The rate of infections in schools is being suppressed from public knowledge

[noblegiraffe]

...claims Karam Bales of the NEU.

I’m pretty sure I agree. When the newspapers are going mad about university cases and 13,000 kids and 700 teachers being off school in Birmingham doesn’t make national headlines, then something dodgy is going on.

This twitter thread collates all the evidence and is pretty damning twitter.com/karamballes/status/1315067136394625032?s=21

My own thoughts:
Why are the government ignoring the WHO recommendations on masks?
Why have they stopped PHE deciding who is sent home when there are cases in schools setting up their own helpline instead which sends home far fewer kids?
Why are the figures not being presented in a way that makes it clear which cases are in schools and not universities?
Why did Chris Whitty use a graph of test positivity rates instead of actual infection numbers in his briefing when it came to claiming that schools aren’t an issue?
Why are they insisting that children only get a test if they exhibit one of the three main adult symptoms, ignoring that the majority of children who test positive don’t have any of them?
Why are they insisting on vulnerable children being sent in with the threat of fines for non-attendance?
Why did they spend the summer pretending that unions were blocking the re-opening of schools and then paying social media influencers to say schools are safe, without taking any steps to ensure that they are?
Why did they announce a Plan B of rotas for schools in tiers of lockdown and then never actually use it?
Why did they say that an effective test and trace system was vital to opening schools and then also say they were surprised when demand increased when schools opened?
Why do they keep saying schools are a priority and that be the only thing they say about keeping them open?

And where the fuck is Gavin Williamson?

We eat in the classroom with the kids

There’s a big difference between primary and secondary. While some kids are eating outside, other kids are having lessons in the classrooms.

Yeah I can’t eat in the classroom I just taught in because although I’m on lunch, they’re not and a teacher has just rocked up for their next lesson.

Spare classrooms are being used for intervention.

It isn’t as easy as some posters blithely assume.

So I eat in our department office.

We've got our staff room open now and a separate room for overflow. We have to stay 2 metres away and clean our area afterwards so feels like we're playing dodgeball trying to avoid getting close! I and others now just sit in our cars to eat. I don't mind it but some days it's tempting to just drive off!

See ONS figure 5 - the figure of year 7-11s testing positive is now 1% and rising.

@HipTightOnions Fair enough it is nice that you said that you didn’t want to upset me. Makes me feel a bit better!

I’m not at all saying that this is easy or that it is isn’t tricky or complicated - I am in fact trying to support you as teachers and other students. I’ve written to my MPs etc and I have relevant ‘qualifications’ I guess in this area that hopefully would make those listen a bit. The core of my point is that teachers should not be pushed into taking risks that could be solved or reduced with good old fashioned sense and problem solving. What frustrates me is that many are just ignoring the risks or pretending that there isn’t one.

Of course, hopefully children do transmit at a lower rate however until we really know more about this, we should protect teachers and students who all have to attend education. There is no option for them. It doesn’t seem fair to me at all.

As a good example, my teacher relative in Ireland works in a huge secondary school. All the teachers and students wear masks, all day except lunch. Yes you are right she can’t have her own classroom to eat in but her and two other teacher’s eat spaced out in one classroom whilst all the kids have to stay outside for lunch (which they had to anyway before). That way is a compromise and it does massively lessen her risk, and she gets a bit of chat in. But if she really didn’t want to she could leave the premises. They weren’t told to by the Government but it just made sense.

Oh crap. While the positivity rate has stayed the same for Y12-age 24 (1.5%) it has doubled for Y7-11 in a week, from 0.5% to 1%

They cannot possibly claim that schools are safe now or continue to blame uni students for anything under ‘educational settings’.

Have had an email from Son's school to say from Monday masks at all times in school buildings apart from when eating.

That’s interesting noblegiraffe. I am surprised how low the positivity rate is though. It’s very low. I am used to seeing 17% up here is Scotland.

Well my pre-schooler is obviously mid isolation due to having to collect him early at the beginning of the week.

1 of my other DCs school has closed as of today until at least after half term.

