to the CDC.

The CDC on Friday said that new hospital admissions for COVID-19 were up by more than 50 percent in December, while new hospital admissions for flu more than doubled from the end of November to the end of December. "These increases are typical for this time of year, and short-term forecasts suggest elevated numbers of hospital admissions will continue," the agency said.

More hospitals in the U.S. are requiring people to wear masks as heath officials face a second winter season where COVID-19, flu and other respiratory syncytial viruses (RSV) have been circulating simultaneously.

New York City instituted a mask mandate for the city's 11 public hospitals in December, and similar measures were ordered at some hospitals in other states, including California and Massachusetts.

COVID-19 is continuing to cause more hospitalizations and deaths than flu and RSV combined, the CDC said.

The JN.1 variant is now the most prominent in the world, but the CDC has said that while this variant may spread easier or be better at evading our immune systems, there is no evidence that its effects are more severe than other recent variants.

"There is no data that would indicate JN.1 infection produces different symptoms from other variants," a spokesperson for the CDC told Newsweek earlier in January. "In general, symptoms of COVID-19 tend to be wide-ranging with all variants."

An updated COVID vaccine formula would protect against the JN.1 variant, the spokesperson said, and "existing vaccines, tests, and treatments still work well against JN.1."

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

See the article here:

COVID Map Shows 8 States With Higher Positive Cases - Newsweek

Stacy and Michael on their wedding day.

When Covid-19 hit, the wedding industry took a deep financial hit because most weddings had to be cancelled or postponed to due to safety regulations. However, many other couples continued with their weddings, despite the lockdown.

This couple had to make adjustments and plan parts of the wedding via WhatsApp.

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For better or worse: Covid-19 couldn't stop this couple from tying the knot | Life - News24

A new Covid-19 variant has exploded in recent weeks to become the world's most dominant strain, despite accounting for just 4% of cases in early November.

First detected in France and the US, the JN.1 strain also referred to as "Juno" is spreading rapidly in the UK. Over the past month, the new variant has accounted for 47.5% of all UK Covid cases.The most recent data suggests the figure has risen to 65%.

Experts suspect that "socialising over the Christmas and New Year period has helped fuel the rise of the variant", said the Daily Mirror.

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Juno was "first tracked as part of the BA.2.86 'Pirola' strain", said The Independent, but has now been classified as a sub-variant by the World Health Organization (WHO), and a "variant of interest in its own right". Juno differs from Pirola by just a single spike protein.

Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick University, told the Mirror: "The rapid rise of infections with the JN.1 variant in the UK and across the world is yet another reminder that the pandemic is far from over. JN.1 is one of the most immune-evading variants to date and is likely to be the lineage from which new variants will evolve."

Both the Pirola and Juno strains descended from Omicron, the last Covid strain to have been issued a Greek letter by the WHO. In late 2021, Omicron came "flying in out of left field", said Fortune. It was "so highly mutated, so drastically different that it changed the trajectory of the Covid-19 pandemic", with Covid and Omicron becoming "all but synonymous", the site said.

Now Juno has achieved similar global dominance, but whether WHO will recognise it with an official Greek letter "remains to be seen", Fortune added.

Juno appears to be "especially adept at infecting those who have been vaccinated or previously infected", said The Washington Post. As well as experiencing huge growth in the UK, it is also the fastest growing variant in the United States.

While highly contagious, Juno "is not thought to be any more severe than other recent Covid variants", said the i news site. However, reduced levels of vaccinations in the past two years "have increased the risk of serious symptoms when people become infected", the paper added.

Although Covid "no longer poses the same threat as it did when it burst onto the scene in early 2020, thousands are currently in hospital with the virus every day", Mail Online said.

And the latest rise in infections comes as "NHS facilities are already juggling with a spike in flu and other seasonal bugs", the site added.

Covid-19 "is still causing lasting personal and economic damage", said Alice Thomson in The Times.Rishi Sunak recently advised the UK to "stick with the plan", but "there is no pandemic plan any more", she said. The government has gone from "locking down the entire country to ignoring the situation".

