Is it ok we are just letting our kids get Covid?

[Moonopoly]

DD5 has just tested positive for Covid. There have been several cases in her Year 1 class but school remains the same. Under the old rules the ‘bubble’ would have closed and she would perhaps have stood some chance of not getting it.
Is it ok that we are letting the government pursue a herd immunity policy with a novel virus amongst our kids?
We seem to be the only country doing this?

[quote Moonopoly]@MarshaBradyo not through herd immunity. By bringing cases down to a reasonable level through mitigations and then tracing them.[/quote]
But we have gone way way past that.
Delta transmits to 7-9 people and many people don’t even know they have it or have any symptoms at all! Many others just have a runny nose and carry on.
Hospital rates are far lower than before becuse it’s far milder for the vast majority with vaxx.
Mitigation’s except full lockdowns won’t do anything to ‘bring cases down to reasonable levels’ you are talking like we are in the first 2020 lockdown!

As others have said, we're all going to get it sooner or later. Better that kids catch it now than in January / February when hospitals are overwhelmed.
The damage to the mental health of way too many kids, by further disrupting their lives, would be the real problem. Well done the government on this occasion. The kids will all be exposed to covid at some point anyway, it is one more virus we need to live with now.
It's great that they're not throwing the children under the bus again.

My point is that it is no longer novel. It was novel in 2020 when it first came out. We are now 18 months down the line, it is no longer something that hasn't been identified in humans, because millions of humans have had it...

Nor is Covid - novel means 'not previously identified in humans'.

Covid 19 wasn't identified till the end of 2019.

I'd reckon we'd still call it novel. That has been a major issue, it produced an illness we hadn't been exposed to before.

@Moonopoly you and you kids WILL get this. Do you want it now in winter/ or over Christmas / early next year? Get used to the fact that at some point soon no matter what mitigation’s are put in place, you will get be exposed to covid.

The mitigations were mostly for adult population not children. The harms to them outweighed the risk from Covid.

@TheKeatingFive

Long Covid most certainly isn't.

When someone amasses some decent data on long covid we can have a conversation. What we have now is a holy mess and not the slightest bit helpful to these discussions or any kind of decision making, no matter how many times you try to use it as your gotcha.

Have a look at the ME Association and Action for ME webpages as there is abundant accurate information. There are great similarities between ME and Long Covid so we are the folk who can respond here. As a vintage veteran ME sufferer the more seriously Long Covid is taken the better Knowledge is power. And many with Long Covid are getting the same scorn and brush off as in your post as we did and still do in some quarters

@Silverswirl with 2 members of staff off they may not have a choice

@GotLittUp

My point is that it is no longer novel. It was novel in 2020 when it first came out. We are now 18 months down the line, it is no longer something that hasn't been identified in humans, because millions of humans have had it...

But we are still working out what the long term effects are, for example.

Also, Chris Whitty has said it will take about 5 years before the vaccine can "hold the line against the virus" - we are still in a relatively early stage of adapting to it as a society.

Of course we shouldn't put our lives on hold, we need to get on with life but we'd be wise to take some precautions still, if we can and where appropriate.

It feels ‘wrong’ but really, what is the actual alternative?

Bring back masks - but primary never wore them anyway, and your DC is young.

Better ventilation- windows open in the Portacabin classroom my DC was taught in last winter was bloody awful - they were all in hats, gloves, coats. There’s no money for magical ‘better ventilation’ in the school buildings we have.

They have to keep going to school. So I hugely feel for people with vulnerable children or those who are at higher risk and can’t be vaccinated but practically speaking what would help? Nothing that I can see.

[quote Silverswirl]@Moonopoly you and you kids WILL get this. Do you want it now in winter/ or over Christmas / early next year? Get used to the fact that at some point soon no matter what mitigation’s are put in place, you will get be exposed to covid.[/quote]
Personally I would go for

• vaccinations for everyone as we have some risk factors

• caution as a family over the winter

• defer as long as possible (for example, there's more time for new treatments to be developed)

Actually that seems to be what we've done.

Yes.
We can’t do anything else now, people are vaccinated. Wasn’t this the end game?
At what point can we move on from covid, Flu mutates every year too. I don’t see how we can keep locking down, closing schools, losing time off work, again and again.
Where does it end?

