Secondary schools are fucked, BOFFINS ADMIT

[noblegiraffe]

Latest ONS random sampling data shows that secondary school children in Y7-11 are now the age group with the highest infection rate in England, overtaking sixth form and university students.

In Wales "Schoolchildren are more likely to catch and spread coronavirus than previously thought, experts have warned... It was also discovered that while children were far more likely to be asymptomatic and not become seriously unwell, they were more likely to be the first positive case in any household."

www.walesonline.co.uk/news/health/schoolchildren-more-likely-catch-spread-19275959?fbclid=IwAR0kpoikv0D_nkwHx3lVyQX_cyDj6Ycy1d6gE3aRx6syxUKzFQsYzMDSqPw

English boffins are a bit slower on the uptake though
"SAGE’s report found that prevalence of Covid-19 in school-age children had “risen significantly” in the first wave, and that the rise in prevalence was “first visible around the time that schools reopened”.

However, it said that while this “may be indicative of a potential role for school opening, causation, including the extent to which transmission is occurring in schools, is unproven and difficult to establish”.

schoolsweek.co.uk/child-infection-rate-rise-began-when-schools-reopened-but-direct-link-unproven-says-sage/

It must indeed be difficult to establish whether there's transmission in a high risk environment where kids are packed in like sardines with no mitigation measures. A real head-scratcher. Especially if you spent the whole summer insisting that it would be fine because the kids are facing forward.

What do we want? Well, one of the major teaching unions has called on the government to:

1. Demonstrate that they are following the scientific evidence and advice.
2. Strengthen the guidance to schools and colleges on ensuring COVID-safe and COVID-secure working practices.
3. Secure the updating and publication of health and safety risk assessments and equality impact assessments by school and college employers.
4. Publish weekly data on positive cases of COVID-19 infections of school/college staff and pupils by local government area
5. Ramp up inspection and enforcement measures in schools and colleges, including more comprehensive use of spot checks and visits by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).
6. Take swift action to protect public health in the event of an outbreak.
7. Protect vulnerable teachers and support staff and pupils.
8. Strengthen the guidance to insist on effective social distancing in schools/colleges.
9. Establish a national plan for remote education/blended and distance learning.

10. Provide significant additional financial support for schools and colleges urgently to ensure the safety of staff and pupils, including extra funding for cleaning, personal protective equipment (PPE) and supply teachers

www.nasuwt.org.uk/article-listing/plan-to-keep-schools-safe-during-pandemic.html

Oh OP I knew this would be you yadayada...yeah that's why I chose the same thread title as before etc etc.

Why do we need another thread blah blah: it's because secondary school kids are now infected at the highest rates in the country. This has implications for lockdown. How effective will it be if the most infected subset of the population are mixing freely? And it's also the first hint from scientists that they might have been wrong about exactly how safe schools are. There's also a strong suggestion that kids are bringing the virus home from school which parents should be aware of.

It's also causing chaos in schools, but there's another thread about that.

@PatriciaHolm

Numbers of people in ONS Sample for that study -

Teachers of unknown Type - 7,714
Primary Teachers - 2,190
Secondary Teachers - 1,852

Wow-that’s a difference!

Hi name changed, teacher, regular poster.

Have this been posted?

www.ons.gov.uk/surveys/informationforhouseholdsandindividuals/householdandindividualsurveys/covid19schoolsinfectionsurveysis#what-is-an-antibody

How have I been selected?
Your primary or secondary school head teacher has agreed for the school to take part in the study.
There are 150 schools (50 primary and 100 secondary schools) participating in this study.
In selected primary schools, where the average enrolment is 280 pupils, we will offer enrolment to:
• all eligible pupils
• all staff
In selected secondary schools, where the average enrolment is 990 pupils, we will only offer enrolment to
• all eligible pupils (excluding year 11) in two consecutive year groups (approximately 250 pupils)
• all staff

*Has

It's antibody testing:

Will I be followed up?
Yes, after the first visit in the school we plan to arrange five more appointments, one at the end of Autumn term and two in each of the remaining two terms in the 2020 to 2021 school year. These will be very similar to the initial round of testing described in Section 10.