Vaccination remains the best way to protect yourself from the latest strains, "but it isn't a 100 per cent guarantee", said the Daily Record.

Doctors have encouraged anyone who is eligible for a vaccine booster to get one if they haven't already done so. Dr Heidi Zapata, from Yale Medicine, said: "I would advise getting your updated vaccine, consider masking in certain situations, and if you get sick, please test for Covid because you can get medicine to treat it."

Further to that, the same approaches to minimising exposure apply to the current variants. People should be "washing their hands regularly, as well as wearing masks in public spaces and ventilating their rooms correctly", the Daily Record said.

Here is the original post:

Covid-19: what to know about UK's new Juno and Pirola variants - The Week

Opinion

By Paul Vallas

Published Jan. 13, 2024, 3:00 p.m. ET

Despite undeniable evidence that they worked against returning students to classrooms during the Covid pandemic, the American Federation of Teachers claims they encouraged in-class learning. They did not -- and American students suffered because of this. Christopher Sadowski

After holding schools hostage during the heights of the pandemic, the American Federation of Teachers is now trying to rewrite history, desperately scrambling to deflect blame for the alarming decline in educational standards.

The Programme for International Student Assessment recently released a report that found US student test scores are down 13 points compared to where they were in 2018. Declines in math were among the lowest ever measured.

Instead of addressing students declining ability to compete in a global marketplace and committing to getting them back on track, AFT President Randi Weingarten shamelessly asserted a total lie that in-person learning is where kids do best, which is why educators and their unions worked so hard to reopen US schools for safe in-person learning beginning back in April 2020.

In what universe did the national teacher unions work tirelessly to reopen schools?

This is the teachers union leaderships dubious playbook at its best. By downplaying the role teachers unions played in keeping students at home, they deny the hurt they caused so many families, struggling students, and teachers who wanted more for their classrooms.

In the fall of 2020, Weingarten labeled attempts to reopen schools as reckless, callous, cruel and even threatened a strike, ominously declaring nothing is off the table.

The Chicago Teachers Union unabashedly joined the chorus, attributing the push to reopen schools to sexism, racism and misogyny. They even walked out for five days in 2022 and threatened to walk out in 2021 to protest in-person learning. How convenient for them to now create an alternate history.

The unions purported concern for the safety of the school community contradicts their actions in keeping schools close. The unions ignored the devastating effects on academic, social, and physical health from remote learning, which disproportionately harmed poor children and the children of color they claimed to champion.

The COVID-19 crisis laid bare the inadequacies of the traditional public education system as hindered by bureaucracy, outdated traditions, collective bargaining agreements, and unwarranted union interference. There is a reason US reading scores have been plummeting since 2018 and math scores have declined since peaking in 2009 on the global assessment.

Rather than adapting and innovating in real time, traditional education institutions failed miserably. They shamelessly exploited the COVID pandemic, securing an unprecedented $190 billion-plus from the federal government for school district spending. In Chicago, while school campuses were fully or partially closed for 17 months, they continued collecting local school property taxes and state aid.

Weingarten, AFT, and other teachers unions across the nation havent stopped wreaking havoc since schools reopened.

Theyve advocated for a retreat from high-stakes testing, jeopardizing educational standards and opportunities for students. Chicago Public Schools, mirroring this trend, is transitioning to a soft scoring and assessment system that diminishes the focus on student outcomes, echoing a disturbing return to the era of inflated grades, social promotion, and the resulting student decline such policies inevitably deliver.

More recently, teachers unions have worked overtime to oppose school choice, including public school choice and charter schools. Weingarten has gone as far as to compare school choice advocates to segregationists.

Her colleague, Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis-Gates, characterized demands for greater school choice as the encroachment of fascists, all while sending her child to a private Catholic school.

