Schools in South Africa

[Noellodee]

I was just on another thread, which was asking how many schools have stayed open with our case numbers. I googled to see what was happening in South African schools, and discovered they had stayed open, and then I found the article below. I know this isn't the same variant we have, but I still found it very concerning.

www.thesouthafrican.com/news/how-many-deaths-teachers-shortage-south-africa-school-calendar/

They is awful, I really feel for those teachers. I wish our government would publish the stats here, although I realise the two countries aren't comparable.

That is awful.

They need to stop ramming us into crowded corridors.

Have you been to South Africa? It doesn't all look like the waterfront in Cape Town.
Many people live in one or two room homes, with water taps and toilets shared with their neighbours.
Google images of the township in Durban (which is in KZN) and see if you think there might be factors other than being a school that are causing rapid spread and high death rates?

I don't know.

South Africa population : 58,000,000 Covid deaths: 30,000
UK population: 64,000,000 Covid deaths 74,000

Personally, I think the teacher deaths come from a combination of the new variant (theirs, not ours) and keeping schools fully open with no mitigations. I think that we need to be very careful going forwards with so much not yet known about these new strains.

Life expectancy 62 as opposed to UK 81, for a disease that hits the elderly hardest?
There are other factors to consider.
Sombody was waxing lyrical the other day about how well South Sudan and Somalia were doing and what could we learn from them. If your life expectancy is mid 50s and you have 1 doctor per 40 000 people, chances are nobody really notices what you die of and you will be dead long before you are a COVID risk.
Can you flag up a school with one or two hundred positive cases, because there are plenty of factories with those kind of figures and I don't see any interest in shutting them, even temporarily in most cases.

So, deaths are low in South Africa because nobody notices if people die there, unless they are a teacher, in which case, they died because the death rate is so high there, even though no-one knows how high the death rate is?

And there is no problem in schools because no-one has tested people in schools to see if there is a problem in schools?

Okay....

The reason countries with low life expectancies were not hit so hard was partly because deaths are poorly recorded, but also because with previous variants, deaths massively disproportionately affected the over 80s. If you have few over 80s, you have few deaths.

The worry is now that this is no longer the case.

South Sudan and Somalia were the countries I mentioned. Please read what I wrote properly.
If three teachers died in a UK school there would be uproar. 3 deaths in a bacon factory barely get a mention.
300 cases in a school - pandemonium, 300 in a sandwich factory - meh.
Why are these people considered dispensable?

Straw man.

Have you ever worked in a food factory, Weedsnseeds? I have. I have friends who work in them. Why would I consider them dispensable? Actually, don't bother answering. You are only here to minimise and aren't engaging in good faith. I can't be bothered.

You chose to ignore the point about factories in my previous post which is very telling.
People who work in factories also have children so even if you couldn't care less about the workers, their offspring could easily bring COVID into a school, which would obviously be a catastrophe.

Yes, I work in food factories Neoelledee, multiple factories, as I have a role which involves inspecting them.

And have previously worked in in them in a technical role. So yes, 30+ years in the industry.

Have more teachers died compared to the rest of the population though? Not clear from the article unless I’m missing something.

It appears to be people with underlying conditions.
www.google.com/amp/s/www.devex.com/news/south-africa-data-shows-higher-covid-19-death-rates-for-people-with-hiv-tb-97447/amp

Which obviously would include teachers, but is unlikely to be exclusive to them.