Because some workplaces are still forcing people to go to work. Those people need somebody to look after their kids.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
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Read up, keep up.
He's still, and always will be a cnut.
Correct
I appreciate that but surely the virus can spread in nurseries as well. People with kids in school age in similar situations won’t be able to go.
Come on F-Red you've embarrassed yourself here
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/04/lockdown-no-3-what-are-the-new-restrictions
I think you owe @UnrelatedPsuedo a pint to be bought once the last COVID mask has been removed in Britain
Don’t be snarky. You’re wrong and advising people incorrectly.
Measures are adopted tonight. They become legal on Wednesday.
Apologies if I’m misunderstanding you. But I think you’re suggesting it’s law from midnight tonight. It’s not.
Yeah, they need to enforce the working from home unless it’s physically impossible.
I think his point is that he's already said he was wrong and apologised and people who can't be arsed to read half a page after the bit they're quoting are being annoying.
The school thing was so fecking obvious to everyone that they should not open, yet the PR machine was out yesterday trying to convince people everything is fine. His comment last week that ‘schools are safe but people mixing inside schools isn’t safe’ - wtf does that even mean?!
They’ve been so reactionary to everything, wasted billions on their pathetic test & trace system, confused everyone with their constant U-turn policies, stood by Cummings when he broke the law which eroded public trust & clearly are not following the science in a timely manner. It’s not just incompetence, it’s dangerous incompetence. They are in a position of power & have a duty to protect the public which they are failing time & again by dithering on decisions.
In the future they may announce an inquiry into how the pandemic was handled by the govt but that’s pointless after the fact, that’s not going to bring back the thousands of people who have died.
I've literally held my hands up about two pages ago, what did you guys miss?
Decorum
The irony.
Some data from today's figures, regional case rates:
Still trying to wrap my head around this.
This is surely enough for him to go? There's blood on his hands (if there wasn't already!).
There's been barely any calls for him to go which is madness in itself.
I do feel dirty. But throughout the pandemic he has been relatively accurate in his analysis of government policy at least.
Dominic Raab would take over I think. Could be wrong.
Id sign up!
It is something you are going to have to deal with so I was actually being helpful. My son missed approx 15 weeks of school per year for his last 4 years of school including a full year of remote learning so I know it isn't trivial but it is achievable and the younger they are the easier it is generally and the learning disadvantage less important.
Obviously it is much harder for some than others either due to work situations e.g. do both partners work from home or have to work at all, socio-economic matters and the educational background of the parents etc etc all make a difference. But for most a term of helping your kid to learn remotely won't matter much for them in the long term.
Any inquiry will have a watered down outcome. Either way, you can guarantee they will not release the findings on a slow news day.
Sorry forum police, do I get a fine?
Only from
Wtf is this?
I can't play golf, yet playgrounds are staying open for kids? feck off man.
How the feck does this make any sense what so ever? It doesn't. Suppose the hoyty toyty can still do their fox hunting or whatever.
I can't play golf, yet playgrounds are staying open for kids? feck off man.
How the feck does this make any sense what so ever? It doesn't. Suppose the hoyty toyty can still do their fox hunting or whatever.
We have good reason to believe the Oxford vaccine - which will be the vast majority of vaccination in that time - will be effective up to 12 weeks after the 1st dose, as per this key finding.
Almost half of the UK triallists got the 2nd dose 12+ weeks afterwards, so that's a very meaningful finding.
We should expect some people to get infected with covid in the interim period because we know the efficacy 21 days after the first dose is worse than the efficacy after the second dose, and we know the efficacy after the first dose was substantially worse in the UK (84 days between doses) than Brazil (36 days between doses). But even then it's still stopping around half of those people from getting any covid, and almost all of them from severe covid.
