AIBU That we learn to accept COVID is here to stay!

[Jakie7700]

That now a massive number is double vaccinated those who want to be and that teenagers have started to be offered them, it seems so ridiculous that kids are still losing out on school because they are being sent home as they have a minor cold with minor cough. Covid will still be around in years to come, so will children still be sent home then with a mild cough due to colds?

Many missed days of school waiting for PCR results, parents usually mothers missing work over and over. Nobody seemed to care two years back when these same children were spreading flu, chicken pox etc which can all kill or cause serious complications both in adults and children.

Nothing is going to change you can get COVID again like a cold. Just last week I heard of two friends kids being sent home because of mild cough (coughed three/four times the whole day) missed days of school waiting for results only to be negative and then told this will happen every time they have a cough which as most will know in primary children will be alot over winter! These same parents who have nearly lost jobs due to having to juggle childcare through lockdowns. Surely it is just time to accept COVID is isn't going anywhere and stop making kids espeically suffer.

@FrippEnos

Backofbeyond50

We are generally no allowed to mention that teachers get covid.
For some reason this upsets various posters.

Quite.

For the past year I've had posters tie themselves in knots trying to claim that I must have caught Covid from anywhere but my school, let alone it coming from a pupil.

Apparently I am far more likely to have caught it from my Dh who has never tested positive, nor have virus acquired antibodies, who worked in a socially distanced office with no known positive cases than from a classroom where we know children and their families definitely had Covid, or where 75% of the staff came down with Covid over the same 6 week period.

Nope, none of those staff should be beloved that the common factor was our work place and the only people we were in close contact with in the building were the children. We must have all caught it from elsewhere, definitely not school.

The lengths some posters have gone too over the year to tell me it must have been caught elsewhere is immense!

I remember all that, @Abraxan. It's been quite extraordinary.
I wonder where all those posters are now, and whether they are now, finally, acknowledging that yes, Covid DOES spread in schools, and by children too.

Yes exactly. This ridiculous and dangerous message that teachers are no more likely ro catch covid than any other profession was spread by the government though. Obviously anyone who actually believed that is a complete fool, but it is awful to have such lies spread by those we should be placing our trust in. My sister in law's colleague caught covid in school and passed it on to her husband (he was working from home and had literally not left the house as he was vulnerable) and he died.

What I find really ironic is that in my experience at my school at least, most of those moaning about their children missing out on education while waiting for a PCR test (or worse still, putting them in school while they wait and then pull them out only when they get a positive!) are the ones working from home - they're happy for us teachers to pile in with a heap of potentially covid-infected, unmasked kids all day every day though!

Yes op my dd has been royally screwed as 2 of her 3 A Level Teachers are off presumably with COVID as it has been allowed to be rife at her school.
@Jakie7700
She had had less education this year than last year. At least last year they made it to October Half Term
She probably had better education back in January when schools were doing home learning as her teachers weren't sick

Obviously anyone who actually believed that is a complete fool, but it is awful to have such lies spread by those we should be placing our trust in

Isn’t this what the data says though? Or at least that teachers weren’t any more likely to get seriously ill compared to the general population (of equivalent age , gender, ethnicity etc).

@bizawit you mean the antibodies data? That was collected months ago and was meaningless because it followed periods of school closures so of course it didn't show the full picture - and even the lead reaearch for PHE commented on the naivety of people thinking teachers were as likely to get covid as people working from home 🙄

@surreygirl1987 doesn't the data back that though ?

Last summer: "Mark Woolhouse, the infectious disease expert, told The Times of London: “One thing we have learnt is that children are certainly, in the 5 to 15 brackets from school to early years, minimally involved in the epidemiology of this virus. “They are probably less susceptible and vanishingly unlikely to end up in hospital or to die from it.

Prof Woolhouse adds: “There is increasing evidence that they rarely transmit. For example, it is extremely difficult to find any instance anywhere in the world as a single example of a child transmitting to a teacher in school. There may have been one in Australia but it is incredibly rare.”"

I bet they could find a few examples now.

@backofbeyond50
Yes op my dd has been royally screwed as 2 of her 3 A Level Teachers are off presumably with COVID as it has been allowed to be rife at her school.
@Jakie7700
She had had less education this year than last year. At least last year they made it to October Half Term
She probably had better education back in January when schools were doing home learning as her teachers weren't sick

I'm so sorry to hear that. It's the same qt my school. One of the A Level teachers in my department has been off for two or three weeks now. Another A Level teacher I know has been struggling with severe long covid and just never returned to her class so they've just had to struggle on. You're right about it being 'allowed' to be rife... As if piling 30+ unvaccinated kids without masks into a small classroom is as low risk as any other situation 🤦‍♀️

Schools have always driven covid spread and we were hugely gaslighted on this issue last year by the government. Teachers have been more vulnerable to covid throughout and we were of course more likely to catch it compared to people WFH, regardless what the 'data' said.

But come on...we are now 18 months into this. Teachers are double jabbed and the risk of serious illness is rare. Many have already had covid alongside the kids. Yes it causes problems when lots of teachers are off sick at the same time but this is nothing new, we were facing this in my college 12 months ago.

Teachers, kids and everyone else in society will probably get covid at some point. Berating a parent for deciding to make a judgement call on using LFT rather than a PCR does not ultimately change this. The level of aggression from teachers on this thread is very alienating to parents and luckily nothing like what I see from colleagues in real life.

@noblegiraffe
it is extremely difficult to find any instance anywhere in the world as a single example of a child transmitting to a teacher in school.

I bet they could find a few examples now

God, it's farcical isn't it! I can't believe they actually said that.

