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–NEXT WEEK'S CONVERSATIONS–

with International School Leaders from Around the World

TODAY'S SEMINAR REPORT:  In this week's AAIE New School Principles get together, we dove into the Community principle: "We co-create caring, engaged, and inclusive communities clearly defined by a common learning language and a commitment to shared learning values.”

 

We surfaced key conversations about how community relates to the events that are occurring in the US right now and elsewhere, and we talked about how important an understanding of both local and global communities are right now for schools. Our work is necessarily moving into the world in important ways. As always, next week we'll start talking about how we best begin to implement this principle in our day-to-day school lives. 

 

We have only five weeks left for these important conversations before we turn to discussions of the whole set of principles and what our next steps toward living them are. We'd love as many voices as possible to engage in this really powerful hour of...well...community, so please join us if you can at 8 am US ET next Friday.

NOTE:  The January 6, 2021 study result is an encouraging sign that mean immunity to the virus probably lasts for many years, and it should alleviate fears that the Covid-19 vaccine would require repeated booster shots to protect against the disease and finally get the pandemic    under control.

Covid-19 patients who recovered from the disease still have robust immunity from the coronavirus eight months after infection, according to a new study. The result is an encouraging sign that the authors interpret to mean immunity to the virus probably lasts for many years, and it should alleviate fears that the Covid-19 vaccine would require repeated booster shots to protect against the disease and finally get the pandemic under control.

 

“There was a lot of concern originally that this virus might not induce much memory,” says Shane Crotty, a researcher at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California and a coauthor of the new paper. “Instead, the immune memory looks quite good.”

 

The study, published January 6 in Science, contrasts with earlier findings that suggested Covid-19 immunity could be short-lived, putting millions who’ve already recovered at risk of reinfection. That predicament wouldn’t have been a total surprise, since infection by other coronaviruses generates antibodies that fade fairly quickly. But the new study suggests reinfection should only be a problem for a very small percentage of people who’ve developed immunity—whether through an initial infection or by vaccination. 

 

In fact, the new study does show that a small number of recovered people do not have long-lasting immunity. But vaccination ought to offset that problem by ensuring herd immunity in the larger population. 

 

The new paper studied blood samples from 185 men and women who had recovered from covid-19—most from a mild infection, although 7% were hospitalized. Each person provided at least one blood sample between six days and eight months after their initial symptoms, and 43 of the samples were taken after six months. The team that ran the investigation measured the levels of several immunological agents that work together to prevent reinfection: antibodies (which tag a pathogen for destruction by the immune system or neutralize its activity), B cells (which make antibodies), and T cells (which kill infected cells). 

 

The researchers found that antibodies in the body declined moderately after eight months, although levels varied wildly between individuals. But T-cell numbers declined only modestly, and B-cell numbers held steady and sometimes inexplicably grew. That means that despite decreases in free-flowing antibodies, the components that can restart antibody production and coordinate an attack against the coronavirus stick around at pretty high levels. Crotty adds that the same mechanisms that lead to immune memory after infection also form the basis for immunity after vaccination, so the same trends ought to hold for vaccinated people as well. 

 

And while immunity to other coronaviruses has been less than stellar, it’s worth looking at what happens in people who recovered from SARS, a close cousin of the virus that causes covid-19. A study published in August showed that T cells specific to SARS can remain in the blood for at least 17 years, bolstering hopes that Covid-19 immunity could last for decades.

 

The new study isn’t perfect. It would have been better to collect multiple blood samples from every participant. “Immunity varies from person to person, and uncommon individuals with weak immune memory still may be susceptible to reinfection,” Crotty cautions. And we can’t make any firm conclusions about Covid-19 immunity until years have passed—it’s simply too early.

 

Nonetheless, this latest result is a good indication that if the vaccination rollout goes well (a big if), we might soon be able to put the pandemic behind us.

