Surely they can’t keep schools open as normal if cases keep going up like today!

[Worriedmum999]

My daughter went back to school last Thursday. She really needed to go as lockdown played havoc with her mental health. She was fine doing her academic work but she is someone who needs the social side of school.

We are a vulnerable family and, with this shitshower of a government, I had no faith that cases wouldn’t rise and I wouldn’t be forced to take her out of school again. But I cannot believe that she has been back 2 days and the jump in cases has been so huge. I honestly expected us to be able to get to half term. Of course deaths are going to rise now. Why wouldn’t we follow the pattern of the other European countries. Add to that the fact that people can’t get tested now and we’re fucked. And I’m so fucking angry and upset about the damage that this is doing.

What are the government going to do? Surely it will be impossible to expect parents to keep sending their children to schools when the death toll is huge again and the ICUs are full.

I would want to see every other part of industry locked down before we even consider closing schools again in the worst case scenario, and even then I would still expect schools to remain open as far as possible in areas of low transmission.

Thar seems more or less to be the current government policy for primary schools. For secondary they appear to expect two weeks on, two weeks off to come more quickly. But of course government policy has changed a lot on this topic so who knows.

Yesterday the march was.

a school has closed for one day only in Suffolk
England: school closes after five teachers test positive
A school in Suffolk, in the east of England, was closed to pupils on Monday morning after five teachers tested positive for coronavirus.

Two other members of staff at the Samuel Ward Academy in Haverhill are waiting to hear their coronavirus test results, the PA news agency reports. It was closed on the advice of Public Health England.

A deep clean is to take place at the school and anyone who has been in close contact with infected staff has been contacted and asked to self-isolate for 14 days, the school said.

The school said in a statement that the closure was a “precautionary measure” and it hoped to reopen on Tuesday. The headteacher, Andy Hunter, said:

The safety of pupils and all those who work at the school is my biggest priority.

Obviously this is a huge disappointment after working so hard to get the school back up and running.

I will be looking closely at the systems we put in place to try to understand how the transmission occurred and to make sure we do everything possible to limit the chances of the same thing happening again.

I am very disappointed by this disrupted start to the school term.

We have taken very extensive precautions.

We were delighted that term had started so well last week and were looking forward to the final two year groups starting (on Monday).

But I have had excellent support from Public Health England, Public Health Suffolk and Suffolk County Council.

We are determined to do all we can to stop the further spread of the virus and agree with the precautionary action to close the school (on Monday).

Further contact tracing will continue and additional pupils and staff may be asked to self-isolate.

Like the school in Dundee, the teachers are those contracting and transmitting the virus. This is a secondary school where older pupils would be symptomatic if they were infected. Worth thinking outside the box about whether the role of pupils, including secondary, in virus transmission.

I am just enjoying a blissful thread without endless teachers telling me I am the worlds worst person for wanting my children to have an education :)

Well, Friends they will be busy teaching right now, so that's not very fair, but there is a balance to reach between keeping everyone safe and the children not being marooned at home for months more throughout winter without seeing their friends or teachers. I know my DS missed some of his teachers as well as his friends.
It does make me sad and angry that the government is keeping some business areas open (even funding them) that are not essential and are leading to the virus being transmitted increasingly, which is putting at risk the safe reopening and remaining open of schools and the health of those in them. Close the non-essential sectors that are bad for health and bad for the environment. A structural economic change was always coming anyway, this has just hastened it.

Close the non-essential sectors that are bad for health and bad for the environment.

They tend to be good for revenue though.? Which we badly need.

Education in particular.

There are no easy answers.

Yesbut people are not sd from elderly as like in march being told its safe.
Lots of Gap doing the school run. As it's safe!
Mar would have had fewer deaths if elderly had been called inside earlier.
Over capacity and any young person needing o2 will die too as several did.

At my dd's school they were back one day and had a confirmed case of covid19 amongst the staff so shebis now isolating along with 3 others, but all children are still expected to attend even though classes are back at 30 and there's no social distancing possible around the school and within classes (the children are moving around the school, not the teachers).

I think we just have to accept that this will be the case now as we can't keep shutting everything down.

I’m afraid it will transpire that secondary school kids transmit. The reason it’s not looking that way is the Government is purposefully not putting surveillance in to monitor. It may be teachers that act as canaries in the coal mines as their symptoms are more obvious as they’re older but it will transpire eventually that the kids are transmitting. Unfortunate reality our Gov doesn’t want to face.

@Keepdistance

Yesbut people are not sd from elderly as like in march being told its safe. Lots of Gap doing the school run. As it's safe! Mar would have had fewer deaths if elderly had been called inside earlier. Over capacity and any young person needing o2 will die too as several did.