Horse, door, bolted to be honest...

@Hardbackwriter
link to the datasets - www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/datasets/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveydata/2020

you need the top one.

@PatriciaHolm thank you! Their sample for nursery teachers is very small indeed...

@PatriciaHolm

Numbers of people in ONS Sample for that study -

Teachers of unknown Type - 7,714
Primary Teachers - 2,190
Secondary Teachers - 1,852

So, is that a total of 11,756 teachers altogether? Or 7714 teachers sampled, of which 4000 ish are primary/secondary?

The 7714 teachers didn’t specify whether they were primary or secondary so were lumped together. Their risk is higher than NHS keyworkers, but the news stories focussed on the primary and secondary teachers who did specify and concluded they were at less or the same risk as NHS.

So basically the news ignored the largest group of teachers by far who were also at the highest risk.

[quote Bromeliad]@MarjorytheTrashHeap This report in the local press was interesting on non-standard symptoms in primary pupils. I think the council have been doing some mass testing in schools here which might explain how they've picked it up.

[[https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/headteacher-warns-parents-over-lesser-19102778]][/quote]
I'm in Greater Manchester too and one of my primary children's bubble has burst. The child who has it had non-standard symptoms, as do their whole family. I now have a sore throat but I'm not eligible for testing as I don't have one of the main three symptoms.

@noblegiraffe

The 7714 teachers didn’t specify whether they were primary or secondary so were lumped together. Their risk is higher than NHS keyworkers, but the news stories focussed on the primary and secondary teachers who did specify and concluded they were at less or the same risk as NHS.

So basically the news ignored the largest group of teachers by far who were also at the highest risk.

Yep - I have to admit that I initially thought this was a bit conspiracy-theory, but with the raw figures you can work out the rate if you include all teachers (0.46) or 'primary teacher + secondary teacher + unknown teacher' (0.49) - and they're both higher than other key worker and other profession. The ONS didn't exactly hide that but they certainly didn't make it clear and they could easily have done, and the headlines would have totally different if they had.

@NorthOfTheBorders
why don't you just say you have one of the symptoms? nobody actually checks....

Actually, I think they did basically hide it. Especially as normally that kind of category - the 'other' - is a little one that you can kind of ignore because it's a few people who didn't fit into the main categories, so you really ought to make it clear if that's actually the majority of your sample.

Thanks to those wading through the data to make sense of it. Logically of course teachers are at highest risk given no one else is mixing in close quarters with people from 30 households for an hour at a time without ppe. They've done their darnedest to try and deny that common sense reality.

Do you know what is annoying me a lot at the moment? The "it's all perfectly safe I don't know what you're worried about" thing.

Like this article from BBC news about how more people are choosing home schooling rather than send children in to potentially catch the virus:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-54908149

So is there a chart anywhere comparing different professions and how at risk they are-showing a proper representation of teachers?

Interestingly nursery workers and university lecturers scored higher than secondary school teachers. Which is surprising because lecturers have been giving lessons online and small child you are less likely to pass on the virus.

The viral load experienced by nursery workers will be very high as their jobs entail very close contact - this will be hugely increased if no PPE worn. The research about children's ability to transmit is variable - with one study showing young children having much higher levels of virus in nasal passages than older children and adults. Even if small children transmit less, that can be more than offset by the increased exposure by spending long periods of time in very close contact.

In secondary school teachers can - to some extent - distance. If your job involves wiping bums and stopping children physically hurting themselves during tantrums, you really can't at all. I would not be surprised at all if nursery workers were at much higher risk because of the likelihood of high viral load owing to very high exposure (without PPE).

University lecturers - it's variable. Some universities were really pushing face to face teaching to encourage students to come back (to get the accommodation income). SOME have been doing mostly online, but some haven't, and we know there have been big outbreaks among university students so any lecturers doing face to face teaching would be at risk.

I don't understand how people -parents, media- can be so complacent and not shout at the top of their lungs

""The protective measures in place make schools as safe as possible for children and staff, and schools are not the main drivers of infection in the community.""

