The party established to represent the interests of working people. Not a bunch of tofu munching hand-wringers in Hampstead.
LOL. To paraphrase Brecht, much of the Labour membership would very much like to dissolve the current working class and replace it with another. The tofu munchers despise everything about them.
Great minds...
Orwell repeatedly warned that there was a chunk of intellectual socialism that thought the biggest problem was the working class. And that this could destroy the Labour movement....
He also repeatedly condemned the anti intellectualism of the British ruling class.
And opposed the Attlee government from the left. It is remarkable how many on the right seem to hang on his every word. They wouldn't have liked Eric Blair as PM.
Then he should submit a series of papers to the MHRA, setting out the evidence for abandoning the previously agreed regime for administering each of the vaccines, so that it may be properly considered.
We currently do not have the infrastructure to move very fast to beat this epidemic. Testing takes months, manufacturing vaccines takes months, and vaccinating people will take months. Meanwhile, the virus is not only infecting and killing people, but also mutating and it could become able to defeat the vaccines by the time they are finally rolled out.
In 1348 we did not have the ability to create vaccines against the Black Death (the first vaccine from dead plague bacteria was created in 1890). In 2020 we have the technology to create vaccines against COVID-19, but it takes so long that there is still no end in sight.
Speed is of the essence in dealing with an epidemic. We need to explore every way of rolling the vaccines out faster, and Tony Blair's suggestion is well worth considering. The fact that to do this means following a slow and bureaucratic process involving large committees of experts illustrates that we are currently just not organised to develop vaccines quickly.
This could become critical if ever Disease X appears, possibly out of the African rain forests. This would spread like COVID and have a death rate like Ebola. We will really need vaccines available fast when/if this happens.
It is rather concerning that while we are trying to deal with Supercovid the deaths yesterday in Germany were 50% higher than in the UK.
In most other European countries too deaths have been worse in the second wave than here.
Yet supposedly we are plague island? I am really concerned this virus is sweeping through the Continent and they simply don't know and are stabbing in the dark.
At the moment, we don't know who the "index case" was - the person from which the mutated version of the virus first emerged.
As a result, we don't know whether the mutation began in Kent or whether it was introduced from elsewhere, Prof Peacock said.
And we don't know whether it has already spread onwards from the UK to other countries.
Prof Tom Connor, who was involved in setting up Covid sequencing in Wales, believes it is "probable" that similar variants are emerging around the world, but they may not have been detected yet.
"We are sequencing in the UK at a disproportionate rate," he said, insisting the UK has a better surveillance system than other countries.
In order to know how far the variant has travelled or where it came from, you would need to compare notes with other countries - but comparable data very often does not exist, Prof Connor said.
For example, Public Health Wales sequenced about 4,000 genomes in the past week, more than the whole of France since the beginning of the pandemic.
This point was emphasised by Prof Ravi Gupta at the University of Cambridge, who pointed out it was "no coincidence" that an "interesting" multiple mutation had also been seen in South Africa, another country which does a lot of genomic sequencing.
Other European countries which were very quick to pick up notable mutations, Denmark and the Netherlands, also have strong surveillance systems.
As I suggested earlier, they probably have the same variant, or their own homegrown version(s), in circulation in many countries, it's just that they're either not bothering to look or are incapable of doing so.
Even Germany isn't outstanding at everything.
But unlike England, Germany does not think it is outstanding at everything.
Are you still in 1940? I'm curious where this idea about England comes from.
Probably from Gavin Williamson, English secretary for education (yeah, I know his dumbfuckery was supposedly about the UK, but the idea that he would be in any way intellectually capable of distinguishing between England and the UK is laughable).
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Leon - I don't want to be gloomy but if we get to 100,000 maybe 200,000 cases a day and maybe 100,000 deaths Q1 2020 that is going to be a 'brutal blow' to everyone!
It's not just about 'saving the old', 100,000 dead and many more with long COVID often young is not a good idea. For most children having two months at home won't make a difference, it's a long time since I went to school but I know 80% of the time there is wasted/spent on pointless things so there will be no real learning loss.
You seem to be making a pretty compelling case for just closing the schools permanently.
It's not about two months though is it, it's that plus the three months earlier this year plus the disruption in between. Plus the distinction between secondary schools and primary schools where disruption at such a formative age is even more keenly felt.
To me the school closure calls always have the same problem. It's easy to see why it may well need to be done but one rarely, if ever, sees any call to close the schools that explains how that time could (or should) be made back up.
We have to assume that online/blended learning is only at best a partial replacement for in-person teaching, particularly at the younger age brackets or in areas where access to online materials will be more difficult, and therefore the time spent physically out of school needs to be made back up somewhere.
Calls to close schools would be more compelling if that was addressed within them, even excepting the many other good reasons to avoid it if possible.
One idea: cancel school entirely for the whole of January and the first half of February, and scrap the Summer holidays. That'd substitute six weeks of online learning for five weeks (I'll get to that) of face-to-face tuition in July and August, when this thing ought finally to be under some kind of control.
Effectively transplanting the school hols to Winter will be total shit for all concerned, both in and of itself and because the long Summer holiday will bite the dust at the point that everybody will be desperate for it, but we can always grant staff and pupils alike forgiveness from the no holiday in term time edicts for a week, so that they can still go somewhere in this country (because foreign holidays will probably need longer than that to open up properly again.)
It's imperfect, but 2021 is going to be a pretty bloody far from perfect year, so...
Jesus the SNP aren't even very left wing, they've been allowed to pretend they were left wing for years because Labour has never bothered to oppose.
Like Brexit, Labour needs to neutralise Independence and then attack the SNP on policy. Blair got this years ago
For Starmer to neutralise Independence in the same way he neutralised Brexit would mean supporting it.
It's to take a position, which he's now done, i.e. oppose.
Supporting Independence is a disaster for Labour.
People that want it will just vote SNP anyway and if you don't you'll not bother or vote Tory.
Then the question about how you look to English/Welsh voters. Strategically opposing but supporting devolution (including for England) is the best play.
Labour needs to make it clear it won't work with the SNP, even if in reality it does
Jesus the SNP aren't even very left wing, they've been allowed to pretend they were left wing for years because Labour has never bothered to oppose.
Like Brexit, Labour needs to neutralise Independence and then attack the SNP on policy. Blair got this years ago
For Starmer to neutralise Independence in the same way he neutralised Brexit would mean supporting it.
A future Labour leader will get there eventually. Their idea for upholding the Union always consists of loosening it. They are stuck in this doom loop whereby they think that the answer to the SNP and the pro-indy lobby getting more and more powerful is to give them more and more powers. The logical end of that process is total dissolution.
Then he should submit a series of papers to the MHRA, setting out the evidence for abandoning the previously agreed regime for administering each of the vaccines, so that it may be properly considered.
We currently do not have the infrastructure to move very fast to beat this epidemic. Testing takes months, manufacturing vaccines takes months, and vaccinating people will take months. Meanwhile, the virus is not only infecting and killing people, but also mutating and it could become able to defeat the vaccines by the time they are finally rolled out.
In 1348 we did not have the ability to create vaccines against the Black Death (the first vaccine from dead plague bacteria was created in 1890). In 2020 we have the technology to create vaccines against COVID-19, but it takes so long that there is still no end in sight.
Speed is of the essence in dealing with an epidemic. We need to explore every way of rolling the vaccines out faster, and Tony Blair's suggestion is well worth considering. The fact that to do this means following a slow and bureaucratic process involving large committees of experts illustrates that we are currently just not organised to develop vaccines quickly.
This could become critical if ever Disease X appears, possibly out of the African rain forests. This would spread like COVID and have a death rate like Ebola. We will really need vaccines available fast when/if this happens.
If that last scenario were ever to happen then everyone would be too scared to leave the house and civilizational collapse would occur.
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Leon - I don't want to be gloomy but if we get to 100,000 maybe 200,000 cases a day and maybe 100,000 deaths Q1 2020 that is going to be a 'brutal blow' to everyone!
It's not just about 'saving the old', 100,000 dead and many more with long COVID often young is not a good idea. For most children having two months at home won't make a difference, it's a long time since I went to school but I know 80% of the time there is wasted/spent on pointless things so there will be no real learning loss.
You seem to be making a pretty compelling case for just closing the schools permanently.
It's not about two months though is it, it's that plus the three months earlier this year plus the disruption in between. Plus the distinction between secondary schools and primary schools where disruption at such a formative age is even more keenly felt.
To me the school closure calls always have the same problem. It's easy to see why it may well need to be done but one rarely, if ever, sees any call to close the schools that explains how that time could (or should) be made back up.
