In Other News: With COVID staffing crunch, who’s going to teach the kids?; A different COVID-19 vaccine debate: Do we need new ones?

Published 11:15 pm Friday, February 4, 2022

With COVID staffing crunch, who’s going to teach the kids?

With teacher absences mounting and substitutes in short supply, parents may be wondering: Who’s teaching the kids? The answer around the U.S. could be a local police officer, National Guard soldier, state budget analyst, parent or recent high school graduate — nearly anyone willing to help keep schools’ doors open through the omicron-driven staffing crunch. States have been loosening teaching requirements to give schools more flexibility on hiring as coronavirus exposures, illness and quarantines add to strains on schools that also have been tapping librarians, custodians and support staff to help cover classrooms during the pandemic.

A different COVID-19 vaccine debate: Do we need new ones?COVID-19 vaccines are saving an untold number of lives, but they can’t stop the chaos when a hugely contagious new mutant bursts on the scene, leading people to wonder: Will we need boosters every few months? A new vaccine recipe? A new type of shot altogether? That’s far from settled, but with the shots still doing their main job many experts are cautioning against setting too high a bar. “We need collectively to be rethinking what is the goal of vaccination,” said Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes, infectious disease chief at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. “It’s unrealistic … to believe that any kind of vaccination is going to protect people from infection, from mild symptomatic disease, forever.” If the goal is preventing serious illness, “we may not need to be doing as much fine-tuning of the vaccines every time a new variant comes.” The virus is essentially shape-shifting as it mutates, with no way to know how bad the next variant will be. Already a sub-strain of omicron bearing its own unique mutations is circulating. Research is underway to create next-generation vaccines that might offer broader protection against future mutants — but they won’t be ready anytime soon. The immediate solution: Getting today’s shots into more arms will “reduce the opportunities for the virus to mutate and spawn new Greek letters that we then have to worry about,” said Jennifer Nuzzo of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Race is on to save the Great Salt Lake: Will it be enough?SALT LAKE CITY — The largest natural lake west of the Mississippi is shrinking past its lowest levels in recorded history, raising fears about toxic dust, ecological collapse and economic consequences. But the Great Salt Lake may have some new allies: conservative Republican lawmakers. The new burst of energy from the GOP-dominated state government comes after lake levels recently hit a low point during a regional megadrought worsened by climate change. Water has been diverted away from the lake for years, though, to supply homes and crops in Utah. The nation’s fastest-growing state is also one of the driest, with some of the highest domestic water use.