Do some people want lockdown until there’s a vaccine?

[grinotpigio]

Trying to make sense of the ‘right’ thing to do with sending my kids to school or not when/if they reopen- very divided opinions from fellow school parents on Facebook and so on.

There’s quite a few people unhappy to put their children at any sort of risk and adamant their children won’t be going back until it’s truly ‘safe’ but what exactly does this mean? I’ve been looking at other threads about how a vaccine isn’t guaranteed any time soon so life with the virus may be the new reality, are some people (including those who are not classed as vulnerable) really prepared to live in lockdown longterm indefinitely until a vaccine is available?

Same with people being criticised on social media for crowding up outdoor exercise spots and so on, even though certain rules are being slowly eased. Or businesses reopening.

I guess what I mean is- what do these people want/expect? A longer, stricter lockdown? Or an indefinite one until we can successfully vaccinate against covid?

news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-children-in-england-more-likely-to-be-infected-with-covid-19-than-any-other-age-group-study-warns-11988784

Maybe by September there will be here immunity among school children?

Herd

Low enough numbers for there to be testing/tracking/tracing with local controls in place if necessary. This has been proven possible and effective in other countries.

Are the government capable though? I suspect they’ll bumble through the next few months in the same way they have so far.
I predict chaotic swinging between lockdown and relaxed measures, then eventually trace/test/track. Just a pity that wasn’t done straight away.

What Pinky said. Infection rates appear to have recently been rising in large areas of the Midlands and Lancashire and near Liverpool, so at the very least it's a mad idea to have schools opening up to more pupils in those areas on 1 June. Infection rates in the UK as a whole have fallen since lockdown, but it's madness for the government to adopt a "one size fits all" approach for the whole of England while infection patterns are varied. I also want to know that the government has testing and contact tracing systems in place so that when you do get a confirmed Covid-19 case in a school, there's a mechanism for containing the outbreak (eg prompt closing of the school for a few days while you trace contacts and test them). I asked the minister on Friday's Mumsnet chat what the government policy is when they get a confirmed Covid-19 case in a school. My question didn't get answered. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to know what the policy is, and for it to be something other than just to let an the infection rip through the school and for parents to hear about it through the grapevine.

I think given the way the debate is going and the fact that no we will not have a vaccine for years (quickest we have ever done it is four years even two years would be super quick and yet that is a lot of education to miss). Therefore I think we are going to have to make virtual schooling work for the majority. It isn’t at the moment for many reasons but that mind set will have to change with us developing methods for effective teaching online. I think we will look back bemused years from now that children were ever educated in classrooms!

I am trying to have confidence that as the dust settles people will realise we need to develop an effective way to educate the next generation and I do believe even the private sector will start to get worried re the future labour supply if we don’t so it will have to be sorted eventually! But I think online is the only conceivable answer given the concerns about having children in schools.

Of course this will mean the days of two parents working full time with primary school children will be over though which will have a devastating impact on women in the workplace.

A lot of Mners (eg OP and Qasd) seem to be trying to frame the debate as either you send your kids back on 1 June or you wait until there's a vaccine! You do realise that there are other options? But those options really on our government focussing on getting the infection rate down to manageable levels and having a proper contact tracing and testing system in place, as other governments in Europe have managed! Actually, given the shambolic way our government has dealt with the coronavirus, perhaps Qasd's pessimism is justified

Could we just put all the healthy children together in giant residential camps until they all had herd immunity & could protect their peers?

It's as sensible suggestion as most I've heard.

In my opinion, the advantage of opening to some pupils in June is that everyone (staff, kids and parents) gets a 'dry run' at reopening with small numbers of children to see how it might work with higher numbers in September.

I agree with you that there's nothing magical about September. There's a small chance we'll have a vaccine by then, but it's unlikely IMO.

qsad Do you know better than the scientists? There has never been a global race to develop a treatment with such urgency and limitless resources. Even the scientists admit they don't know so how on earth do you? Tell everyone what they should do if you must, but don't pretend it's based on information you don't have.

ragged You're not taking my kids to a residential camp. Especially not when 100 children in New York (a huge number actually) have a very serious autoimmune response as a result of this apparently harmless illness (scarring on the lungs excepted).

