I feel horrified that a handful of paranoid, anxiety ridden probably left wing financially comfortable parents are agitating for more school closures. Don't you even care about the impact on your own children, Never mind those children from less fortunate families or who find these unnecessary significantly more difficult than you?
Actually I'm not paranoid or anxiety driven.
I care about the children from less fortunate families who are being impacted by the decision that they have to be in school unless isolating.
If you look at the statistics the lowest socio-economic group is the most likely to get it. That's from the government statistics that they publish each week.
By having all the children in school unless you're isolating produces this:
- As above the lowest s-e group is most likely to get it, so most likely to be off due to either having it or a family member with it.
- If they're off, they're less likely to have computers/internet. But if you know they have a planned time off, something can be arranged. Like the laptops the government promised (and provided a tiny fraction of what they said, but oh well). If they're suddenly sent home then there's less time and less likely to be able to sort this.
- Then if the majority of children are online learning through planning, like in the summer, the vulnerable children can come in more safely. They can't if they're isolating, but if it's a planned closure they can arrange for that-as most schools did.
- If half the year is online and half at school, then the teachers can't do both. Which are they going to do? The ones who will riot in front of them if they don't, naturally. So those at home won't get much support. And there it's a case that the more privileged children will gain as their parents are more likely to have access to what is needed.
5.If the support staff are then freed up from their normal activities, they can, as they were in our local schools, be contacting the children they know are vulnerable and offering specific help. Be that food parcels, internet packages, or a listening ear.
And that's before you get into the children who have health conditions and disabilities.
and because the stats are massively skewed in favour of COVID (deaths within 28 days of a +VE test, a test over which there are significant concerns about false positives) the true scale of actual illness and death, especially in younger people, is impossible to know.
Stats are massively skewed in covid? Haha!
False positives are far less common than false negative. False positives are less than 1%. So assuming that it's exactly 1%, yesterday we had 27000 cases, approximately. So false positives would be 2700.
False negatives, they're not quite sure but somewhere in the range of 2-20%.
Let's for ease call it 2%, so the lowest number. The last testing date had 375k tests. 350k tested negative. So 7000 tested falsely negative.
So overall around the number of cases should be up over 4k.
Now go onto deaths from covid. They reduced it down from 60 days to 28 days from a positive covid test. Now of the 6 people I have known who died of covid, and yes, they did die of covid, 3 would not be in the current statistics because they died after 28 days.
This is quite simply that covid is often a long term illness.
Now you're probably thinking of the oft quoted "if they died in a car crash." Okay. Do you know how many people died in a car crash in 2019 (probably fewer in 2020 on the basis fewer journeys have been done)? It's about 1700. Out of 67k deaths that is approximately 2.5% percent. That's assuming each of those deaths had had a positive test within 28 days.
Then we had the "he died of cancer not covid, why is covid on the death certificate." If you ask doctors here, they have explained, better than I can, that when someone has cancer, it isn't the cancer that kills them. It's pneumonia or organ failure as a result of the cancer. The doctors are completely correct to say that covid was the actual cause of death. Cancer meant they were susceptible, but wasn't actually the cause of death.
And one of the people I mentioned above, I knew died, had cancer. They'd been living with it for nearly 15 years, and was expecting to do another 15 years at least. Of the 6 deaths I know about, only one wouldn't have expected to see next Easter.
And lastly, generally scientists think the best way of estimating covid deaths is to look at the excess death figures. Covid deaths are around 67k now, excess deaths are around 80k.