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.

@donewithitalltodayandxmas I’m in the same place as you. Always felt I’d send in no matter what but not sure I would now with rate of infection doubling weekly.

Ah yes news channels. Always backing their headlines up with lots of scientific evidence. Never sensational at all.

Yes it’s worth discussing. In a balanced way. Anecdotal isn’t good enough.

May-July versus Dec-Feb. I know when I would have preferred my children in school.

The fact they were off so long is the reason they are all going to go back in Jan/Feb. Right at the worst time...

They can't do any of those things in the next three weeks, though, can they? They've had this long and not done any of them.

There's what should have been done, and there's where we are now.

What do people think will happen if we open schools with only lateral flow tests in place? Does anyone think, My school will be fine, because it has staggered start and finish times? Because the windows open a whole ten inches?

If we open, we will close shortly afterwards. The only difference will be that more people will become more sick more quickly.

@Igglepigglesgrubbyblanket

There are more solutions to this than just blanket school closures. They could issue advice to not mix generations, they could do mass testing of school children followed by tracing of contacts, isolation and support for those who need it, they could find the fucking NHS properly so it can cope. Children have born the brunt of restrictions too much already in my opinion and they will be starting their adult lives during the resulting recession. I don't think they should be further punished.

If only they had all that time to sort it out, with teachers asking for it.

Oh wait.....

It was too easy to do nothing and leak to the press that all teachers r lazy mmmkay. Bad unions, blah, blah.

Here we are.

There wasn’t the evidence in May to make that decision though, which was my point.

Well there’s no evidence now to say schools are safe either? Yet still they are open...

However if they hadn’t missed so much school in Spring/summer there would be more appetite to close them now when it’s a much more serious situation. We could see cases were low in May/June. We know hospitals are overrun in Winter......You don’t need evidence to tell you that it happens every year.

Can someone link to the data showing teachers are more at risk than others as I’d like to see it as a teacher myself

I know equal numbers of all professions

Don’t think that teachers as only ones at risk as hardly any workplaces are covid safe

The prob isn’t kids getting covid

It’s families having support bubbles and so passing it on to the GPS - like being in a bubble gives immunity

Support bubbles for kids shouldn’t be happening full stop.

Science shows it’s prolonged indoor contact - not fleeting visits to supermarkets or pubs etc

That’s why I never got the fuss over students - most live away from family so what’s the big deal if only mixing amongst themselves

Of course they needed testing before going home but uni students aren’t the ones in hospital at end of the day

Why would anyone let their kids round their gps I have no idea?!

Never mind child care need - find another solution! Don’t blame government it’s people continuoninf to mix under the bubble umbrella

If kids don’t meet elderly family it’s nowhere near the issue

And what do you do if you are CEV and had your children in your 40s? You really can't shield from your own children.

Well there’s no evidence now to say schools are safe either? Yet still they are open...

Hence the many threads from worried teachers and parents asking for schools to be made safer or close....

In a May/June there was still little known about the virus. You might have felt confident enough to make a decision like that, but you’re not the one making those decisions. Scientists didn’t have enough evidence at that point to be confident in a safe return to school.
Had the time been filled preparing schools to be covid-safe, with rotas, online lessons, PPE etc that would be fine. The government, however, didn’t feel that was necessary, and now here we are.

The government don’t give a shit. They care about money schools don’t make money

Why not write to your MP if you are concerned about secondary schools?

Dear

I am writing to you because I am deeply concerned about the current situation in schools and the dangers of this new strain that caused so many problems in secondary schools in London and the South East before they broke up for Christmas.

The science seems to suggest that the new strain is more transmissible, and was severely disruptive to education, with attendance in Kent secondary schools on 10th December only at 55%, with other areas also badly affected. This is very worrying in terms of the ability of schools to provide quality education if large numbers of children are at home and also if staff are badly affected.

Cleary, it would be foolish to re-open secondary schools in January without major changes to account for this new strain. I welcome the move to a staggered start in secondary to reduce the number of pupils in school for the first week to reduce the risks caused by increased infection rates due to Christmas mixing.

I understand that the government has decided to test every secondary student in the first week of January. This would be a positive move, however the plan was announced very late in the term, giving Heads one working day's notice, inadequate resources, inadequate funding and no staffing. All the teaching and headteaching unions, including from the private sector say that this is impossible and will not be implemented in time. In addition, the testing is to use lateral flow tests whose usefulness is now heavily disputed due to only catching 50% of positive cases.

It's clear we cannot rely on mass testing as a solution to the schools problem and this should be discarded from any planning for schools at the start of January.

I am also horrified to hear that secondary schools are to be instructed to no longer send close contacts of positive cases home to isolate and instead test close contacts in school for 7 days using these ineffective lateral flow tests. This means that pupils at high risk of covid will be travelling to school on school buses and public transport, and then potentially released into classrooms if the test fails to detect their infection. This would appear to be less safe than the current scenario of sending those pupils home to isolate and should be abandoned on health and safety grounds.

The current mitigation measures in schools are wholly inadequate to deal with this new strain and need an urgent review. I am very concerned that the debate seems to focus on a binary between schools open or closed, with no discussion about making them safer.

I would suggest:

Mass testing of pupils using gold-standard tests before re-entry to school, properly administered and resourced, not given to schools to organise
Urgent funding to improve ventilation in classrooms
Masks to be worn in secondary classrooms.
Removal of the threat of fines for clinically vulnerable pupils
Testing of bubbles where there are positive cases and wider sending home of contacts where further cases are found.
In Tier 4, or in schools with significant numbers affected, rotas should be implemented to ensure that more pupils get some consistent face to face teaching.

