Are schools the reason for the surge?

[NebularNerd]

Thousands of people mixing daily with no social distancing.

Children pass the virus on, as BJ has said recently (despite previously saying otherwise).

Surely even if other measures are put in place, the numbers will continue to rise?

Are schools behind the surge?

The 1st week or 2 maybe not cases were community transmission.
However as the weeks go on yes school will be a source.
We South west low r numbers yet least 12 local schools effected with whole class or year groups sent home.
Eldest is senior school confused me as she said people attending school awaiting test results?
Its been incredibly difficult get a test in South west last 2 weeks so supect r rate is inaccurate and thourght it had 3 weeks lag anyway.

Sorry time : it was a general comment, not aimed at you. hence separate paragraph.

Don’t know if this has already been said as I’ve not read the full thread, but IMO I think we can’t just put the surge down to schools, how about the eat out to help out scheme? Loads of people who had been staying at home suddenly had the incentive to go out and get cheaper meals - it was a green light for lots of people to socialise with friends again.

I think there is also going to be a horrible culture of blame and witchunting in schools both amongst staff and parents about 'who brought it in' etc. It's stressful!

Piggy now with regards to Shingles I didn't realise that.

Dd had it although GP never said 100%!

Same when they had Scarlet Fever.

I've just got my DD2s test results - 7 days after symptoms started.

So that's 7 days of her close contacts going to school, after school clubs, the park, mixing.

Luckily, it's negative. But if it were positive, you've got to wonder what the point of contact tracing would be at this stage? Would they have to isolate for a further 7 days (it would be ridiculous if they had to isolate for 14, surely).

Coronavirus is spreading unchecked, like it was in March, because testing is broken.

I think you can see that somany with the last blow out comment, the vile letter the school's headteacher wrote, the Welsh health minister's comments about teachers, and the leaked email from someone in the education authority in Glasgow. They now they are fighting a losing battle policing teens' behaviour so they will police and scold the teachers and wider school staff instead.

action do you have any conception at all that that is unusually rigorous?

It's great but it's not the norm. At all. At all.

From graphs upthread, incidence is rising in older teens and people in their 20s. But these will be people who (mostly) were symptomatic, so were tested.
As you are not supposed to get a test unless showing symptoms, and as the younger you are the less likely you are to not show symptoms if infected, I think that the incidence of infection in older teenagers is likely to be higher than we think. Asymptomatic people are less likely to infect others, but they can do so. The poster who compared schools to Petri dishes was correct.

My sister has just received year 3 nieces test results, positive.

Her closest friends have still been going to school with their ‘colds’ and she has siblings in reception and year 8 who have still been going in despite their symptoms, as the heads at those schoolS have insisted that anyone with a runny nose does not need to stay off.

It’s a shit show.

Dsis is especially worried as she knows the DM of DN’s best friend is extremely vulnerable and was scared about sending her daughter back.

Foreign holidays, domestic holidays, pubs, back to the office, public transport, restaurants, eat out to help out, shops, complacency in supermarkets, people not wearing masks/lack of social distancing. People in and out of each others houses, parties, bbq's. etc etc.

It's just a reality that the more people mix around other people, particularly indoors, the more the virus will spread.

Before kids/teachers went back to school many were socialising a lot (i.e. the first paragraph) so went back to school with the virus. Obviously if nobody went back to school with the virus then it wouldn't spread in two weeks. It's because of all the socialising in the summer holidays that it was spreading.

Sorry, forgot to add the time waiting for DN’s results, it was five days.

I think it had more to do with the Eat out to help out. There was a restaurant near me in London which had a one and a half hour queue outside on the 31st August, the restaurant which has mainly inside table was packed full. It pushed people to go inside to restaurants when perhaps they would not have and the weather in August was not good. They should have given takeaways a discount too. Telling people it was Ok to go out when it was not.

Asymptomatic people are less likely to infect others, but they can do so.

Yes, I thought they now believe that completely asymptomatic (as opposed to pre symptomatic) transmission is very rare?

I think it sort of depends on the definition of “completely“, “asymptomatic” and “rare”.

My children went back to school on the 8th!!

My post was in reply to 2X4B523P who commented that a surge in cases began on the 6th, therefore it must be schools.
Of course it has nothing to do with eat out to help out, packed pubs and people moving all around the country on "staycation" all through late July and August.
This was inevitable, the virus never went away we just hid from it and when we stopping hiding it crept back up. We cannot hide forever and I don't want to.

@Piggywaspushed

Notifiable also means you have to tell people in the workplace - especially those who are clinically vulnerable and follow certain precautions.

We have this frequently with shingles and chickenpox,

Sorry, are you saying chickenpox and shingles are notifiable in the U.K? They don’t appear to be

www.gov.uk/guidance/notifiable-diseases-and-causative-organisms-how-to-report

Irrelevant to thread but, yes, staff need to be told if shingles or chickenpox are in schools.

We had twins with a rare condition last year (thankfully now left as covid would be a nightmare) who had to be notified of everything and literally we had to know who sat at the same desks as them in every single lesson they attended lest there was a notifiable disease.

Aworld that user has a thread clearly wanting schools to close.

Poster either does not know how to interpret data or closes to ignore it as it doesn't fit agenda.

@Piggywaspushed

Irrelevant to thread but, yes, staff need to be told if shingles or chickenpox are in schools.

We had twins with a rare condition last year (thankfully now left as covid would be a nightmare) who had to be notified of everything and literally we had to know who sat at the same desks as them in every single lesson they attended lest there was a notifiable disease.

That isn’t “notifiable” though.

greyish, I think I am using notifiable wrongly : you are correct. Chickenpox outbreaks do not need to be notified in the sense you mean but they are diseases which are meant to be reported to the community (as is done with headlice, for example). I wish I had written scarlet fever now!
Regardless, covid definitely is! And so my original point stands that the teaching staff should be informed . there is a standard letter for school communities so any school not doing this is not following guidelines, which does seem an odd thing to do.

1 you can ignore last weeks confirmed cases as they would all be higher. A newspaper showed you just cant get tests
2 there are 3 schools in SE brighton and worthing
3 0.5 for schools did we have that spare - no = couldnt open schools like this.
4 if this were a football match would you be saying it's the community transmission to the event? Or saying it spread at the event? Obviously you have to have cases there to spread it . But you dont give it the mass gatherings to do this.
5 our area also had cases decrease. Not surprisingly as previously there were at least 3 sites and postsl.
This week nothing and noone at the sites... However 2 cases at the local secondary and another 2 at other schools in the LA.
6 if youve caughr a cold from school then that could have been covid. These 'measures' do not work ffs!
9 1/900 is someone in most secondaries.
Some schools will be completely closed next week as either run out of teachers or all bubbles affected
5 if you think pub crawls are a bad idea. It's really no different to secondary kids moving classes.
6 yes other things have set this off. But other countries have had this issueand they all qickly either put masks back on (israel) or went back online (aus/us etc)

Yes, Piggy COVID definitely is.

The fact remains that there was not enough time between schools restarting and cases rising for schools to be the driver. If schools were the driver you would see lots of positive tests in schools first followed by a rise in those children's contacts. That isn't what is being seen.

I can see that schools absolutely could be a source of spread but at the moment there is no evidence for it and in my view it weakens the argument overall when the assertion can't be backed up by data.

There has already been far too much "boy who cried wolf" with this so far and I think we need to be really careful not to have a similar issue with schools or people will simply switch off and ignore it if/when there actually is an issue further down the line.