Government reportedly considering schools going back in 3 weeks

[FiveFootTwoEyesOfBlue]

On BBC News 24 now, article in tomorrow's Sunday Times says that ministers are considering schools going back in three weeks time. Plus allowing some shops and social gatherings, but not pubs and clubs.

I know plenty of adults who aren't mature enough to socially distance properly - what on earth makes anyone think a bunch of children will?

How many children live with people who are shielding?

Who honestly expects a child to adhere to guidelines around a vulnerable adult in their household?

We are asking children to kill their families. They won't understand or appreciate it now, but in 10 years' time when they look back, they are going to be wracked with guilt over secretly hugging their friends at school when the teacher isn't looking and then inadvertently passing COVID-19 to a parent or a grandparent.

This is cruel and all kinds of wrong.

I bet the Government fines anyone who doesn't send their children back, even if they are high risk and don't want to risk orphaning their kids.

We need to work on better remote learning for all. We shouldn't be rushing to reopen schools. We're not ready.

September at the earliest.

Keeping school closed till the autumn and the start of the flu season would be disastrous. The virus won’t have gone. We would get a double whammy, plus folks wouldn’t be able to get their flu vaccine so those death numbers would be huge

Exactly. In honesty the best policy would be too reopen soon, go through the summer holidays and then close from October half term until January, with 6 weeks actually off with no expectation for work etc to be set or marked by teachers. And before anyone says OmG teachers working through the summer, I am a qualified teacher and would happily go back and work whenever if it helps, and there would still be 6 weeks clear. It might need to be done on a rota so that key workers children are still able to attend, but it needs some flexibility to be safer.

@ChrissieKeller61 it’s not beyond your wit to realise that not all kids are like yours, is it?

With advanced testing for teachers

That was a joke, right?

And the predictions of a peak in Autumn? That is the cases of people dying after schools have reopened and people have gone back to work, spreading the virus. That is why it might peak.

September at the earliest.

What is special about September though? It's heading towards flu season which seems to make it one of the worst times.

It's far too early to be sending the back in as the numbers are still rising and I am pretty sure we havwnt seen the peak yet.

I agree that it's disappointing that the curve isn't starting to drop off (deaths aren't rising but look pretty flat).

So... what if lockdown isn't actually working that well? Average time from infection to first symptoms is 3-5 days. Median time from first symptoms to death has been cited as 18.5 days. So it takes about three weeks from someone being infected to dying.

We've been on lockdown for 4 1/2 weeks with some significant social distancing in place for a week and a bit before that. I know there are delays in reporting some deaths, but most hospital deaths are notified within a couple of days.

Most of the 800+ people dying in the last few days must have been infected well after lockdown started which seems quite strange. How?! Maybe within household transmission explains it? Supermarkets? People not following the rules? If school closures has had a massive impact, as they do for some other diseases, the stats would ALREADY be looking better than they do.

The shape of Sweden's curve looks similar (overall numbers much lower) and they've not locked down. We need to be careful (without a proper control) in assuming that lockdown itself, rather than other factors (eg more UV light and warmer weather; better handwashing) is causing the curve to flatten off. Also careful about assuming we have ANY solution for getting it to bend down.

And with lock down or even social distancing there will be hardly any flu cases. Flu is less contagious than corona. Social distancing and hand washing will drastically cut flu cases.

It's hard to judge however long the lockdown should be. But one thing the government MUST do is to order the employers to make sure their staff still WFH whenever possible. This will avoid further spreading of the disease via public transport and offices without damaging to the economy.

Exactly @Bluntness100

One third of the population is vulnerable apparently. That includes a lot of schools staff and parents.

That's farcical. You can't have on the one hand a disease that will be undetectable or mild in 80% of the population, and on the other hand define a third of the population as 'vulnerable'.

Who exactly is going to keep the country running for the next 18 months?

@ChrissieKeller61 is it beyond you to imagine that other children are different from your own? Some might have a different experience of family life? My dd is autistic. The change in routine has impacted her mental health which in turn has impacted family life. That is just one example of how things could be different outside of your perfect bubble

I'm sorry it's only being "considered". I'd like to hear it was actually happening on 11th May.

I find it rather patronising to be continuously told we are flattening the curve. Open the schools up again in the way some posters want (ie as'normal') and that curve will spike again. Second spikes can be worse.

