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The most important news in healthcare: Tuesday, July 14.
Good morning. Today, we’re discussing how schools should reopen and a new technique for improving lung transplants.
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How do schools reopen?
The pulse:
On Monday, LA and San Diego schools announced that they were going online-only in the fall. Their decision comes as President Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos push for schools to reopen. Who’s right?
Point one: Remote learning did not work well in the spring.
According to a working paper from NWEA, a nonprofit organization, the average student can expect to start the school year in September having lost as much of ⅓ of the expected progress from the previous year in reading and ½ of the expected progress in math.
These declines are a result of virtual classrooms which struggled to enforce attendance and academic rigor in the spring and are exacerbated by socioeconomic divides. Consulting group McKinsey & Company estimates that in a baseline pandemic scenario, the average student will fall behind by seven months, with black students falling behind by 10 months and Hispanic students falling behind by 9 months.
Point two: Kids don’t get very sick from coronavirus, but they may still spread it.
Less than 2% of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are in kids under the age of 18, and kids are significantly less likely to get hospitalized from the disease than adults. However, there is no conclusive evidence regarding the frequency with which kids transmit the virus. The NIH is currently monitoring 2,000 families to get a better sense of this.
Point three: Schools in other countries reopened successfully, but they had help.
As President Trump noted, Germany and Denmark have reopened schools without causing big outbreaks. These countries, however, have done two things that the U.S. has not:
Controlled transmission. As of last week, Germany had 35 cases per million residents; the U.S. had 1100.
Allocated money for schools. Germany, for example, is subsidizing laptop purchases for low-income children to help them combine remote and in-person learning. Hong Kong is covering cleaning costs for schools.
Bottom line it for me.
Remote learning is damaging to children’s education. However, we must achieve three things before going back to a “normal,” in-person model:
Understand how kids transmit disease.
Get case counts down.
Support public schools financially as they look to reopen.
Source: newscientist.com.
Pigs and lungs
The pulse:
Scientists have figured out a way to restore damaged donor lungs by leveraging the circulatory systems of pigs. The process could greatly increase the number of life-saving lung transplants performed each year.
What do you mean by damaged lungs?
The lungs of deceased donors are often too scarred or deteriorated to be beneficial to a recipient. In fact, 80% of donated lungs offered for transplant are rejected for these reasons. As a result (in addition to a general shortage of donors), there are far fewer lungs available annually than lungs needed by recipients. Hundreds of people die each year while waiting on the recipient list for a lung to become available.
How exactly do pigs fit into this?
Researchers at Vanderbilt and Columbia hooked up damaged human lungs deemed unfit for transplant to veins in the neck of a live pig. The pig’s blood then flowed through the lungs, reoxygenating them and restoring them to a level that met the criteria for transplant. Incredibly, the lungs stayed usable for 24 hours, surpassing the current six-hour window that human lungs can remain viable outside of the body before transplant.
So, are you telling me lung transplants are going to involve pigs now?
The idea is eventually to replace the pig with the human patient waiting for transplant. In this way, the recipient’s own blood supply would restore the organ they are about to receive.
How soon could this happen?
It’s still far from being ready for clinical practice, but experts in the field are excited by the prospect. Transplant surgeon Dr. Zachary N. Kon of NYU said, “It’s a transformative idea that would allow a jump forward in the field.”
Bottom line it for me.
An experimental method to salvage damaged lungs could significantly shorten the transplant waiting list.
Rapidfire:
Despite the fact that Florida now has more COVID-19 cases than all of Europe combined, DisneyWorld started its re-opening last Saturday. We’re not quite sure how magical that combination is going to be.
A Los Angeles Apparel factory has been shut down after 300 of its workers tested positive for COVID-19. The worst part? They were making face masks.
The FDA has announced it will be resuming pharmaceutical facility inspections after a four month moratorium due to COVID-19. Proponents say it’s a necessary step to ensure the quality and safety of all drugs, especially those tied to COVID-19.
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