The Pfizer vaccine is different because they ran a different trial. It works a lot better than Oxford's vaccine in many ways so we hope it works better in that sense too. But we don't know whether it provides protection up to 12 weeks after. Even their phase I/II study only changed the dose level of the vaccine, not the dose phasing, so we really have no data on how effective the dose is after 21 days. It might decline a little but hold up pretty well like AstraZeneca's, or it might stop working well a month after. The immune response was notably different between the two so it's a risky assumption to believe they'll work the same way.
Their main point is that kids are safe, because they don't transmit it as much as adults and they don't get infected as easily as adults, which is why teachers get infected less frequently than the average profession despite having more human contact than the average profession. If schools were unsafe, teachers would be getting sick substantially more than the average worker. That was a reasonable fear back in March but it hasn't worked out that way, in part because class quarantines have been so frequent, and in part because the kids that get it before quarantine are less likely to pass it on.
When the virus is transmitting at such a high level for such a long time in the general community, it matters less that kids are less likely to get it than the average person. The exposure levels of all people in the UK are at such an elevated level that the risk of kids getting it and bringing it back becomes too high, and there are already too many people getting it without children adding to the spread. They've been doing as much as they can to keep schools open but there's no more wiggle room.
Kids spread it less easily than adults. All people are significantly less likely to spread it outdoors, but there's still a risk of spreading, and that risk is minimised much more by being a tiny human. That might be unfair but that unfairness is driven by the biology of the virus, it's just a fact at this point that they get it and pass it on less often.
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Your messaging has mellowed a lot in the last month or so! Starting to feel more at ease now the vaccines are on the way, albeit slowly?
Do you think missing out on those ~ 15 weeks of school for those 4 years had any impact, even in the short-term? I guess the amount of time spent in school is arbitrarily defined as is, but it is kind of hard to believe missing so much of something we deem so essential could have no impact. Did you worry about it at the time?
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Just in a constant rush to get out of lockdown instead of actually dealing with the you know the pandemic.
Too late to lockdown last march
Too early to come out in July
Straight into eat out to help out
Schools and universities not delayed returning in september
Advisers suggest as early as late September a circuit break which gets pushed and pushed until it was too late even though October half term could of been a good time resulting in the 4 week national lockdown in November.
Then instead of easing out of the November lockdown into Tier 4/3 everywhere some places came out in lower tiers resulting in us going up the tiers not down.
Meanwhile Christmas gatherings are allowed despite a new variant and tier system not working and also other religious festival were not allowed (look at the rhetoric around diwali).
The common thread throughout is that the they want to leave it as late as possible, so as little as possible, and ease restrictions as soon as possible because money matters more than lives.
Yeah it does seem mad but at the same time it would be madness to for the tories to oust a PM who won a huge majority and was leading brexit. Meanwhile the country isn’t going to look favourably on a party busying themselves with yet another leadership race while people are dying.
Churches are mostly empty I think
Shuffle him out the back door when covids almost over and then let gove / sunak take the glory is probably the plan
Wanting to leave things as late as possible is totally normal. Germany were hailed as the success story up until winter, with their regional approach, their track and trace system and their proactive restrictions. Last week they had over 1,000 daily deaths, they are almost at 50,000 daily cases and it has risen each week, and they are about to extend their lockdown for 3 weeks. That’s because they wanted to leave things until as late as possible. Locking down does huge damage to the economy, so you don’t want to do it too early, you want to do it only when necessary. The problem is they misjudged the timing, like almost every comparable nation has done. Ireland were in a very different situation and managed things much better up until a few weeks ago, but look where they are now too.
I understand wanting to wait as long as possible I just think their reasoning isn’t based on doing what’s best for people.
Especially after ‘learning’ the lesson of the first lockdown surely an abundance of caution is the way to go. Instead we are now seeing the same mistake over and over again.
We weren’t even tracking arrivals through the airports until the autumn.
You're telling me 20 kids in a playground who are touching the same equipment, sneezing and coughing on each other, touching each other, is safer than 2 adults playing golf together using their own equipment?
Something tells me them 2 people playing golf are going to move a virus about much less than 20 little people in a playground.
