Safety lasagna, pregnancy updates, words of wisdom from Emily
We're pulling from ParentData today to give you the latest
Happy Friday! Today’s a bit of potpourri as we pull from a few different issues of Emily Oster’s newsletter, ParentData, to give you the latest, most relevant COVID updates.
First up…
School Safety
If you’re subscribed to ParentData, you’ll have seen Emily’s “safety lasagna” analogy explaining the objectives of school safety policies. But you’ll have yet to see our adorable graphics summarizing the concept!
COVID-19 School Dashboard
Hot off the press! You may recall this being mentioned in some of our previous issues—the dashboard launched on Wednesday and is wicked cool if we do say so ourselves. The homepage has handy links to the FAQ and enrollment pages if you(r schools) want to participate in the tracking effort.
COVID & Pregnancy: In Brief
Directly from ParentData because we know this is a topic of interest to many of you!
Last week there was significant coverage of two new reports on COVID-19 in pregnant women. Both reports (see them here and here) focus on pregnant women with COVID-19 who were hospitalized (either for COVID-19 related reasons or for labor and delivery). The authors find that some pregnant women are hospitalized with severe illness, and they find some serious complications, including a small number of stillbirths and a (possibly) higher rate of preterm birth.
These papers, along with everything else we know, certainly suggest that pregnant women should take precautions around COVID-19, as we all should. This includes mask wearing and hand washing. They also make clear that COVID-19 illness can be very serious in pregnant women and can result in pregnancy complications. This is true for many illnesses.
What this evidence really cannot speak to is whether pregnant women are more likely to have serious COVID-19 than non-pregnant women (they are more likely to be hospitalized in general in these data, but most of these hospitalizations are for labor and delivery). They also cannot speak to whether COVID-19 is more common in pregnant women than non-pregnant. Overall, I’m afraid this doesn’t add much to what we know in this area. As usual, I’m a bit frustrated with the outsize attention given to non-new evidence, but I’ll leave this for now.
Words of Wisdom
We wanted to include this bit because we get a lot of questions similar to the following:
Our kid is in a small home day care. Because the pod is so small, is there any reason to wear masks?
or…
The science teacher in my kids school goes around between the classrooms and teaches. Doesn’t this ruin the pod system?
or…
What on earth is the point of temperature checking?
These questions happen to be related to safety precautions in schools, but we get specific ones like this all the time (which are incredibly valid and important—we appreciate everyone who sends them in!).
But because we’re unable to respond to every question individually, we’ll leave you today with some words of wisdom from Emily:
If you are a regular reader here [on ParentData], you will probably recognize the fact that I have really only one insight. Namely, that we should not look at questions like this individually, but step back to the bigger picture and develop a framework for answering them. (Perhaps someday I will have additional insights, but today is not that day).
Note: the aforementioned safety lasagna is one such framework, and we’d encourage you to develop your own to think through such questions.
What’s up next?
You may have noticed that we’ve been switching up the format of the newsletter. We have more developments coming! Stay tuned in the next few weeks for some very exciting new issues—we think you’ll like what we have in store.
Please feel free to share your thoughts, questions, and concerns — you can get a hold of us via email, Twitter, Instagram, and the site itself.