The Sixty-Fifth Republic - The Covid School Phoney War under way so who will the gold medal and who will get the wooden spoon?

[Staffholidayclubrep]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff only – a sort of room of requirement for school staff to let off steam.

Baiters, haters, goaders, and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

If you are NOT staff and just have a general education query please start your own thread.

Do not give the staffroom password to non-staff as it attracts the wrong sort of crowd.

Other requirements for staff room entry include the ability to find the staff room, the ability to find a clean mug in the staff room, knowledge of the photocopier codes, and the ability to sniff out where the booze is stashed - Thirsty Tuesdays, Fizz Fridays now in operation.

You can sit on chairs but keep the windows open. You don’t have to upload LFT results during the holidays. You do not have to wear mask - free choice

(Am presuming it wasn’t yours!)

No, not mine, here's the deletion message, which is unusually apologetic.

It did appear to have been found by anti-lockdowners posting a load of crap about ivermectin being suppressed by Big Pharma, maybe they're investigating that? It didn't seem to be any more crank-filled than some other threads. Can't remember who the OP was though.

Oh. I’ve been waiting for the ivermectin loons. I’ve found a lovely piece on how the big ivermectin trial may well have been a big fraud and never took place. So the meta analyses are now based on a fraudulent trial and the results are quite different if you take it out.

Sounds not dissimilar to this one, which is still up?
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/coronavirus/4305141-The-Times-today?msgid=109455207#109455207

Oh no, Jan, very different, no discussion about how the vaccine will kill us all on that one...

Ooh, I meant to say, I posted a thread in the covid section yesterday that got zero responses.

Complaints about a workforce not being prioritised for vaccination, not given adequate PPE, finding out vital info from the newspapers, being issued conflicting and confusing directives.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/coronavirus/4307712-The-police-have-had-enough-of-this-government-treating-them-with-contempt

Just read that twitter feed. It's not surprising but still shocking to see the machinations laid out like that.

Great news @echt

You'll be able to look forward to the end now!

What will you do next Echt? (Bearing in mind that 'nothing' is a perfectly acceptable answer I just wondered if you had a plan.)

A big garden and veggie patch, that I'm trying to simplify, beckons.

I want to keep my brain in gear and so am training as a guide in a museum of the John Soane kind.

I really wanted to travel with DD, but that's off. Even interstate is hard to plan, with borders opening and closing like a privy door in a gale. Still, not being tied to work means I can take off for mini-breaks when the opportunity arises.

Veggie patch and museum guide sounds great. I’m quite jealous. You can give me advice on growing potatoes next year. This years crop is extremely disappointing.

Sorry the travel plans are on hold for the time being.

Sounds good Echt. Teaching is so tying in terms of travel - being able to pick up and go when the flights are cheap or, in these times, when you're allowed would be lovely.

Echt my FE retirement job wasn’t tied to term time (in fact got pretty busy in August with last minute exam panics), so I could book holidays whenever I liked. I decided to go somewhere relatively warm for a week in late Jan/early November, generally Portugal, Morocco, Menorca, Madeira, and did that for seven years - even managed to get away early and late 2020 before/between lockdowns. What a difference it made! Also cheap as out of season…now I’ve retired again I’ll keep it up I hope.
You may not need the warmth but the change of scenery at that time of the year is a tonic in itself.

Good luck Echt with your plans. I'm very envious.

I thought a few of you might be interested in this data that Jan noticed on a BBC report today. Lots of detail about children and their contacts. It is the first time I've seen it but the reports go back months and have been discussed in Sage meetings.

cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/comix-reports.html

You may not need the warmth but the change of scenery at that time of the year is a tonic in itself

The various lockdowns have kept me close to home, and a long drive through regional Victoria sets me up. A different horizon. I'm conscious of great privilege, living in a lovely suburb, full of trees and close to the beach, but as unreasonable as humans are, I want more. Yes, so looking forward to term time holidays. Or holidays, as I expect I'll call them in time. :o

Below thanks lonely, I hadn’t got as far as that, very interesting!

However, lonely, have you seen this paragraph:

As children (

So, POLYMOD is a European model considering social contacts and how they spread disease, developed about 2008:

cordis.europa.eu/project/id/502084/reporting

Blimey-don’t go near the DM today, the TBashers are out in force. I just don’t quite get why we are still so utterly hated?! Holidays, I presume? Though the job/holiday clearly isn’t so enticing that people want to leave their own jobs and go and retrain.

The Comix study also assumes transmission is equal with all age groups, which is a bit problematic (adults possibly transmit more; do age groups only have contacts within age group)

I hadn't seen that paragraph. Funny how that data was missing.
Adults may have bigger viral load and transmit more but children are more likely to get up really close to a larger number of people. Social boundaries are different for kids.

Te reading rhe SAGE report from April 2020 about possible re opening of schools and the role of children in transmission.
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/886993/s0141-sage-sub-group-role-children-transmission-160420-sage26.pdf
Much that hasn’t been acted upon, including:

An alternative route would be surveying children on their contacts and behaviours through teachers.

Blimey-don’t go near the DM today, the TBashers are out in force. I just don’t quite get why we are still so utterly hated?! Holidays, I presume

Why today? How odd. I’m tempted to have a look but I think I’ll avoid it.

@lonelyplanet has just posted this on Data, will go some way towards explaining recent drops in case rates

Dr Duncan Robertson comments on positivity:
mobile.twitter.com/Dr_D_Robertson/status/1420765010708500483

"Over one in three PCR tests for 10-19 year olds males is positive.

This is a very large percentage and indicates that not enough testing is being done in this age group

So, we can infer that the case detections for 10-19 year olds is significantly undercounted.

In fact, test positivity is in excess of 10% in all age groups between 5 and 80.

So, not enough testing is being performed to generate accurate data on cases.

But the 10-19 year old age group stands out here. For females 3/10 tests are positive, and this figure is increasing"

We’ll see tomorrow if the fall in case rates is matched by a fall in infection rates. It should do, for school kids. The Y12 to age 24 group will be interesting.