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SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
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?
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?
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.
Is that you Gareth Bale? I was wondering why we’d not seen you on the Spurs bench recently. New golf clubs, makes sense now.
Got me! Might request to go on the bench sometime soon though. Nothing better to do now.
Simpleton: announce a hard lockdown close it all down Arghhhhh!
*Boris announces lockdown*
Simpleton: ooh, so, errm, am I allowed to walk me dog twice a day
Why do people call for lockdown and then ask such daft questions trying to find loop holes
*Boris announces lockdown*
Simpleton: ooh, so, errm, am I allowed to walk me dog twice a day
Why do people call for lockdown and then ask such daft questions trying to find loop holes
In fairness, as much as golf should be permanently and forever banned for reasons unrelated to Coronavirus, I can't see the logic at all for banning it when it's perfectly legal to meet up with a friend to go for a jog.
I must admit @redshaw, I have wondered about the low transmission quotes re kids in school, but have taken it at face value and not seen the sources for the claim. I've also wondered if kids with vulnerable parents have been given a permission not to attend schools so as to protect the parents.
The school thing is something which has got my back up I suppose, mainly because the schools don't seem to have been very proactive in making learning safer.
I've commented before about how the private schools in my area got organised with remote learning very early {within 2 or 3 weeks of the first lockdown}.
My youngest is in the final year of secondary school, meant to be the top comp in our area, and yet very little communication happened through lockdown, with intermittent contact with the school and only 1 lesson per week online with an actual teacher.
When they went back in September, initially they didn't even require students to wear masks in school communal areas, which I found shocking and raised with them.
I think if schools had focused on remote teaching where possible, clearer and firmer rules regarding masks and distancing, then at least secondary schools could remain open safely.
Primary schools are a different matter I imagine, as young children struggle to distance at the best of times and hygiene is a foreign word to them.
A concern I do have, about kids from secondary schools primarily, is that parents seem to have been happy for them to socialise in groups on an evening after school. I wonder how many will continue to be let loose now there is no school at all?
I feel the frustration, I've got some new fishing rods and was hoping to get out as well. Mind you, with this weather I'm better off indoors!
Fecking golf should be banned anyway. Breeding ground for cretinous ex-football pros who think they are Davis Love III reborn.
I think the UK is in such a mess what should have happened back in March/April doesn't now need to be stated. I still very unhappy with all governments, Australia's included, for various reasons. We have fecked up vaccine purchase by the look of things so will be a 2 or 3 months late starting as things now stand.
Missing the 15 weeks did reduce his ATAR (Uni entry score derived from A level equivalent exams) for sure, partly as we chose "easy" subjects that don't scale well and he was never very academic anyway. But he got through with a half decent result. He could have got into some courses at some Unis here, assuming he wanted to, and there are so many alternative pathways to almost any career these days as well.
We took a deliberate choice to prioritise his sport, led by what he wanted, and it turned out well. Post school he was offered a sports scholarship in the US almost out of the blue but didn't have a SAT score and he needed quite a high one to get in. Somehow he crammed for a month with our help and liberal use of The Khan Academy and got a good enough score to get in. My wife's reaction when she saw his result was "is that your score?"
He then found the first year of Uni hard as he hadn't enough practice with independent learning but scraped through. It scared the shit out of him as you can't fail a semester or have an overall GPA below 2 and still play/get a scholarship but he knuckled down and worked hard and is now getting straight B's which is more than good enough.
We are both former academics and teachers who still work in education so we were quite relaxed about it all as we know getting in to Uni to a very competitive course isn't really necessary straight out of school and is often a bad idea. We both have done things career wise that didn't even exist when we went to Uni and we know Uni isn't for everyone anyway. Our biggest stress was that he was 100% confident that he was going to get selected for the junior and youth national sides and we knew that it was far from certain as politics is often a huge factor and he had previously been repeatedly overlooked. But he was right which was a relief.
The next stress was that once he aged out of the junior ranks he was still in the state Institute of Sport on a scholarship but too young to have a chance of going to Tokyo and would therefore be a bit aimless for the next 4 years. Then the US offer arrived and he is motivated to get a degree (from a great Uni) in a way he wouldn't have been if he stayed here.
We were of course lucky that it all worked out despite the huge amount of effort from all concerned and it could all have fallen flat on it's arse, but the only way to not fail is to not try (platitude of the day contender).
The biggest issue with closed schools is a) social issues and hopefully a 3 month closure won't be that bad for most and b) kids who rely on school for far more than most, often from the lower socio-economic end of the scale. Special arrangements should be made but it is Boris and the Tories so they won't give a feck.
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I taught my class all day today (the half that attended as parents were put in an impossible situation) and couldn’t answer their questions. I said this in March last year but quite possibly the strangest day of my adult life: we’re not supposed to be political during school hours and if anything it is actively discouraged. Not today. The building was full of anger, upset and resentment against this government, and at the heart of this you have confused pupils who just came in and cracked on quite the thing. Couldn’t fault them.
The political and ideological decision to send 3 million pupils to schools today will kill people. Johnson and Williamson must own that.
The political and ideological decision to send 3 million pupils to schools today will kill people. Johnson and Williamson must own that.
This sort of action should've happened the moment it becomes clear in the data that the new strain looks to be more transmissible and target the areas like Kent Aus/China style. With a whole week of 50k+ cases and the prospect of this south east inferno replicating across the UK the death toll will be startling worldwide and could see Tories out for a long while. Even without the new strain we had high levels of around 20k cases not really going down. The autumn was a time to not go down the March April path of mistakes. The government is like the equivalent of sitting on a shore hoping the tide won't come in this time and when it reaches their chin they scramble out and get washed ashore with their trunks around their head. All this holding out to the last minute hasn't stopped the UK economy shrinking the most per reports. The AZ vaccine may just save some face if distributed quickly.
