Secondary schools are stuffed, GOVERNMENT ADMITS

[noblegiraffe]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55265098

Mass testing for secondary school pupils in worst affected areas.

I do hope my flight of fancy above has been seen in the context of posters who are teachers (and who want to wear masks) being told by other posters, who are not teachers, that they should wear masks, even when it’s been made clear that they (the teachers) have been told by the government/headteachers they’re not allowed to.

I don't know whether it's been mentioned Breakfast on BBC this morning?
It's the first time I've seen all noble's points raised in the media.

Dr Deepti Gurdasani, an epidemiologist asking why on earth the only options considered seem to be full school or online learning. She said why don't they don't try to mitigate spread in secondary schools in ways by the WHO and demonstrated in Germany.Namely, mask wearing, ventilation and smaller class sizes (perhaps by rota, I can't remember if she said).
It's almost as if she had read these threads....
I have no DC in school but I do have one who is a teacher.

"New press update from @educationgovuk. You know. That department that couldn't get the proper grades for your kids. Yeah, the one that wouldn't feed them either.

However, when it comes to pandemics you can 100% trust our advice."

I do like the Gavin Williamson parody twitter account.

I don't know whether it's been mentioned Breakfast on BBC this morning?
It's the first time I've seen all noble's points raised in the media.

It was incredible wasn't it? The fact that it hasn't been discussed before. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000qdtw/breakfast-12122020 go to 3:16

So the question is 'do we now need to keep children at home' and she just lists all the ways that schools could be made safer and asks why the leap is always to 'schools should close' instead of other measures.

Unfortunately no follow-up. That epidemiologist should now be going around all the news shows to repeat what she said.

Probably will be blacklisted instead.

It would be interesting if they separated the data for 35-49 and 50-69 into people living with/directly caring for/teaching school kids and people who don't have direct contact with kids. .

I think MP writing needs to happen.

It would be, herecomes, so expect it not to happen any time soon!

The headlines that were dutifully reported in the press about how parents of school aged kids were only 8% more likely to catch covid were presented in November but were based on data collected during lockdown.

Given that children are far more likely to be infected now than they were in lockdown, I suspect the new figures would look very different and will thus be suppressed.

There’s talk of schools on Matt Frei on LBC and I’ve just read an article about school transmission on the Daily Mail (I know) and the top comments are saying that schools are the problem.

So maybe teachers and schools will finally be heard.

They also need to separate the data of toddlers and preschoolers from primary children.

Probably will be blacklisted instead

Never to be seen again!!

I know this thread is about secondary schools but primaries would look much worse if children were being tested for all the other symptoms.

@Appuskidu

Probably will be blacklisted instead

Never to be seen again!!

Almost certainly.

A mask would protect the teacher though, a proper surgical mask. This is what has stopped many health care worker catching covid from patients with covid not wearing masks. Maybe the government should provide them now given the current situation however they are easy to purchase at the moment.

Not interested in protecting the kids who will be taking covid home to their families, stairway?

@stairway

A mask would protect the teacher though, a proper surgical mask. This is what has stopped many health care worker catching covid from patients with covid not wearing masks. Maybe the government should provide them now given the current situation however they are easy to purchase at the moment.

The problem is that the messaging is still that schools (classrooms) are safe. Ergo, no need for teachers, or children, to wear masks (in classrooms). For the authorities to provide masks they would have to acknowledge the lie. So they won’t.

@lonelyplanet

I know this thread is about secondary schools but primaries would look much worse if children were being tested for all the other symptoms.

The ONS survey which produced the above graph is random testing so doesn't require any symptoms and picks up asymptomatic cases.

Primary kids seem to be genuinely less infected than secondary kids. Lockdown also had much more of an impact on them. It would be really interesting to try and unpick why.

Awareness of the spread of the virus in schools seems to be mimicking the actual spread of the virus in schools, with it largely unacknowledged, then bubbling up in places, then becoming more widely obvious, then (I hope) becoming impossible to ignore.

Primary kids seem to be genuinely less infected than secondary kids. Lockdown also had much more of an impact on them

Easier to keep them indoors?

I think the working theory on why young children are less infected is connected to ACE-2 and the way SARS-COV2 uses that to get into the body, and that ACE2 lowers with age

"Varying ACE2 expression might affect disease susceptibility and progression. ACE2 expression is highest in children and young people and women, decreases with age, and is lowest in people with diabetes and hypertension. Therefore, lower levels of expression of the viral receptor ACE2 are found in those at the highest risk for progres­sion of COVID­19 to a severe disease phenotype"

Children are less infected - until they are not less infected, because they have been exposed sufficiently to become infected... ie even children can be infected if you stick them close together in a small classroom with their teacher and TA every day. It really doesn’t take much effort to work out why it takes a while for a problem to become obvious when it was obvious it would eventually become a problem, surely?

"Primary kids seem to be genuinely less infected than secondary kids. Lockdown also had much more of an impact on them"

Another factor is that the bubble system for a primary class is still used? In secondary it is commonly seating plan and friendship group tracing in school which I think Is very lax making it more likely that there are asymptomatic cases in school. School staff aren't trained for it and it is often based on immediate neighbours not 2m based. Cases in my school exploded about 3 weeks after they brought it in.....

Easier to keep them indoors?

I think the main source of infection for secondary kids is school whereas for primary kids it isn’t.

Primaries are far more on top of covid restrictions than secondary. They are usually sending home the whole class when there’s a case which actually way better represents that kid’s close contacts than secondary. Bubbles are much smaller. Hygiene standards are higher (kids are actually forced to wash hands and use hand sanitiser regularly).

"The ONS survey which produced the above graph is random testing so doesn't require any symptoms and picks up asymptomatic cases.

Primary kids seem to be genuinely less infected than secondary kids. Lockdown also had much more of an impact on them. It would be really interesting to try and unpick why."

You're right about this. I'd forgotten the ons data was random. However there is a large increase in positivity as children get older so lumping the preschoolers and nursery children with primary makes the data look better than it is. I don't know whether the ons tests are usually carried out by professionals (dh did one at home himself) but testing young children may not always be accurate if parents are worried about hurting them.

ange that post ahs been removed so best not to quote it!

I'd be really interested to know whether infections in primary are less likely to spread once they are in the class. Because anecdotally in my area, there's been a lot of primaries that have just had staff cases identified and it hasn't spread between staff, but then there have been others where pupils have tested positive and that bubble has been in and out like a yoyo.

My hunch is that bubble size plays a large role, as does the fact that primary pupils travel less to get to school and are more closely supervised out of school. I'm not entirely convinced that once it is within the pupils in a bubble that it spreads significantly less than in other settings, but that at least the fact that most schools do bubble closure instead of close contacts does mitigate this further.