STAYING UP-TO-DATE ON CORONAVIRUS SCIENCE

The arrival of the first coronavirus vaccines less than a year after the pandemic began blew away the previous development record of four years, which was held by the mumps vaccine. Now social scientists and public health communications pros must clear another hurdle: ensuring that enough people actually roll up their sleeves and give the shots a shot—two doses per person for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines that won emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in mid-December. Somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of adults and children must be vaccinated or have antibodies resulting from infection in order to arrive at the safe harbor known as herd immunity, where the whole community is protected.

 

After months of rising death tolls, a collapsing economy, activity restrictions and fears of falling ill, many Americans are eager to be immunized. In a nationally representative survey of 1,676 U.S. adults conducted in early December by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), 71 percent said they would definitely or probably get a vaccine for COVID-19, up from 63 percent in September. A November Pew Research Center survey showed a similar rise.

 

Health communications specialists like to say that “public health moves at the speed of trust.” Fortunately, research by Nyhan, Milkman and many others points to ways to build that trust and prompt more people to step up and get vaccinated. Surprisingly, these strategies include not directly contradicting people’s mistaken ideas about vaccine dangers and instead approaching them with empathy. That approach means acknowledging historical reasons for medical distrust among people of color and working with leaders within their communities. For Republican skeptics, it may involve messages that are less about the risks of COVID and more about giving the economy a shot in the arm.

Hesitancy to Take the COVID-19 Vaccine (USA model)

As scientists try to track the spread of a new, more infectious coronavirus variant around the world — finding more cases in the United States and elsewhere this week — they are also keeping an eye on a different mutation with potentially greater implications for how well Covid-19 vaccines work.

 

The mutation, identified in a variant first seen in South Africa and separately seen in another variant in Brazil, changes a part of the virus that your immune system’s antibodies get trained to recognize after you’ve been infected or vaccinated. Lab studies show that the change could make people’s antibodies less effective at neutralizing the virus. The mutation seems to help the virus disguise part of its signature appearance, so the pathogen might have an easier time slipping past immune protection.

 

It’s not that the mutation will render existing vaccines useless, scientists stress. The vaccines authorized so far and those in development produce what’s called a polyclonal response, generating numerous antibodies that home in on different parts of the virus. Changes to any of those target sites raise the possibility that the vaccines would be less effective, not that they won’t work at all.

–THE NEWS of COVID-19–

88,617,915 Cases Worldwide (Johns Hopkins CSSE)

The Impact of Asymptomatic Carriers

As the United States marked another grim milestone Thursday with more than 4,000 Covid-19 deaths reported in a single day, federal disease trackers said research suggests that people without symptoms transmit more than half of all cases of the novel coronavirus. The findings, which came from a model developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, demonstrate the importance of following the agency’s guidelines about wearing a mask and maintaining social distance, officials said. The emergence of a more contagious variant of the virus, first detected in the United Kingdom and discovered in eight U.S. states by Thursday, places the federal agency’s conclusion about how the virus is spreading in even starker relief. (The Washington Post)

 

11,000,000 People on Lockdown Near Beijing

Shijiazhuang, the capital of north China’s Hebei province neighboring Beijing, was locked down after the emergence of dozens of new Covid-19 cases in the country’s worst outbreak in months. Authorities in Shijiazhuang, home to 11 million, banned all people and vehicles from leaving the city, according to the state-run People’s Daily Thursday. Citywide virus tests have been rolled out, while people in certain areas with higher risks are not allowed to travel around the city, according to the report, citing Deputy Mayor Meng Xianghong. The Shijiazhuang Railway Station was temporarily closed Wednesday. As of Thursday morning, Shijiazhuang Zhengding International Airport canceled more than 300 flights. (Caixin Global)

 

Tokyo State of Emergency as of Yesterday

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga yesterday declared a coronavirus state of emergency, asking Tokyo-area bars and restaurants to close early and residents to stay home at night as he vowed to rein in rising cases in a month. The move came as the number of new cases in Tokyo jumped to a record 2,447 the same day. It was only a week ago that the daily total surpassed 1,000 for the first time. The accelerating pace has unnerved the country and made virus containment a top political priority. "I promise to turn the situation around within a month," Suga told reporters after formalizing the declaration. (Nikkei Asian Review)

  

The UK Can’t Keep Track of its Spiralling Covid-19 Case Numbers

The proportion of Covid-19 tests coming back positive is higher than any point after April, which means the UK is losing sight of where the virus is spreading.

