I am super interested in seeing how schools do after Spring Break. My neighbor just told me that her 2 college aged daughters are both going on break with groups of friends. If they are doing it, I suspect a LOT of people at their school are (a large, state flagship). Spring Break is technically cancelled but since classes are remote the kids are just traveling and doing their courses from wherever they are.
Do you know which counties?
An encouraging UK study about transmission. 300,000 health care workers and their households where followed since the vaccine was first introduced there.
People who lived with staff who had received both doses where 54% less likely to catch Covid. The others could have caught it from another source, not necessarily the vaccined person so 54% is probably a underestimate.
So hopefully this spring break wonât be as big as a â super spreaderâ as last year.
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My son just sent a photo from last night that you would swear was from the pre-Covid days. It was a refreshing glimpse into the potential possibilities on college campuses next fall. Itâs a picture of 12 students, smiling ear to ear, maskless, arms around one another outside on a deck. Every student in the photo received their second dose of Moderna a month ago. They looked so happy. They deserve this. Everyone deserves this.
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Pretty much everyone is waiting for this (because of the vaccine shortage and resulting rationing).
Basically, there are two points in time that people are waiting for:
- When they and the people they interact with are all fully vaccinated: then they can have private gatherings.
- When everyone has had the chance to get fully vaccinated: then more general reopening is likely.
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Agreed! Theyâre obviously in a very unique position for their ages. It was just so nice to see.
Me too! D said a lot of kids traveled over spring break even though the school scheduled a shortened midweek break with no adjoining weekends. Like you said, classes are remote so kids just check in from wherever they are. And at Dâs school, if students miss their scheduled asymptomatic test then they could receive a âredâ pass which prohibits them from accessing campus buildings like their dorm. It seems harsh but the universityâs message to students about no unnecessary travel during the semester was very clear.
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Interesting. This particular school tests twice a week. Wonder what happens if you miss? At my Dâs school they test weekly and if you miss, you are quarantined until you test. I actually didnât know that was the consequence but D said last night her best friend forgot to schedule her test and got a notice she was quarantined. I assume it will be for the weekend until testing starts again Monday unless there are weekend options.
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At my Dâs school if you miss a mass testing event youâre put on quarantine and fined- I donât know how much the fine is though.
This is good news! But I think an even better assessment was done in Israel with the Pfizer vaccine, and it found 94% effectiveness against asymptomatic infection (hallelujah),the news came out this week, so yes itâs clear people who are vaccinated are largely NOT catching the virus, not even asymptomatically, so it appears concerns about vaccinated people being potential silent spreaders were overblown and this is fantastic news!! Keep the vaccines rolling! It is hard to imagine schools not returning to (near) normal in the fall. (There have been many indications about transmission being extremely limited in vaccinated people; including Moderna. I will say I remain baffled that they didnât bother to bake this analysis into the original clinical trialsâŠthe cost and effort of testing the participants for covid after vaccination seems incredibly trivial compared to how valuable this information is, and I think itâs a shame it took several extra months to relieve concern about it). As it is we are still piecing together bits of info from different analyses, so while itâs pretty obvious that transmission is largely inhibited, we donât have a single âdefinitiveâ answer to point to, which will mean pessimists will continue to say âwe donât knowâ even though we really do. Iâd love to hear the CEOs of Pfizer/Moderna/JJ/AZ etc explain why they didnât choose to test participants. Rant over; itâs all sunny newsâŠ
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Have to agree with this â not testing the original vaccine trial groups for asymptomatic infections meant that very useful information about vaccine effects was not available initially.
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In order to collect data about asymptomatic infection in the vaccine trials, every participant in the trial would need to be tested every fourth day or so. Thatâs 30-45,000 people so itâs a lot of tests. Very expensive, and there might be issues with compliance. I would not want to be swabbed that often for months.
Plus, this still would not give us the answer to whether vaccinated people with asymptomatic infections can transmit. (The consensus was that vaccinated people would likely still get asymptomatic infections.) You could measure viral load and extrapolate infectiousness from that, or you could contact trace and test contactsâŠAll this would need to be done for the placebo group also, to keep the trial double blind and randomized.
Iâm glad they focused on:
- Is it safe?
- Will it keep people out of the hospital, and keep them alive?
Those were the crucial questions, and time was of the essence.