AND:
www.thewestmorlandgazette.co.uk/news/18872874.sedbergh-school-reports-multiple-positive-cases-covid-19/

Apparently , mass testing uncovered 53 cases, largely asymptomatic.
In only one school.

Actually, I think they did basically hide it.

Yep. It has been an inescapable conclusion over the last few months that the official sources are suppressing, fudging and misrepresenting data in an effort to give the impression that schools are safe.

They've released data according to wildly different age categories which are no use when you are trying to establish whether school kids are getting covid (this has got better, with some data broken down by year group released just before half term, too late to be used to argue for a circuit breaker).
The released to media fanfare the PHE report saying that schools posed no increased risk and were safe - based on data from when schools were open to a handful of socially distanced kids
They released the report last week that showed adults living with a child were only at an 8% greater risk from covid - based on data from before schools re-opened in September, giving the impression that schools are safe now
JVT's heatmaps use the age category 0-15. We know from other datasets that younger kids have below average infection levels and older kids higher than average. Combine the two groups and hey presto, the figures don't look worrying.
That press conference where Chris Whitty brought up some slides with data that showed positivity rates for various age groups, while implying that what was being shown was infection rates leading people to think that schools were fine.

The ONS putting out this teacher dataset which is misleading bullshit is only the latest in a long line.

Yes, this:

""The protective measures in place make schools as safe as possible for children and staff, and schools are not the main drivers of infection in the community.""

WHAT PROTECTIVE MEASURES?

And this is in no way a criticism of schools and teachers who are doing their absolute best under almost impossible circumstances but there are not really protective measures.

My boys are at a big secondary which like many others holds many more students than it was originally designed for. Corridors and classrooms are crowded. They are, since half term, wearing masks in corridors, before that it was optional. But they are not wearing masks in class, they are not 2 metres away from other students and not always 2 metres from the teacher either as there just isn't the space. There are still 30 + in a class. If any students get "standard" symptoms and therefore a positive test they are only sending home those who sit next to them - not the rest, who have spent at least an hour in the same classroom, unmasked. Maybe the windows open, maybe they don't.

Sedbergh, linked above, is an independent school who presumably paid for their own testing. That article suggests that it was an outbreak among boarding students which presumably means even more chance for transmission. But - I'd be interested to see results from mass testing in "ordinary" secondaries.

Good luck with waiting for mass tests in state schools... :(
The private school I know has no intention to tests. They don't want to know and they spout the "everything is fine" line over and over again.
And they have boarding kids too.

And on being transparent. On Google classroom today the PE teacher wrote to the form that he will be off for 2 weeks due to health issues.
So it's not covid related, yet exactly the same time amount that it takes to isolate. Or he is a real guru and knows how long his cold will last. exactly.

In some part of my brain which is not flooded with rage I understand heads want to/have to be compliant with Dfe, but on another level: no, I don't. They are being accomplices by not doing anything in their own right. I have yet to know of a school in the UK where the HT said masks everywhere and enforced it. and that's basic stuff

I don't understand how people -parents, media- can be so complacent and not shout at the top of their lungs

People don't want to know. I assume politicians because then they might have to do something about it and parents because they don't want to homeschool again.

@TheSunIsStillShining

I don't understand how people -parents, media- can be so complacent and not shout at the top of their lungs

""The protective measures in place make schools as safe as possible for children and staff, and schools are not the main drivers of infection in the community.""

AND:
www.thewestmorlandgazette.co.uk/news/18872874.sedbergh-school-reports-multiple-positive-cases-covid-19/

Apparently , mass testing uncovered 53 cases, largely asymptomatic.
In only one school.

All teachers have said this, asymptomatic cases in primary will be higher too as they are least likely to show the main three symptoms.

Schools are full of Covid which is why they are hiding it.

@NorthOfTheBorders my mum didn't have the symptoms listed so I had to lie and and said she did - she got a positive test.

It's a huge shame sen teachers aren't defined.

Their risk would be similar to nursery staff. And on an ons page about risk of infections (all) they are listed next to care staff and nursery staff.