It’s because the ONS data is random household testing, chicken, not the results from people seeking tests due to symptoms. It means that the infection rate in Y7-11 has doubled in a week in random testing, suggesting double the number of kids are infected than last week in that age group.

The test positivity rate for 10-19 is 17% from people seeking tests.

Ah thanks for clearing that up. It’s so important to understand what data actually means and not interpret it wrong !

17% is high isn’t it

So last week 1 in 200 in that age group had COVID. Now 1 in 100. So typically 10 kids at any given time in a secondary school.

19 year olds include uni students.

Y7-11 doesn’t include uni students, Jane, and infection rates have doubled.

I did say people couldn’t use uni students as an excuse any more.

schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-closes-covid-attendance-loophole-6-weeks-into-term/

So the government have not even bothered to collected the full set of data for covid related absences. How can we be sure the school statistics are correct if data is not even collected. Such a mess.

The test positivity rate for 10-19 is 17% from people seeking tests

Sorry, I assumed this was age?

Discussing the ONS survey data, Jane.

Another year 6 in my class has tested positive. I've just had an email. They started feeling ill on Monday apparently- when we were still in- but mum didn't take it seriously. Now we've had a positive she did. Presented with fatigue and loss of appetite and a bit of tummy cramp. Only managed to get tested because of proximity to the already positive child. And 1 in my local village school in year 6 too.
I haven't been told what this means for me in terms of isolating, whether it resets the button as it were.

I suspect we mean different things by "positivity".

So ONS tests random samples of people, and they found that (as I understand it) if you randomly test 100 secondary age kids age approx 11-16, you get 1 in 100 testing positive.

Of course, if you are in Greater Manchester, the number's likely to be higher, and in Cornwall, the number's likely to be lower.

Another positivity measure is the number of people testing (usually because they have symptoms) that then test positive. The figures in Scotland for this have been really high sometimes, and I suspect that this is where the 17% positive comes from.

Both figures concern me.

17% positive of young people being tested with symptoms would suggest that a lot of young people who are positive are being missed. (and so could go on to spread the virus unknowlingly)

1% positive of 11-16 year olds on random testing suggests that there are a lot of children out there positive, possibly asymptomatic, who can spread this. There are a lot of interconnections across different schools through siblings, friends and so on. If the virus is seeded through young people this age, the crowded environment and lack of mitigations means it could spread really easily.

And of course, many young people are asymptomatic, which makes prevention and also tracking very difficult.

Sorry, very belated cross post with @noblegiraffe

So last week 1 in 200 in that age group had COVID. Now 1 in 100. So typically 10 kids at any given time in a secondary school.

I watched a video this morning taken in the local secondary last week. I was rather distracted from the point of the video by thinking the whole time 'holy crap that is the PERFECT environment for coronavirus spread'.

They were all sitting right next to each other in rows of 4, shoulder's touching. No windows open, no masks, absolutely no space between students, desks crammed in.

If there are 10 students with covid on average in each secondary you can expect the R to be the R0 and the growth within secondaries to be exponential. There's nothing to stop it, certainly within year groups. They're indoors together for hours at a time.

The problem is the 'bubble' approach doesn't really help that much if it spreads within a class and then they take it home to their siblings, who then take it into their bubbles and year groups. The chances of this happening are greater for children as they're more likely to be asymptomatic. We DESPERATELY need data on the proportion of children who are asymptomatic. Why is this data not being collected? Surely it's easy to test close contacts?

We especially need this data if they're sending home only 'close contacts' (from the video I saw I fail to see how they're not all close contacts).

When you see what's happening in other countries, even those much less wealthy, it's just so appalling and shocking that they've put no extra money into schools here. www.unicef.org/stories/heading-back-school-pandemic

[weeps inside]

In my year 9 class today I had 4 off with "tummy pains / tummy bug / headache", and 2 with the X code that corresponds to coronavirus.
Similar in my year 7s and 8s.
Year 10 I've got 2 who are just "ill" and have been for over a week now.
However I haven't been told about any cases since the first few in the first few weeks.
I teach in the South West which is supposedly a low incidence area....

And masks are Not ALLOWED in my school. At all.