The infection rate for pupils last week was 2,509 out of 100,000!!

[SoscaredforJan]

The Times today had reported that the infection rate for secondary pupils last week was 2,509 out of 100,000!! With the rate for primary school pupils close behind.

That’s absolutely shocking.

Rates of 300+ per 100,000 in the South East led to the emergency Tier 4 announcement at the weekend.

Rates among secondary school children are approx nine times this and primaries not far behind.

There can no longer be any conversation about schools remaining open. They need to close to all but key workers and the vulnerable and not reopen until the government has provided the money and means to make them truly ‘Covid secure’ or until enough people have been vaccinated.

How many deaths will we have in a months time when those infections have transferred to the elderly and vulnerable? How many more mutations will we have if the virus is allowed to carry on running through children? I for one do not want to find out that they vaccine no longer works.

It’s time to do what needs to be done. It’s tough and awful for everyone but it has to be done. The schools need to close.

Schools are closed right now and secondary schools are going online in January and getting staggered starts

@ElizabethG81

Yes, Freddie, I'm sure that's the case. It's a very small school and no children have been off. I appreciate it's lucky, but my argument still stands - why should they close if there are no cases in children or staff?

We were in that exact position the week before term - then it cam down like a house of cards. All isolating, staff and students.

It's worth noting how the media are dealing with this.

Bbc is the governments hand puppet and they've definitely been discussing it, in depth articles exploring it.

The Times tend to get early info too.

Data is definitely being closely monitored on this.

@QueenStromba

I think they know they have to close the schools but don't want to announce it until after Christmas.

My spidey senses are starting to think this too. But also that they need a little more analysis.

Tone has changed, definitely.

I think people who think that their schools have no cases, and report this as fact, are wrong. Simply put, there are more likely to be undetected cases in schools, rather than no cases at all. In the high school I teach in, we have over 1800 students. On average, over the last half term, we have had two positive cases a week. Limited amounts of students are then sent home as contacts, certainly not all students sitting within 2 metres of the positive case. Then, we have a further outbreak, and so on.

There are many cases of students who are positive in school but undetected. I had four year 7s off in my class Monday before we broke up, all with "tummy bugs". They had returned for their Thursday lesson with me, all snotty noses and under the weather. None had been tested, because they didn't meet the 'covid' testing criteria. Low and behold, yesterday, a parent of one of those students is confirmed as a positive - with the usual covid symptoms. So, their child has to now isolate...but the chances are, with news about this new variant, that the child was the person who infected their parent.

When and if we get to the point that school staff and students are regularly tested, we will get a true picture and I think it will astound some people just how many students (and staff) are positive.

Schools won't return as normal in the new year, we already know we are only open for years 11 and 13 for the first week - but the head thinks this will change too, and all will be online. And those who think that this will be for just a week, whilst testing is set up, are deluded. There is no way on earth that schools can set up and effectively test students in a week. If testing is going to be the criteria for students to return, we'll be lucky to have them back at half term.

I value teachers lives over a small loss of education. They're keeping infections so quiet in schools, so people don't realise how bad it is around here.

Yes, we had a number of tummy bugs. Soap kills norovirus but not hand sanitiser I believe. Last year we had a huge outbreak of noro but were relying on sanitiser. Makes me wonder if it's not a usual tummy bug.

Is it 1/3 of cases are asymptomatic? That's the number given by the dfe to argue the case for school testing.

(Makes me wonder if it's not a usual tummy bug. As in Covid.)

We also get a number of parents refusing to test pupils.

We suspect a teacher was infected that way. Luckily she had a mild cold, and the ta she passed it onto also v mild.

My sons have both had to isolate twice. Every year in their primary school have been out at least once. Both of their teachers have caught Covid and current 6 teachers at the school have it.
I am a secondary teacher, every single year group in my school has been out twice, sometimes 3 times. I know of 6 colleagues who tested positive last week, this takes the total number to over 20 members of staff.
My husband works in a college, one of his colleagues is currently in hospital with Covid.
I want schools open, I want to all children to get the best education possible. I do not feel safe and it feels inevitable that my husband and I will catch it.

The last week of secondary the whole school was shut because they had no staff to teach because a lot were isolating.
We also had an email about testing in the first week back with years 7-9 online for a week.
But it also did say that to come back children did not have to be tested so don't know how high the uptake will actually be.

I think if you’re interpreting statistics then you should be unbiased in your reporting but you aren’t.
If you look at @Loftyloft post you’ll see a different picture
MN scaremongering and misunderstanding again
Don’t send your kids to school then!

I teach in a bubble of a 1000, no ppe, no extra cleaning etc. Infection rates have been high - but - I still think schools need to stay open. Most cases are asymptomatic. We should do what we should have done from the start - protect the vulnerable not shut down the whole system. Let teachers who fall into a vulnerable category work from home (they are not allowed at our college). Make sure vulnerable students have access to laptops and all staff are properly trained in live streaming - happening haphazardly at our place. I can do it only because I bought by own equipment. The government promised equipment for students to work from home - we have received nothing, no extra funding, no equipment, no promise of equipment - just more real term cuts.

@TeenageMutantNinjaCovid

No-one is out clapping for the teachers and support staff who have died of Covid this term are they.

I wonder they exceed the NHS staff who have died of covid since September?

I see the PHE figures for Greater Manchester each Friday. Since about June NHS have been top of the list of infections, followed by supermarkets and police. There has always been a school in the list, but usually around 5-6 down the list and usually only 1 case rather than the 7-8 for NHS.

