Where are people catching COVID?

[ApplestheHare]

Can anyone point me in the direction of data showing the most common UK settings for catching COVID? I've seen some gov or test and trace slides somewhere but can't find them again!

I did see some official pie charts last week and supermarkets were the leading area of spread.....will go and see if I can find a link.

However I took it all with a pinch of salt. Nobody will know for sure. Most people will visit a supermarket weekly so if asked where they got it from it’s an easy venue to latch onto. Doesn’t make it true. Also some people who have broken the rules won’t admit they went to a party, someone else’s house, a black market hairdresser, etc.

It's here

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/6november2020

But if you understand data at all , it is really actually pretty useless. Huge margins of errors and great vagueness. It doesn't actually show teaching to be a low risk profession.

Their doesn't seem to be much focus on infections in workplaces this time round. Last time, lots of information was gathered. This strays into the territory of gathering data with a political purpose which the BMJ railed against this week.

A FOI request reveals how little data is being gathered:

www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/teachersstudentsinfectedwithcovid19bymonthandthenumberofschoolclosuresbyarea

It was a PHE tweet

And interesting they separated primary and secondary school figures. If added together schools overtake supermarkets as the leading area.

I think that is just based on where people have been jacob. It's in the same link I posted a while back (ie the surveillance reports). People can give multiple answers to that question. the same places do pop up weekly: shops, education settings, visiting family - just the places most people go all the time really!

Our backwards contact tracing to establish superspreading events etc is really non existent. But they do seem more now to be identifying children as first cases in households.

Totally agree piggy it’s impossible for individuals or officials to know. If I test positive and I’ve been to work, Dd has been to uni, I’ve been to the gym and supermarket how can I know where I got it?

I guess during lockdown that maybe whittles the list down...

@JacobReesMogadishu

And interesting they separated primary and secondary school figures. If added together schools overtake supermarkets as the leading area.

Unfortunately it is the usual lies, dam lies and statistics. I have had cause to ask similar questions due to the constant complaints from the NEU rep saying that their members are at such high risk the school should be closed.

Schools have incredibly tight Covid procedures. Every time there is a positive case it is discussed with PHE. Children with symptoms are usually getting tested and cannot attend school whilst awaiting a test. Interesting of those getting tested few actually test positive.

What sits behind this is a wider problem of people having clear symptoms but refuse point blank to be tested as they think they will still have to quarantine for 14 days...therefore the true rate of transmission is nothing like what that chart shows as that is known transmission only...

In our school of nearly 1800 children, we have had only 13 cases. 4 of these were linked to transmission within a friendship group and in fact doesn't look like it happened in school, but a local pub (pre lockdown2) as that group had little contact within school.

I'm surprised it isn't higher given that a lot of children come on buses that are full

Woeful test and trace means we don't know this, this far down the line - what an inept response

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54938735

BBC article about deaths in Bradford that mentions the scenario of children / university students coming home and giving this to vulnerable family members

Schools have incredibly tight Covid procedures. Every time there is a positive case it is discussed with PHE. Children with symptoms are usually getting tested and cannot attend school whilst awaiting a test. Interesting of those getting tested few actually test positive.

I work in primary.

Ime very few children are being tested as very few are getting the main 3 symptoms.

The only children to have been tested recently at my school were tested through T and T offering it to them without symptoms or with more cold like symptoms. Some of these have now come back positive.

We have staff and parents testing positive where we know that other close contact hasn't been happening. The only thing that links the cases are school but via symptom free children.

Mass testing of schools would be interesting to do.

When done at universities they found high numbers of positive cases but mainly symptomless ones. Is use it we'd see the same in schools.

PHE isn't overly cautious in my experience either.

When I tested positive they only took the date of the test in my case. As my other symptoms were not one of the big three they were ignored. This meant that following my positive result due to its timing no staff or children had to isolate. If they'd have taken the date of my (non big 3) symptoms starting it would have involved four school days, at least 6 different classes and up to 180 children.

Track and trace, for the purpose of outside of school tracking, however based it on the date of my symptoms and not the date of my test.

[quote Marieg10]@JacobReesMogadishu

And interesting they separated primary and secondary school figures. If added together schools overtake supermarkets as the leading area.

Unfortunately it is the usual lies, dam lies and statistics. I have had cause to ask similar questions due to the constant complaints from the NEU rep saying that their members are at such high risk the school should be closed.

Schools have incredibly tight Covid procedures. Every time there is a positive case it is discussed with PHE. Children with symptoms are usually getting tested and cannot attend school whilst awaiting a test. Interesting of those getting tested few actually test positive.

