Reopening Of Schools

[Bletchleyite]

But, very approximately, there's 74 million under 18s and 62 million under 15s in the US.

That's 0.0006% of under 18s dying from flu, and 0.00007% of under 15s dying from Covid. Both are pretty small numbers, and yes the Covid figure is smaller, but given Covid hasn't been around for the majority of the last year, and also given that measures to stop it were put in place for Covid, I don't think it's a fair comparison.

Anti-COVID measures will of course, pretty much in equal measure, prevent flu cases, because they spread the same way. Will be interesting to see if that means we don't have a "bad flu year" as some are fearing.

 

[Ken H]

Was this not one of the issues in Italy? They closed the schools/childcare fairly early and before most businesses so parents who needed to still go to work sent the children to granddad and grandma with tragic consequences? My hazy recollection of those days in March is that schools and businesses in the UK closed and shifted to home working much more in step with each other. Indeed didn't the schools close for all but vulnerable and key worker children on a Friday afternoon and then full lockdown followed on the Monday evening?

Schools closed because teachers self isolated and so not enough staff to run the schools. So that sort of happened by default.
People working had to get child care so used their retired parents. Even when working from home, having to look after kids at the same time is nearly impossible, so granny childminder steps in again.
See that happen in my own village. People have been having grandkids to stay so people can work.

How much this caused COVID to spread I dont know.

 

[Ken H]

Anti-COVID measures will of course, pretty much in equal measure, prevent flu cases, because they spread the same way. Will be interesting to see if that means we don't have a "bad flu year" as some are fearing.

Unless the new flu virus is here already, and isn't spreading widely during the summer when its not as deadly, giving herd immunity. So when the cold wet weather starts it could flare up badly.

 

[Puffing Devil]

So why haven't lots of spikes been traced to schools? Those two studies cited are both theoretical and neither seem to actually demonstrate the claims in practice - if it was true, there would surely be some evidence of it actually happening by now!

Early reports did not find strong evidence of children as major contributors to SARS-CoV-2 spread,3 but school closures early in pandemic responses thwarted larger-scale investigations of schools as a source of community transmission. (Research Letter cited in Forbes Article)

Because they were closed?

 

[DB]

Because they were closed?

Not in all countries they weren't!

 

[Bletchleyite]

Unless the new flu virus is here already, and isn't spreading widely during the summer when its not as deadly, giving herd immunity. So when the cold wet weather starts it could flare up badly.

It won't if social distancing is properly adhered to, as that will prevent it doing so because it will lose the opportunities to transmit.

 

[trebor79]

It won't if social distancing is properly adhered to, as that will prevent it doing so because it will lose the opportunities to transmit.

Yes, but it isn't being adhered to, as the masses think the magic masks mean it isn't necessary any more.

 

[Ken H]

It won't if social distancing is properly adhered to, as that will prevent it doing so because it will lose the opportunities to transmit.

but kids arent. They are playing together as kids do.

 

[bramling]

Agree. If anybody got some paid time of work, well.... you might as well enjoy it! Just need to be prepared to return to work as soon as is requested by your employer.

I suspect resentment from some posters that they haven't been "lucky*"

I’m not sure it’s resentment - personally I’m glad to have kept the sanity-inducing structure of being at work each day and its positive effects on mental health, plus beaches aren’t really my thing.

I do object to the idea that we are subsidising people who are quite happy to remain at home, and wish to big this whole thing up at every opportunity in order to string out their furloughing / working from home as long as possible. There’s certainly people in that category.

 

[Bletchleyite]

There's nothing wrong with working from home if you can actually do your full job that way, and I see no reason why people *shouldn't* push for that arrangement, if it genuinely works, to be permanent.

 

[Puffing Devil]

Not in all countries they weren't!

True - have a look at Israel.

 

[peters]

Like now. Employers have to pay employers NI for furloughed staff from 1st Aug. I think thats 11%. 11% of £2,500 is a fair wedge.

Most furloughed people aren't getting £2500 and in some cases the question is would the employer be better off making someone redundant and then going through recruitment costs for a new person in a few months time or keeping their existing employee on furlough? I heard it claimed the average employer's NI and pension contribution for a furloughed employee is £75 a month, which is low compared to the £1000 grant on offer if they keep the employee on their books until the end of January 2021.

The rate of employer's NI is 0% for the first £169 a week and then 13.8% for anything about that so for £300 a week it would be £18, rather than the £33 if it was a flat 11%.

 

[DB]

True - have a look at Israel.

And what else did Israel do at the same time? I've not been watching, but I would bet that they did other things at the same time.

 

[peters]

Indeed didn't the schools close for all but vulnerable and key worker children on a Friday afternoon and then full lockdown followed on the Monday evening?

