Not following you around threads agreeing with you but I agree
And I’m completely staggered by the theories going around that schools and colleges aren’t having a large effect. These studies and graphs that claim to show it hasn’t I can only dismiss as complete garbage.
It is so far beyond reason, common sense, logic and evidence that schools/colleges haven’t caused a major upturn in cases. I actually think it was right for them to open and to remain open but honestly claims it’s not had a big effect is just.. I dunno wow.
I was actually in a college a few weeks back and was alarmed by how little the teens were keeping distance. They were huddled in numerous groups, bunches of half a dozen to a dozen, shouting over each other at basically face level.
Teens mostly live at home with other family members. We also know they are less attentive to cleanliness. Pretty much 95% of the people I’ve seen not wearing masks have been people below 16.
Schools/colleges open and LITERALLY six weeks later cases are surging and we’re heading into lockdown, bars/restaurants opened in fecking July but somehow despite all this the schools are apparently not the main cause. As in what? Seriously what? When did so many people abandon reason for madness?
I got a D in my GCSE Science but I would happily discredit with 100% certainty any article/study that tries to say schools and colleges weren’t a main cause of an upsurge in cases.
Yes I would agree that kids keep their distance less, moderate their voices less, pay less attention to cleanliness and generally speaking are less likely to adhere to rules. Generally speaking, kids also spread lots of viruses, including coronaviruses like the common cold. Common sense would then lead you to believe that kids are spreading it like wildfire. Most people agree up until that point.
However many things exist in the world that are counter-intuitive. Is it possible that all of those things are true, and yet at the same time, kids aren't spreading this virus as much? Yes. Why should we think that kids and adults "magically" respond to the virus differently? Well let's agree on a baseline reality.
Kids are much less likely to be hospitalised or die from covid. We all now accept that at truth, so we accept that in some fundamental ways, the virus impacts different age groups differently. How do we know this?
In the UK 4 kids aged 1-14 have died from covid, compared to 5,188 aged 45-64.
In the US the hospitalisation rate for kids aged 5-17 is 5x lower than those aged 18-29.
Those are just the facts, they're not misleading charts or faulty theories. Most of us now consider that intuitive knowledge,
of course kids don't get infected by it badly. But kids get infected badly by a lot of things, in fact "medically vulnerable" tends to mean very young and very old for most diseases. For example the very young are more vulnerable to flu than you or I. But the very young aren't very vulnerable to this.
Do we know exactly why that is? Not really, but it might involve things like ACE2 receptors. Do you know anything about ACE2 receptors? No, neither do I. But if it is true that a) ACE2 receptors are where the virus latches on to us, and b) children have fewer of them, then the intuitive assumption is that kids are less likely to get the virus. And so by default, they are less likely to spread it among themselves.
We know roughly how many kids pick up the virus from ONS' study. Young kids pick it up less often than young teenagers, and young teenagers pick it up less often than young adults. Why is that? We don't expect it's because young kids shout less, distance more or wash their hands more often, so you can likely rule out a behavioural explanation. For the most part, they're in equal social settings also. The common sense explanation them comes back to the biology of it.
That doesn't change the fact that young kids do still pick it up, and sending them to school increases the likelihood they will pick it up vs. making them stay at home like the older age groups. We know that reducing social contacts has the biggest impact on controlling the spread. If we closed schools we would reduce the spread further. The question is not whether it would have an impact but how big an impact it would have, and how that weighs up against the negative impacts. And to answer that we need to know how infectious kids are, particularly among themselves.
If you take Northern Ireland's logic for closing schools, they said
- Not clear the role that children play in transmission
- Unclear how much schools may contribute to community transmission
- Remains unclear how infectious children may be.
Why would they say that? Are they unable to identify obvious patterns? No, that's their job. Are they just trying to justify their own political position? No, they closed down schools anyway. What are you left with as an explanation? It's just some grand conspiracy?
Can't share the image, but from PHE pie chart, the following "Sites of multiple outbreaks for the last 4 weeks";
Hospitality 4%
Hospitals 4%
Workplace 20%
Care homes 26%
Education 36%
Other 10%
Worth looking into the detail there. The report
here shows that among those aged 0-4 and 5-9, case rates were steady or falling in the last weeks of September, and they had the lowest infection rate of any age group. If they were the source of the spread, they would be outpacing everyone else. That's what you see among those aged 20-29, and to a lesser degree, 10-19. There is a big distinction between young kids and young adults that you can't account for precisely with that data, but that is straightforward to infer.
In spite of that, they can attribute most known clusters to education, followed by workplaces and care homes. Those places are the easiest to find known clusters because they report them to a much, much higher degree than hospitality. But if you were to add up all of the known clusters across any area they have, you would see they only account for a minority of all clusters in that period. 782 incidents were identified in a week when 29,797 cases were identified, i.e. they really struggle to identify the vast majority of clusters.
So from the PHE data we can say conclusively that we don't know where the majority of clusters come from. All we know is that for that very small proportion of clusters they can identify, more of them come from the places that are required to report them and find it easier to report them. The majority are completely unknowable based on that methodology and efficiacy.