Teacher unions have reason to fear competition from charter and private schools. Stanfords Center for Research on Education Outcomes tracked charter school outcomes over 15 years, tracking some 2 million charter students nationally, to conclude: Charter schools produce superior student gains despite enrolling a more challenging student population. Moreover, Black and Hispanic students in charter schools advance more than their [traditional public school] peers by large margins in both math and reading.

If American students are to compete on a global scale, the evidence is pointing more and more toward private and charter schools leading the way.

Instead of rising to the challenge, teachers unions have resorted to squashing their threats and changing the rules. Putting their own needs first, they demonstrate a blatant disregard for the well-being and prospects of the very students they claim to champion.

In the face of the damning national and international report cards, Weingarten and the teachers unions find themselves with a lot of explaining to do. Their obstinate refusal to acknowledge systemic COVID-19 failures and their relentless efforts to deflect blame only compound the crisis facing the education system.

The time for accountability and genuine commitment to students well-being is long overdue.

Paul Vallas is a policy advisor for the Illinois Policy Institute. He ran for Chicago mayor in 2023 and was previously budget director for the city and CEO of Chicago Public Schools.

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Teachers' unions should stop claiming credit for COVID classroom wins - New York Post

The curves on some COVID-19 graphs are looking quite steep, again.

Reported levels of the virus in U.S. wastewater are higher than they have been since the first omicron wave, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though severe outcomes still remain rarer than in earlier pandemic winters.

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We are seeing rates are going up across the country, said Amy Kirby, program lead for the CDCs National Wastewater Surveillance System. The program now categorizes every state with available data at high or very high viral activity.

The surge might reach its peak this week or soon after, modelers predict, with high levels of transmission expected for at least another month beyond that.

Hospitalizations and deaths have remained far lower than in previous years. There were around 35,000 hospitalizations reported in the last week of December down from 44,000 a year earlier and 1,600 weekly deaths as of early December, down from 3,000. (At the same time in 2020, there were around 100,000 hospitalizations and 20,000 deaths each week.)

Many of the metrics used early in the pandemic have become much less useful indicators of how widely the virus is spreading, especially since federal officials stopped more comprehensive data tracking efforts when they declared an end to the public health emergency last spring. Higher population-wide immunity has meant fewer hospitalizations even with high virus spread, and the sharp decline of COVID test results reported to authorities has made case counts far less relevant.

Wastewater testing remains one of the few reliable instruments still available to monitor the virus. It can signal the start of a surge before hospitalizations begin to rise, and it includes even people who dont know they have COVID. For many who remain at higher risk from the virus like those who are older, immunocompromised or already have a serious illness its become a crucial tool helping them understand when to be particularly careful.

But its an imperfect metric, useful primarily for identifying if theres an acceleration of virus spread, not for telling you exactly how much virus is circulating.

The data is often reported as normalized viral copies per milliliter or per gram, a number that is nearly impossible to translate into precise case counts, experts say. Its also hard to know how comparable two different surges are: A peak in the data may not mean exactly the same thing this year as it did last year.

Thats why many scientists who study the data will say only that it shows the nation is in the middle of a large wave, not whether the surge this winter is bigger than previous ones.

Wastewater testing works at all because everybody poops, said David OConnor, a virus expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Samples of wastewater are captured at or on the way to treatment plants and tested for viral RNA in a lab. But no two samples are perfectly comparable. The amount of RNA in the sample will fluctuate depending on many factors, including the local population at any given time think of a holiday influx into Miami or a college town emptying out for summer and how much other material, such as industrial waste, is in the system.

What experts really want to know, said Marisa Eisenberg, a professor at the University of Michigan who runs a wastewater monitoring lab for five sites, is how much virus there is relative to the number of people around the wastewater equivalent of the per capita case count.

Some labs normalize the data that is, they adjust the denominator by looking at the number of gallons flowing through the plant, Eisenberg said. But many sites use something called pepper mild mottle virus, a virus that infects pepper plants.

People have studied this in human sewage and found we shed pretty consistent levels of this pepper virus, she said. So thats a measurement of how many people went to the bathroom in the sewer shed today.