They were going to do a big trial on college campuses this spring to see whether vaccinated people could infect their contacts, but they didnât get the funding. If everyone who wants to be is vaccinated, then it isnât essential to know whether vaccinated people can infect the unvaccinated.
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I agree the most important question for them to answer was if the vaccines could safely prevent serious symptomatic cases, but I also think it would be very valuable to have quickly determined if vaccinated people can infect unvaccinated. During the transition phase before the pandemic hopefully ends, it leaves a lot unclear about how vaccinated people can behave, although I think we are piecing together in a less satisfying way that transmission is seriously blunted. I wonder if its true that to answer this secondary question they would have had to test their full clinical trial participant set, or if they could have picked a smaller subset, say 5,000 people, for just this question, and still get a statistically useful answer. I donât think itâs too onerous to ask people to swab once or twice a week; college kids have been doing it 3x a week and itâs so not a big deal. They could have done it through the mail like Pixel, so the participants wouldnât have to go somewhere inconvenient. And would they have really had to test twice a week anyway? Wouldnât it still be useful if you tested a group of 5,000 vaccinated and 5,000 placebo participants once a week or every two weeks, for a couple of months, and compare the number of positive tests? You might miss some short-lived cases, but wouldnât it still be useful to know that the vaccinated group had only X positive tests when tested every other Friday, and the placebo group had Y positive tests? That wouldnât tell you exactly that vaccinated people cannot test positive, but would show the reduction in positive cases perhaps? Anyway, it wasnât done but it baffles and irks me nonetheless! I would have loved to see the results of the college kid study you mentioned was considered; I wonder who the funding was requested of and who denied it? The NIH? The pharmaceutical companies? WHO? Other? Oh well, we at least are learning from the real life experience in the locations with high vaccination rates, and I guess that will have to satisfy!!
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Duke stay-in-place order:
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Yes, I agree that it would be nice to have more data on whether vaccinated people transmit and at what level. The college study was proposed by a network of researchers organized by NIAID (of the NIH). They were prepared to study 20,000 students at 20 different universities. Part of the problem was that they didnât get federal funding, but they were also worried about getting everything up and running in time for spring semester, and they were concerned that university healthcare workers were already overwhelmed by Covid on campus and wouldnât have the extra time and energy needed to manage a clinical trial. Hereâs an article about it: Covid-19 Vaccine Study on Preventing Transmission Is Stalled - WSJ
I would still rather they put that money and effort into getting more vaccines into more arms more quickly. I really hope weâre going to see all the college kids vaccinated before they leave campus in May.
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The move is designed to âcontain the rapidly escalating number of COVID cases among Duke undergraduates, which is principally driven by students attending recruitment parties for selective living groups,â the administrators wrote.
More than 180 students over the past week have been in isolation for a positive test, and 200 students are in quarantine due to contact tracing.
Duke delayed in person rush until the Fall (itâs usually held second semester). In mid-February, the majority of fraternities disaffiliated with the university with support of their nationals because they couldnât possibly not have their rush events. And here is the result. The schoolâs warnings earlier this week stated that they were very concerned with students attending these events who were not forthcoming with contact tracing protocol and also lying on their symptom monitoring responses trying to evade detection. My kid is so irritated with the entitled attitude of the students that caused thisâŠactions of a small % affect the entire school community.
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Why didnât they just hold their parties outside? Duke is hardly lacking in open spaces. I am lucky to live on the coast near the beach and our local authorities encourage people to meet outside since Covid is less transmissible in open air.
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Because there are entitled people everywhere. Some people feel they are entitled to have large, maskless, indoor parties. Itâs really that simple. The state of NC limits gatherings outside to 50 people. It would have been difficult for them to hold their huge parties outside and not be noticed.
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Itâs unfortunate about these recents events at Duke but overall I have been very impressed in how the adminstration and students have handled CV-19 this past school year.
Hoping this is the last âhiccupâ before things get back to relative normalcy this summer and certainly by fall.
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My D24 returned to in-person school today for the first time in a year. We carpooled with my next door neighbor (whose kids have been in school for a few weeks). By 9:30 I got a phone call from the mom that she was called to pick her daughter (D24âs bff) from school as she had been exposed to someone in class last Thursday.
I donât see this experiment lasting too longâŠ
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