@herecomesthsun
That’s great but:
Vaccinations won’t stop you getting it. You will still be exposed to covid and ‘get it’ you might just not know or just have a cold.
What does ‘caution as a family’ over winter look like? Presumably even if you lock yourself away and home school / WFH / live like a hermit, some poor sod is still delivering you your food and essential supplies.
If your kids are still going to school then really, what does caution look like because school is the biggest risk factor of all.
Yes new treatments might be developed. They might not. Even if you are CEV if you have had your jabs then it will overwhelmingly be a very mild illness for you.
No need for kids to keep missing school because of close contacts isolating. No other measures except full lockdowns do much anyway.

Schools will close if too many teachers are off with Covid. Flu is much less easily transmitted and therefore less of an issue in previous years.

No. It's also not OK that it's compulsory for CEV children to go to school. And many children have CEV brothers and sisters.

@Moonopoly

For those asking about it being endemic… It’ll mean that growth isn’t exponential (which it is where I live) and that chances of you getting it will be less…

New diseases become endemic when enough people have immunity to them, either through vaccination or previous infection. They don’t become endemic because we shut ourselves away from them and wait them out.

We could shut all the children away at home for six months, ban schools, ban socialising, do everything we can to stop them being exposed. And at the end of that six months we’d let them out and… they’d all get exposed again anyway, because covid will still be out there.

It made sense to delay most people getting exposed to it when we were still waiting to see if vaccines would come through. It made sense to delay it when we could reduce everyone getting ill all at once and overloading hospitals. But it doesn’t make sense to delay it just for the sake of delaying it, when the cost of delaying it is so high and the benefits are… what? What would we be waiting for?

Agree with other posters. There were 13 cases in my kids' school last week, but what else can we do? The school has taken every precaution it can but I accept that it's not a matter of if my kids get it, but when. The purpose of lockdown was to slow the virus so that the NHS could cope, and we know that children are unlikely to end up in hospital because of COVID, so I'm kind of hoping that they get it over and done with sooner rather than later, while there's still a chance of my vaccine holding up!

@TheKeatingFive

Long Covid most certainly isn't.

When someone amasses some decent data on long covid we can have a conversation. What we have now is a holy mess and not the slightest bit helpful to these discussions or any kind of decision making, no matter how many times you try to use it as your gotcha.

Sticking our heads in the sand due to a lack of data is exactly what our government did in February/early March 2020.

Yes the children are going to school, but in what are currently low risk areas, we're lucky there. We are all as vaccinated as we can be. They do clubs but not involving close contact, often outdoors, not in big groups.

Yes we have food delivered, mind you we often did that before covid.

And we do stuff outside the home, but often outdoors, we wear masks in shops.

The adults will be getting boosters.

I'm much less worried about risk than I was last year before the vaccines, we are still taking what precautions we can.

I’m not ok with the sibling / household mixing aspect. Makes no fucking sense to not isolate the household if someone tests positive.

@EvilPea

I’m not ok with the sibling / household mixing aspect. Makes no fucking sense to not isolate the household if someone tests positive.

Why not? How long would you like kids to keep missing week upon week of school for?

I honestly don't know what else you expect to be done?

The vast majority of adults are now vaccinated. Many people are cautious or actively against vaccinating children for virus that in the overwhelming majority of cases in children is mild and presents no real threat to a child's health. If we don't accept that our children will pick up the virus and don't want them vaccinated then what is left? Live in long term isolation and destroy any semblance of normal life for our children in the fear of some unspecified threat from covid. What happens if it mutates to a more dangerous strain for children and due to lack of immunity our kids start getting seriously ill?

The hospitals aren't overwhelmed at the moment and we need to keep this in perspective. Lots of diseases and illnesses present some risk to us but we don't try to eradicate them or think we should hide in our houses until they magically disappear.

Yes

Long Covid most certainly isn't

It was reported last week that "long covid" is rare in children. So you will have to stop beating that particular drum.

If everyone is going to get COVID and they think roughly 10% of people get some sort of Long COVID that is a lot of people suffering long term impacts.

I know other viruses can do the same, but when I had glandular fever and missed a term of school I don’t remember anyone saying never mind everyone gets glandular fever. In fact I don’t know anyone else who has had glandular fever. It certainly didn’t appear to rip through school