Schools in September? What do you think will happen?

[2boysand1princess]

I’m pretty sure we will lose restrictions and finally open up come 19th July. Cases are high, but thankfully deaths and hospitalisations are low.

However, I get the feeling that there is absolutely no hesitancy this time in opening up on the 19th mainly because it’s summer and there’s more people outdoors, schools are closing etc, but when we get to autumn and the new school academic year, I get the feeling some restrictions will slowly creep back. How do you think they will manage the situation in schools come September/October? Cases are already very high in some schools at the moment. My eldest DS school has closed completely for a week for deep cleaning and they didn’t ever have to close like this during the previous “waves” My middle DC has had his residential cancelled due to 7 out of 14 bubbles closing and many staff off. It’s so frustrating and difficult to keep this up.
Realistically, what do you think the government’s plan will be for schools in areas like mine, where cases in schools are already very high and that is with masks and still many restrictions in place?!

App, I agree.

The suppression of figs won't change and we won't know what's going on unless media does investigation and tells us.
We will just see people I'll around us, people coughing and spluttering and no ventilation measures and we won't know what's going on and we will just have to pray we don't get huge killer viral loads, that for under 50s we survive and get through it.

If we can simply get pcr tests up and running there shouldn't be any issues at all.
But we can't risk families doing it, only today I saw someone fake a lat flow test... People get fatigue they don't bother...

I totally respect those who don't want too but ideally if 70% of school population can do pcr before going on school site...

@Lemonmelonsun

If we can simply get pcr tests up and running there shouldn't be any issues at all. But we can't risk families doing it, only today I saw someone fake a lat flow test... People get fatigue they don't bother...

I totally respect those who don't want too but ideally if 70% of school population can do pcr before going on school site...

Is doing PCR tests part of the plan for schools? I haven’t read that anywhere.

@QwertyGirly

Realistically, the government will have a plan, send guidelines to schools the day before schools open, not give them any funding to purchase good quality air filtration system.

The isolating system will be scrapped and not replaced with anything else. We will start off ok because it's summer, and we will have another explosion of cases comes November. Back to square one, the government will then do a U-turn and impose self-isolating rules again to slow down the spread.

They are counting on children 'taking it on the chin' and achieve herd immunity instead of vaccinating them.

This. People talk about what is an acceptable level of deaths to learn to live with. I guess, given that government has no appetite to help schools with measures, then there needs to be an honest conversation about what level is acceptable for how many children we as a country are willing to live with getting long covid or worse.

I hope it’s all back to normal. Teachers are vaccinated (or will be). Kids barely get ill. It’s time for life to go on. On mumsnet, you’d think every other child & adult has long covid. In reality, the numbers are tiny.

Children and adults have had post viral illness since the dawn of time. It gets better I had it for 12 months post glandular fever as a teenager in Yr10/11. I still got 10 A’s at GCSE despite missing months of school & needing extended time to do my exams because of the fatigue. You just get on with it as a kid. It was tough but the pull of being wit my your mates & having a social life drags you through! And I was at my worst when just a home, it was important to build my stamina back up. The more I did, while I’d be exhausted afterwards, the next time I could do a little bit more & so on. And it just got better slowly over time. Long covid is a fancy new name but it’s no different in most cases.

@Bobholll But Long Covid isn't just post viral fatigue. For some it's heart and kidney damage, development of diabetes, and there's growing evidence of brain damage too.
It's far too dangerous to be putting children at risk of all that, & the figures seem to be 7-8% of those who get Covid. That sounds like a small number, but if an entire class caught it, then that's potentially 2 kids having to go through what you did at minimum, or possibly with much more damaging, life-long consequences.

The Pfizer has been tested fully and declared safe to use on 12+, and it is being used in the USA, Canada, across Europe, the UAE, and even Australia & NZ have appproved it too, not that they're needing to vaccinate too fast there.

I don't know if there aren't enough supplies here that's putting the government off rolling it out to those who want it, or whether they simply don't care enough, or whether they think it'll save money not to bother (it won't in the long-term with the damage to children's health and education but they've never been long-termist). It's at best negligence, and at worst it's murderous, frankly.

@duffeldaisy, I agree. It is a short term view and feels like a nightmare lottery for kids and their families. Thankfully the vaccine does seem to be working and heavily weakening the link, but it's not 100% effective and I don't think enough is known yet to just let it potentially rip through 12m kids with no measures in place. I don't know what the answer is, but I do think there will be a long term economic and health cost from this approach. Learning to live with it needs some suppression or mitigation in my mind. I don't know how other countries are dealing with kids, but the let it rip approach through so many kids seems really wrong.