British schools are already open. Unlike other countries we never completely shut them. Keyworkers children are already entitled to attend school.

People who point out that schools in Denmark are open might want to look up what that actually entails.

@Thisisitisit It's the start of the next academic year for many - and it's 4 months off, rather than 1. I'm not even convinced September is reasonable, and it's a date that could get kicked back until next year, but I think the target dates bandied about of May and June are too ludicrous to even consider.

We are still within a 12-week shielding period. We are still in early stages of clinical trials.

We might have more facts as we approach September.

We won't as we approach May.

@Thisisitisit there is a lot of magical thinking about. Opening in september would be disastrous from an infection control point of view, but magical thinking states that be September everything will be under control. It won’t.
Confusingly the same people who want only to open in September also want to holiday/ go to Festivals/ pools etc in July/august which is an awful lot more dangerous. But apparently that is ok. Magical thinking

its interesting isnt it how most people are saying "no May is too soon" but feel that Septemeber is fine. Nothing much will have changed by September. There certainly wont be a vaccine by then . the point of lockdown was never to STOP people getting it, it was to slow down the peak so the NHS could cope. But meanwhile so many other NHS treatments are paused till who knows when. How long should that go n for?

A gradual reintroduction of life needs to happen. It makes sense to prioritse yrs 10 and 12. (although not much help for me as my kids are yrs 7 and 9!) Just because your child is "totally fine" staying at home does not mean other children are. I can tell this IS having a massive negative impact on a lot of young people's mental health.

And with lock down or even social distancing there will be hardly any flu cases.

So we should lockdown yearly then, really - WE CAN SAVE 17,000 PEOPLE DYING FROM FLU!!!!!!

@hopsalong After lock down you are right it seems to take 3 weeks for people who caught it before lock down to either recover or die. But it takes another 2 weeks until their household members have got it, recovered or died. So it takes 5 weeks before any cases are cases where people could have only caught the virus before lock down.
Opening schools in 3 weeks means in the week before schools open deaths should have plummeted. Within 3 weeks of schools opening they will rise again, and will within 5-7 weeks be at the peak of now.

That is not based on some inevitable peak of deaths. It will be based on schools reopening and people going back to work. Your family members dying of corona in the next 1-2 months will be caused by ending lock down.

Whilst some people don’t understand we are not waiting out until the virus has disappeared, others clearly don’t understand that we don’t want to rush headlong back into another situation that is only containable by yet another extended lockdown for pretty much everyone. It will almost certainly be too soon to reopen schools in 3 weeks. If the newspapers actually wanted a proper and open discussion about how schools should be reopened in the future, they should stop putting stupid timelines in their articles, as it’s one thing to discuss how it could be handled and another to put inane timelines in that just prove the Government right that people are clearly not to be trusted with talking about next steps when they immediately want to stick precise dates onto them.

I suppose @hopsalong people may have been infected before lockdown and not shown symptoms for 2 weeks?

Given that the vast majority of people are following the rules I don’t think the small number of rule breakers would keep numbers so high. I think it’s just a long old haul. I reckon we will see a plateau for a good few weeks now and then the numbers start to drop.’

@MarginalGain Why are you shouting? No one is saying that. And as little as 400 people die from flu in some years. 17,000 was the worst by a long way and there was much alarm in the newspapers at the time. But no we would not have lock down for that. I am simply pointing out that it is wrong to say that we will inevitably have lots of flu deaths in the Autumn so need to end lock down. Whatever stops corona spreading also stops flu spreading. Flu is much less contagious than corona, much harder to catch.

@Maxandezra Other NHS treatments are being paused either because there is not enough staff or because consultants are saying it is more dangerous for patients to come to hospital for treatment as catching corona poses a higher risk than delaying treatment.
Ending a lock down will make both of those situations worse. People will be less likely to get treatments.

MarginalGain - no, funnily enough we immunise the entire primary school population against the flu in order to protect the vulnerable and elderly instead of closing schools - pretty much what it is clearly hoped we will one day be able to do with coronavirus, so that we can limit those deaths to a mere 17,000 too.

Some people hover on the brink for 1-2 weeks, so with the delay of reporting, we are now seeing the deaths from people infected 3-4 weeks ago, plus their social contacts. In the first week, many did not exactly practice social distancing