 

Ten months after the first one, the UK is back where it started: stuck a national lockdown. Since England came out of a national lockdown on December 2, the trajectory of daily confirmed cases across the UK has morphed into a near-vertical climb. Confirmed cases topped 60,000 for the first time on January 5, and a day later the daily death toll surpassed 1,000 for the first time since April.

 

It’s obvious that the virus is spreading across the UK, but the testing numbers reveal something else worrying going on. The country is reporting a higher share of positive Covid-19 tests than at any point since April, when testing was extremely limited. This suggests that the real number of people with the virus is much higher than testing currently conveys.

 

To figure out how well (or badly) a country is keeping the virus spread under control, one metric that comes in handy is the test positivity rate. Taking a closer look at the test positivity rate in the UK may be the most efficient way of deciphering what exactly is going on, how virus transmission is happening – and whether enough testing is being done.

 

Put simply, the test positivity rate is the number of tests that come back with a positive diagnosis, divided by the total number of tests done. It can go up for two reasons: if a higher percentage of tests come back positive, or if fewer tests are being done. As opposed to the actual number of confirmed cases, the test positivity rate can be used to tell how hard one has to look to find a case.

 

The lower the number, the better. For example, South Korea currently has a test positivity rate of 1.9 per cent. According to the World Health Organization, the test positivity rate should remain below five per cent for at least 14 days for an outbreak in a specific region to be considered under control. That number right now in London is almost 28 per cent. In the rest of the UK, it was 10.8 per cent, according to the most recent numbers from December 30. (Wired, UK)

 

USA Unable to Track Virus Mutations

With no robust system to identify genetic variations of the coronavirus, experts warn that the United States is woefully ill-equipped to track a dangerous new mutant, leaving health officials blind as they try to combat the grave threat. The variant, which is now surging in Britain and burdening its hospitals with new cases, is rare for now in the United States. But it has the potential to explode in the next few weeks, putting new pressures on American hospitals, some of which are already near the breaking point. The United States has no large-scale, nationwide system for checking coronavirus genomes for new mutations, including the ones carried by the new variant. About 1.4 million people test positive for the virus each week, but researchers are only doing genome sequencing — a method that can definitively spot the new variant — on fewer than 3,000 of those weekly samples. And that work is done by a patchwork of academic, state and commercial laboratories. (via The New York Times)

 

A 10-Minute COVID Test

Chinese researchers have developed a biological sensor they say can detect the new coronavirus in 10 minutes from a throat swab, based on initial study results. The sensing chip developed by a Peking University team fits a portable, laptop-sized device, and the scientists said it detected the Sars-CoV-2 viral gene almost instantly during their testing. (South China Morning Post)

Worries Increase in Northern China

North China’s Hebei province reported 51 new locally transmitted Covid-19infections and 69 asymptomatic cases on Wednesday, after 63 infections were reported a day earlier,local health authorities said on Thursday. All but one of the new infections were recorded in Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital. The remaining case was in the neighboring city of Xingtai. In addition, two new cases from overseas were reported in Hebei on Wednesday. With 92 confirmed infections and 149 asymptomatic cases as of Wednesday, the Hebei outbreak marks China’s biggest rise in Covid-19 infections in recent months. (South China Morning Post)

 

Status of Vaccinations Around the World

(As of January 5, 2021)

–FROM JOHNS HOPKINS CSSE–

The Cultures of Dignity Resources for Supporting

Social-Emotional Wellness 

A Final Note: The AAIE COVID-19 Briefing is provided to support your leadership for the school community you serve. We encourage you to use these resources in any way, shape or form that helps you, your communications and toward furthering close relationships across your community.  – The AAIE Board