Yes. The pubs, nightclubs and restaurants were also made to close by no later than the early hours of the day after the schools closed. It was then a sunny weekend and a lot of people flocked to beauty spots like Snowdon, which was probably one the reasons the full lockdown happened so quickly after the school and hospitality closures.

 

[bramling]

There's nothing wrong with working from home if you can actually do your full job that way, and I see no reason why people *shouldn't* push for that arrangement, if it genuinely works, to be permanent.

I think the question is whether it does genuinely work.

I know someone who has recently retired and still hasn’t started receiving his pension, which has been put down to “the difficulties of people working from home”. When attempting to chase up, he’s spoken to people who have been very clearly uninterested in work whilst conspicuously partaking in other activities (including in one case clearly being at the seaside).

Likewise we’re still hearing excuses at work for support functions not being provided due to people working from home, yet I thought government guidance was all people in non-critical jobs which couldn’t be done from home were supposed to have returned some time ago?

My neighbour (to be fair he has been taking shielding quite seriously) also works from home - yet seems to spend most of his day either on a sun lounger or doing veg patches!

Now all this is fine if it’s between employers and employees, however one draws a line when people then want to big up Covid to allow the whole thing to continue longer, especially if that then becomes a reason why schools can’t return.

 

[AdamWW]

Likewise we’re still hearing excuses at work for support functions not being provided due to people working from home, yet I thought government guidance was all people in non-critical jobs which couldn’t be done from home were supposed to have returned some time ago?

The government never actually asked them to stop working.
Though the messaging was somewhat vague and they seemed happy to pay to furlough people working for employers who chose to close their premises even though they had no obligation to do so.

 

[Howardh]

There's nothing wrong with working from home if you can actually do your full job that way, and I see no reason why people *shouldn't* push for that arrangement, if it genuinely works, to be permanent.

As an aside, was called by my bank (not a scam...arranged!!) and enquired if the assistant was in an office or working at home, she was working at home here in Bolton! Told me that some days at heme, some in the office would be perfect, which to me makes sense.
Would love to see the amount of traffic - commuters - reduced significantly, but there is a rail issue, if TOC's depend on peak fared for their income, but fewer need to commute in future during peak hours, what then?

But I wouldn't want schools to go on-line, maybe for pupils who are poorly or in remote locations, but they shouldn't lose that one-to-one contact with the staff and their pals.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Call centres are an obvious case for home-working, as it allows much greater flexibility for both employer and employee - for instance, things like split shifts to cover busy times are more feasible and may well work quite well for e.g. parents, who might work during school hours (say 10-3), then have a break when their kid comes home, then do a bit in the evening when their 9-5 working partner gets home to cover busy evening times. That just doesn't work if you work in an office.

 

[Domh245]

Looks like Mr Williamson may not be quite correct. Or that spread in schools may be limited, though the ankle biters are very good spreaders out of school.

The papers the Forbes article is based on are for want of a better word, far from conclusive. The first paper has some interesting comments left on it

The Abbot RealTime SARS-CoV-2 Assay that used in this paper says in its package insert that it is "intended for the qualitative detection of nucleic acid from SARS-CoV-2". I understand that one would expect the CT values to be lower with higher viral loads but the assay is not really designed to draw quantitative conclusions. I get that this is potentially interesting preliminary data but shouldn't this be confirmed with an assay that is designed to quantify viral RNA before we draw the conclusion that "young children can potentially be important drivers of SARS-CoV-2 spread in the general population"?
..
Your data seem plausible, however the qPCR data are not performed how they should.

- The Abbott test is only validated for qualitative purposes. A quantitative validation with a standard curve should have been included. Furthermore, this is a multiplex, which makes quantitation even harder. Cycle quantification values (Cqs) from different targets do influence each other.
- Getting quantitative data from such early PCR amplification cycle thresholds (Cts) is hard. Did you validate your linear range with a standard curve? I mean, at a Cq = 5 f.e. it gets really hard to correctly subtract your baseline. /> - Thirdly, Cq is not a quantitative measure. If you took a calibrator sample, you should use the values or you should work with (d)dCq taking into account efficiencies from your standard curve.
- An analysis with normalized qPCR data would be more correct. Normalization for volume/internal control is a minimum, as extraction can be a variable factor. Even better is a human control, to assess for RT efficiency and for swabbing efficiency.

In summary, you cannot take a quantitative assay and use in in a qualitative way.

Kind Regards

tl;dr - whilst interesting data has been produced, the methodology used seems to be poor, and the results should be taken with a big pinch of salt. Also worth noting that they've only tested symptomatic children, further reducing the usefulness of the paper (disclaimer - these points are taken from this thread on reddit discussing the paper, rather than my own findings!)