We have to assume that online/blended learning is only at best a partial replacement for in-person teaching, particularly at the younger age brackets or in areas where access to online materials will be more difficult, and therefore the time spent physically out of school needs to be made back up somewhere.
Calls to close schools would be more compelling if that was addressed within them, even excepting the many other good reasons to avoid it if possible.
One idea: cancel school entirely for the whole of January and the first half of February, and scrap the Summer holidays. That'd substitute six weeks of online learning for five weeks (I'll get to that) of face-to-face tuition in July and August, when this thing ought finally to be under some kind of control.
Effectively transplanting the school hols to Winter will be total shit for all concerned, both in and of itself and because the long Summer holiday will bite the dust at the point that everybody will be desperate for it, but we can always grant staff and pupils alike forgiveness from the no holiday in term time edicts for a week, so that they can still go somewhere in this country (because foreign holidays will probably need longer than that to open up properly again.)
It's imperfect, but 2021 is going to be a pretty bloody far from perfect year, so...
That's exactly what I'd do. It's the sensible thing to displace the teaching rather than lose it entirely.
But I can't see it happening because of the teaching unions (and also all the other people who support schools being open).
I know schools near me were actually planning to ADD an extra week to the next summer holidays to account for an extra week of term they did after lockdown 1 to make up for some of the lost time in the original extended school closure.
It is rather concerning that while we are trying to deal with Supercovid the deaths yesterday in Germany were 50% higher than in the UK.
In most other European countries too deaths have been worse in the second wave than here.
Yet supposedly we are plague island? I am really concerned this virus is sweeping through the Continent and they simply don't know and are stabbing in the dark.
At the moment, we don't know who the "index case" was - the person from which the mutated version of the virus first emerged.
As a result, we don't know whether the mutation began in Kent or whether it was introduced from elsewhere, Prof Peacock said.
And we don't know whether it has already spread onwards from the UK to other countries.
Prof Tom Connor, who was involved in setting up Covid sequencing in Wales, believes it is "probable" that similar variants are emerging around the world, but they may not have been detected yet.
"We are sequencing in the UK at a disproportionate rate," he said, insisting the UK has a better surveillance system than other countries.
In order to know how far the variant has travelled or where it came from, you would need to compare notes with other countries - but comparable data very often does not exist, Prof Connor said.
For example, Public Health Wales sequenced about 4,000 genomes in the past week, more than the whole of France since the beginning of the pandemic.
This point was emphasised by Prof Ravi Gupta at the University of Cambridge, who pointed out it was "no coincidence" that an "interesting" multiple mutation had also been seen in South Africa, another country which does a lot of genomic sequencing.
Other European countries which were very quick to pick up notable mutations, Denmark and the Netherlands, also have strong surveillance systems.
As I suggested earlier, they probably have the same variant, or their own homegrown version(s), in circulation in many countries, it's just that they're either not bothering to look or are incapable of doing so.
Even Germany isn't outstanding at everything.
But unlike England, Germany does not think it is outstanding at everything.
Good grief! I assume that you don't live here. Nobody thinks we've had a "good" pandemic, if such a thing exists.
I have been in Berlin for the last 7 years, but am English and have lived in England for over 40 years. So yes I do realize that many English think Britain is shit at everything. But there are also very many English people who think that Britain is best at almost everything except for winter sports. That kind of blind patriotism vs antipatriotism is not common at all here (i want to make it clear that I'm not talking about the rise of the AfD and pegida which is something quite different)
English exeptionalism is a cancer in this country. It's why we are Brexiting.
If you really want to describe things in those terms then Europhilia is the cancer. Brexit is the surgeons knife.
Jesus the SNP aren't even very left wing, they've been allowed to pretend they were left wing for years because Labour has never bothered to oppose.
Like Brexit, Labour needs to neutralise Independence and then attack the SNP on policy. Blair got this years ago
For Starmer to neutralise Independence in the same way he neutralised Brexit would mean supporting it.
It's to take a position, which he's now done, i.e. oppose.
Supporting Independence is a disaster for Labour.
People that want it will just vote SNP anyway and if you don't you'll not bother or vote Tory.
Then the question about how you look to English/Welsh voters. Strategically opposing but supporting devolution (including for England) is the best play.
Labour needs to make it clear it won't work with the SNP, even if in reality it does
How does it neutralise the issue? Do you mean neutralise it in terms of English politics because you think being seen as somehow pro-SNP is a weakness?
It is rather concerning that while we are trying to deal with Supercovid the deaths yesterday in Germany were 50% higher than in the UK.
In most other European countries too deaths have been worse in the second wave than here.
Yet supposedly we are plague island? I am really concerned this virus is sweeping through the Continent and they simply don't know and are stabbing in the dark.
At the moment, we don't know who the "index case" was - the person from which the mutated version of the virus first emerged.
As a result, we don't know whether the mutation began in Kent or whether it was introduced from elsewhere, Prof Peacock said.
And we don't know whether it has already spread onwards from the UK to other countries.
Prof Tom Connor, who was involved in setting up Covid sequencing in Wales, believes it is "probable" that similar variants are emerging around the world, but they may not have been detected yet.
"We are sequencing in the UK at a disproportionate rate," he said, insisting the UK has a better surveillance system than other countries.
In order to know how far the variant has travelled or where it came from, you would need to compare notes with other countries - but comparable data very often does not exist, Prof Connor said.
For example, Public Health Wales sequenced about 4,000 genomes in the past week, more than the whole of France since the beginning of the pandemic.
This point was emphasised by Prof Ravi Gupta at the University of Cambridge, who pointed out it was "no coincidence" that an "interesting" multiple mutation had also been seen in South Africa, another country which does a lot of genomic sequencing.
Other European countries which were very quick to pick up notable mutations, Denmark and the Netherlands, also have strong surveillance systems.
As I suggested earlier, they probably have the same variant, or their own homegrown version(s), in circulation in many countries, it's just that they're either not bothering to look or are incapable of doing so.
Even Germany isn't outstanding at everything.
But unlike England, Germany does not think it is outstanding at everything.
Good grief! I assume that you don't live here. Nobody thinks we've had a "good" pandemic, if such a thing exists.
I have been in Berlin for the last 7 years, but am English and have lived in England for over 40 years. So yes I do realize that many English think Britain is shit at everything. But there are also very many English people who think that Britain is best at almost everything except for winter sports. That kind of blind patriotism vs antipatriotism is not common at all here (i want to make it clear that I'm not talking about the rise of the AfD and pegida which is something quite different)
English exeptionalism is a cancer in this country. It's why we are Brexiting.
If you really want to describe things in those terms then Europhilia is the cancer. Brexit is the surgeons knife.
I didn't notice mass pro-EU rallies before the Brexit vote. If you really want to describe it in those terms then Brexit has caused Europhilia to metastasise.
The party established to represent the interests of working people. Not a bunch of tofu munching hand-wringers in Hampstead.
LOL. To paraphrase Brecht, much of the Labour membership would very much like to dissolve the current working class and replace it with another. The tofu munchers despise everything about them.
Great minds...
Orwell repeatedly warned that there was a chunk of intellectual socialism that thought the biggest problem was the working class. And that this could destroy the Labour movement....
He also repeatedly condemned the anti intellectualism of the British ruling class.
And opposed the Attlee government from the left. It is remarkable how many on the right seem to hang on his every word. They wouldn't have liked Eric Blair as PM.
He was actually pretty happy with the Attlee government.
I'd support the last sentence but... what steps would you recommend to make that happen?
Get institutional investors into the residential rental market in a bigger way. Expand social housing building but with a model based on discounts to market rent for limited time tenancies rather than life tenancies. And outwith the control of local councils
The party established to represent the interests of working people. Not a bunch of tofu munching hand-wringers in Hampstead.
LOL. To paraphrase Brecht, much of the Labour membership would very much like to dissolve the current working class and replace it with another. The tofu munchers despise everything about them.
Great minds...
Orwell repeatedly warned that there was a chunk of intellectual socialism that thought the biggest problem was the working class. And that this could destroy the Labour movement....
He also repeatedly condemned the anti intellectualism of the British ruling class.
And opposed the Attlee government from the left. It is remarkable how many on the right seem to hang on his every word. They wouldn't have liked Eric Blair as PM.
He was actually pretty happy with the Attlee government.
"It is astonishing how little change has happened." Of course he was pretty happy. It was the most left wing government he experienced in the UK. But wasn't radical enough for his tastes.
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Leon - I don't want to be gloomy but if we get to 100,000 maybe 200,000 cases a day and maybe 100,000 deaths Q1 2020 that is going to be a 'brutal blow' to everyone!
