Media blackout on school cases this term

[3asAbird]

I find it really odd all English secondary schools are back including my own children's school.
They all did testing well over a week ago.
Neither the news letter or local rag that normally lives for this kind of news has reported any postive cases which find hard to believe.

I asked primary head and she said only if 5or more cases would they inform parents and I argued how do vunerable parents or parents of vunerable kids assess risk to them if they unaware.
I would love to see more transparency on how many postives each week and % of kids who have tested.
Also phe clear published figures how much infections within educational settings each week.

The current newsletters are like alternate universe where covid doesn't exist.
None of my kids are vaccinated and 1 has ashma.

Think people summoning any absence i school or staff possibly maybe covid but I dislike all the secrecy.

The media was a main driver of whipping people up in a frenzy and causing fear in order make people stick to restrictions or follow guidance. The narrative has now changed were expected to carry on as normal and treat it like any other illness and the media response reflects that. Also perhaps there's more news worthy things going on in the world to report on than how many LFTS were done across the country. Not sure why you'd NEED to know what's happening in any other schools than the ones your dc attend

In England here. Our secondary school emailed to let us know how many had tested positive after the first week of in school mass testing. Very low cases in main school but 12 in sixth form prob due to festivals.

No mystery.

@Chillychangchoo

Thank god for that, all our newsletters consisted of covid updates last year and yesterday’s newsletter was a blessed relief. We don’t need to be bombarded anymore.

Cause if you just ignore a problem it effectively doesn’t exist does it ?

So none of your kids have freinds who attend other schools or aftershock childcare or clubs like brownies or gymnastics where kids from other schools attend?

Nice to see some schools are keeping their parents informed.

Are we not concerned our media is not fot for purpose as its not exactly holding the government to account if its going along with government policy of downplaying covid in children and schools?
Is decent investigative journalism and being impartial gone?

@Chillychangchoo
As a parent of a CEV dh and a CV did who is in 6th form we need to know how many cases are in our schools so we can assess our families risk but yeah why not ignore it all and take our chances.

@Watapalava

Are they noble because I’m northwest eat and at 330/100,000 it’s less than half Feb/March

Yep, infection rates (not case rates) in the North West are about 3 times higher than they were when schools went back in March.

The media knows that most people are no longer concerned about cases

Mixing at clubs etc does happen

I genuinely don’t Carr if my kids are mozimb with covid positive children since I do not worry about covid risk for them

I am 100% not alone and don’t know any parent who’s worried about covid at all other than their kids missing school

Hence why many are refusing tests or advising kids not to test ‘properly’

People have had enough of it

Kids isolating for an illness which causes than less symptoms than a common cold and you have to test to even know you have it

It’s mind blowing really

There are millions of people who don't have children so no we don't want constant covid testing reporting in main media anymore. It doesn't affect me, what do I do knowing x children are positive? Naff all.

Since they changed the isolation rules to if a person in your house is positive you don't have to isolate and can still go out etc. Then what is the point?

We don't report on flyr or cold cases even though those are transmissible too, remeber wheb you would go to work and someone came in with a cold and it got passed around. Never had reporting on that, would it have chnayed our behaviour...absolutely not even though flu does kill people

@Chillychangchoo

Thank god for that, all our newsletters consisted of covid updates last year and yesterday’s newsletter was a blessed relief. We don’t need to be bombarded anymore.

Well exactly.

What are you going to do with daily updates of how many tests have been taken, how many are positive, how many LFTs, percentages etc. Be scared? I regularly get the "there has been a positive covid test in your child's yeargroup" message but they go straight into spam.

People in general need to stop this obsession with "cases" especially in children who do not get very ill. Are there any children in hospital with covid? Of course there aren't. Will the information have any effect on whether you send your children to school or not? Of course it won't.

I actually agree with you OP. I think the disconnect between what is being reported in MSM and what is actually happing on the ground in schools is so big that it can only be explained by a deliberate choice being made to suppress reporting.

Now, whether or not that is a good thing, is a different matter - perhaps it is. A media frenzy over rising cases in schools - at levels that would have led to immediate closures thus time last year - will certainly not help to keep schools open.

But yes, I agree it is being underreported.

It’s not information that is in demand by most

I thought zero was low but a passing read of an email was enough

That’s my school I’m not interested in other schools

As a parent of three DC at school this isn't information I need or am particularly interested in. If my DC catch it they'd stay home for ten days, if they don't we carry on as normal. I don't care how many cases there are as it won't change anything.

Covid is here to stay, I'm well aware of this, so having constant statistics published won't make may difference to me.