What sits behind this is a wider problem of people having clear symptoms but refuse point blank to be tested as they think they will still have to quarantine for 14 days...therefore the true rate of transmission is nothing like what that chart shows as that is known transmission only...

In our school of nearly 1800 children, we have had only 13 cases. 4 of these were linked to transmission within a friendship group and in fact doesn't look like it happened in school, but a local pub (pre lockdown2) as that group had little contact within school.

I'm surprised it isn't higher given that a lot of children come on buses that are full[/quote]
You are clearly not talking about UK state schools if you have incredibly tight covid procedures (see WHO recommendations for re-opening of schools)

However, unless you have tested all the children regularly, you have 13 cases of whom you know. You may well have had many more children who exhibited non-typical symptoms such as those below. Possibly very mildly. Or have been asymptomatic.

"The most common symptoms of COVID-19 in children are fever and cough.
The symptoms of COVID-19 are similar in adults and children and can look like other common illnesses, like colds, strep throat, or allergies. The most common symptoms of COVID-19 in children are fever and cough, but children may have any of these signs or symptoms of COVID-19:

Fever or chills
Cough
Nasal congestion or runny nose
New loss of taste or smell
Sore throat
Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
Diarrhea
Nausea or vomiting
Stomachache
Tiredness
Headache
Muscle or body aches"

The positive child who's parent messaged me most recently had two illness symptoms, none from the big 3.

Day 1 - headache
Day 2 - vomiting
Day 3 - felt fine

She was tested because it was offered via t and t after the parent tested positive.

Schools have incredibly tight Covid procedures

What are the tight covid procedures that your school has?
You mention PHE so I assume this is in England.

Of the confirmed cases I know:

• Parent/toddler group (March)
• Hospital (1 in April and 1 recently)
• Unknown (March, person is a lorry driver so could've been anywhere!)
• Adult caught while working in a nursery (August)
• Passed between family members (August/September)
• Friend in their house, didn't know they had Covid (September)
• Socialising/Pub (over summer)

There were 3 cases in my sons school before half term, all unconnected and no further spread.

There have been 4 cases since, 3 of which are in the 6th form and connected but believed to have been through socialising together during half term not transferred in school.

My dad died from Covid in April, he caught it the week before lockdown and at the time there were only 30ish confirmed cases in the whole County and the only places he had been were petrol station, local shop, pharmacy and in his partners house.

What do I conclude from this? It's EVERYWHERE and has been since March.

Schools are the least covid secure places to be at the moment. Overcrowded classrooms, no distancing, children breathing on each other, talking in each other's faces, licking their fingers, I could go on.

All cases are known cases. By definition unknown cases are..... unknown.

So we hear calls to close schools...if we do that then it will be next April at least before reopening....don't think that's a great idea. On the same rationale we could shut the nhs as well due to the risk to staff.

Some jobs carry risk to a greater or lesser degree. That's tough really

[quote JamesAnderson]@Hayeahnobut that works well when you have almost zero community transmission but when you have 25,000 new symptomatic cases each day, not forgetting the asymptotic cases it's a bit more challenging. Even with excellent track and trace[/quote]
It's the other way around: with functioning track and trace you will not have widespread community transmission in the first place, that is the point of it!

Laughing here at the idea that schools have incredibly tight Covid procedures.

@MarieG10, it's not even about the risk to staff. It's the fact that children are driving there spread of the virus. Whilst they continue to mingle at the close quarters they are in schools, with zero effective mitigation, there is no hope of controlling it.
That's the tough reality and someone needs to decide what to do about it.

Friend in melbourne says in her school kids are sent home with a sniffle or sore throat as they're "symptoms." Quite different from here.

I am in the US and it’s widely publicized here that 80% of our cases are from restaurants and bars.

How can that be? If R0 is ~3 then removing those 80% of cases would take R to 0.6 in which case transmission would fall pretty quickly. We've seen that closing bars and restaurants alone isn't enough to do that.
Could they mean 80% of superspreading events?

I don't want schools to close either. I love teaching my class, genuinely, and hate home schooling my DCs. But lies are being told about schools being safe. Far from it. We're just carrying on and hoping for the best.

Some jobs carry risk to a greater or lesser degree. That's tough really

That's true, but I doubt the schools will close because everyone feels sorry for the teachers, they will close because they are infecting too many people in the community and the NHS won't be able to cope. Watch what happens in Germany and France over the next few weeks. Boris always copies.

Yes, one thing is that people may be lying about where they've been. Also, where people catch it will depend on the restrictions in a particular area. Somewhere that is locked down may have proportionally more cases caught in supermarkets because people aren't going anywhere else. It wouldn't necessarily mean that supermarkets are particularly risky.