When I grow up I want to live in Nova Scotia.
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Thatâs great!
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Come on over - Iâll make you a cup of tea. 
(Although real estate is becoming increasingly hard to come by 
)
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I think I can only come for short visits so tea is good.
Iâve heard that old retired folk arenât in much demand. 
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The FDA Advisory Committee is scheduled October 26. Then there still needs to be FDA approval, CDC advisory committee recommendation and CDC approval. That could take a week or so.
I think (not 100% sure though) RSV is more contagious via surfaces than Covid so if Covid preventions were in place (all kids masked, HEPA filters, outside air brought in through ventilation system), I could envision scenarios where RSV spread through a school faster than Covid. But yeah, the RSV outbreak you describe is scary for potential Covid implications.
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Yes, I believe you are correct. RSV can be picked up on surfaces easier than Covid. So it could easily be spread on surfaces kids share, such as pencil sharpeners, door knobs, bathroom surfaces, tables and desks, etc.
Yep, in fact, per CDC guidelines, RSV infection requires contact isolation in the hospital, but only require droplet isolation âif the production of respiratory droplets is anticipatedâ. You know, because kids are so great at not coughing in your face.
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Yeah, thatâs roughly what Iâm thinking. I think weâll see the CDC ACIP meeting get scheduled and that will give us a better idea if itâs going to be just a couple of days or a week or so.
I tried to piece together some timelines for comparison and I think this is how things went:
Pfizer booster timeline
8/16 Pfizer submits initial data to FDA
8/25 Pfizer submits additional data and initiates supplemental Biologics License Application (sBLA) with application to be complete by âend of weekâ
9/1 FDA VRBPAC meeting scheduled for 9/17
9/15 CDC ACIP meeting scheduled for 9/22-23
9/17 FDA VRBPAC meeting & recommendation vote
9/22 CDC ACIP meeting begins-they close noting they canât move forward without FDA decision
9/22 (evening) FDA authorizes booster (Iâm super curious if they wanted to hear ACIP discussion first?)
9/23 CDC ACIP meeting continues & recommendation vote
9/24 CDC issues guidance and boosters begin immediately (same day)
Pfizer ages 12-15
3/31 Pfizer announces top line results
4/9 Pfizer submits request to expand existing EUA to include ages 12-15
5/4 CNN reports on an email it received from the FDA that VRBPAC will NOT meet to review but likely will for 5-11 (âFor the younger children, we almost certainly will consider more strongly going to an advisory committee meeting.")
5/5 CDC ACIP meeting scheduled for 5/12 with undisclosed agenda
5/10 FDA amends Pfizer EUA to include ages 12-15; CDC ACIP agenda announced
5/12 CDC ACIP meeting & recommendation vote; CDC issues guidance âand providers may begin vaccinating them right awayâ
Pfizer ages 5-11
9/20 Pfizer announces top line results
9/28 Pfizer submits initial data to FDA with formal EUA submission âto follow in the coming weeksâ
10/1 FDA VRBPAC meeting scheduled for 10/26 as it âanticipates receiving a request from Pfizerâ
So I think we need to watch for the CDC ACIP meeting to be scheduled to know how fast this is going to happen. Theyâve been scheduling them about a week in advance, it looks like.
(Note: some of the press releases used different wordings to describe the submissions, so Iâve tried to retain these as Iâm not sure if those wording choices are meaningful or not)
Also, the same day the FDA expanded the Pfizer EUA to ages 12-15, they scheduled a 6/10 VRBPAC meeting to brief them on that and also talk about what would be needed for ages 5-11. The summary of that meeting is really interesting given whatâs happened with Delta and kids since then:
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-releases-archive
Pfizer Full Approval (ages 16+)
5/7 Pfizer submits initial Biologics License Application (BLA) with supporting data to be submitted âover the coming weeksâ
8/23 FDA grants full approval
[just came across this in the process and wanted to capture it since it may be relevant for school mandatory vaccine schedules at some point in the future]
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I just cannot even process this.
