Coronavirus, schools.

[floatygoat]

My father has informed me I should not be putting my DC in school tomorrow. He is quite an eccentric character and I'm inclined to think, yeah ok dad ..... but he's just said because of the fairly lengthy incubation/contagious period that erring on the side of caution is best seeing as it's now in York...who knows how far the virus will have spread in two weeks time and how many people will have got it by then?
Am I being completely bonkers for worrying about this?

Yabu. Handwashing, tissues and a general awareness is what you need. You haven't been to China, it isn't in your school. My dh has colleagues visiting from China in his office, in that theory should I stay home tmrw - probably not as I'm part of emergency planning for my trust on this issue and have dealt with a fair bit of the planning. I guess the general public would prefer me at my desk dealing with the things we need.

What?!

To the PP who is worried about being in the Wirral... it's way more likely to have cases in London than as a failure of quarantine and it is much more transmissible here due to overcrowded public transport etc. London is literally the last place I would recommend going if you have health anxiety around this sort of stuff!

Where would it end though. He'd be off school indefinitely. Ignore your father. As pp said it's university students who are at risk due to the high number of international students, especially those who have just had graduations.

Ok I'll take my tin hat off now 😬

@CallmeAngelina I think what the pp meant about courts corona not being as bad as flu it’s that flu kills over 50 000 people every winter according to WHO.

You have to ask yourself if there are a number of children at our child's school that have just returned from travelling in China?

How on earth do you know that?

Well, because there's been lots of analysis done already. AFAIK the coronavirus has an R factor of about 2.25 (the number of people each infected person infects on average) compared to measles which is 16 - 18. It has a current death rate of about 2% compared to SARS which was 10% and ebola at around 50 - 60%. Still higher than seasonal flu but far fewer people have been infected.The vast majority of those who have died have other illnesses or are old. There are, as always, some statistical outliers. It is not currently a pandemic.

All of this information is widely available, subject to change of course, but not masked or downplayed by some weird conspiracy. There's really no need to dream up your own reality. Just google and find out.

I've got the opposite issue - a child with a cough and some tin pot wearer has said I should keep them off school in case it's the Corona virus. They haven't left the country since last summer!

Shut up @opticaldelusion. We don’t need experts, or science. Not when we have the Daily Fail