@Piggywaspushed
And we have all seen that most NHS deaths have occurred outside those covid wards , including amongst non PPEd porters, so the lack of adequate PPE to NHS staff and careworkers is appalling, not a good thing . I know nursing unions have complained vociferously (it just isn't reported much) and that the unions have said they can say they won't work without adequate measures in place ( I am sure they haven't done this because of a sense of responsibility; teachers have also not said they won't work , even though there is a widespread lack of conviction that the 5 test have been met). the press just haven't launched on nursing unions in the same way. I do not understand why NHS staff are so keen for teachers to take a great deal of personal risk just because they do. They are different jobs : teaching is normally a pretty safe job (although not the safest by any means ) and now has become a high exposure job, asking primary school TAs and teachers to spend six hours in a room with 16 other people : unlike nurses and doctors , teachers and schools staff are not infection control specialists and medical experts. I would think people could try and understand a little bit why school staff are jittery.
Hopefully, this will prove unfounded . However, schools in S Korea shut down today after only a few days of being open.
Aside form anything else, if our government cares at all about infection control, I think parents need to prepare themselves for schools opening, closing, opening, closing for a while which will be very disruptive, more so than now. That said, I think Johnson is very bullish and will try to keep schools, and other workplaces, open despite spikes.
Of course the children aren't covid patients : I thought the idea was that we were trying to curtail the spread.
The spread is curtailed, hospitals are emptying out. I work in London, our ITU is now below it’s normal capacity, with very few covid patients and none are new.
When we health workers caught covid in large numbers we couldn’t test any patients or staff, we were commuting in on packed public transport and the community spread was at its highest. Those things are now much better.
So I don’t believe schools going back will lead to ‘high exposure’. Community transmission is at its lowest since many weeks prior to the schools shutting, and by September it will be minimal. Children are not covid patients, teachers can socially distance from other teachers and pupils (to an extent), and there is no evidence that children are spreaders in the same way adults are. Teachers will need to take some precautions in the way health staff would. So you should have the option of a visor (we didn’t!), gloves and apron if you need to work within a metre or so of a child, or clean a primary child up if they have an accident.
Nursing unions did fuck all to be honest, and no nurse that I heard of refused to go into work. We were told by our employer that if we refused to work with covid (and many staff were redeployed to areas they had no experience of working in, with a 2 hour ‘update’ of skills) that we’d have to resign.