Once Eisenbergs team normalizes the results, it sends data to the state and to the CDC, which collects information from sites across the country that together account for about 40% of the U.S. population.

The CDC then aggregates its data and publishes state, regional and national trends. (Two companies that analyze wastewater, Verily Life Sciences and Biobot Analytics, also aggregate data from hundreds of sites and offer national and local pictures of virus spread.)

But those nationwide estimates can be tricky.

The sample population the CDC looks at largely excludes people with septic tanks and cities with no wastewater testing. There can be data lapses, as when the CDC switched contractors last year. Existing sites can stop testing, and new sites start up, as the network changes and expands.

And while Biobot and Verily can use the same methodology and normalization across all their sites, the CDC has to determine trends from data that arrives from different sites with a variety of methodologies.

Finally, there are changes to the virus itself that could make comparisons over time more difficult. Scientists who track those changes say there are hints that this latest variant, JN.1, may be able to better replicate in the gut.

Its still just a hypothesis, OConnor said. But its possible the virus is a little more cozy in the gut than it used to be, he said. If the hypothesis proves correct, it could mean that infected people shed more viral copies than they used to. In the wastewater data, the same number of infections could look like a lot more COVID.

All of that together creates significant uncertainty about how comparable the data is from year to year.

Michael Mina, a public health researcher and chief science officer for eMed, estimates the real amount of COVID spreading could be quite a bit higher or lower than this time last year. But theres no doubt that theres a lot of virus, he said. And far more now than just a few months ago.

Many experts who study this data recommend dropping any notion of precision and just squinting a little at the lines recent trajectory. And look at your citys wastewater if possible, since data for a single site tends to be more reliable over time than a national estimate.

If you have vulnerable people in your community or family, you want to be particularly aware when cases are going up, and take more precautions, Mina said. And when cases are going down or at a lull, relax those precautions.

Those precautions include wearing a high-quality mask, getting vaccinated, testing and staying home if sick and if someone at high risk is infected, taking Paxlovid.

Even in this new pandemic phase, people are still dying and can still get long COVID, said Maria Van Kerkhove, the technical lead on COVID for the World Health Organization. While the crisis of COVID is over, the threat is not, she said.

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We Are in a Big COVID Wave. But Just How Big? - Yahoo News

GENEVA The head of the U.N. health agency said Wednesday holiday gatherings and the spread of the most prominent variant globally led to increased transmission of COVID-19 last month.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said nearly 10,000 deaths were reported in December, while hospital admissions during the month jumped 42% in nearly 50 countriesmostly in Europe and the Americasthat shared such trend information.

"Although 10,000 deaths a month is far less than the peak of the pandemic, this level of preventable deaths is not acceptable," the World Health Organization director-general told reporters from its headquarters in Geneva.

He said it was certain that cases were on the rise in other places that haven't been reporting, calling on governments to keep up surveillance and provide continued access to treatments and vaccines.

MORE: Is It Dangerous to Keep Getting COVID-19?

Tedros said the JN.1 variant was now the most prominent in the world. It is an Omicron variant, so current vaccines should still provide some protection.

Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead at WHO for COVID-19, cited an increase in respiratory diseases across the globe due to the coronavirus but also flu, rhinovirus and pneumonia.

We expect those trends to continue into January through the winter months in the northern hemisphere, she said, while noting increases in COVID-19 in the southern hemispherewhere it's now summer.

While bouts of coughs, sniffling, fever, and fatigue in the winter are nothing new, Van Kerkhove said this year in particular, "we are seeing co-circulation of many different types of pathogens.

WHO officials recommend that people get vaccinated when possible, wear masks, and make sure indoor areas are well ventilated.

The vaccines may not stop you being infected, but the vaccines are certainly reducing significantly your chance of being hospitalized or dying, said Dr. Michael Ryan, head of emergencies at WHO.

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Holiday Gatherings and a New Variant Are Fueling COVID-19 Deaths, WHO Says - TIME