It's not just about 'saving the old', 100,000 dead and many more with long COVID often young is not a good idea. For most children having two months at home won't make a difference, it's a long time since I went to school but I know 80% of the time there is wasted/spent on pointless things so there will be no real learning loss.
You seem to be making a pretty compelling case for just closing the schools permanently.
It's not about two months though is it, it's that plus the three months earlier this year plus the disruption in between. Plus the distinction between secondary schools and primary schools where disruption at such a formative age is even more keenly felt.
To me the school closure calls always have the same problem. It's easy to see why it may well need to be done but one rarely, if ever, sees any call to close the schools that explains how that time could (or should) be made back up.
We have to assume that online/blended learning is only at best a partial replacement for in-person teaching, particularly at the younger age brackets or in areas where access to online materials will be more difficult, and therefore the time spent physically out of school needs to be made back up somewhere.
Calls to close schools would be more compelling if that was addressed within them, even excepting the many other good reasons to avoid it if possible.
One idea: cancel school entirely for the whole of January and the first half of February, and scrap the Summer holidays. That'd substitute six weeks of online learning for five weeks (I'll get to that) of face-to-face tuition in July and August, when this thing ought finally to be under some kind of control.
Effectively transplanting the school hols to Winter will be total shit for all concerned, both in and of itself and because the long Summer holiday will bite the dust at the point that everybody will be desperate for it, but we can always grant staff and pupils alike forgiveness from the no holiday in term time edicts for a week, so that they can still go somewhere in this country (because foreign holidays will probably need longer than that to open up properly again.)
It's imperfect, but 2021 is going to be a pretty bloody far from perfect year, so...
That's exactly what I'd do. It's the sensible thing to displace the teaching rather than lose it entirely.
But I can't see it happening because of the teaching unions (and also all the other people who support schools being open).
I know schools near me were actually planning to ADD an extra week to the next summer holidays to account for an extra week of term they did after lockdown 1 to make up for some of the lost time in the original extended school closure.
The teaching unions will kick up a stink because that's what they do, but you just overwrite their contracts by Act of Parliament. If the Commons is prepared to curtail basic liberties for everyone and place the entire nation under house arrest for months on end, then it can certainly order teachers to work for one August only. Dare the Unions to strike and the Opposition to vote it down. They wouldn't.
And as for people who support schools being open no matter what, just say the schools will be open but at a different time than usual. Offer them the choice between face-to-face learning now accompanied by mass carnage, Zoom now, or a break now and face-to-face learning later in the year, and they might actually see the benefits of the latter (after moaning loudly for a few weeks.)
Labour has opened up a four-point lead in the polls after Boris Johnson ditched a promised relaxation of Covid rules for Christmas. The Conservatives fell two points to 37 per cent in the YouGov survey for The Times, while Labour’s support rose from 37 per cent a week ago to 41 per cent — its highest since July 2018.
It is rather concerning that while we are trying to deal with Supercovid the deaths yesterday in Germany were 50% higher than in the UK.
In most other European countries too deaths have been worse in the second wave than here.
Yet supposedly we are plague island? I am really concerned this virus is sweeping through the Continent and they simply don't know and are stabbing in the dark.
At the moment, we don't know who the "index case" was - the person from which the mutated version of the virus first emerged.
As a result, we don't know whether the mutation began in Kent or whether it was introduced from elsewhere, Prof Peacock said.
And we don't know whether it has already spread onwards from the UK to other countries.
Prof Tom Connor, who was involved in setting up Covid sequencing in Wales, believes it is "probable" that similar variants are emerging around the world, but they may not have been detected yet.
"We are sequencing in the UK at a disproportionate rate," he said, insisting the UK has a better surveillance system than other countries.
In order to know how far the variant has travelled or where it came from, you would need to compare notes with other countries - but comparable data very often does not exist, Prof Connor said.
For example, Public Health Wales sequenced about 4,000 genomes in the past week, more than the whole of France since the beginning of the pandemic.
This point was emphasised by Prof Ravi Gupta at the University of Cambridge, who pointed out it was "no coincidence" that an "interesting" multiple mutation had also been seen in South Africa, another country which does a lot of genomic sequencing.
Other European countries which were very quick to pick up notable mutations, Denmark and the Netherlands, also have strong surveillance systems.
As I suggested earlier, they probably have the same variant, or their own homegrown version(s), in circulation in many countries, it's just that they're either not bothering to look or are incapable of doing so.
Even Germany isn't outstanding at everything.
But unlike England, Germany does not think it is outstanding at everything.
Good grief! I assume that you don't live here. Nobody thinks we've had a "good" pandemic, if such a thing exists.
I have been in Berlin for the last 7 years, but am English and have lived in England for over 40 years. So yes I do realize that many English think Britain is shit at everything. But there are also very many English people who think that Britain is best at almost everything except for winter sports. That kind of blind patriotism vs antipatriotism is not common at all here (i want to make it clear that I'm not talking about the rise of the AfD and pegida which is something quite different)
English exeptionalism is a cancer in this country. It's why we are Brexiting.
If you really want to describe things in those terms then Europhilia is the cancer. Brexit is the surgeons knife.
I didn't notice mass pro-EU rallies before the Brexit vote. If you really want to describe it in those terms then Brexit has caused Europhilia to metastasise.
It was there for all to see but was largely limited to the metropolitan elite. But still just as nasty and dangerous for all that. Thankfully we have dealt with it before it could kill the host.
BTW. The German death figure, today - 944 - is a record for the country, by some distance.
I imagine tonight’s German TV news will NOT be dominated by Supercovid or Brexit lorries.
N501Y and the stranded lorries (they aren't Brexit lorries) are making the news, but you're right, it's not the headlines. Yesterday evening the headlines were life imprisonment for a terrorist attack on a synagogue a year ago. There are a few other things going on than just Covid and Brexit.
To back up my point, the first item on the German news at midnight was the collapse of the Israeli government, despite the record number of covid deaths in Germany today.
That seems quite odd. To me. But I know from a friend who worked for German State TV that your media is quite bonkers, by British standards
Much better compared with British standards IMO. Certainly more serious and more ready to show different opinions about an issue rather than "make a story" where nearly everyone interviewed backs it up except for one token critic (the Newsnight pattern).
BTW. The German death figure, today - 944 - is a record for the country, by some distance.
I imagine tonight’s German TV news will NOT be dominated by Supercovid or Brexit lorries.
N501Y and the stranded lorries (they aren't Brexit lorries) are making the news, but you're right, it's not the headlines. Yesterday evening the headlines were life imprisonment for a terrorist attack on a synagogue a year ago. There are a few other things going on than just Covid and Brexit.
To back up my point, the first item on the German news at midnight was the collapse of the Israeli government, despite the record number of covid deaths in Germany today.
That seems quite odd. To me. But I know from a friend who worked for German State TV that your media is quite bonkers, by British standards
Much better compared with British standards IMO. Certainly more serious and more ready to show different opinions about an issue rather than "make a story" where nearly everyone interviewed backs it up except for one token critic (the Newsnight pattern).
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
"Tram drivers in Nottingham will not receive bonuses this year - and have been offered turkey rolls instead. The GMB union said Nottingham Express Transit (NET) staff were usually given a £25 shopping voucher at Christmas. But this year drivers have been offered a free roll or baked potato from a food van parked outside its city depot."
Jesus the SNP aren't even very left wing, they've been allowed to pretend they were left wing for years because Labour has never bothered to oppose.
Like Brexit, Labour needs to neutralise Independence and then attack the SNP on policy. Blair got this years ago
For Starmer to neutralise Independence in the same way he neutralised Brexit would mean supporting it.
A future Labour leader will get there eventually. Their idea for upholding the Union always consists of loosening it. They are stuck in this doom loop whereby they think that the answer to the SNP and the pro-indy lobby getting more and more powerful is to give them more and more powers. The logical end of that process is total dissolution.
They won't, Scottish independence is political suicide for Labour, the only way Starmer becomes PM on most current polls is with the support of Scottish MPs.
Quebec only stayed in Canada ultimately because of ultra devomax
"Tram drivers in Nottingham will not receive bonuses this year - and have been offered turkey rolls instead. The GMB union said Nottingham Express Transit (NET) staff were usually given a £25 shopping voucher at Christmas. But this year drivers have been offered a free roll or baked potato from a food van parked outside its city depot."
