70 cases in French schools since reopening

[Hippywannabe]

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Unfortunately these are exactly the kind of assholes who do become politicians.

It would be great if people a bit less power hungry and who didn't get kicks from controlling others would give it a go.

Could somebody define what they mean by safe for the kids to go back to school .....

Barbie

Having no choice is certainly not idiotic, there are plenty of idiots who can't wait to see the back of their kids and that's

Devlesko how do you know? How many people have told you that the reason they’re sending their children back to school is because they can’t wait to see the back of them?

The problem with debating this issue is that people get emotionally entrenched and invested in their position. You get utter polarisation and no one is willing to properly examine another viewpoint. They will just deny any evidence presented to them as wrong or false and denigrate the person who presents them with it.

Its It'sjust like bloody Brexit.

Could somebody define what they mean by safe for the kids to go back to school .....

Well mine ended up in hospital after developing severe complications from scarlet fever (caught from school) last autumn, so it can’t have been ‘safe’ then. 16 of her class were off with it at the same time.

Jesus, Driving, don't give them another pretext for locking kids up for their own safety.

Aunt Lydias get a kick out of this. They will hold onto this power at all costs.

Nihiloxica true!

Not all schools have opened in all areas btw. A friend in Lux says her kids aren't back for 2 more weeks.

Areas were coded and if red, schools didn't open.

I don't know how many did however.

Correct about slowness getting of the ground with testing, incorrect that the UK is now behind on resting compared to Europe
actually Germany is now doing less testing than the UK per day although earlier in the epidemic it was doing about 160,000 a week when we were doing 50,000 (10,000 per day)
apart from USA nowhere else seems to be doing more than 100,000 tests per day

The NHS is not overwhelmed in Scotland there are 63 people in ICU
in 10 of the 15 health boards the number is less than 5

Highland where I live (from Helensburgh just north of Glasgow all the West Coast right up to Thurso ) has only had 331 postive tests there are only 12 in hospital and less than 5 in ICU ( they don't give numbers below 5 because it could be identifying) there has only been 6 new cases in the last week (probably all of which were in Care home in Skye)
yesterday there were 6 deaths in Scotland from Covid though weekend reporting is way behind

@nellodee if the new cases in France from schools are 2.7% is not a substantial portion at all that is much lower than expected as school age children make up way way more of the population than 2.7% if it was in proportion to age then 27% of new cases would be in under 20's when actually it seems like it is a tenth of that which adds to the growing weight of evidence that children are less likely to have covid and they are not super spreaders at all but because they have it mildly or aymptomatically they are not coughing and spreading droplets so they are not the cause of many of the infections unlike with normal flu

Just a reminder folks, the fatality rate for under tens is absolutely tiny. As in 0.01%. probably a higher chance of getting meningitis.

Why wouldn't there be cases think people REALLY need to get a grip of reality . This virus isn't going anywhere the situation will be no different in September .
Don't people realise sitting at home indemnity is not an option .
Your choices will also depend on your situation getting fucked of with older people taking the moral high ground from the secure jobs no dependants and own house .

I think re bristol they mean there are actually 2 schools 1 sen 1 secondary. So that may be where they get 200 from.

In England luckily parents are free to choose what they want to do.
Have to say though logically they should have limited to 2parent KW first then gradually expanded. Because instead you get more workers in the other year groups adding plus the 3 (r/1/6). Just makes sense to start with people actually needing the childcare.
It is also likely parents of other year groups will start to meet up.
As it can take 1-28d they cannot know the kids didnt catch at school as you can be shedding for a very long time and obviously asymptomatic too.
So the more interesting thing will be how much it has spread round the rest of the school/bubbles in France.

Wouldnt it be great if we could get the tests from usa who can detect before you get symptoms.

I think re bristol they mean there are actually 2 schools 1 sen 1 secondary. So that may be where they get 200 from.

2 is the new 200.

It has been upgraded to being a big number in order to justify keeping Scotland in full lockdown.

Could somebody define what they mean by safe for the kids to go back to school .....

But all safety is relative.

Going back with a very good test, track and trace system in place is safer than going back without that. Going back with low enough numbers of cases out there (so that a testing and tracking system has a chance of working) is safer than going back with high numbers. It's not as though nothing is going to change between now and the vaccine, so now is as good as any time - things are changing all the time as more is learned, and currently, UK infection rates are dropping but still have a way to go to get down to the really low levels where testing and tracking has a good chance to work.

The lower the number of coronavirus cases there are locally when schools go back, the less likely children are to bring the infection into school from their families to pass it on to other children and then their families. And if there's good testing and tracking in place, the shorter the chains of transmission from any case before everyone who might have caught it realises and starts isolating themselves. Even an extra couple of weeks could make a significant difference to both of those things.

With a really shit hot tracking and tracing system, kids who might be incubating coronavirus should already have been picked up as contacts of tested cases, before they even start to be infectious themselves. So then they wouldn't be at school anyway - again, making school safer.

If we really knew for sure that schoolchildren could barely spread the disease even when ill, we'd be in a position to go earlier rather than later. Since we don't know that yet, all our eggs are in the baskets of hoping there are low levels of disease in the local community, and having good testing and tracking. They might be fine by June 1st (or relatively fine), but it could be that waiting another couple of weeks would be sensible, or a couple more after that.

Safety is also multi-faceted.

There are risks other than Coronavirus and lockdown brings its own risks.

To justify extending lockdown for an additional 4 week (to a total of 16 weeks!) you need to also account for those risks.

You are not doing an adequate risk assessment if you are not taking ALL significant risks into account.