âAccording to data collected by Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, one in every 84 people in Alaska was diagnosed with COVID-19 from Sept. 22 to Sept. 29.â
Thatâs actual diagnosed cases. In one week. (Yeah, I checked the math.) And their vax rate is pretty low.
Florida maxed at 138. My county maxed at 118.
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Alaska?? How? I thought they had more bears than people!!
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They have more men than womenâŚ
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Exponentials. Most of the protection is by keeping community spread linear by not exceeding a threshold of cases that trigger exponential growth. Lots of ways to achieve that but itâs very hard to stop once it gets going.
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I remember seeing this predicted back when things were on the steep increase here in Texas and Alaska had barely started to bump up. This makes me wonder what other rural counties in the US have had that kind of infection rate.
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Ouch
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Here are my school Covid testing learnings from last week. (I was waiting to see if anything progressed. Spoiler: nope)
TL;DR - If your school has in-school testing, coach your kids that if they develop symptoms at school, they should tell the teacher and request to be tested before coming home. It will greatly simplify things. Or, if you think itâs very unlikely to be Covid, do an at-home test on the down-low, and if itâs negative then just send them and tell them to tell the teacher after arriving.
DS11.1 came home from school last Monday with a cough and obvious nasal congestion. Without fail, DH always gets seasonal allergies this time of year and thatâs really what it seemed like DS11.1 had, and it improved some with allergy meds. But we figured the responsible thing was to get him tested before sending him to the classroom since he really hasnât had seasonal allergies before.
During the last school board meeting, they said all of the campus nurses have plenty of tests. And I had heard stories from a couple of different schools about the nurses coming out to the parking lot to test kids. So I figured getting tested through the school was the logical approach.
DS11.2 had zero symptoms so quarantine wouldnât be recommended by CDC even if DS11.1 was positive, so I drop him off at school and called the school nurse from the parking lot. She advised that since DS11.1 isnât currently in the school, she canât test him. We will need to go through central testing for the district. She will email me the link to the form, and then theyâll call me to set up the appt, but theyâve been able to get kids tested fairly quickly(?).
So I sit in the parking lot, fill out both portions of the online form, and at the end get the QR code that I will need to bring to the appt. And note this in the instructions:
What is 24 business hours? Is that 3 business days? One full business day? 
Since home and the testing center are in opposite directions, I decide to look online for other options while I await a call back. Nothing nearby available at CVS or Walgreens until tomorrow and nothing up in Houston until 2pm or later. At this point, with him having such mild symptoms, Iâm really thinking I should have just sent him to school normal. But I was trying to be responsible. 
So I check Walgreens and CVS, and finally find an at-home kit. Take him home, he tests negative, so I email the nurse a picture and that Iâm bringing him to school, and they are welcome to retest him if they like. (Still no call back from the testing center after over 1.5 hours.)
Get to school, the office calls the nurse, and apparently I must have done something wrong with the online forms(?), because she says central testing has no record of my registration. (Um. I have the QR code from the end? So how long was I supposed to wait for a call back?)
And apparently Iâve violated procedure because at-home tests donât count, but since weâre now on campus in the front office, sheâll go ahead and test him. (Ok, I get why at-home tests arenât sufficient by themselves, but that seems like it should be sufficient to bring him to campus to be tested without this central testing hurdle.)
He tests negative. Again. But of course we missed the 10am attendance cut off by about 10 min, so it still counts as one of his allowed excused absences. But at least he only missed a couple of classes.
They are making this much harder than it should be.
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For comparison, our school does not provide tests at all â if your kid gets a symptom you have to pick them up and arrange your own PCR test to come back. Mostly this means your own doc or a pharmacy or a city site (but they request people with insurance not take up the city spots).
Anyway, could be worse! But yeah itâs a hassle to be responsible nowadays for sure.
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Also at our school if a kid went to school with symptoms and guessed wrong and ended up positive or false positive (school had a false positive recently), word would get out. Risky proposition when everyone knows everyone by only a degree or two of separation, and most people together at this school many years. 
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