'Trump has been strategizing in recent days with a band of his fiercest congressional supporters about the effort, which will involve lodging objections during the typically pro forma congressional certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
It’s a gambit that even Republican leaders and those around Trump concede is doomed to fail, given the makeup of Congress. But that’s not the only point, according to GOP lawmakers, Trump advisers and Republican operatives.
The objections will also force Republicans in Congress to go on record voting to affirm Biden’s victory — acknowledging the outcome and likely inflaming Trump’s diehard supporters, a crucial GOP faction that has joined the president in denying the election results. Republican strategists and Trump allies inside and outside Washington said Trump’s core supporters will remember how their lawmakers vote on Jan. 6.... “This will be the new cause of the right,” said one Trump-allied GOP operative, who predicted Trump would leave office on Jan. 20 but keep animating his base with a slow drip of information to fuel election-fraud theories he’s pushing. “Joe Biden will take the oath of office and then his problems begin”....
Trump has made no secret of his plans to remain a political force after he leaves office. His closest campaign advisers have relaunched a consulting firm that aims to keep Trump’s hold on Republican politics in 2022 and beyond — with a particular focus on primary challenges to Republicans Trump has clashed with in recent months.'
Didn't we at one time show several photos of the Labour leader to indicate Labour's lead? I think we should go back to that. I must say I can't believe Johnson is still polling around 37%. Even people with zero interest in politics would love nothing better than to see him hanging on Westminster Bridge.
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
Philosophically, I agree with much of that. My original post is a narrow view of what I'd put in place today. In my mind this is an instance where we can see where we are in the first week of January and make a decision late on cancelling school, but push back a week now and try and sustain next term. Keeping within the capabilities of the NHS is crucial and schools should close of they jeapordise that. The SE corner looks like it's going to be close to that.
I also look at this from the north as well. Case numbers are steady-ish, relatively low, and very low prevalence of b the variant.
It is rather concerning that while we are trying to deal with Supercovid the deaths yesterday in Germany were 50% higher than in the UK.
In most other European countries too deaths have been worse in the second wave than here.
Yet supposedly we are plague island? I am really concerned this virus is sweeping through the Continent and they simply don't know and are stabbing in the dark.
At the moment, we don't know who the "index case" was - the person from which the mutated version of the virus first emerged.
As a result, we don't know whether the mutation began in Kent or whether it was introduced from elsewhere, Prof Peacock said.
And we don't know whether it has already spread onwards from the UK to other countries.
Prof Tom Connor, who was involved in setting up Covid sequencing in Wales, believes it is "probable" that similar variants are emerging around the world, but they may not have been detected yet.
"We are sequencing in the UK at a disproportionate rate," he said, insisting the UK has a better surveillance system than other countries.
In order to know how far the variant has travelled or where it came from, you would need to compare notes with other countries - but comparable data very often does not exist, Prof Connor said.
For example, Public Health Wales sequenced about 4,000 genomes in the past week, more than the whole of France since the beginning of the pandemic.
This point was emphasised by Prof Ravi Gupta at the University of Cambridge, who pointed out it was "no coincidence" that an "interesting" multiple mutation had also been seen in South Africa, another country which does a lot of genomic sequencing.
Other European countries which were very quick to pick up notable mutations, Denmark and the Netherlands, also have strong surveillance systems.
As I suggested earlier, they probably have the same variant, or their own homegrown version(s), in circulation in many countries, it's just that they're either not bothering to look or are incapable of doing so.
Even Germany isn't outstanding at everything.
But unlike England, Germany does not think it is outstanding at everything.
Good grief! I assume that you don't live here. Nobody thinks we've had a "good" pandemic, if such a thing exists.
I have been in Berlin for the last 7 years, but am English and have lived in England for over 40 years. So yes I do realize that many English think Britain is shit at everything. But there are also very many English people who think that Britain is best at almost everything except for winter sports. That kind of blind patriotism vs antipatriotism is not common at all here (i want to make it clear that I'm not talking about the rise of the AfD and pegida which is something quite different)
English exeptionalism is a cancer in this country. It's why we are Brexiting.
If you really want to describe things in those terms then Europhilia is the cancer. Brexit is the surgeons knife.
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
Philosophically, I agree with much of that. My original post is a narrow view of what I'd put in place today. In my mind this is an instance where we can see where we are in the first week of January and make a decision late on cancelling school, but push back a week now and try and sustain next term. Keeping within the capabilities of the NHS is crucial and schools should close of they jeapordise that. The SE corner looks like it's going to be close to that.
I also look at this from the north as well. Case numbers are steady-ish, relatively low, and very low prevalence of b the variant.
sorry can't edit on my device and submitted.
So, the thing is also when to act nationally and when locally. I don't see need for a national lockdown now, but we've got to be prepared to move faster than we have before when the numbers develop.
Didn't we at one time show several photos of the Labour leader to indicate Labour's lead? I think we should go back to that. I must say I can't believe Johnson is still polling around 37%. Even people with zero interest in politics would love nothing better than to see him hanging on Westminster Bridge.
Didn't we at one time show several photos of the Labour leader to indicate Labour's lead? I think we should go back to that. I must say I can't believe Johnson is still polling around 37%. Even people with zero interest in politics would love nothing better than to see him hanging on Westminster Bridge.
"Tesco has introduced purchasing limits on some products such has soap, eggs, rice and toilet roll amid fears over stock.
The supermarket chain’s move, which was announced in an email to customers, it said was to make sure the products do not run out. Shoppers will be allowed to buy up to three of each item."
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
You're a qualified and practising teacher obviously?
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
It’s not just in the U.K. either, for many countries schools are last on the list of things governments want to close down. As you say, most people on forums such as this are in the top quartile of incomes, and don’t see how this year has affected kids and parents further down the income scale in overcrowded housing, hourly paid jobs and not able to afford new technology to support remote schooling.
In good news this morning, Pfizer vaccines have started arriving in the sandpit Oldies first of course, but it’s being distributed free of charge by public health authorities (in contrast to the otherwise mostly private healthcare system out here).
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
That's a fair point.
*BUT*
Here in Los Angeles, schools have been closed since March. They have successfully distributed laptops to all students. (We passed, because we have our own.)
Kids are doing OK. Not all, sure. And younger kids are finding it harder. But they're doing OK.
Before CV19, there were people - thousands in the UK alone - who were too remote from their local school. And you know, they turned out OK.
There's this bonkers fear that anything that deviates from just how things have been the last few years will cause some kind of massive harm. Humans are resilient. We do ok.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
And as I said last night, nobody wants in-person tuition to go and it will be pretty much the last thing that does. The Government will certainly be desperate to avoid keeping children at home, not just for the reasons that worry you (as they do most of us) but also because it will mightily offend and inconvenience millions of working parents and blast away much of its remaining credibility. If previous reports are to be believed then the Tories' research suggests that the all-important Red Wall voters will be especially inclined towards displeasure at the news.
However, given present circumstances, what do we do? Besides anything else, if the hospitals buckle under the strain then sick children will suffer and die from delayed or withdrawn treatment, along with the rest of the population.
For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not one of the people who thinks that every child has a wonderful and supportive home learning experience, with good quality provision in a conducive environment. That's very far from the truth. We also discussed last night if there was anything that could be done to tip the balance back in favour of getting as much face-to-face teaching done as possible, and came up with the idea that we scrap the long school Summer holidays next year and bring the leave forward into the period immediately after Christmas instead. That's also far from ideal for all sorts of reasons, but if there's no school at all until mid-February, and then catch-up time through July and August (which should, pray God, be late enough in the year for the Plague to finally be under some kind of control and have the classrooms up and running again,) then that ought to do undo a lot of the damage from a Winter lockdown.
Anyway, we can do our best to get creative and help children as much as possible, but at the end of the day if sending them home is the only tool we have left to tackle the spiralling caseload then it'll have to be done. And it would be far better if the decision were to be taken now than if it were to be forced by events a few weeks down the line, with the result that it starts later but then has to last longer.
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
It’s not just in the U.K. either, for many countries schools are last on the list of things governments want to close down. As you say, most people on forums such as this are in the top quartile of incomes, and don’t see how this year has affected kids and parents further down the income scale in overcrowded housing, hourly paid jobs and not able to afford new technology to support remote schooling.
In good news this morning, Pfizer vaccines have started arriving in the sandpit Oldies first of course, but it’s being distributed free of charge by public health authorities (in contrast to the otherwise mostly private healthcare system out here).
We may not have enough home delivery slots for every household but we probably do to cover every household with over 60s living there. Other country involved the army in door to door food distribution. Do that if necessary.
Blackrock’s quite casual inference that kids must continue paying the price fills me with a burning a rage. How much more do you want them to give?