*any

Ps as a pp says, I'm glad school newsletters are returning to normal, ie focused on things that matter to me and my children, such as their education Instead of endless covid related updates and policies, which I (and I'm sure others) stopped reading quite a while ago.

Yes schools have returned even the who have said we have to priories schools now soI afraid your days of the papers calling to continue shut the schools but yes it’s ok for the pubs to open are behind us at least for now!

Thank goodness really because future doctors need to come from somewhere abs I am unconvinced bbc bitesize is quite the answer to a future educated workforce many claimed!

Do you have any idea what a ‘media blackout’ would actually entail? 70,000 UK journalists all working for competing titles all just shutting up about something because the government told them to. Despite what you might think, journalists are champions of transparency and spend most of their working lives trying to expose stuff that people don’t want you to know. The chances of compliance with a blackout on this are zero.

In fact, in a 20 year media career I’ve been asked not to report something on national security grounds by the government (asked, not told) only once. And that was as a courtesy to them, and they only asked my to delay it by a few days so they could make a significant arrest.

The media reporting on school cases has been low-key for several reasons:

1. schools simply do not tell us when they have cases. Despite what you might think, we can’t just make it up.

2. there aren’t actually that many cases in each individual school and round here, the figures are only released as an outbreak by public health if they start getting into the dozens in a single setting

3. people aren’t that bothered about outbreaks anymore. A year ago we went at these outbreak stories hard and poured lots of our (incredibly meagre) resources in them because they got lots of page views. I’m not going to put two of my three reporters on a story that nobody is interested in. We’ll still report it, as is our moral duty, but it’s more likely to be a shorter story with less detail than before. And while people seem to have this idea that journalists should work for free and newspapers should merely exist as public service endeavours, in reality we do have to pay our journalists and the best way to do that is to get as many page views as possible.

Our primary school says it will tell us if there are cases.

Our secondary school tends to be extremely diligent about these things.

Are there any children in hospital with covid? Of course there aren't

KingsleyShacklebolt neatly illustrating here why access to data is important.

There are actually children in hospital with covid. Interesting how they group deaths in different age groups to infections and hospital admissions though. Why lump in 15 year olds with 44 year olds?

You see it as honesty and transparency, but if we had more local and national reporting of cases I’d see it as scaremongering, drama creating, needless propaganda.

We really don’t need to know how many other people have covid, or a cold, or the flu, or chicken pox, or any other virus. If it’s a concern because of a vulnerability, talk to the people you’re going to be around, use the free testing, and make your own choice about public events knowing that there’s always a small risk.

We really don’t need regular stats about other people’s sniffles.

It's not going to be so obvious or so problematic now there's no isolation so there's not much to report on.

I have Covid right now. I had been in the hall for inset with 100 adults, in a whole school assembly, in a singing practice with over 100 children and had classroom contact with dozens of children.

If this were last term, the school would have had to close. For one case. But, as it is, not a single other person has tested positive and the rest of the school is carrying on as normal.

Just me being at home with what is, for me, the very mildest of colds, is not newsworthy. A whole school closing after less than a week might have been.

Do you have any idea what a ‘media blackout’ would actually entail? 70,000 UK journalists all working for competing titles all just shutting up about something because the government told them to. Despite what you might think, journalists are champions of transparency and spend most of their working lives trying to expose stuff that people don’t want you to know.

I used to think that, until they absolutely didn't expose anything the government didn't want you to know about covid in schools before Christmas. It was genuinely mad how they all dutifully trotted out pictures of socially distanced kids wearing masks in any story about schools which was nothing like the actual conditions in schools, and didn't report on the millions of kids missing school.

@blameitonthecaffeine

It's not going to be so obvious or so problematic now there's no isolation so there's not much to report on.

I have Covid right now. I had been in the hall for inset with 100 adults, in a whole school assembly, in a singing practice with over 100 children and had classroom contact with dozens of children.

If this were last term, the school would have had to close. For one case. But, as it is, not a single other person has tested positive and the rest of the school is carrying on as normal.

Just me being at home with what is, for me, the very mildest of colds, is not newsworthy. A whole school closing after less than a week might have been.

We did have half a school close due to one case last term. Not newsworthy at all just WhatsApp worthy ; annoyed parents

Tg we’ve changed it and the outcome isn’t closure.

There was over 1000 child related covid admission during the month of July and August in the UK.
1/7 kids who get covid can go on to get long covid.
Admittedly the media's not reporting child covid admissions that well.

Are there any children in hospital with covid? Of course there aren't.

Of course there are, there's some data here

Though one blessing of this pandemic has been that children have not been as affected as adults.

Our secondary school has just told us that with over 1000 LFTs done this week in school they’ve not had one single positive result.