You can take my children to a residential camp.

Anything to get them back to spending time with their peers.

This is an awful experiment we're conducting on children and I would like to opt out.

Nih Sending children back at this point is actually an awful experiment for those children who are unlucky enough to be affected (almost certainly more than we realise as there is a time delay on the immune response and some studies suggest apparently mild cases can still leave lung scarring).

It's also a terrible experiment for the families of those children who are sent back. It is difficult to grasp who little we know about covid relative to other illnesses that have been around for longer. It doesn't necessarily behave just as a Corona virus would. Our treatments are at the embryo stage. Any children who get the virus now and require significant care are quite literally being experimented on as doctors follow hunches, write reports and compare their findings from a standing start five months ago (nothing in medical terms). Our delay in locking down has also led to an obscenely high death toll that will probably have researchers zeroing on the UK as an excellent field study for the long term effects of bereavement in children for years to come, in a country where we rely heavily on grandparents to support working families.

You know the devil that is lockdown. Don't assume the devil you don't know is any better.

I know that children far more likely to be murdered by their parents than die of Coronavirus.

So I'd like to end the experiment where we shut down schools and remove all they contribute to safeguarding and child wellbeing.

People worried about their children getting the virus should keep them at home (forever, given their aversion to tiny risk).

I'm happy for my children to be in the vanguard of children who leave their homes to be reunited with their peers and play and live their lives again with some independence from their home.

I know some parents never want that for their children, so they can continue to keep them "safe".

All those suggesting improving online education as a permanent thing or some sort of solution to the current problems - two things. Firstly, how the hell do you online educate a reception age child? For example an active boy, with little self motivation, no interest in looking at screens or doing worksheets. Sure, we read and do counting work at home. But if it was that easy to properly educate children we wouldn’t be paying teachers would we? How would any SEN be picked up? Any proper safeguarding be done?

Secondly, when do children get to play, properly, hands on, with other children? Because that’s absolutely vital and online stuff isn’t going to help that. Small children don’t sit and have a nice Skype conversation, they run and play fight and play house together. They get used to other people looking after them. Are we really going to sacrifice our children’s childhoods for a few years, to protect other people?

We really need a test, trace and isolate system in place and low enough cases to make it manageable

I agree with this. Most people I speak to in real life have similar opinions. The polarised opinions I see on here - "If you abide by restrictions you are Coronaphobic" to "I am never leaving my house ever again" are outliers.

Most of us want the sensible middle road but are unlikely to get it as the government are a shower of shit.

I'm shielding so I would like to know more about the risks and have confidence in the schools' ability to hand those risks. I don't think they will have the staff, space or money to do so. I would like to have some confidence in the testing and tracing app and process.

Do those who expect a vaccine to be ready by sep expect to receive a dose this side of Christmas? Even if by some miracle a vaccine was developed, it would take months (or even a year) before mr & mrs average (and their offspring) were offered a dose. Priority would probably go to the shielded.

Re a possible vaccine, don’t forget that we don’t have a vaccine for the other recent Coronavirus’ - SARS and MERS. It’s very possible we will never have one, particularly when you consider that 90% of vaccine trials will fail to produce any results.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-covid-vaccine.html

Re a possible vaccine, don’t forget that we don’t have a vaccine for the other recent Coronavirus’ - SARS and MERS.

This gets brought up on every single vaccine thread, but fails to take into account that since both of these diseases more or less burned themselves out, there was no need to go to the trouble and expense of continuing the search for a vaccine. However, the work put into vaccines for these illnesses has provided the foundation for work on the closely related SARS Cov 2 vaccine.

It’s very possible we will never have one, particularly when you consider that 90% of vaccine trials will fail to produce any results.

Yes, but most vaccine trials don't have over 100 different teams around the world urgently working on them.

Yes, but do these v