They’ve already missed out on 3 months of education when normally a a few days truancy results in a fine. I can tell you first hand what almost a year of sub par social interaction does to them. Their malleable minds are being bent ever further by social media as what else is there? They’re inheriting the consequences of another £450bn of debt monetisation that will only serve to make it harder to eventually earn their way to prosperity versus all the happy asset holders that preside here. Do you know how heartbreaking it is for a 3 year to look sadly into your masked face at the school gate and ask when his teacher will be able to see your face? And all this without focusing on the kids in the section of society that Marcus Rashford champions, who in a lot of cases have had things unimaginably bad in 2020.
If you’re really that worries about supercovid, all members of any household with a +60yr old should go into a Tier 10 until that person is vaccinated. No leaving the home at all, except for medical appointments. Such households with school age children and teachers should be moved up to the very top of the priority list for vaccination. By the end of Jan we’d have vaxxed all health workers, all at risk teachers and all vulnerable people living with kids.
Everyone else can sensibly go about their business in whatever geographic tier is most appropriate.
We make our choices as a society on who we move heaven and earth to protect and we always find a way to do so. With £450bn of QE, a £15k buy-to-let tax cut, and blunt lockdowns with little to no risk segmentation by age for a disease that does not affect the young, we have clearly made ours. And it it saddens me to my core.
It is rather concerning that while we are trying to deal with Supercovid the deaths yesterday in Germany were 50% higher than in the UK.
In most other European countries too deaths have been worse in the second wave than here.
Yet supposedly we are plague island? I am really concerned this virus is sweeping through the Continent and they simply don't know and are stabbing in the dark.
At the moment, we don't know who the "index case" was - the person from which the mutated version of the virus first emerged.
As a result, we don't know whether the mutation began in Kent or whether it was introduced from elsewhere, Prof Peacock said.
And we don't know whether it has already spread onwards from the UK to other countries.
Prof Tom Connor, who was involved in setting up Covid sequencing in Wales, believes it is "probable" that similar variants are emerging around the world, but they may not have been detected yet.
"We are sequencing in the UK at a disproportionate rate," he said, insisting the UK has a better surveillance system than other countries.
In order to know how far the variant has travelled or where it came from, you would need to compare notes with other countries - but comparable data very often does not exist, Prof Connor said.
For example, Public Health Wales sequenced about 4,000 genomes in the past week, more than the whole of France since the beginning of the pandemic.
This point was emphasised by Prof Ravi Gupta at the University of Cambridge, who pointed out it was "no coincidence" that an "interesting" multiple mutation had also been seen in South Africa, another country which does a lot of genomic sequencing.
Other European countries which were very quick to pick up notable mutations, Denmark and the Netherlands, also have strong surveillance systems.
As I suggested earlier, they probably have the same variant, or their own homegrown version(s), in circulation in many countries, it's just that they're either not bothering to look or are incapable of doing so.
Even Germany isn't outstanding at everything.
But unlike England, Germany does not think it is outstanding at everything.
Good grief! I assume that you don't live here. Nobody thinks we've had a "good" pandemic, if such a thing exists.
I have been in Berlin for the last 7 years, but am English and have lived in England for over 40 years. So yes I do realize that many English think Britain is shit at everything. But there are also very many English people who think that Britain is best at almost everything except for winter sports. That kind of blind patriotism vs antipatriotism is not common at all here (i want to make it clear that I'm not talking about the rise of the AfD and pegida which is something quite different)
English exeptionalism is a cancer in this country. It's why we are Brexiting.
If you really want to describe things in those terms then Europhilia is the cancer. Brexit is the surgeons knife.
Nah. Every bad thing about this country will be blamed on Brexit, and only most of it will be true. Europhilia will grow stronger than ever, with the grass greener on the other side of the fence.
The poll in the header shows how little true enthusiasm there is for Brexit.
It's a conundrum and I'm not sure 'burning rage' helps. There are good arguments either side and neither solution is ideal.
I'm also not sure vaccinating children is viable. Pfizer's vaccine hasn't been tested on under 18's. So schools become big viral vectors and that then impinges on the whole of society including parents and carers as well as the elderly.
There's no easy solution to this and losing one's temper over it is as bad as doing so in the classroom.
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
That's a fair point.
*BUT*
Here in Los Angeles, schools have been closed since March. They have successfully distributed laptops to all students. (We passed, because we have our own.)
Kids are doing OK. Not all, sure. And younger kids are finding it harder. But they're doing OK.
Before CV19, there were people - thousands in the UK alone - who were too remote from their local school. And you know, they turned out OK.
There's this bonkers fear that anything that deviates from just how things have been the last few years will cause some kind of massive harm. Humans are resilient. We do ok.
Social inequalities in schooling will only grow as a result.
Also, closed schools don't seem to have controlled the epidemic in LA, even without the presence of mutant Covid-19.
It's a conundrum and I'm not sure 'burning rage' helps. There are good arguments either side and neither solution is ideal.
I'm also not sure vaccinating children is viable. Pfizer's vaccine hasn't been tested on under 18's. So schools become big viral vectors and that then impinges on the whole of society including parents and carers as well as the elderly.
There's no easy solution to this and losing one's temper over it is as bad as doing so in the classroom.
I have a school age child, by the way.
I merely tell you how I feel. The last week has tipped me over the edge. I suspect that goes for many millions. There is another way (risk segmentation by age) that is no worse than what we’ve done so far but for some reason people fall over themselves to find excuses why we can’t try it.
It isn't that Republicans aren't condemning Trump because they are afraid of him. Trump has just exposed what the Republican Party already was before he became president.
We may not have enough home delivery slots for every household but we probably do to cover every household with over 60s living there. Other country involved the army in door to door food distribution. Do that if necessary.
Blackrock’s quite casual inference that kids must continue paying the price fills me with a burning a rage. How much more do you want them to give?
They’ve already missed out on 3 months of education when normally a a few days truancy results in a fine. I can tell you first hand what almost a year of sub par social interaction does to them. Their malleable minds are being bent ever further by social media as what else is there? They’re inheriting the consequences of another £450bn of debt monetisation that will only serve to make it harder to eventually earn their way to prosperity versus all the happy asset holders that preside here. Do you know how heartbreaking it is for a 3 year to look sadly into your masked face at the school gate and ask when his teacher will be able to see your face? And all this without focusing on the kids in the section of society that Marcus Rashford champions, who in a lot of cases have had things unimaginably bad in 2020.
If you’re really that worries about supercovid, all members of any household with a +60yr old should go into a Tier 10 until that person is vaccinated. No leaving the home at all, except for medical appointments. Such households with school age children and teachers should be moved up to the very top of the priority list for vaccination. By the end of Jan we’d have vaxxed all health workers, all at risk teachers and all vulnerable people living with kids.
Everyone else can sensibly go about their business in whatever geographic tier is most appropriate.
We make our choices as a society on who we move heaven and earth to protect and we always find a way to do so. With £450bn of QE, a £15k buy-to-let tax cut, and blunt lockdowns with little to no risk segmentation by age for a disease that does not affect the young, we have clearly made ours. And it it saddens me to my core.
If risk segmentation had a chance of working - and if there were no vaccine, and no imminent prospect of one, then we would have to give it a roll - then the new variant has probably ended that. A national effort to seal off the oldies is as all well and good (although there are so many of them I doubt that the home delivery capacity of the supermarkets could cope, even with help from our small and already stretched army,) but a middle-aged man on a CPAP machine takes up one hospital bed the same way as a 90-year-old on a ventilator does. Resorting to these horrible lockdowns over and over again isn't being done to save doddery dears at the expense of our long suffering children, and trust me, I understand that a lot of them are bloody long suffering too. It's being done to prevent the healthcare system from keeling over.
Logically, with much of the economy already having been shut down and masks and social distancing implemented, there's not very much left that we can do to cut down transmission. Places of worship are still permitted to hold services, so that's one obvious target, but most people aren't religious. We could shut down manufacturing and construction, but that would crush the tax base to little useful effect (most of that kind of work takes place outdoors, or in indoor settings where you do not have thirty people clustered together in a small room.) We could shut down essential retail, but clearly the capacity to home deliver to the whole nation doesn't exist so everybody would soon begin to starve. That leaves the schools and universities.
You can get as angry as you like about the way in which society, in more general terms, keeps prioritising the interests of the old over the young, and I agree with you about that. The pension triple lock is utterly indefensible by any measure except one: that politicians are terrified of scrapping it because the old are numerous, getting more numerous by the year, and they vote in large numbers. The "but I paid my taxes!" tendency amongst the grey vote - what I refer to as the stickbangers - will defend their interest by picking whichever party will stuff their mouths with gold. The resulting age divide in politics is frightening: the intergenerational contract has broken down. But how is bathing the country in a vat of Covid going to solve that problem? A public health cataclysm (which will inflict huge collateral damage on the young and the middle-aged, as well as killing a lot of older and medically vulnerable people) is not the answer.