@Brickskithouse

Schools have always driven covid spread and we were hugely gaslighted on this issue last year by the government. Teachers have been more vulnerable to covid throughout and we were of course more likely to catch it compared to people WFH, regardless what the 'data' said.

But come on...we are now 18 months into this. Teachers are double jabbed and the risk of serious illness is rare. Many have already had covid alongside the kids. Yes it causes problems when lots of teachers are off sick at the same time but this is nothing new, we were facing this in my college 12 months ago.

Teachers, kids and everyone else in society will probably get covid at some point. Berating a parent for deciding to make a judgement call on using LFT rather than a PCR does not ultimately change this. The level of aggression from teachers on this thread is very alienating to parents and luckily nothing like what I see from colleagues in real life.

Vaccines are wearing off hence the fuss about boosters….

[quote surreygirl1987]@bizawit you mean the antibodies data? That was collected months ago and was meaningless because it followed periods of school closures so of course it didn't show the full picture - and even the lead reaearch for PHE commented on the naivety of people thinking teachers were as likely to get covid as people working from home 🙄[/quote]
I think there have been a few studies. Not just on antibodies data, but also looking hospitalisations/ deaths etc?

Certainly I don’t think there is evidence to say teachers are particularly more at risk than other groups?

Schools have always driven covid spread and we were hugely gaslighted on this issue last year by the government. Teachers have been more vulnerable to covid throughout and we were of course more likely to catch it compared to people WFH, regardless what the 'data' said.

Well said!

The level of aggression from teachers on this thread is very alienating to parents and luckily nothing like what I see from colleagues in real life. Interesting point. I think it's anger more than aggression, but it's not come out of nowhere! I think teachers have every reason to feel angry after the way we have been treated over the past 18 months.

@bizawit
Certainly I don’t think there is evidence to say teachers are particularly more at risk than other groups? Are you actually serious?!?!

[quote surreygirl1987]@bizawit
Certainly I don’t think there is evidence to say teachers are particularly more at risk than other groups? Are you actually serious?!?![/quote]
Yes. Please direct me to some if you know otherwise..

So many farcical things have been said - as though kids weren't human (can't catch it, can't spread it, don't get ill etc). Kids are human, as are teachers. I think the long term fallout from this mass infection in schools policy will be awful. We need to live with covid in a sustainable way. Not like this.

Have you seen this? It explains how although teachers appeared to be at lower risk during some periods (ie during summer term when kids were wearing masks and doing lots outside lessons!!) and during school closure, there was a period of time when teachers were actually 20% MORE likely than the general public to be admitted to hospital. But the media conveniently don't mention that, and wrote articles like this - www.google.com/amp/s/www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/health/proof-shows-teachers-not-greater-25180978.amp - which select what they want to go with their headline.

I'm just finishing a doctorate at the moment and we discussed this in a workshop a fortnight ago as one of many examples of data manipulation and ways research can be presented to convince the public of pretty much anything. There are loads of example like this! Hope that helps anyway.

Oh, meant to share this: publichealthscotland.scot/publications/risk-of-covid-19-among-teachers-in-scotland/ Makes for interesting reading and shows that it's really not black and white at all!!

But that study doesn’t support your claim at all?

And as for this:

there was a period of time when teachers were actually 20% MORE likely than the general public to be admitted to hospital.

This was one term and the confidence interval was huge, such that the researchers concluded:

However, the 95% confidence interval ranged between 11% less likely to 61% more likely, so we cannot say with confidence that teachers had a higher risk than the general population at this time

The. In the summer term of 2021, we found that teachers were 15% less likely than the general population to be admitted to hospital with COVID-19. However, the 95% confidence interval ranged between 46% less likely and 36% more likely

So no, this study does not provide evidence that teachers are more at risk.

The study wasn’t done when close contacts didn’t have to isolate. I’d like to know how anyone thinks that teachers can’t catch covid off 10-15 year olds when they self-evidently catch it so readily off each other in school?

@Bizawit

But that study doesn’t support your claim at all?

And as for this:

there was a period of time when teachers were actually 20% MORE likely than the general public to be admitted to hospital.

This was one term and the confidence interval was huge, such that the researchers concluded:

However, the 95% confidence interval ranged between 11% less likely to 61% more likely, so we cannot say with confidence that teachers had a higher risk than the general population at this time

The. In the summer term of 2021, we found that teachers were 15% less likely than the general population to be admitted to hospital with COVID-19. However, the 95% confidence interval ranged between 46% less likely and 36% more likely

So no, this study does not provide evidence that teachers are more at risk.

This is what the researchers concluded 🤷🏼‍♀️:

“The study did not find any evidence for an increased risk of being admitted to hospital with COVID-19 for teachers compared with other working-age adults. Between March 2020 and July 2021, teachers’ overall risk of hospital admission was lower than that of other working-age adults. This risk varied over time, with a pattern of being lower than the general population in periods when schools were largely closed, and similar to that of the general population when schools were open.”

@Bizawit - why are you quoting yourself?! And as I said, the study was not done at a time when children did not have to isolate when in close contact with a positive case. They don’t have to isolate anymore and see what has happened tot heir case numbers. So - what has happened to teachers in affected schools this term?

I’m sure there was some ONS data about how risk had changed recently and teachers had increased the most - I can’t find it anywhere now though?!? I remember reading it out to DH…

[quote Walkaround]@Bizawit - why are you quoting yourself?! And as I said, the study was not done at a time when children did not have to isolate when in close contact with a positive case. They don’t have to isolate anymore and see what has happened tot heir case numbers. So - what has happened to teachers in affected schools this term?[/quote]
Sure - we are yet to see data/ studies on the impact of ending isolations for close contacts, so maybe that will change the evidence on risk for teachers. But we don’t know yet..