@Nihiloxica

Indeed. Making up numbers and also making up policies.

No policy in England currently to say you go into 'quarantine' if you may have been in contact or worked in the same environment as someone who tested positive for CV.

The NHS and many other essential services would have collapsed if that was the case.

It's not as though nothing is going to change between now and the vaccine
and not a lot will change when / if a vaccine comes

so
what will make people realise that kids are safe to go back to school
as are their parents
and their teachers

because the risks of lockdown are now VERY substantial

Being a sen school they were likely all in contact with each other and the chilren.
Secondary i would be surprised there were that many students or teachers in.
Imo a school needs to say if a child or adult has gone off with a cough even if it's another bubble and before test results are back because aomost all bubbles will be linked by siblings anyway.

With many more uk cases you have obviously many more asymptomatic people.

Also with 20%+ asymptomatic we will be spreading extra of that compared to other countries that are requiring masks.

risks to children exist all the time, some of the risks have increased during lockdown

every year in the UK 5000 people under 20 die about 2800 in the first year of life maybe premature often very ill from birth, there are 2,200 from age 1-20 that is about 6 per day every day the two biggest causes of death are accidents / non accidental deaths ( cars falls drowning murder etc) and suicide:- obviously some are just very sick children
this equates to 1 in 13,000 young people die every year ( of course this risk is not evenly spread amongst all children some are at greater risk than others)

The risk of dying of covid if you are under 10 is 1 in 62,000 this is 5 times less than the risk of just living normally it is about the same as the annual risk of dying in an accident, no-one thinks you are an irresponsible parent for driving, cycling or walking on a pavement with your child you make them wear a seatbelt and/or use appropriate seat / cycle helmet etc to reduce risk but you don't stop them going in cars or riding a bike or walking on a pavement as it is an unacceptable too high a risk to life
life in the UK for children has never been safer than it has been the last few decades even traffic fatalities have dropped substantially despite more cars
number of children known to have died with or of covid is 11 ( 8 of whom had other medical problems) number of children that would normally have died in the 7 week lockdown period is 296 unfortunately most of these will still have happened
it is possible that 11 or more children have died as consequences of covid ie suicide, harmed by a parent or someone else we know domestic violence has increased in lockdown as has the murder rate

I haven't disappeared, I was working and getting ready for June 1st. ☺
Interesting to hear other people's opinions.
Within my circle of friends and acquaintances, people aren't keen on children going back. Mn is good for hearing other viewpoints.
Mine is still that testing after is too late, the exposure has already happened and adults who get the virus have to hope that they are lucky. A teacher in our city has died with Covid as the cause as has a baby from kawasaki, so I possibly am being hypervigilant.
I do think we have to make steps back to normality but as safely as possible. I am intending to wear a mask when I go back, I won't be criticising colleagues who don't.
I cannot fathom the logic that the government has of wear a mask in an enclosed space but not in schools, turn your back on colleagues when talking to them but not in schools etc.
Each family will have to do what is best for them, whether or not that is to return on June 1st, wait for numbers to fall further and return in September, wear masks or not.
It is interesting to read the French thread in here and the AMA in Aibu from the Dutch family to see what schools are actually doing compared to a DM headline of European schools return.

The thing is it's not about going back as it's "safe for the kids."

On one hand, It's the impact on the wider society. And then the nhs.

On the the other, it's about impact on school staff, which aside individual risk, affects staffing. which in turn means the school closes, as was happening before they officially closed to all but KW children.

Testing of children helps (those over 5!) but most are asymptomatic.

So the schools can't physically maintain any form of being open for more than KW if infection levels are too high.

what will make people realise that kids are safe to go back to school as are their parents and their teachers

They're not "safe" in some absolute way, they're just "safer than they were a while ago", and (possibly) "safe enough that there's now more harm caused by all children staying in lockdown than by some children going back to school".

There's debate about all of these, there's no objectively right answer.

Quite a few people now have anecdotal experience either of hearing of cases with severe illness, hospitalisation or death, or they know friends or family who've been unwell for weeks even if they're recovering. Then you have families with vulnerable family members. And on top of that, rare but serious, is the new rare complication in children. And then the stories about blood clots and strokes in people who otherwise have mild symptoms.

Collectively, all of those things mean that lots of people are not YET going to be comfortable with a message that seems to be "they might catch it but they'll be fine". (They might well be by further on in the pandemic, if more is known about the disease and doctors can pinpoint which people are going to be severely affected and which aren't.)

But that's OK, because we can instead reassure people by saying "don't worry, you're very unlikely to catch it". That can be true, and it can be true quite soon, if we get low local rates of infection and really good testing, tracking and tracing.

It is still rational to want to avoid catching this virus if at all possible. There are still too many unknowns. Getting cross with people because they're not relaxed about it isn't going to work at this stage.

Reassuring people that we're working really hard to keep the amount of infection in the community as low as possible (it won't ever be zero), and that testing and tracking will help us squash new local outbreaks quickly, has a chance of working.

We're not quite there yet with the testing and tracking in this country, but people might be a lot more reassured when they've seen it in action, and when they can also see that our excess deaths are much lower than they are now. When that's true (soon I hope), schools will clearly be safer than they are right now - and possibly, safe enough for a lot more people.

A local teenager was airlifted to major trauma unit today after a cycling accident. This would not have happened today if he had been in school rather than lockdown. He has been spending a great deal of lockdown ( with full safety gear) on a local cycle x track. Came off one of the jumps and landed badly.
Hopefully he will be ok. As lockdown eases we will probably see more children hospitalised because of accidents than due to Covid.

Life is literally never utterly "safe"