OT. Schools...normality and Coronavirus.

[Trickytreesreds]

Perfectly clear rA, but those who probably don't follow it should get back to school ASAP for additional maths lessons.

Or the poster needs to understand the problems of posting unformatted data vua cut n paste

Apologies GP. I probably deserve a flogging in the accounting world for such a sin.

[mistaram]

That is a shame, they should be leading on that kind of decision making, after all it effects us all.

Yes your right Adi ,what I can't understand though is why private schools are not opening

[ramAnag]

Yes your right Adi ,what I can't understand though is why private schools are not opening

Many of them have a ‘boarding’ facility, mista, which brings additional complications re; social distancing.

The government’s leadership has, imo, been poor throughout...why should they be any different on schools?
Regions are impacted differently and, as Ram59 pointed out, some schools are better equipped for social distancing than others, so, imo, at this stage leadership needs to be based on knowledge of regions and individual schools.

[Andy_Faber]

Yes your right Adi ,what I can't understand though is why private schools are not opening

Litigation

[Geoff Parkstone]

Yes your right Adi ,what I can't understand though is why private schools are not opening

Also consider that private schools with boarding facilities and significant numbers of overseas students are quite possibly still open, especially if those students would have been repatriated into covid hotpots when lockdown started end of March.

Not just private schools either - a number of students at my son's university (both overseas and UK) are doing lock down in halls of residence

[Geoff Parkstone]

Apologies GP. I probably deserve a flogging in the accounting world for such a sin.

Nowt to do with accounting, its IT 1.01 in college!

[ramAnag]

Litigation

Absolutely...and that’s not just in public schools.

My first spell as an Acting Head coincided with the ‘Legionnaires’ crisis which necessitated the thorough testing of all water sources throughout the school. After about a week the caretaker went off sick for a month and the Authority made it clear that testing would be my responsibility.
It was the most stressful aspect of the whole period, and goes someway to explain the reluctance of Heads and Governors to be as accommodating as some would like in this current crisis.
Local Authorities can be very expert at abdicating responsibility when the you know what hits the fan.

[mistaram]

Many of them have a ‘boarding’ facility, mista, which brings additional complications re; social distancing.

The government’s leadership has, imo, been poor throughout...why should they be any different on schools?
Regions are impacted differently and, as Ram59 pointed out, some schools are better equipped for social distancing than others, so, imo, at this stage leadership needs to be based on knowledge of regions and individual schools.

Yes we continue to get mixed messages about practically every thing Apparently now we don't need the 2mtr rule it should only be 1mtr because France Hong Kong and China have done it The W.H.O have always said 1mtr. If we do adopt it should really help in a lot of businesses even pubs and cafes But a lot of 2mtrs apart signs being made redundant

[swaledale]

I really couldn’t say, Swale, but to describe cars as ‘mobile bombs’ seems to be somewhat of an exaggeration to me.

You really can not compare risks when one leads to an average of 1800 deaths per year and the other leads to 36,000 (not ‘over 30k’) deaths in two and a half months.

Yes 250,000 is a very small % of 67 million, but it’s artificially small precisely because of the steps we’ve been taking, and I’ve never disputed the existence of the other conditions you rightly speak of but I very much doubt they’ve led to 36,000 deaths since March.

The government almost certainly hasn’t got the ‘bottle’ as you put it, because it knows that to restart compulsory attendance at school would be both very unpopular and impossible to implement.

I’d be much happier if it, and the three odd amigos on here, would recognise that a return to school should be done gradually on a region by region basis as part of an effort not to compromise the ‘R’ which is only where it is, between 0.7 - 1.0, because of the restrictions of the last couple of months.

Well I'll take the first part first, yes handling this crisis on a regional basis would be best, indeed local emergency planners have complained that its very centralised and there is insufficient information and poor communication from central government, who appear to be politically opposed to local government at precisely the time its needed and also worried about controlling the flow of information and how its presented. Not very successfully as the backlash from devolved countries and local authorities has shown.

There is much dispute about the calculation of the R figure, scientifically as it depends upon the quality of the data and may not be that useful in the control of the virus anyway - its too complicated to explain here. However its irrelevant in the case of children as the current information is that they are neither major spreaders or affected by the virus.

Another point about R is that actually we need the virus to spread, to increase the percentage of the population who have it in order to get back to normal life!

Again there is a misconception that the lockdown was about stopping infection per se, when in fact its designed to stop a large number of cases occurring at the same time and overwhelming the NHS, that has been successful and planning beyond that the only way forward is to have the resources to deal with infected people and track and test.

This virus isn't going away but unless its very different from other coronaviruses, immunity will build up and it will become something we live like flu.

OK so 250,000 infections is artificially low, firstly because its suspected that the figure is most likely double that - a lot of people have been asymptomatic, so not aware they have had it, others have had it but its not being confirmed by testing.

Conversely the death rate could well be exaggerated, many thousands of people were dying of something else have been attributed on death certificates to Covid-19 when there has been no test to confirm. It has been admitted by Government scientists that there is considerable overlap between deaths from flu and Covid-19, so its a moot point about how many additional people have died from Covid-19 who wouldn't have died anyway. But lets be generous and say 20,000.

So a virus that kills 36,000 (last time I looked that was over 30K but hey ho) in one year, is worse than continuous factors which could be addressed that kills an average 30,000 every year - I'm talking excess winter deaths due to respiratory diseases, poor diet, poor housing and air pollution, deaths that could be avoided if action was taken. Whilst obviously its worse than driving that injures or kills over 6,000 every year? Flu kills around 17,000 every year.

So even though all the evidence shows that children are not at risk (unless classed as vulnerable due to health reasons), that they do not on current evidence act as major spreaders of Covid-19 and that teachers are certainly at lower risk in their job of infection, than the thousands of workers who meet and deal with hundreds of different people everyday, you feel that they should not return to work?

Bear in mind that the thousands of people who have had to work, often having to travel by public transport, have not actually suffered significant levels of death or illness either (I'm not suggesting that any death is not tragic) so that the risk of working is clearly not at the level suggested.

So whats your alternative? That everyone who works should be able to choose whether or not they go back to work? How exactly is that going to be paid for?

Its very easy to take a risk averse approach if it costs one nothing to the individual to do so. In the current situation if your sick, or of an age considered vulnerable then the vast majority, can sit in their homes claim their pensions and protect themselves. However for the young and those at work a return to normal life (with suitable precautions) is essential as soon as possible for both their well being and the country's.

[swaledale]

Yes we continue to get mixed messages about practically every thing Apparently now we don't need the 2mtr rule it should only be 1mtr because France Hong Kong and China have done it The W.H.O have always said 1mtr. If we do adopt it should really help in a lot of businesses even pubs and cafes But a lot of 2mtrs apart signs being made redundant

Aint that typical of the way the Government has handled this? Not taking information from elsewhere, not adopting the tracking app that works but developing our own, not taking action based on what was happening abroad? Its as if Brexit nationalistic policies have got in the way of a coordinated approach tackling the pandemic based on all available information.