Only 1 / 20 kids need the virus to have a chance of passing it into someone else in that scenario. That's 5% of the children there (I'm not even including the adults who, you know, need to watch them and will push the same swings and sir on the same benches as others).
The golf thing? You'd need at least 1/2 to have it anyway. Let's say 25% if it's a group of four.
Maybe j just don't understand math and logic though.
2 people go back to 2 households, maybe even 1.
20 little people probably go back to 30 households with split parents / babysitters while parents work.
It's not just "unfair", it's fecking stupidity.
Even taking into account staffing for golf courses, every job can be done socially distanced. It's basically the perfect exercise at this point.
I know it sounds petty I am moaning about golf, but the expect everyone to just follow some BS rules that actually make no real sense to actual people. I ain't a runner, a jogger, a walker. I don't have kids. I am expected to goto work through all this.
My outside sport is golf, that's my exercise, and I pass less people on a golf course than if I was out jogging anyway.
I'm not arguing btw, I think I'm just venting. Shiny new golf bats for Xmas, back to work today, and lockdown.
What seems to be missed by some is schools are a huge swapping ground for viruses. The may not pass it on to teachers but children pass it on to each other, even a small percentage can be a large driver. In general a small child won't be passing the virus on to a tall adult in the shop, on the street, or in a class room.
What happens is the children transmit the virus to another child, that child goes home and has very close contact with their mum dad for many hours a day and passes it on to the parents despite how careful they've been at work, around friends etc. It's now in the family and the adults can spread the virus more easily to other adults and their own parents and other relations. You can be as careful as can be, dip yourself in Dettol all day if you like and not go near anyone but your child has gone to a large meeting ground for the part of town or village you're in, kids from hundreds of households, some over a thousand households like my old school.
Another factor is grandparents do look after children on a semi permanent basis and others pick them up in cars each day plus many teens move into grandparents houses. These more elderly people are exposed. I know some that have gone back to looking after their grandchildren becasue it's family, it's needed money and the parents are working. More furloughed parents mean less grandparents looking after kids, picking them up etc and passing it around elderly circles less. If the schools are closed with parents still working then there's less chance those looking after the kids like grandparents will catch it from them, a 4-8 week period will stop this constant spreading chain.
What happens is the children transmit the virus to another child, that child goes home and has very close contact with their mum dad for many hours a day and passes it on to the parents despite how careful they've been at work, around friends etc. It's now in the family and the adults can spread the virus more easily to other adults and their own parents and other relations. You can be as careful as can be, dip yourself in Dettol all day if you like and not go near anyone but your child has gone to a large meeting ground for the part of town or village you're in, kids from hundreds of households, some over a thousand households like my old school.
Another factor is grandparents do look after children on a semi permanent basis and others pick them up in cars each day plus many teens move into grandparents houses. These more elderly people are exposed. I know some that have gone back to looking after their grandchildren becasue it's family, it's needed money and the parents are working. More furloughed parents mean less grandparents looking after kids, picking them up etc and passing it around elderly circles less. If the schools are closed with parents still working then there's less chance those looking after the kids like grandparents will catch it from them, a 4-8 week period will stop this constant spreading chain.
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You keep stating things like this like it’s fact. It isn’t. At best it’s a hypothesis based on incomplete and possibly out of date data. The data we do have shows that secondary school age kids have the highest positivity rates in any age group, with primary school age in second. This has been the case since early November. All coinciding with this new strain they clearly don’t know enough about yet.
Got to admit, I agree with all the above @Brwned. I would add Italy to your examples as well. They got hammered initially and were taken by surprise by the virus. This was followed by a lengthy and much more strict lockdown which many posters here commented on. For quite some time restrictions were only very gradually released, and even then cases still snowballed out of control.
As much as our government have made mistakes, it's fair to say that almost every other country has made similar mistakes.
Out of interest @Brwned what's your take on Boris saying earlier that the new varient has had a huge impact on the decision to shut us down at this point?
From the graphs I've looked at, it really seems like the spread rapidly accelerated from around 10th December.