Sorry, should say they are the weekly figures, not cumulative.

You can see the last graph shows it’s been around 2% for months for this age group, and if we look back I don’t personally think the schools should have been shut for the last three months. I think it should be reviewed regionally and possibly by tier (as if a school has loads of cases likely to be off anyway for isolations), but I’m not sure a blanket England approach would be the best balance of education vs pandemic response
Well said @Loftyloft
And as another poster said, when schools shut it disproportionately affects poorer children. Like it or not, the education system is more than just stuffing facts into them -if it were that then the dc can access much better learning online than the random allocation of ‘real’ teacher they receive /but it is I longer about that. In countries where schools are places for academia and pastoral/extra-curricular is negligible eg France, much easier to close schools and provide an acceptable alternative remotely.
I am a teacher in a school where we did pretty much full timetable online in the summer term and academically it worked quite well and I had mostly full attendance in my classes but even in that scenario where they made progress academically I was worried for them and was delighted to be back on school for the autumn.
Schools need to be open even if compromises have to be made in disease control -th or is no perfect solution but closing schools is the most imperfect.

@ElizabethG81

Calm down. My children's school has had 0 cases, 0 periods of isolation. Are you suggesting that they close too? Why does it have to be a blanket response?

I'd suggest the school rates are high because the overall rate is high, which is because we're in the middle of winter and the virus is doing what viruses do.

How do you know? Many parents won’t tell others, some don’t test when ill etc.

Nobel posted a graph showing the cases in schools so the numbers don’t surprise me,

Closing will break a huge part of the chain and it needs to be done. Key worker places maybe where both parents are frontline key workers, actually in work and no childcare bubble to keep numbers as low as possible.

If schools stay open I don’t see any way to stop exponential growth of infection rates.

With high numbers of infected people there surely comes a greater chance of virus mutations. This latest mutation is more contagious. Another mutation may make the virus more severe, which would be a problem given that it can be spread before symptoms show. A mutation could limit the efficacy of a vaccine.
We’re still dealing so much with the unknown. It would be massively irresponsible to try to carry on as normal despite the evidence of rising infection rates in the school population - both secondary and primary.

I agree there shouldn’t be a blanket closure. I’m a TA and we have had no reported cases in our school which IMO is very covid safe. It’s taken nearly all term to get the children back to learning as they should be and everyone is now wanting them closed indefinitely? The impact on these children will be massive. I have children in my class (Y2) who still cannot write a sentence because they missed so much learning in Y1. So if we are off for months again, how do you intend these children to ever catch up with no parental support at home? It’s not as simple as providing online learning because a huge amount of parents just won’t comply.

DS1 is in Y11 and hasn’t even sat his mocks yet. His school have also had no reported cases. His HT was waiting until after Christmas to give them the maximum amount of revision time possible but now it’s completely backfired. If the schools are closed there will be very little data to go on to give them CAGs in the summer?
Yes children are getting ill but for the vast vast majority of children it is a mild illness. And yes I understand about staff as well. I also have a disease which makes me more at risk but I think you’ll find most teachers want the schools to remain open.

If the schools had opened in May when the weather was fine and incidence of transmission declining rapidly, I'd be far happier about schools closing in January. Regrettably the teachers' unions opposed schools opening last summer.

Teachers need to be given access on a par with NHS vis a vis the vaccine.

I'm in a Tier 2 area that's had maybe 5 cases in the secondary school and none in the primaries. No closures.

Last night the local news reported that the nearest hospital to me now has twice the number of Covid inpatients that they had during the peak in the spring. The second nearest hospital is full and diverting patients. That's all happened in a week.

This new strain is no joke, and we can't afford to take chances. Even if your area has been fine up until now.

If the schools had opened in May when the weather was fine and incidence of transmission declining rapidly, I'd be far happier about schools closing in January. Regrettably the teachers' unions opposed schools opening last summer.

That’s weird, because schools opened last summer.

It was the government’s decision to only open primary to certain year groups instead of all year groups on a rota. It was the government’s decision to keep secondary mostly closed.

If anyone has learned anything this year it should be that the teaching unions have zero power over what the government does.

The problem with taking it on a school by school basis is the speed with which everything being OK can move to lots of children and staff testing positive. In our area, the case rates shooting up astronomically definitely started in the schools - it’s a small enough town to see it in the figures, knowing exactly how many children and staff had reported positive test results to the school (I work in the first school affected in our area) and how many cases were being reported in the area of town around that school (pretty much all of them linked to the school), and then watching as it spread from there to other parts of the town. Parents completely failed to take isolating children who had been close contacts seriously, due to the constant mantra that children don’t get covid and that if they do, they don’t pass it on, so were taking their children shopping with them and meeting up with other parents whose children were “isolating.” Parents were also unbelievably poor at socially distancing from each other at drop off and pick up times. If schools are to stay open, more parents need to start taking more responsibility for helping to keep schools and communities safe by following the advice they are given when given it.

It would be interesting to see that chart on a regional basis. In my borough (with an overall rate of 170) the reported rates for age 0-15 are the lowest at about 105/100,000 and the rates for 15-29 are the highest at 210/100,00. Appreciate this will not pick up every case though.

So if the rates in NW are so low, they must be even higher in SE/London to get to that average?

Maybe they need proper mass testing in schools once a case is reported... To pick up the asymptotic children, not to replace isolation.