Covid and education

[JustAnotherRandom]

With the covid inquiry taking place and discussing pandemic preparedness, I thought I'd share a thread on the impacts of current covid policy on education https://twitter.com/natebpanic/status/1674342348740866049?s=46&t=G9BWOZlYGPa11_pR7aKkbHQ

Please get your facts right.
Schools were closed by the government, not by teachers.
Schools were open throughout, but not for all children. This was decreed by the same government
The same government also told teachers NOT to teach during the first lockdown but simply provide childcare
The same government told schools to provide an education during the subsequent lockdowns, which was done.

I was in school every day throughout, as were the majority of my colleagues, except those who were ill with covid.

My father died from covid related complications. Do not blame ANYONE who wanted to protect their families from that.

I'm sorry for your loss @spanieleyes. Thank you for dispelling some myths too.

@SimoneBristol Children are at risk from covid though - why do you think a virus that has been shown to harm organs spares children? Those kids that are now in wheelchairs, the ones that have died, the ones that have family members with long covid, the ones that have lost caregivers, the ones with increased risk of mental health issues etc following a covid infection are not affected?

FWIW, I think both carers and teachers should be paid more. Thanks both for working in difficult circumstances through lockdown.

@SimoneBristol you know an awful lot, based on your giant experience of one teacher.

Hard to believe people are still banging on about Sweden. Sweden whose own government and scientists admitted very early on in 2020 that they got it wrong.

Any particular reason you've joined Mumsnet and posted lots of conspiracy theory anti -vax stuff on COVID threads over the last couple of days @SimoneBristol?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01097-5

There's quite a detailed analysis of all the mistakes made by the Swedish COVID advisors at the height of the pandemic.

James Melville is a twitter "influencer" whose personal opinions on lots of things (some of which are related to COVID) have been discredited and rejected by actual scientists.
He simply doesn't know what he's talking about.

Teaching unions and teachers didn't want schools closed, they wanted what was felt by all to be proper protection- including ventilation, masks, PPE etc. Perhaps, at a later date, it was proved that these were not necessary but, certainly at the initial outbreak and before vaccines, it was the only protection available and schools just wanted to be able to purchase the, without bankrupting the school.

It was the government that decided schools should open to key workers, they set the parameters and the conditions that had to be met.

If your husband didn't provide a proper education, shame on him and his colleagues. We provided full online teaching from 8.45 to 3.15 to all children, those in school and at home, we sourced laptops and computers from local companies and charities and provided them to families without, before the government got its arse into gear and provided more, we delivered free school meals to homes, we checked daily on every child who didn't log into lessons, our 1:1 staff sat in children's gardens to ensure they had a familiar face to speak to.

Yes, things were done that, in hindsight probably weren't needed, but no one really knew at the time and the VAST majority of people, both in school and outside did what was felt to be in the best interests of all.

How do you feel about excess deaths in Swedish school children going up after March 2020? In the U.K. and the rest of Europe deaths in children and young people were below the 5 year average.

My understanding is that Sweden have quite and epidemic of type 1 diabetes among school age children now too. So it wasn’t exactly harmless.

What do people think about the impact on education of current policy?

Good to see you know about the entirety of UK schooling during covid.

Perhaps your partner should consider a better choice if school to work in.

With regard to teachers choosing to shut schools, he's feeding you a bullshit sandwich or doesn't actually work in a school.

My link above is to a peer reviewed cross border analysis from scientists, governments and statisticians. Published in Nature magazine. The scientists who were involved in the analysis do agree. That Sweden's handling of the pandemic especially in the early stages was catastrophic. The Swedish govt is in agreement and the politician responsible for that policy has been totally discredited in the aftermath. It's all in the reputable publications which abound.

Your Twitter link is to a self-appointed social commentator who has no qualifications to either interpret statistics or analyse scientific data.

Feel free to link to something reputable to illustrate your point.

Not sure what's going on anymore as so many deletions before I've read them!

The deleted poster has been cherry picking "statistics" posted by twitter influencers with known anti-vax, anti-lockdown conspiracy theory agendas and then resorting to ad hominem attacks when asked if it might be possible to link to credible data.

You've not really missed anything relevant.

You could read the analysis in the link to find out? TL:DR it evaluates the entire handling of COVID not just giving an "X number of people died"

Yes, Sweden has fewer deaths overall

Yes, Sweden (if you look at one of the Swedish ways of analysing excess deaths- they use more than one method) has a lower excess death rate than almost all countries (using one of the Swedish ways of evaluating excess deaths they are the lowest, the other they are the 7th lowest)

As I said, it's a lot more complicated than just reading a number.

They aren't my scientists. But I do tend to trust their analysis more than I do trolls who throw meaningless numbers into threads to try and prove the pandemic never existed, vaccinations are killing more people than COVID did, and Sweden was a shining example of what should have happened.

Ask the relatives of the elderly in Swedish carehomes what happened as a starting point.

I haven't mentioned lockdowns. At all. Nor have I put forward any "argument" other than to link the Nature analysis of Sweden's approach. Sweden, like most countries, as you say, got some things right (mainly the civility of its people who realised that care of one, means care of all, and actively chose isolation and SD to protect the most vulnerable) but a lot wrong. Particularly in the early months of the pandemic when their death rates were the highest in Scandinavia and not looking good CF Europe in general.

I agree that NHS waiting lists are appalling, though I think less to do solely with the pandemic and more to do with over a decade of chronic underfunding from successive governments. I fail to understand why we can't yet see a GP face to face, though I rather suspect that's all part of an insidious creep towards a US style privatisation of health. My daughter is at university in an affluent UK city (Bath) and couldn't even get a private dentist to give her emergency treatment, let alone an NHS one.

I'm a teacher, and agree absolutely about the mental health crisis in young people. I have 8 classes and not one of them doesn't have a student with some form of mental health issue. I do blame the pandemic for that, to a large degree, yes.