A third of confirmed teacher cases of coronavirus were in north-west England at one point, according to data seen exclusively by the BBC”

[motherrunner]

I posted this in another thread but I actually think it deserves a thread of it’s own.

Worrying article on BBC this morning: www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-54695618

This is what we teachers are really concerned about - the disparity of continued education. I’m in a Tier 2 area and my school have had 4 year closures since Sept. We are not unique - I don’t know a school in my city that has gone untouched. One school closed completely as over 20 teachers tested positive. This is just the first half term and anyone who works in a school know the real illnesses haven’t started yet. Going to be a tough year.

But you last post would rather explain the so called sharp decline sonnen....

What isn't clear from the article is whether that is 'tests on that day that were positive' or 'those who had tested positive and were absent from school on that day'

It would also be helpful to know what percentage of positive teachers had asymptomatic or mild symptoms? And how many infected teachers actually are vulnerable or have vulnerable relatives in their household?

Anecdata: a colleague of mine was blue lighted to hospital. His wife caught it too, but none of their children have shown symptoms. He's out of hospital now but this was over a month ago. We don't expect him back for a while.

It would also be helpful to know what percentage of positive teachers had asymptomatic or mild symptoms?

Teachers would be unlikely to be being tested if asymptomatic - there is a presumption against teachers being identified as 'close contacts' [as we are 'not supposed to be' getting close to students so it is 'not the done thing' to say you have] and there is no mass testing of teachers as there has been for university students or those in other outbreaks.

A while back in the first wave they had data for infection rates by profession (transport workers were coming off very badly if I recall and that's why masks are compulsory on public transport.

Would be interesting to see how infection rates for teachers compare to others who are face to face now eg retail or hospitality. I think that would surely shed light on whether measures in schools are effective or not compared to other places.

You would think they must be collecting this data to see if there are sectors where measures are not effective. Transparency would mean releasing those data publicly.

Why would you test if you had no symptoms?

Would be interesting to see how infection rates for teachers compare to others who are face to face now eg retail or hospitality. I think that would surely shed light on whether measures in schools are effective or not compared to other places.

Absolutely, and given that they collect the occupation of everyone who books a test, it is being collected. Just not released. I think it's the kind of information you'd sit on until you needed to shift public opinion about something like reduced numbers in classrooms quickly

@Barbie222

Why would you test if you had no symptoms?

A school near me had multiple cases it ended up that the whole school teachers and pupils were tested they found quite a few asymptomatic positive cases , the school was closed for 2 weeks

I'm not quite sure why posters in "low rate" or tier 1 areas are so sure it's not on the verge of being an issue in their school.

I'm tier 1 and every single secondary school in my city and surrounding villages had multiple cases and at least one - often more - year group closures. Staff missing because their primary aged children are self-isolating due to positive cases in primary schools, or have Covid themselves.

The attendance figures are irrelevant. There's a code on the registers to denote Covid absences and they therefore don't count in the published absence figures. It's deliberate obfuscation.

I'm not quite sure why posters in "low rate" or tier 1 areas are so sure it's not on the verge of being an issue in their school.

I don't think anyone can be sure. But if that happens, those schools will do the best they can to stay open.

The reduced isolation period of 7 days should also help reduce absence.

The reduced isolation won't help reduce absence. The whole point of reducing the time it is that people are more likely to isolate for 7 days than 14, so it increases the amount of people who will isolate at all, and so lowers cases. It's better to have 80% of people isolating for a week than 20% of people isolating for a fortnight.

For students, they have to isolate, they have no option, so the 14 day rule was being followed quite rigorously. Reducing the time period to 7 days will increase cases because more people will be in contact with positive, infectious cases. It may have the effect of halving absences in the very short term, but in the long term, the way to decrease absence is to prevent growth. This does not prevent growth, rather it encourages it, so in the long term, it will increase, rather than decrease absence.

It may have the effect of halving absences in the very short term, but in the long term, the way to decrease absence is to prevent growth. This does not prevent growth, rather it encourages it, so in the long term, it will increase, rather than decrease absence.

I think that is way to early to tell. As the average incubation period is 4-5 days, staying at home for 7 may well be long enough to catch the vast majority cases.

@cantkeepawayforever

I think the really interesting extra piece of information to come from this is how many teachers are infected with Covid.

From the data given, it appears that on a single day, there were 2028 teachers nationwide who tested positive for Covid. What isn't clear from the article is whether that is 'tests on that day that were positive' or 'those who had tested positive and were absent from school on that day' - whatever, it is the first data that i have seen giving specific information about infection within the profession.

Given there are half a million teachers, that's a very small percentage.