I have 3 kids - 11 (first year at secondary), 7 and 3. Home schooling earlier this year was challenging. This was despite my wife being a teacher not at her school and my working being done at home. It is hard to home school two whilst the third is clinging onto your legs. I really don't want to return to that again.
What I think could be a good compromise is for secondary to go to remote working. They are old enough and good enough with technology for it to work. The older ones can tend to stay at home alone if parents need to work. Primary go into school still. They are easier to bubble and they tend to have less social interactions. Finally keep pre-school settings open. Trying to work with toddlers around is almost impossible.
Just keeping secondary schools as remote work would.impact R significantly. Certainly anecdotally in recent weeks it has been far more secondary schools with cases rather than primary. I am in a T4 area.
He really is bonkers enough to believe his own lies. It will be great to see the back of the man baby, as he is carted off the premises in January. No one has done more damage to the reputation of democracy in America than him.
Earlier today someone posted that we should ask for Calais back. I was sort of tempted to suggest we might give the French Scotland in exchange.
So far as I know the previous best offer was 3 green shield stamps and an empty beer mug from Mr M Smithson. He evaded settlement on a technicality.
Calais is a moral issue.
We have been given detailed statements from charitable organisations, that the living conditions for refugees there are so hideous, that we have a humanitarian obligation to take them in.
This means that this part of France is a failed state.
And we all know what we should do with failed states, don't we children?
Is there any oil around Calais? Lithium?
But have UNICEF spent £25k on food for the Calais refugee kids?
They have not reached the state of England just yet
I have 3 kids - 11 (first year at secondary), 7 and 3. Home schooling earlier this year was challenging. This was despite my wife being a teacher not at her school and my working being done at home. It is hard to home school two whilst the third is clinging onto your legs. I really don't want to return to that again.
What I think could be a good compromise is for secondary to go to remote working. They are old enough and good enough with technology for it to work. The older ones can tend to stay at home alone if parents need to work. Primary go into school still. They are easier to bubble and they tend to have less social interactions. Finally keep pre-school settings open. Trying to work with toddlers around is almost impossible.
Just keeping secondary schools as remote work would.impact R significantly. Certainly anecdotally in recent weeks it has been far more secondary schools with cases rather than primary. I am in a T4 area.
Shutting primary and preschool forces at risk grandparents into the childcare chain at a time they should be taking extra precaution. Some people (including our government) seem utterly unable to think through the second order consequences of their actions.
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
That's a fair point.
*BUT*
Here in Los Angeles, schools have been closed since March. They have successfully distributed laptops to all students. (We passed, because we have our own.)
Kids are doing OK. Not all, sure. And younger kids are finding it harder. But they're doing OK.
Before CV19, there were people - thousands in the UK alone - who were too remote from their local school. And you know, they turned out OK.
There's this bonkers fear that anything that deviates from just how things have been the last few years will cause some kind of massive harm. Humans are resilient. We do ok.
Social inequalities in schooling will only grow as a result.
Also, closed schools don't seem to have controlled the epidemic in LA, even without the presence of mutant Covid-19.
That's a different point.
Los Angeles - like many US cities - has a CV19 problem. People in low end jobs - in delivery, in retail, in kitchens, in factories - they have to go to work.
Nogotowork. Nogetpaid.
And this is an expensive place to live.
It's hard working these jobs safely. But there's no safety net. So you do it.
Wealthy, middle class, people: by and large they can work from home on their laptops.
But the question was about schools.
In many places - like Germany - kids don't go to school until they're 7. So, is losing one term, when you're a little kid, that serious? And older kids can remote learn.
I'm nit denying there are challenges. I'm merely asking you not to overstate them.
Jesus the SNP aren't even very left wing, they've been allowed to pretend they were left wing for years because Labour has never bothered to oppose.
Like Brexit, Labour needs to neutralise Independence and then attack the SNP on policy. Blair got this years ago
Labour are dead in Scotland, they had many years of filling their pockets and 13 years after devolution to do something. Instead they doubled down on filling their pockets , and only since the SNP got in have things improved. From having all the top poorest areas in UK to None shows what can be done.
As I have said before you obviously know nothing of Scotland , have likely never been there and are an immature thick cretinous Labour drone.
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
That's a fair point.
*BUT*
Here in Los Angeles, schools have been closed since March. They have successfully distributed laptops to all students. (We passed, because we have our own.)
Kids are doing OK. Not all, sure. And younger kids are finding it harder. But they're doing OK.
Before CV19, there were people - thousands in the UK alone - who were too remote from their local school. And you know, they turned out OK.
There's this bonkers fear that anything that deviates from just how things have been the last few years will cause some kind of massive harm. Humans are resilient. We do ok.
Social inequalities in schooling will only grow as a result.
Also, closed schools don't seem to have controlled the epidemic in LA, even without the presence of mutant Covid-19.
That's a different point.
Los Angeles - like many US cities - has a CV19 problem. People in low end jobs - in delivery, in retail, in kitchens, in factories - they have to go to work.
Nogotowork. Nogetpaid.
And this is an expensive place to live.
It's hard working these jobs safely. But there's no safety net. So you do it.
Wealthy, middle class, people: by and large they can work from home on their laptops.
But the question was about schools.
In many places - like Germany - kids don't go to school until they're 7. So, is losing one term, when you're a little kid, that serious? And older kids can remote learn.
I'm nit denying there are challenges. I'm merely asking you not to overstate them.
Have you seen what a 3 year old is like that hasn’t interacted with another child in 6 months?
Jesus the SNP aren't even very left wing, they've been allowed to pretend they were left wing for years because Labour has never bothered to oppose.
Like Brexit, Labour needs to neutralise Independence and then attack the SNP on policy. Blair got this years ago
Labour are dead in Scotland, they had many years of filling their pockets and 13 years after devolution to do something. Instead they doubled down on filling their pockets , and only since the SNP got in have things improved. From having all the top poorest areas in UK to None shows what can be done.
As I have said before you obviously know nothing of Scotland , have likely never been there and are an immature thick cretinous Labour drone.
I can't see Starmerism appealing much to Scotland. For all his divisiveness, at least some people were enthused by Corbyn, but while offending fewer people, Starmer is enthusing fewer.
It's a conundrum and I'm not sure 'burning rage' helps. There are good arguments either side and neither solution is ideal.
I'm also not sure vaccinating children is viable. Pfizer's vaccine hasn't been tested on under 18's. So schools become big viral vectors and that then impinges on the whole of society including parents and carers as well as the elderly.
There's no easy solution to this and losing one's temper over it is as bad as doing so in the classroom.
I have a school age child, by the way.
I merely tell you how I feel. The last week has tipped me over the edge. I suspect that goes for many millions. There is another way (risk segmentation by age) that is no worse than what we’ve done so far but for some reason people fall over themselves to find excuses why we can’t try it.
You sound as if you are barking. FFS children used to be up chimneys by the time they were 7 or 8 and working 7 days a week. Whining liberal jessies like you wittering on about them being stuck in centrally heated houses with computers and iphones. The issue is the duff parents actually having to look after their children, they are stupid, selfish gits and have no parenting skills. How the F*** can you not keep children occupied. Whining gits would rather be talking pish at the coffee machine about their latest purchases or how much their house price has gone up rather than actually being a parent. Get a backbone and a life, it is not all about you.
Didn't we at one time show several photos of the Labour leader to indicate Labour's lead? I think we should go back to that. I must say I can't believe Johnson is still polling around 37%. Even people with zero interest in politics would love nothing better than to see him hanging on Westminster Bridge.
Yet again he has no competition. Starmer is a complete DUD. Grey , boring , policy light duffer. He could not beat a carpet.
Then he should submit a series of papers to the MHRA, setting out the evidence for abandoning the previously agreed regime for administering each of the vaccines, so that it may be properly considered.
We currently do not have the infrastructure to move very fast to beat this epidemic. Testing takes months, manufacturing vaccines takes months, and vaccinating people will take months. Meanwhile, the virus is not only infecting and killing people, but also mutating and it could become able to defeat the vaccines by the time they are finally rolled out.
In 1348 we did not have the ability to create vaccines against the Black Death (the first vaccine from dead plague bacteria was created in 1890). In 2020 we have the technology to create vaccines against COVID-19, but it takes so long that there is still no end in sight.
