[quote MRex]@herecomesthsun - You are showing a chart of hospital admissions rising from the week before schools went back as evidence that schools are driving infections. Why?
Look at the data in figures from August: coronavirus.data.gov.uk - the case rises bed in during mid-August and hospitalisations from 24th August.
The education settings includes all the uni cases. Look at the previous ONS report; how did young children not catch covid for 6 weeks at school, but then you want to blame the same school environment for transmission? www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/englandwalesandnorthernireland9october2020#age-analysis-of-the-number-of-people-in-england-who-had-covid-19.
Schools reflect community spread; children can also catch covid from their parents, from playdates etc. 90% of infections come from the 10% who are superspreaders. If young children in primary were the main superspreaders, most of the class would catch it, then you would see their parents all catch it. This is why it matters to be specific about which school group you mean, there is a clear difference with primary.
Older secondary age (14+) - yes, there is increased transmission. We know from research back in May that they were likely to spread covid as much as adults, while younger children weren't. (Most likely because of ACE2 receptors). However, they for some reason had lower positivity as well as rates than university teenagers. Physical differences are unlikely to impact from 16-18, so that makes it activity risk. Do you think university students caught covid:
A) in lectures, or
B) sharing flats with someone infected, or
C) at parties.
Cause of infection actually matters, it really really does. I don't think you should expect cases to go down if you send teenagers out of school to hang out in each other's homes.[/quote]
1 Why [is this chart circumstantial evidence of school return influencing infection rates]? I wouldn't expect the curves to be that shape if the increase in cases were primarily driven by returning holiday makers. I'd expect a sharp rise in August-? early September followed by a slower rise, a plateau or even a fall.
In fact, cases rose a little in August, but so slightly that many people on the data thread had difficulty seeing a rise at all for a long while.
I'd agree that holidays played a part- back in August- but I don't think they were the main cause of rises in September and October. You can see the gradient of the curves rising more and more steeply as the weeks go by.
I would also agree with both SAGE and Independent SAGE that there is a significant transmission risk from schools remaining open.
I also agree that there is a difference, fortunately between primary and secondary.
- The graph from 9th October does show a slight increase for primary school children, but the y axis is not calibrated to show this very much.
If smaller units on the Y axis were used for this data, the beginnings of a rise in cases would be better shown.
3 how did young children not catch covid for 6 weeks at school, but then you want to blame the same school environment for transmission
think the numbers were really very low in many areas for several weeks. If cases weren't getting into schools in the first place, then the transmission between pupils of course wouldn't be happening.
I think that as cases rise in the community, people, even young people, who are crowded together indoors are going to be vulnerable to infection and transmission processes. If you just get 1 case in a crowded classroom, at the end of the school day there are liable to be more cases, and this is likely to progress.
If cases are transmitted in the community, why wouldn't they also be transmitted in school, which is unusual currently as a place when many people from different households are gathering together indoors with poor ventilation for hours at a time?
There may be transmission happening elsewhere as well of course, but now we are in lockdown, we can expect that a larger proportion of the transmission will be happening in school (from the ONS figures, it looks like this would be both primary and secondary). This increase in the proportion of transmission happening in schools may have been happening already in areas with higher tiers, of course.
- However, do actually look at the ONS graphs I was discussing (and I'm really sorry that I can't reproduce them directly, I did try) from 23rd October and 2nd November, the most recent available. The positivity rate for children in primary school in the ONS graphs is as high or higher than anyone else in the community aged over 25.
Year 12 - age 24 have highest rates (now coming down) but positivity rates in primary school children are rising to close to the rates for secondary school children.
I have linked many times on the Coronavirus board to the WHO recommendations, which we still aren't following in our schools. They are not as stringent for younger children, but there is yet much guidance which we aren't following.
It is of course great that younger children seem to be less at risk from the virus than other people. However, the evidence does suggest that younger children can and do spread this infection, even if this is at a lower rate, other things being equal, than in adults or secondary school children (again there are studies to which I have linked a number of times before. Also there is a level of common sense scientific thinking here. )
Certainly, putting children all together in classes of 30, not sending the whole class home if one tests positive, and indeed limiting testing, this is creating the right conditions for spread, as Neurotrash Warrior was suggesting. There is a good infection control reason why everyone else in society is social distancing etc.
5 I wouldn't like to speculate on the transmission issues around young adults, as I couldn't do that in an informed way, but I am very sure that rigorous academic analysis is being done around that, with a view to making University life possible and safe (I note that University teaching is currently going almost entirely on line and that seems sensible)