Secondary school kids will probably hang around a smaller group more local and not be spending many hours a day a week in a much wider circle, that's some benefit in terms of not spreading the virus and quite a few have smaller groups and spend time at home online gaming and socializing online.
It's really tough as many schools are so difficult to organize and lots of people depend on them so children don't go down the wrong path and I count education as very important but stopping and severely limiting the spread is quite straight forward if people can sit tight for a while like in Aus/NZ. For countries like England/UK stopping pubs etc is just one drawbridge cut, we cut two but we still have the third one down and get ransacked. We've tried living with the virus, tried various levels of restrictions, protocols at work but they don't have the impact.
Secondary school kids will probably hang around a smaller group more local and not be spending many hours a day a week in a much wider circle, that's some benefit in terms of not spreading the virus and quite a few have smaller groups and spend time at home online gaming and socializing online.
It's really tough as many schools are so difficult to organize and lots of people depend on them so children don't go down the wrong path and I count education as very important but stopping and severely limiting the spread is quite straight forward if people can sit tight for a while like in Aus/NZ. For countries like England/UK stopping pubs etc is just one drawbridge cut, we cut two but we still have the third one down and get ransacked. We've tried living with the virus, tried various levels of restrictions, protocols at work but they don't have the impact.
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Has anyone that’s had it or been told to isolate been contacted by track and trace at all? We were expecting calls and or surprise visits to ensure we weren’t being naughty, but nothing so far. Only 2 days left hiding in the house. And then leave isolation in to full lockdown. Yay
Why don’t you go all Fight Club and just play golf in the street? They’ll be deserted what with lockdown and you won’t have to worry about being shit because no one will be there to see it
I have a cousin in London who caught the virus a month ago but luckily has recovered. I talk to her about once a month online and just want some good news for the UK.
Are there any dates in terms of vaccine doses being available and their rollout? Is there an actual known timeframe for manufacture and delivery?
Are there any dates in terms of vaccine doses being available and their rollout? Is there an actual known timeframe for manufacture and delivery?
Hey! We’re winning!
7000 cases / 100k.. Bloody hell.
Hey! We’re winning!
Mormons getting busy!
Hey! We’re winning!
Masks are communist!
Germany reacted on the higher numbers in autumn - they just did not react as strictly as they should have and probably later than they should. But it is always easy to tell that after it happens. There is a lot people think that the German government has overreacted in spring.
The 7-Tage-Inzidenz is the number of cases per 100k inhabitants in the last 7 days - to compare it with the chart of the English regions posted some pages before in this thread.
The trend seems to be that the numbers now go downwards - but the question is how much this is still influenced by less testing around Xmas and New Years. The lockdown measures between mid of November and mid of December (no school closures, all shops still open etc.) were not enough to get the numbers down. The lockdown probably will be prolonged for atleast another two weeks with schools still closed - but that will be discussed in a meeting this week.
| Total cases | Difference to yesterday | Number of cases in the last 7 days | 7-Tage- Inzidenz | Number of deaths | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baden-Württemberg | 244.930 | 1.016 | 14.301 | 129 | 4.947 |
| Bayern | 334.567 | 1.948 | 20.858 | 159 | 6.925 |
| Berlin | 98.754 | 657 | 4.618 | 126 | 1.305 |
| Brandenburg | 42.887 | 174 | 4.295 | 170 | 1.008 |
| Bremen | 13.747 | 34 | 552 | 81 | 204 |
| Hamburg | 37.535 | 0 | 2.027 | 110 | 661 |
| Hessen | 140.371 | 406 | 8.397 | 134 | 2.991 |
| Mecklenburg- Vorpommern | 12.562 | 108 | 1.472 | 92 | 179 |
| Niedersachsen | 110.777 | 506 | 7.282 | 91 | 2.041 |
| Nordrhein-Westfalen | 402.519 | 1.925 | 21.620 | 120 | 6.820 |
| Rheinland-Pfalz | 74.435 | 520 | 4.825 | 118 | 1.476 |
| Saarland | 20.199 | 58 | 855 | 87 | 445 |
| Sachsen | 139.700 | 1.368 | 13.153 | 323 | 3.378 |
| Sachsen-Anhalt | 32.083 | 586 | 4.003 | 182 | 694 |
| Schleswig-Holstein | 25.751 | 211 | 2.272 | 78 | 446 |
| Thüringen | 44.696 | 330 | 5.364 | 251 | 1.054 |
| Gesamt | 1.775.513 | 9.847 | 115.894 | 139 | 34.574 |
You aren't being helpful at all mate.
I already spend way more hours teaching my kids outside of the classroom than most would guess.
But that wasn't the topic of conversation, we were talking about the incompetance of teachers and schools to provide a basic education.
It's pointless you asking me to spend time teaching my kids - either I already do that or I don't, but it's not going to help the rest of the countries children who are missing out on their education.
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With the level of community spread now matching/exceeding last March, are we getting any data about re-infections in that time scope? I know testing was limited back then.
Secondly, why is the new variant more transmissible? Is it because you're asymptomatic for longer, or you're more likely to spread it while asymptomatic?
Secondly, why is the new variant more transmissible? Is it because you're asymptomatic for longer, or you're more likely to spread it while asymptomatic?