Speed is of the essence in dealing with an epidemic. We need to explore every way of rolling the vaccines out faster, and Tony Blair's suggestion is well worth considering. The fact that to do this means following a slow and bureaucratic process involving large committees of experts illustrates that we are currently just not organised to develop vaccines quickly.
This could become critical if ever Disease X appears, possibly out of the African rain forests. This would spread like COVID and have a death rate like Ebola. We will really need vaccines available fast when/if this happens.
We should put a medicine into humans using an untested protocol.
Sorry, but no. There are things that are important to do right.
Jesus the SNP aren't even very left wing, they've been allowed to pretend they were left wing for years because Labour has never bothered to oppose.
Like Brexit, Labour needs to neutralise Independence and then attack the SNP on policy. Blair got this years ago
Any updates on how successful Blair was in neutralising Independence and then attacking the SNP on policy?
The idiot will be telling you shortly how the Starmer masterstroke of resurrecting the Gorgon will sweep away the SNP. London Labour idiot pontificating about a far far away place as ever.
It's a conundrum and I'm not sure 'burning rage' helps. There are good arguments either side and neither solution is ideal.
I'm also not sure vaccinating children is viable. Pfizer's vaccine hasn't been tested on under 18's. So schools become big viral vectors and that then impinges on the whole of society including parents and carers as well as the elderly.
There's no easy solution to this and losing one's temper over it is as bad as doing so in the classroom.
I have a school age child, by the way.
I merely tell you how I feel. The last week has tipped me over the edge. I suspect that goes for many millions. There is another way (risk segmentation by age) that is no worse than what we’ve done so far but for some reason people fall over themselves to find excuses why we can’t try it.
You sound as if you are barking. FFS children used to be up chimneys by the time they were 7 or 8 and working 7 days a week. Whining liberal jessies like you wittering on about them being stuck in centrally heated houses with computers and iphones. The issue is the duff parents actually having to look after their children, they are stupid, selfish gits and have no parenting skills. How the F*** can you not keep children occupied. Whining gits would rather be talking pish at the coffee machine about their latest purchases or how much their house price has gone up rather than actually being a parent. Get a backbone and a life, it is not all about you.
Well you sir are a troll and a boring one at that.
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
That's a fair point.
*BUT*
Here in Los Angeles, schools have been closed since March. They have successfully distributed laptops to all students. (We passed, because we have our own.)
Kids are doing OK. Not all, sure. And younger kids are finding it harder. But they're doing OK.
Before CV19, there were people - thousands in the UK alone - who were too remote from their local school. And you know, they turned out OK.
There's this bonkers fear that anything that deviates from just how things have been the last few years will cause some kind of massive harm. Humans are resilient. We do ok.
Social inequalities in schooling will only grow as a result.
Also, closed schools don't seem to have controlled the epidemic in LA, even without the presence of mutant Covid-19.
That's a different point.
Los Angeles - like many US cities - has a CV19 problem. People in low end jobs - in delivery, in retail, in kitchens, in factories - they have to go to work.
Nogotowork. Nogetpaid.
And this is an expensive place to live.
It's hard working these jobs safely. But there's no safety net. So you do it.
Wealthy, middle class, people: by and large they can work from home on their laptops.
But the question was about schools.
In many places - like Germany - kids don't go to school until they're 7. So, is losing one term, when you're a little kid, that serious? And older kids can remote learn.
I'm nit denying there are challenges. I'm merely asking you not to overstate them.
Have you seen what a 3 year old is like that hasn’t interacted with another child in 6 months?
Did you know that tens of thousands of Americans and Brits grow up on farms and in isolated communities where they don't get to see people outside their family regularly?
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
That's a fair point.
*BUT*
Here in Los Angeles, schools have been closed since March. They have successfully distributed laptops to all students. (We passed, because we have our own.)
Kids are doing OK. Not all, sure. And younger kids are finding it harder. But they're doing OK.
Before CV19, there were people - thousands in the UK alone - who were too remote from their local school. And you know, they turned out OK.
There's this bonkers fear that anything that deviates from just how things have been the last few years will cause some kind of massive harm. Humans are resilient. We do ok.
Social inequalities in schooling will only grow as a result.
Also, closed schools don't seem to have controlled the epidemic in LA, even without the presence of mutant Covid-19.
That's a different point.
Los Angeles - like many US cities - has a CV19 problem. People in low end jobs - in delivery, in retail, in kitchens, in factories - they have to go to work.
Nogotowork. Nogetpaid.
And this is an expensive place to live.
It's hard working these jobs safely. But there's no safety net. So you do it.
Wealthy, middle class, people: by and large they can work from home on their laptops.
But the question was about schools.
In many places - like Germany - kids don't go to school until they're 7. So, is losing one term, when you're a little kid, that serious? And older kids can remote learn.
I'm nit denying there are challenges. I'm merely asking you not to overstate them.
Have you seen what a 3 year old is like that hasn’t interacted with another child in 6 months?
And, presumably, you know that schooling in Germany (even including kindergarden) doesn't usually start until kids are 5 or 6. Before then, it's parents, parents, parents.
"Tram drivers in Nottingham will not receive bonuses this year - and have been offered turkey rolls instead. The GMB union said Nottingham Express Transit (NET) staff were usually given a £25 shopping voucher at Christmas. But this year drivers have been offered a free roll or baked potato from a food van parked outside its city depot."
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
That's a fair point.
*BUT*
Here in Los Angeles, schools have been closed since March. They have successfully distributed laptops to all students. (We passed, because we have our own.)
Kids are doing OK. Not all, sure. And younger kids are finding it harder. But they're doing OK.
Before CV19, there were people - thousands in the UK alone - who were too remote from their local school. And you know, they turned out OK.
There's this bonkers fear that anything that deviates from just how things have been the last few years will cause some kind of massive harm. Humans are resilient. We do ok.
Social inequalities in schooling will only grow as a result.
Also, closed schools don't seem to have controlled the epidemic in LA, even without the presence of mutant Covid-19.
That's a different point.
Los Angeles - like many US cities - has a CV19 problem. People in low end jobs - in delivery, in retail, in kitchens, in factories - they have to go to work.
Nogotowork. Nogetpaid.
And this is an expensive place to live.
It's hard working these jobs safely. But there's no safety net. So you do it.
Wealthy, middle class, people: by and large they can work from home on their laptops.
But the question was about schools.
In many places - like Germany - kids don't go to school until they're 7. So, is losing one term, when you're a little kid, that serious? And older kids can remote learn.
I'm nit denying there are challenges. I'm merely asking you not to overstate them.
I live in a fairly middle class leafy suburb of Leicester, but even here it was obvious that many kids were doing very little remote learning in the last school closure, just hanging out with their mates.
The problems of the low waged in LA are not greatly less here. People have to work in some jobs, not least in healthcare where many have young children.
I am amongst the most anti-education on this site, and have long been suspicious of what school does to people and its usage as policing social conformity, but even I would blanch at complete closure.
Extending the Christmas break is probably inevitable, at least for secondary schools. Once again our government is acting too late. Announcing that before the break up would have meant that some work could have been set and planning done. The usual incompetence has manifested though.
We may not have enough home delivery slots for every household but we probably do to cover every household with over 60s living there. Other country involved the army in door to door food distribution. Do that if necessary.
Blackrock’s quite casual inference that kids must continue paying the price fills me with a burning a rage. How much more do you want them to give?
They’ve already missed out on 3 months of education when normally a a few days truancy results in a fine. I can tell you first hand what almost a year of sub par social interaction does to them. Their malleable minds are being bent ever further by social media as what else is there? They’re inheriting the consequences of another £450bn of debt monetisation that will only serve to make it harder to eventually earn their way to prosperity versus all the happy asset holders that preside here. Do you know how heartbreaking it is for a 3 year to look sadly into your masked face at the school gate and ask when his teacher will be able to see your face? And all this without focusing on the kids in the section of society that Marcus Rashford champions, who in a lot of cases have had things unimaginably bad in 2020.
If you’re really that worries about supercovid, all members of any household with a +60yr old should go into a Tier 10 until that person is vaccinated. No leaving the home at all, except for medical appointments. Such households with school age children and teachers should be moved up to the very top of the priority list for vaccination. By the end of Jan we’d have vaxxed all health workers, all at risk teachers and all vulnerable people living with kids.
Everyone else can sensibly go about their business in whatever geographic tier is most appropriate.
