Covid restrictions

[badhairday23]

I live in Germany. For over a year now, my children (year 1 and year 5) have had to test themselves 3 times a week for covid, and wear masks at school. I wonder if this has contributed to my sons speech impediment. In any case, now they have to wear masks during indoor sport and its getting a bit much. The rest of the restrictions (mandatory masking everywhere, and lockdowns of the unvaxxed seem draconian too).
What are the school restrictions like in the UK? I'm wondering if we should come back....

Primary school age... no masks or testing in school, just with symptoms.

The only restrictions really is that parents aren't allowed inside and classes don't mix inside

Perhaps you can ask to have this thread moved to the Primary Education forum, this is for Secondary Education questions (years 7 and up).

My own kid’s (y7) Secondary school have just reinstated a mask requirement today, albeit for the communal areas. However, this will have little relevance to your query.

Ah ok. Secondary school here starts at year 5. Still I would prefer to leave the thread here, since my son will start secondary soon and I would imagine that primary school is more lax than secondary. I want to know the current worst case scenario. Here even the teachers have to be masked all the time....

What you regard as worst case scenario is one that I wholeheartedly welcome and see as good practice.
Secondary schools seem to be able to make adjustments in requirements according to the changing circumstances. What we haven’t yet seen and can’t yet gauge or predict is how vaccinations will affect secondary school decisions. The percentage of uptake in pupils must be very different from school to school and, even in schools with a majority of engaged vaccine acceptors, there is still the wildcard year 7 to contend with as only those who have reached their 12th birthday can accept the vaccine*
Saying that, the trend seems to be on “bubbles” so that mask wearing, even when mandated, is mostly required/requested in the communal areas between the “bubbled” classrooms and study areas.

It could be that the schools that have a more pro-mask stance and a higher pro-vax contingent at this moment could end up becoming more lax in the coming year or so whereas the schools which currently prefer to avoid anti-Covid measures and have more vax-resistant types in their cohort end up having to implement more draconian measures down the line. As with so many things; past performance is no guarantee of future results.

• there are some children who can accept a vaccine before they are twelve.

I work in a primary school in England. The only difference in my school is that parents aren’t encouraged into the school building but they can collect their children from the playground and speak to the teacher at the door.

We are still having trips and whole school assemblies and there are no masks for staff or children in the classroom. If there are covid cases in the class then the children in that class are encouraged to get PCR tested but they can’t be denied face to face education if they refuse to do so.

14 / 28 of my class got covid this term in just over a week including the 2 adults working in the room. The timeline shows that these cases spread in school.

I think we need a better balance in England of sensible mitigation measures and a protocol to deal with large outbreaks in schools as it seems to be reactive rather than proactive.

to be honest, masks have been mandatory in schools and underground and restaurants etc for over a year. Likewise my kids have had to carry out covid tests 3 times a week, even when the caseload was not too bad over the summer. Yet, here with are. With worse covid rates than the UK and overflowing hospitals to the point where people are being sent to Italy for treatment.
I'm not sure this is a country the Uk would want to emulate.

@badhairday23

to be honest, masks have been mandatory in schools and underground and restaurants etc for over a year. Likewise my kids have had to carry out covid tests 3 times a week, even when the caseload was not too bad over the summer. Yet, here with are. With worse covid rates than the UK and overflowing hospitals to the point where people are being sent to Italy for treatment. I'm not sure this is a country the Uk would want to emulate.

Masking is no magic bullet, the efficacy in helping curb the spread of Covid is reported to be between 5% and 18%, depending on which study you look at (I’d say it’s roughly 10%). And that’s the key to EXACTLY what you are referring to; when A&E are overwhelmed and hospitals are overflowing that 10% means everything.

@Cookiecrisps offered a perfect boots-on-the-ground example of what is actually happening here. The only way I can rationalise it is that there is a segment of our government working diligently towards the goal of having every English school child become infected.

But like I said, the germans have been masking diligently to no avail. I know that that is just anecdotal, but there have also been many studies to show that facemasks are next to useless: swprs.org/face-masks-evidence/

You’re opposed to masking and don’t consider the 5%-18% * efficacy in curbing transmission attributed to them as being useful in any way. Got it.

*these % figures are also represented in some of the studies in your link.

www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2729

Ok. You prefer to get your facts from a study of Bangladeshi villages... where I'm not sure they adhered to the masking regulations.
I prefer to follow the statistics from Bavaria which I can see with my own eyes has followed masking regulations to a tee, and has no noticeable difference with other German States which did not have mask mandates...
Tomaa tos, Tomaytoes.

Like I said, my 6 year old is masked up all day and I'm not sure that the risk reduction is work it. No-one can say for sure. The studies are pointing in all different directions.

Also, in the trial that you are mentioning, they did not say 5% to 18%. They stated figures of 0% to 18% giving an average of 9%...
This proves nothing.