@Ruffledcardigan
The teachers are probably off with covid. Some genuine, some not. The school has probably spent their supply budget or not will to spend further cash on supply.
This is kind of what I was getting at. The school said they just can't get supply teachers at the moment (which I can fully understand - they must be in incredibly high demand and low supply - who the hell would want to be a supply teacher right now?)
I sympathise entirely with teachers, they've effectively been dumped in the frontline trenches with no weapons to defend themselves with. Any moron (except the goverment ones, apparently) could see months ago exactly how this was going to unravel in schools. It does seem to be a deliberate policy to go for herd immunity by transmission through school kids. I can't believe even Boris is this incompetent.
We had systems in place (bubbles, household contacts isolating etc) that seemed to be holding back the spread last year. I can't understand why they were dumped at the start of this school year. Particularly where I am - in a county that was put into 'special measures' in August because of soaring covid cases. All that did was request masks be worn in communal areas, but the school openly admitted that they can't even enforce that, just ask nicely.
But I do wonder how 1/3rd of the teachers are off sick. Statistically at least some of them (hopefully the vast majority/all) have been vaccinated, so that should give them a bit more protection than the pupils, none of whom have been vaccinated (until last week). So you'd think there would be at least 1/3rd of the pupils off sick as well. Except there aren't. Yes there is quite high sickness rate, but probably only 1/6th from what I'm hearing.
So I do wonder how many teachers are off with stress (again, not that surprising really), or if there's even a varying attitude between teachers school to school - and some schools just have a far higher staff sickness rate? Is it a case of a few teachers go off sick/into isolation and then a bunch of others think, "fuck this, I'm calling in sick for a few days too."
By complete coincidence, I was talking to a friend who's a head of a small primary school this evening. He said they've hardly had any cases of covid in school, but worryingly high numbers in the wider community. So today he's decided to reintroduce bubbles in the school. He also said he's had two staff members off with covid back in Sept/Oct, but he strongly suspects they didn't actually have it and were just skiving off. I don't know exactly why he thinks that, but clearly has his reasons. He said he's not allowed to request proof of infection from the school staff.
The thing is it doesn't matter what the local rate is, it matters what the rate in school is.
Obviously it does matter what the local rate is, because the pupils at the local schools who are going down with covid are going to counted in the local case numbers. And we know (in the most recent data I've seen anyway), that about 50% of current cases are in secondary school age kids.
Oh, and the take up rate for vaccinations in school kids seems disappointingly low - my daughter is the only kid in her class who's been vaccinated. Sounds like a lot of them aren't intending to be either. They also had the HPV vaccinations last month, my daughter just told me only 5 kids in her class took that one up. What the fuck is wrong with people? Covid vaccine suspicion/antivaxers I can somewhat understand, but to not have the HPV vaccine seems like stupidity. I wonder if a lot of it is down to the kids being given a choice? "Would you like us to stick one of these needles in your arm, or would you like to skip this one?" I can imagine most 12 year olds declining the offer. I remember when we were kids and they did TB vaccinations at school. You didn't get a choice, line up and get a bloody shot. I reckon if a kid had refused they'd probably have just pinned them down and jabbed them anyway! 