@sonnenscheins

It may have the effect of halving absences in the very short term, but in the long term, the way to decrease absence is to prevent growth. This does not prevent growth, rather it encourages it, so in the long term, it will increase, rather than decrease absence.

I think that is way to early to tell. As the average incubation period is 4-5 days, staying at home for 7 may well be long enough to catch the vast majority cases.

Vast majority is not all (and I would be interested to see the proportions of people who were contagious at the various dates). It will catch less cases than 14 days, therefore cases will rise. This is a given.

The reduced isolation period of 7 days should help reduce absence

Faster testing and better T&T needs to be in place first , my ds wasn't sent home from school until day 6 which to me seemed a bit like closing the gate after the horse had bolted given that most spread is likely to take place within the early days of contact

Here's some info regarding incubation periods:

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.20.20216143v1.full

This scoping review finds that based on studies to date, the mean incubation period for COVID-19 is given by 6.71 days with a standard deviation of 4.00 days and 95% CIs ranging from 1.8 to 12.4 days.

This means that if people isolated for 7 days, rather than 14, we would catch slightly over 50% of cases, as opposed to over 95%. We wouldn't be catching "the vast majority" at all. It would still be worth decreasing the isolation period if we more than doubled the amount of people actually isolating. However, as I explained, this would not be the case in schools, where every student has to isolate because the school are telling them to do so.

So yes, cases would rise.

@3littlewords you're absolutely right - if people weren't even isolating until day 5, it would prevent even less spread.

"From the data given, it appears that on a single day, there were 2028 teachers nationwide who tested positive for Covid. What isn't clear from the article is whether that is 'tests on that day that were positive' or 'those who had tested positive and were absent from school on that day'"

I doubt it is the former. There were about 16000 positive cases that day of which about 4000 were in NW England. 1 in 8 positive cases being teachers is too high

The one third of the cases being in that area may suggest that in areas of high transmission they are disproportionately effected.

It's been taken up on the data thread, and it looks - if the 'snapshot' is of 'teachers off work on that day due to Covid, with positive tests', then it looks as if teachers are 25-50% more likely to test positive than the rest of the population, depending on the particular assumptions made.

@Nellodee

Your linked study was based on data until July and if you you read to the end it states:

A limitation of our results is however the lack of published data on the variability in mean times. Of the 64 papers included in the review only 30 reported mean incubation period times and only 4 reported standard deviations or variance. This lack of information on the variability in mean times will undoubtedly introduce a level of uncertainty and bias into the Gamma distribution parameter estimates. Furthermore, the range in mean values reported across the 30 studies varied greatly. Clearly the quality of some studies was lacking, and this assessment of quality was by definition outside the stated objectives of a scoping g review. None the less, this scoping review has provided the first meta-analysis of 64 studies published from January to July 2020.

So do you have any better data to support your theory that a 7 day incubation period would catch "the vast majority of cases"? Or is it just wishful thinking?

If there was a 7 day isolation period there wouldn't be many who needed to isolate for the full 7 days, even if we managed to get to a point of same day result there will likely be a couple of days between last contact to symptoms starting to getting a test. I doubt many would get a test after first initial cough as it's not persistent or continuous by that point, you might see if a temp goes with a dose of paracetamol before testing, can't comment on the loss of taste and smell dont know how quickly that becomes apparent

@Whatchasayin

But surely now all these teachers have had it, the schools won't in danger of closing again. They're extremely unlikely to get it again. I don't really understand your point.

What do you think is going to happen in cases of long covid? Secondary schools don’t have cupboards full of maths, chemistry, physics and MFL teachers just sitting around waiting to teach. I worked supply in a particularly deprived area of the North West for years and can assure you that I had the pick of schools to take long term assignments in. And that was a few years ago now, before the trickle of resignations became an exodus. Where does that leave children who’s school can’t find a Spanish teacher when theirs needs 6 months to recover?

And I suppose the lives of teachers who are affected long term. or their families who lose an income or experience the loss of a loved one don’t matter?

I have found evidence suggesting that the median incubation period was estimated to be 5.1 days (95% CI, 4.5 to 5.8 days).

Yes, we will miss a few cases by reducing the isolation period to 7 days, but we will halve the school time missed by pupils. It depends whether that's a worthwhile trade off?

Whatchasayin
But surely now all these teachers have had it, the schools won't in danger of closing again. They're extremely unlikely to get it again. I don't really understand your point.

What do you think is going to happen in cases of long covid?

But how many pupils or teachers are actually getting long COVID?

We can't eliminate all risks! But we need to decide, as a society, what our priorities are imo.