Govt plan to one-off test all secondary kids on return to school, too late to Christmas safer

[noelgiraffe]

The DfE have just woken up and realised that schools might be in even deeper shit come January than they are even now, due to Boris's Insane Christmas Covid Bonanza.

So they are going to offer a round of tests to all secondary and college students and staff on return to school in January to try to mitigate the effects.

It will be optional and consent will be required. This will be two lateral flow tests 3 days apart and is separate to the daily testing for close contacts.

This is good news, but it's a shame they didn't think of this before Christmas and allow secondary kids and staff to be able to visit elderly relatives more safely and minimise the Covid Bonanza in the first place. Reactive rather than proactive as ever.

www.gov.uk/government/news/staggered-rollout-of-coronavirus-testing-for-secondary-schools-and-colleges

@FiggyPuddingFiend

Could also work well for a probabilities. If you have covid but have 2 tests that only pick up 50% of cases, what is the chance of them both being negative...

Ha! I’ve used that already.

Also very useful for averages, mean, median, mode, particularly with regard to length of time in hospital/ICU. More or Less podcast very good for this.

I'm sure the DfE think that taking 2 tests that are each 50% accurate = 100%

@EndoplasmicReticulum

I'm sure the DfE think that taking 2 tests that are each 50% accurate = 100%

Of course they do. Common sense, isn’t it?

There is no guarantee that it is a random 50% that are picked up either. It might be that the 50% with Covid who test negative,test negative for a reason that is still acting at the second test.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/news.sky.com/story/amp/covid-19-teachers-wont-have-to-play-role-in-coronavirus-testing-in-schools-minister-confirms-12166021

Teachers won't be testing apparently...and yet schools will have to find "volunteers" from within their staff. So who is it going to be?

His comments come after Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said in a written ministerial statement that schools and colleges would need to "provide a few members of staff to support the testing programme".

It's all so confusing and unclear.

Hmmmm school stafff...not teachers.... hmmm I wonder who that will be then

The children are the guinea pigs.

@EndoplasmicReticulum

I'm sure the DfE think that taking 2 tests that are each 50% accurate = 100%

Someone's clearly not passed GCSE Maths there

I wanted to share recent experience of lateral flow tests.

DH's colleague tested positive on Tuesday (results received Tuesday afternoon). As a precaution DH's employer sources lateral flow tests for 19 other employees.

17 tested positive! 14 of these have now received positive tests via 'regular' drive in testing system, 2 are waiting results, 1 has chosen not to have nhs test.

None of the 17 had classic 3 symptoms at the time of their lateral flow, most now feel very or quite unwell.

My y10 has an exam on 11th Jan. hmmm
@TicTacTwo my year 12 does too.

Teachers won't be testing apparently...and yet schools will have to find "volunteers" from within their staff. So who is it going to be?

Are those the support staff who went under the cuts in recent years?

Copied from another thread and a bit late to the party here, but it’s worth repeating:

As a teacher on Twitter pointed out -
it’s taken 7 months / £22bn to get national testing to 400k/day (actually 150k) yet they expect teachers to create a parallel testing regime which can manage 500k to 1m people a day with 1 day to train, no up front funding and no staff to carry out the tests. Plus all of this comes with just 1 working day’s notice at the end of the most exhausting by term ever.

Interesting Matt Hancock saying they have a plan to open schools safely. Rolling out mass testing administered by who admin staff / volunteers? This is the test that only detects 50% of cases. How are the thousands of y11 and yr13 not going to increase spread esp in tier 4? Is mass testing realistically going to be in place on the morning of the 6th.

No, it’s not. It’s voluntary and a lot of schools have opted out of organising it over the holidays, especially as the full guidance isn’t out yet.

Years 11 and 13 are back on the 4th here. So no, I don't think a testing centre complete with equipment, tests, staff and necessary training will have appeared magically in 2 weeks time without any money or expertise or working days to make that happen in between.

The guidance as to what it entails isn't even available yet. Possibly because the government pulled this idea out of their arse last minute and haven't got a clue how anyone should/could implement it?

The government's webinar (which by all accounts was shit) confirms that the testing will involve throat swabs (good luck with that), and will not meet gold-standard safety measures that were applied to university testing.

Good-oh.

Got an idea- why don’t DfE staff come in to secondaries to organise. After all they will understand their own guidelines etc.

Seriously - a record breaking amount of tests, with one days training, weakened safety measures, a Christmas boom, 50% accuracy previously, but now with a new, more contagious and potentially harder to detect variant....

...what could possibly go wrong?

I believe whoever is going to do the test is going to change the gloves before each pupil or wash the hands. But, I don't believe this will happen. Also, the test will take 15 seconds to make 5 turns in the throat. Aren't the children going to gag?
Why couldn't they order simple saliva tests used by students and staff at the UK universities?

I believe = I hope

Just catching up on this thread but I'm so cross with this government.

How about reducing transmission in schools? That should be the starting point of everything. The only point to testing is to try and isolate the correct people to prevent spread. How about taking some basic measures (and funding them) to stop spread in the first place?

Like smaller class sizes and masks.

My DD1s school with extra money for extra TAs did this in the summer. They could do it again straight away with more money. If all the schools did masks from age 6 like basically everywhere else in Europe and all the schools that could do SD and smaller class sizes with minimal extra TAs did it, then that would do a lot to reduce spread. Rather than trying to set up testing that noel has correctly pointed out has cost an absolute fortune elsewhere and which is clearly doomed to failure unless they throw millions at it (and qualified staff).

I'm all for my kids being tested regularly but actually I'd prefer some basic measures first, like masks and social distancing and smaller class sizes. And I'm not that keen on some untrained volunteer sticking a swab down my kids throat. A nurse, yes, fine.

I also suspect that part of the reason this new variant has spread so quickly is that it's been given an environment in which to do so - schools. Indoor, crowds, no masks, no social distancing. That was already the perfect environment for spread for the old variant but even more so for something more easily transmitted.

@SantaAssociationRepresentitve

Got an idea- why don’t DfE staff come in to secondaries to organise. After all they will understand their own guidelines etc.

And Ofsted-they have been very quiet lately.