I wouldn't have a problem with it if the said they were prioritising Primary schools because online learning is too limited for the younger ones. I'm more dubious about them allowing Secondary to continue - especially fulltime on-site - the autumn term contained a massive missed opportunity to improve online resources and complete the roll out of laptops/data hotspots where needed. That makes me suspect they hadn't even thought about it, crossing their fingers and hoping for the best isn't the same as prioritising it.
The continuing hesitation over advice to Universities and Colleges is even worse as it has less actual educational necessity behind it, and a lot of extra potential for spreading problems around the country.
Then finally we get the question of, "so what do we sacrifice to keep the schools open?" and we get the easy bits, the pubs, the restaurants, the gyms, the non-essential shops. But take a look at Tier4 rules - those aren't the March/April lockdown rules. Places of worship stay open, so do face to face support groups, and there are a whole bunch of other things there that we realised were essential whether for mental health reasons or sheer practicality - like house moves etc, that are listed there. The default "stay home" now only really applies to certain aspects of certain people's social lives and some businesses - who can't workaround the rules.
So basically I hear the "we've prioritised schools" - but I don't see the evidence that we've done enough elsewhere to match how we acted in March/April (against a less transmissible strain) let alone match that improvement and keep schools open. Especially not now as we head into winter, and we don't have the immense advantage that the "chance to say hello and hand the shopping over in the front garden" spring weather gave us.
Incidentally Manchester's numbers suggest that the new strain accounted for 25% of cases before Christmas. The regions are porous and the mutation is in community transmission across a lot of the country.
Really I don't know enough about the school system to know what they are / aren't capable of, but from the one friend I have that teaches secondary school in Dagenham, there was no hope they would have the resources for kids to be taught online, nor any belief that the majority of the kids would have the appetite to learn remotely if resources were available.
It doesn't seem that implausible to me that they looked at the options in the summer and came to the realisation that all the issues raised about the public education system for years before covid were very real, and very limiting. So rather than crossing their fingers and hoping for the best, they realised they were stuck between a rock and a hard place: no real education, or no possibility to crush the curve with schools open. And there was no shortage of evidence on the huge risks to children's development without proper education for a long time.
Boris' interview today suggested to me that they had no intention to match the results of March, which probably explains all the rest. We committed to suppression then, now we're in mitigation with a high tolerance for community transmission and a willingness to let hospitals reach their absolute capacities. Which is what Boris wanted to do at the beginning of March before the mad scramble, which mostly followed from some worst-case scenarios in the modelling that were a lot worse than we now believe possible.
Closing schools and the other essential services were only tolerable as a temporary choice when we had no testing capacity, had a lot of flimsy models of virus transmission and we didn't know the effects of public health measures or the degree of compliance that would follow. Now we have clearer ideas on that we don't need to take such severe measures, because we don't think proactively crushing the curve for a limited period of time is a worthwhile sacrifice for the economic and social damage that comes with it. This was the most honest thing he's said in a while (at
51 mins):
Boris Johnson said:
What is absolutely clear is that of course, from March onwards, you could have closed down all transmission, the government could have pastoralised the UK economy. By the way there are people who advocate that, there are scientists that think that would have been the sensible solution. However, the damage to people's mental health, the damage to the long-term prospects of young people growing up in this country, the exacerbation of the gap between rich and poor, that would have been colossal.
It was the job of government to manage a very, very difficult situation which is being faced by every liberal democracy in Western Europe. And when you talk about we should have locked down in September or done things differently, plenty of people have tried to do things differently. They had a lockdown in Wales in September, they locked down tightly, they took the breaks off and then things immediately surged again.
...
If you want to stop coronavirus spreading, then of course it's open to you or any government to close down the entire economy for the duration. If you look at all these examples of firebreakers or circuit breakers, all they do is buy you some temporary respite. What we're doing now is using the tiering system, which is a very tough system, and alas probably about to get tougher, to keep things under control.
So I agree with you that we haven't done enough to match what happened in March, but I don't think that was because they hadn't thought about it and just hoped for the best. They just accepted worse public health outcomes than you (or presumably anyone in the NHS, along with huge swathes of society) would have accepted. But then he pays attention to what folks in The Telegraph and the like say. They think he's still doing too much harm to the economy by taking these public health measures.
We definitely know that the worse strain was in most parts of the country pre-Christmas, we know a lot more of it was spread around the country from people jumping on trains from St Pancras to Leeds and the like, and we have every reason to expect the spread accelerated around various communities during Christmas mingling. So I'm not saying the issue is exclusively limited to London or that we should expect it to remain that way. It's just that the government currently hopes it hasn't spread as badly as many fear, and that extreme containment measures in the South East can hold it back somewhat while Tier 4 measures in other areas cut the chains of transmission early enough that things won't get out of control there too.
If that isn't the case, they'll have another haphazard national lockdown because their current mitigation plan goes out the window in that scenario. They're just desperately clinging to the belief that this worst-case scenario hasn't materialised, and they can hobble by until mass vaccination starts having an effect. They will only accept that worst-case scenario once the data confirms it, which inevitably comes with a time lag. We don't really know what proportion of new cases are the new strain in e.g. Newcastle right now, and won't for a little while. I wouldn't take the same position but I can understand the motivation behind it.