Please can you pass my concerns to Gavin Williamson and the DfE and seek an urgent response to these issues?

Many thanks, and Merry Christmas

www.writetothem.com/

@Delatron - In the summer, there was insufficient confidence, due to lack of evidence, that fully reopening schools would be safe. It was not sufficiently known what role children played in transmission, it wasn’t even understood how the virus was primarily transmitted, so anyone claiming now that they knew it would be safe to open schools fully in the summer is talking through their arse. All they can possibly really mean is they would have been willing to play Russian roulette with school reopening then. We are now in a situation again where, with the new strain and winter, it is not fully understood what role children are playing in transmission. We do know that they must be transmitting in school settings, though, or they wouldn’t have had more spectacular increases in positive cases than all other age groups in recent weeks. And, as you rightly pointed out, the NHS barely copes in a normal winter in any event, let alone one with covid in the mix, so now is a phenomenally stupid time to argue all children have to be in school full time, however dangerous, simply because they weren’t in school in the summer.

As for the spring and summer, the way schools did open up to more than key worker children and vulnerable children was entirely down to the DfE. Schools were just as perplexed as parents as to the manner in which the DfE chose to do it. Yes, it was wasted time, but then the DfE didn’t even really know what it wanted schools to teach, or whether there should or should not be exams, or whether there should or should not be an algorithm to award children exam results, so it is pointless to look back now and claim children should have been in school carrying on seamlessly with the National Curriculum all summer as though the country wasn’t generally in chaos around them and nobody knew what they were supposed to be doing.

I desperately want schools to be able to reopen again after the New Year - I have children of my own and want life for them to be as normal as possible, and recognise how vital schools are for more than just providing an academic education, but society has to ask itself why, if it realises how vital schools are, it has abjectly failed to stand up for schools when they have been pointing out for years that they are seriously underfunded for what is expected of them. From where I stand, it seem like it’s just one unreasonable and unrealistic demand after another being heaped on schools, and virtually nothing in return in terms of respect for what they do do - they are not only expected to provide an education for children, but also to make up for the inadequacies of our underfunded and woefully underperforming children’s services and mental health services and deal with the consequences of massive societal inequalities and poverty. Time to start supporting them more and complaining less.

According to the chart OP posted, age 70-79 group was at 2.5% infected as recently as September/October. Why so high then? And why are they down so much now? Weird!

Define ‘safe’.

Politics aside I would much rather have had my children in school in the Spring/summer months than now. There are so many things that were obviously safer. They could have been outside more, there were less other viruses (flu) around, vitamin D levels would be higher across the board, we would have had a natural break in August. Then we could have actually taken a break in Winter.

That time has passed so I guess there’s no point in discussing it but I do think it would have made a difference if we’d just used common sense back then. Cases were much lower in May/June. Yet now it’s fine for kids to be in school through Jan/Dec. You keep quoting science and evidence. There’s no evidence that schools are safer now than June we’ve just accepted the consequences of children being out of school is too great.....

@lljkk

According to the chart OP posted, age 70-79 group was at 2.5% infected as recently as September/October. Why so high then? And why are they down so much now? Weird!

I think you’re looking at the line for Y12 to age 24, that was the rocketing infection rates in uni students as they moved into accommodation. The drop is the successful measures taken to tackle infections in uni students - mass testing, quarantining and moving to online learning.

"They could issue advice to not mix generations"

Which generation should I get to move out of my house? My children, or my parents?

I might write to my MP but he's a chocolate teapot and I already know I'd just get the copy and paste Schools are Safe and Children Don't Get That Ill Anyway response.

S.African expert on R4 tonight says the idea that this new strain affects younger people is not evidence based.

How can teachers provide online teaching plus child care for key workers and vulnerable at the same time?
How can they do testing too? Will masks and ventilation be introduced to classrooms? What about social distancing? Bubbles of less than a couple of hundred for secondary teachers? Bubbles of less than 30 for primary?
Vaccination for teachers?
The South African variant (which is now in the UK) makes young people seriously ill so maybe it won't just be teachers at risk in schools anymore - perhaps that will mean people actually caring about introducing measures to mitigate COVID transmission. It seems teachers concerns have been ignored so far.
Rates in secondary schools were incredibly high with primaries not far behind.

@Delatron

S.African expert on R4 tonight says the idea that this new strain affects younger people is not evidence based.

Expert on BBC saying the opposite.

What did the BBC expert say?

One of the problems with experts, whether genuinely expert or just presented as such, is that they seem to have fallen for the fiction that social distancing, bubbles and hygiene measures mean that schools are relatively safe (as per misleading images in the media showing six students, masked, in a classroom). Consequently they’re puzzled about this strangely transmittable new variant, not realising it’s just behaviour and exponential growth. It’s odd how resistant to reality even intelligent people can be.
If you took them into any big comprehensive at lesson changeover and walked them down a corridor, they’d probably have a panic attack and have to be led out gibbering to douse themselves in alcohol gel. (To be fair, it’s alarming enough even without a pandemic.)

[quote NeurotreeWenceslas]No share token sorry:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/staggered-return-if-schools-able-to-open-boris-johnson-admits-07d9xg9vl[/quote]
This article doesn’t say that “the infection rate for secondary pupils last week was 2,509 out of 100,000.”

@SoscaredforJan Do you have any source or proof at all that this figure was quoted by the Times?

It is in the Times article? Screenshot attached

My daughters school has had cases recently. Most have not had any symptoms. I bet it’s the norm. Or very little symptoms. Hardly a need to close schools. I also work in a preschool. And I my opinion no matter what schools/nurseries need to stay open!