The main reason GP’s are doing the school run at our school is because before and after school club hasn’t reopened and their parents have to go to work. There is no other wrap around care in our village.

@Oaktree55

I’m afraid it will transpire that secondary school kids transmit. The reason it’s not looking that way is the Government is purposefully not putting surveillance in to monitor. It may be teachers that act as canaries in the coal mines as their symptoms are more obvious as they’re older but it will transpire eventually that the kids are transmitting. Unfortunate reality our Gov doesn’t want to face.

I think it’s pretty obvious that they will. They still need to go to school though.

Didn't they reduce the death rate from covid because it included people who died months later? But people take time to get ill & covid can have severe side effects (often caused by the blood clots it induces - in various parts of the body & organs) & sepsis & weakening of the body which allows co-morbid infections -etc etc. I thought Hancock stated that they only included people who died within a month? Note it often takes time to get severely ill -think weeks- so death could easily occur later than a month - but I suspect that wouldn't be helpful for Hancock idea of "we are in control". nb Haverhill is in his constituency.
Further thoughts -if several teacher prove positive you have to wonder who they mixed with inside & outside of school & how far it spreads in the community both ways.

Didn't they reduce the death rate from covid because it included people who died months later?

In England. Not anywhere else. Death rates have lowered across the board.

In Europe

@Oaktree55 yes, you may be right. I think it needs looking into and explanations given for the fact that teachers were mainly affected in both schools.
I don't think that teachers are all against going back into schools though. Both my DC school have said how happy they are that the schools are open and full of pupils. I think it is a very vocal and noisy minority who come on MN and say they feel like canon fodder. Everyone is at risk in a school environment, pupils and teachers. But if the government would stop the current transmission within the hospitality and travel industries, then schools would be a safer place.

“Non essential” sectors are essential not only to those working in them but also to bring in tax revenues to pay for public services. Nothing is “non essential”. That’s not to say that businesses shouldn’t be closed if they are driving the spread but not a blanket closure just because you deem places “non essential”.

@mumwon

Didn't they reduce the death rate from covid because it included people who died months later? But people take time to get ill & covid can have severe side effects (often caused by the blood clots it induces - in various parts of the body & organs) & sepsis & weakening of the body which allows co-morbid infections -etc etc. I thought Hancock stated that they only included people who died within a month? Note it often takes time to get severely ill -think weeks- so death could easily occur later than a month - but I suspect that wouldn't be helpful for Hancock idea of "we are in control". nb Haverhill is in his constituency. Further thoughts -if several teacher prove positive you have to wonder who they mixed with inside & outside of school & how far it spreads in the community both ways.

Not quite... any death with Covid on the death certificate is recorded as Covid, whenever it happened. The ones taken from the death toll were the extra ones recorded by PHE, in which they went through the data of all deaths that have occurred and cross referenced them with people who have had a positive Covid test at any point, and then subsequently died. In effect, it was impossible to ever recover from Covid under the previous system. Someone could have tested positive with Covid in May, died of something entirely unrelated in August and it would have counted as a Covid death.

It does make me sad and angry that the government is keeping some business areas open (even funding them) that are not essential

You mean businesses that generate the tax revenue used to pay for healthcare and education? Where do you think the money will come from if businesses stay closed?

@Friendsoftheearth

I am just enjoying a blissful thread without endless teachers telling me I am the worlds worst person for wanting my children to have an education :)

This!

I am not against those areas, but they are being proven to be the areas currently spreading infection.

We are doing very little now except school, with bike rides etc at weekends. I’m happy to limit all other activity if it means my children can get an education.

Same here. I have found this thread very reassuring and am glad so many of us feel the same about education.

@Friendsoftheearth

fly We are already doing that! We are already leading a very restricted life as far as I can tell. I haven't been to the theatre, concert etc for months. Shops all limit to four customers here. No parties or festivals. It is already happening.

So are you suggesting we restrict people further?

No, I'm suggesting that people keep to the existing rules. Plenty of people on MN are bragging that they don't.

Many are pressing to open concert halls and theatres fully. People want to be able to watch the football. More and more people are pushing for more relaxation.

Chris Whitty says we have opened as much as we should but Johnson is driven by money not science. I trust Whitty to know what he's talking about. Johnson is poorly educated as far as science goes.

I'm saying keep everything where it is for now. Steady as she goes.

Surely, if a councillor from Bolton says that the young people working in the hospitality industry are the ones being infected and then spreading the virus, those industries should be closed? After all, if a school had an outbreak and was spreading the virus, it would be closed.

@Friendsoftheearth

I am just enjoying a blissful thread without endless teachers telling me I am the worlds worst person for wanting my children to have an education :)

Not one teacher has said that. I wonder why you felt you needed to lie. But any excuse to bash a teacher, eh?