Back to…

This week, I took my kids to Staples to do our back-to-school shopping. No, they’re not going back to in-person school. But bypassing the fresh-start ritual of picking up new three-ring binders, pristine tab divider inserts, and fresh reams of college-ruled paper felt wrong to all of us… that was until we found ourselves standing in the middle of the massive-and-nearly-empty store, debating whether or not there would be any papers to sort in the first place. I mean, it’s not like teachers are handing anything out this year, said one of my kids. Well, maybe we’ll be at school next month, so don’t we need supplies just in case? the other answered and asked at the same time. We stood in the binder aisle for another five minutes trying to figure out the mechanics of ping-ponging between online and in-person school; we did it again when we hit the highlighter aisle. By the time we reached the backpack section, which usually fills what feels like miles of territory but this year amounted to a few feet at most, we acknowledged we had no answers. The miles and miles of backpacks, by the way, had been given over to masks, wipes, and signage about how to maintain proper distance or reminding people to close the lid before flushing.

It is downright surreal to flip-flop between an imagined life of Zoom school and an alternate reality of in-person. None of us in my family had really gone beyond the human connection piece until we stood in Staples. But how kids learn – down to the nitty gritty of where they take notes and who prefers to underline versus annotate versus doodle – changes dramatically based upon setting. We are embarking on a school year when our kids will need to become adaptable in both big ways and small. Yes, they need those buzzy qualities of grit and resilience, but they also need a new 2020 skill: adaptability. The ones who can manage varying degrees of whiplash across all corners of life are the most likely to emerge out the other end of all of this most whole.

The whiplash – and its antidote of adaptation – extends well beyond constantly shifting guidelines about being at school/at home. Newspapers and journals bring it too, with a daily onslaught of COVID content contradicting articles published just weeks – or even days – earlier. I have posted this video before, but if you haven’t watched it (or even if you have!), F. Perry Wilson explains why the more studies that are done, the higher the likelihood that a few of them will land in opposition to much of the preexisting research, and some will reach wrong conclusions altogether. Take 4 minutes to watch his explanation before trying to make sense of this week’s links, and I promise you will feel a little less dizzy when you are done.

Let’s start with the latest headlines that don’t bode well, like this one: Coronavirus forces UNC to abandon in-person classes after one week.

And this one, too: FDA flags accuracy issue with widely used coronavirus test.

But on the brighter side, there’s actually some fairly promising news this week: Scientists see signs of lasting immunity to COVID-19, even after mild infections. This runs counter to earlier research (and more notably, headlines) that coronavirus antibodies aren’t churned out for the long haul, and in some cases aren’t churned out at all.

Another up note: FDA issues Emergency Use Authorization for SalivaDirect, a saliva-based coronavirus test that doesn’t rely upon the scarce reagents or swabs that are causing delays in test turn-arounds. Better yet, the test will be widely available from the get-go because its instruction manual will be posted on an open source platform for any other lab to copy.

And while this headline looks worrisome, the article actually offers some pretty helpful advice despite the fact that smartphones are lowering students’ grades on closed-book exams

Of course, there is a large bucket full of articles that leave many people simply feeling confused. Like this one, about the trade-off between test access and accuracy.

And this one, announcing that pharmacists can give childhood shots, US officials say. Which seems like a promising way of getting more kids vaccinated, until you consider why the American Academy of Pediatrics opposes HHS action on childhood vaccines.

We are all in need of a meme. And a new calendar.