The second paper is preprint, so naturally should be taken cautiously, but the numbers do seem a little on the low side to be drawing conclusions from. A total of 14 out of 2812 cases were under 15YO, and they specifically pick out that 8 of the 14 infected 11 of their 49 contacts - hardly big numbers. The other thing to bear in mind is that it is simply reporting what happened in Trento, it makes no attempt to normalise the infectiousness per age group or similar. For all we know, those 8 'hyper infectious' children could have spread it to family members outside of a school environment. The fact that the government have a study supporting their view is good, although it remains to be seen how supportive the study actually is. There certainly seem to be plenty of other studies worldwide which support the idea that children aren't superspreaders

 

[Ken H]

I think the question is whether it does genuinely work.

I know someone who has recently retired and still hasn’t started receiving his pension, which has been put down to “the difficulties of people working from home”. When attempting to chase up, he’s spoken to people who have been very clearly uninterested in work whilst conspicuously partaking in other activities (including in one case clearly being at the seaside).

Likewise we’re still hearing excuses at work for support functions not being provided due to people working from home, yet I thought government guidance was all people in non-critical jobs which couldn’t be done from home were supposed to have returned some time ago?

My neighbour (to be fair he has been taking shielding quite seriously) also works from home - yet seems to spend most of his day either on a sun lounger or doing veg patches!

Now all this is fine if it’s between employers and employees, however one draws a line when people then want to big up Covid to allow the whole thing to continue longer, especially if that then becomes a reason why schools can’t return.

managers need to monitor output from people at home and manage shirkers properly
but then just cos you are in the office doesnt mean you are not on facebook or railukforums rather than working!

 

[WelshBluebird]

Going to preface this by saying this is probably off topic and deserves its own thread if it is going to be kept (along with a few more of the posts above!).

and wish to big this whole thing up at every opportunity in order to string out their furloughing / working from home as long as possible.

This constant conflating of furlough and working from home is getting tiresome. They are different things and I have no idea why people can't seem to understand that.
I have been working from home since March and have certainly not had the same experience of the last few months as my partner has who was furloughed until pubs reopened in July. The Telegraph are trying to do the same and equating working from home with not working at all - which I am sorry to tell you, is just not the case. If anything many of us are working more than when we were in the office due to the lack of separation of home and work!

I think the question is whether it does genuinely work.

For some industries, WFH has been pretty damn common before all of this anyway and the only reason it wasn't more prevalent is because of the utterly pointless "bums on seats in the office = work being done" attitude some (generally older) bosses have (the same attitude which tends to punish people for taking legitimate sick leave and produces a toxic environment where people are more worried about being "seen to be working" than actually working). In my industry for example - plenty of software developers are 100% remote anyway. So in terms of does it work - generally the answer is yes.

I know someone who has recently retired and still hasn’t started receiving his pension, which has been put down to “the difficulties of people working from home”.

I suspect more accurately that should be worded as "the difficulties of people working from home in a rushed manner where we were not able to properly modify our processes to accommodate it". Working from home itself isn't the issue. Its the fact that many companies were forced into rushing the process without having the time to update the ways they work.

Likewise we’re still hearing excuses at work for support functions not being provided due to people working from home, yet I thought government guidance was all people in non-critical jobs which couldn’t be done from home were supposed to have returned some time ago?

Isn't it still up to employers though?
Clearly if you have a small office then you as a business are probably less likely to be willing to be in a rush to open said office compared to a much larger office where some of the suggestions from government (spacing people out etc) is more viable.

 

[Ken H]

I have WFH quite a bit. I work as hard as I do in the office.
My last contract I worked from home after i was seriously ill 2 yrs ago.
Then COVID started and everyone was kicked out of the office with little notice.
the infrastructure worked even if it creaked a little. But it got better quite quickly as the network guys tweaked things.
I think most staff were diligent in working hard.
but it was an older workforce, and people had done the odd days at home for many years. they prefer a days work than a day off so someone can go forma medical appointment. Most lived many miles away.

The thing is, once you have worked from home, when the manager says 'can you come back and work in the office?' and you reply 'Why? was there a problem with my work WFH?' , what does a manager say? This will have big effect on communing and notably the railways.

 

[trebor79]

I'm seriously considering asking my employer to pay for a desk in a flexible working space once I get back from my summer break in Cornwall. I was WFH before COVID, but at least 50% of the time out and about at meetings and doing work on the train.
I definitely don't work as well at home. Too many distractions, the wife asking me to do this that and the other, noisy toddler who wants to play and the past few months a noisy 6 year old too.

If some said I could go work in an office 5 days a week I'd bite their hand off!

 

[Mag_seven]

Can we please stick to subject of this thread which is about schools reopening. Thanks.