We make our choices as a society on who we move heaven and earth to protect and we always find a way to do so. With £450bn of QE, a £15k buy-to-let tax cut, and blunt lockdowns with little to no risk segmentation by age for a disease that does not affect the young, we have clearly made ours. And it it saddens me to my core.
If risk segmentation had a chance of working - and if there were no vaccine, and no imminent prospect of one, then we would have to give it a roll - then the new variant has probably ended that. A national effort to seal off the oldies is as all well and good (although there are so many of them I doubt that the home delivery capacity of the supermarkets could cope, even with help from our small and already stretched army,) but a middle-aged man on a CPAP machine takes up one hospital bed the same way as a 90-year-old on a ventilator does. Resorting to these horrible lockdowns over and over again isn't being done to save doddery dears at the expense of our long suffering children, and trust me, I understand that a lot of them are bloody long suffering too. It's being done to prevent the healthcare system from keeling over.
Logically, with much of the economy already having been shut down and masks and social distancing implemented, there's not very much left that we can do to cut down transmission. Places of worship are still permitted to hold services, so that's one obvious target, but most people aren't religious. We could shut down manufacturing and construction, but that would crush the tax base to little useful effect (most of that kind of work takes place outdoors, or in indoor settings where you do not have thirty people clustered together in a small room.) We could shut down essential retail, but clearly the capacity to home deliver to the whole nation doesn't exist so everybody would soon begin to starve. That leaves the schools and universities.
You can get as angry as you like about the way in which society, in more general terms, keeps prioritising the interests of the old over the young, and I agree with you about that. The pension triple lock is utterly indefensible by any measure except one: that politicians are terrified of scrapping it because the old are numerous, getting more numerous by the year, and they vote in large numbers. The "but I paid my taxes!" tendency amongst the grey vote - what I refer to as the stickbangers - will defend their interest by picking whichever party will stuff their mouths with gold. The resulting age divide in politics is frightening: the intergenerational contract has broken down. But how is bathing the country in a vat of Covid going to solve that problem? A public health cataclysm (which will inflict huge collateral damage on the young and the middle-aged, as well as killing a lot of older and medically vulnerable people) is not the answer.
Hard to believe the amount of selfish tossers on here, upset that they have to actually look after their own children, whining about pensioners who have worked all their lives getting 10 or 20 pounds a month rise. Is it any wonder the country is F****d when you have so many spineless, whining , over privileged numpty nothings only caring about themselves and how much money they deserve to have. Pathetic cretins.
Then he should submit a series of papers to the MHRA, setting out the evidence for abandoning the previously agreed regime for administering each of the vaccines, so that it may be properly considered.
We currently do not have the infrastructure to move very fast to beat this epidemic. Testing takes months, manufacturing vaccines takes months, and vaccinating people will take months. Meanwhile, the virus is not only infecting and killing people, but also mutating and it could become able to defeat the vaccines by the time they are finally rolled out.
In 1348 we did not have the ability to create vaccines against the Black Death (the first vaccine from dead plague bacteria was created in 1890). In 2020 we have the technology to create vaccines against COVID-19, but it takes so long that there is still no end in sight.
Speed is of the essence in dealing with an epidemic. We need to explore every way of rolling the vaccines out faster, and Tony Blair's suggestion is well worth considering. The fact that to do this means following a slow and bureaucratic process involving large committees of experts illustrates that we are currently just not organised to develop vaccines quickly.
This could become critical if ever Disease X appears, possibly out of the African rain forests. This would spread like COVID and have a death rate like Ebola. We will really need vaccines available fast when/if this happens.
If that last scenario were ever to happen then everyone would be too scared to leave the house and civilizational collapse would occur.
It's also not plausible - that combination of rapid death and transmissibility is implausible. You'd need the ability for the virus to survive on fomites for an extended period.
(Don't worry about Ebola. Look at Marburg's Disease if you want to scare yourself. Mutate it to include respiratory transmission - there is an argument that some people make that this was actually the Black Death vs. Yersinia pestis transmitted bubonic plague. Read the following if you don't want to sleep tonight:
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
That's a fair point.
*BUT*
Here in Los Angeles, schools have been closed since March. They have successfully distributed laptops to all students. (We passed, because we have our own.)
Kids are doing OK. Not all, sure. And younger kids are finding it harder. But they're doing OK.
Before CV19, there were people - thousands in the UK alone - who were too remote from their local school. And you know, they turned out OK.
There's this bonkers fear that anything that deviates from just how things have been the last few years will cause some kind of massive harm. Humans are resilient. We do ok.
Social inequalities in schooling will only grow as a result.
Also, closed schools don't seem to have controlled the epidemic in LA, even without the presence of mutant Covid-19.
That's a different point.
Los Angeles - like many US cities - has a CV19 problem. People in low end jobs - in delivery, in retail, in kitchens, in factories - they have to go to work.
Nogotowork. Nogetpaid.
And this is an expensive place to live.
It's hard working these jobs safely. But there's no safety net. So you do it.
Wealthy, middle class, people: by and large they can work from home on their laptops.
But the question was about schools.
In many places - like Germany - kids don't go to school until they're 7. So, is losing one term, when you're a little kid, that serious? And older kids can remote learn.
I'm nit denying there are challenges. I'm merely asking you not to overstate them.
I live in a fairly middle class leafy suburb of Leicester, but even here it was obvious that many kids were doing very little remote learning in the last school closure, just hanging out with their mates.
The problems of the low waged in LA are not greatly less here. People have to work in some jobs, not least in healthcare where many have young children.
I am amongst the most anti-education on this site, and have long been suspicious of what school does to people and its usage as policing social conformity, but even I would blanch at complete closure.
Extending the Christmas break is probably inevitable, at least for secondary schools. Once again our government is acting too late. Announcing that before the break up would have meant that some work could have been set and planning done. The usual incompetence has manifested though.
You know how much schooling kids have missed? The summer term in 2020. And maybe a few weeks from 2021.
That's nothing. That's negligible. That will have next to no impact on life outcomes.
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
That's a fair point.
*BUT*
Here in Los Angeles, schools have been closed since March. They have successfully distributed laptops to all students. (We passed, because we have our own.)
Kids are doing OK. Not all, sure. And younger kids are finding it harder. But they're doing OK.
Before CV19, there were people - thousands in the UK alone - who were too remote from their local school. And you know, they turned out OK.
There's this bonkers fear that anything that deviates from just how things have been the last few years will cause some kind of massive harm. Humans are resilient. We do ok.
Social inequalities in schooling will only grow as a result.
Also, closed schools don't seem to have controlled the epidemic in LA, even without the presence of mutant Covid-19.
That's a different point.
Los Angeles - like many US cities - has a CV19 problem. People in low end jobs - in delivery, in retail, in kitchens, in factories - they have to go to work.
Nogotowork. Nogetpaid.
And this is an expensive place to live.
It's hard working these jobs safely. But there's no safety net. So you do it.
Wealthy, middle class, people: by and large they can work from home on their laptops.
But the question was about schools.
In many places - like Germany - kids don't go to school until they're 7. So, is losing one term, when you're a little kid, that serious? And older kids can remote learn.
I'm nit denying there are challenges. I'm merely asking you not to overstate them.
Have you seen what a 3 year old is like that hasn’t interacted with another child in 6 months?
And, presumably, you know that schooling in Germany (even including kindergarden) doesn't usually start until kids are 5 or 6. Before then, it's parents, parents, parents.
Yes, but they are allowed to socialise with other households.
Looks like Kent, as a current example of an R rate forged in Tier 3 (post lockdown) is running with R at about 1.3, compared with an average around 0.9 in the earlier T3s once they stabilised.
Looks like Essex, which is an example of an R rate forged in Tier 2, is running at about 1.6, as opposed to around 1.1-1.2 typical for earlier tier 2 regimes - this might be the peak growth.
So, it does look like a numerical 0.4 on observed R rates a month or two ago.
The thought that this extra transmissibility is mostly through children passing the virus on does seem plausible. And so a quiet tier 4 Christmas will help.
R rates are similarly high across the whole East and South East. I'd do something like the following - the exact tiers would depend on the distribution signals for the new strain:
Re-tier - Be minded to make the whole SE, E and London T4. - Make all remaining areas London side of the Severn and Trent, T3. - No areas to remain in T1. - Review tiers on a daily basis.
Strengthen the current tiers a little more specifically for childrens' activities: - Tier 3 currently allows most in person out of school and leisure activities for children, socially distanced of course, to continue. This should stop, say at least for over 11s in T2, and probably for all ages in tier 3. - The extension of secondary Christmas holidays until at least 11/1, possibly with the phased return, then an additional week to half-term (13/2-28/2 would be typical). The first week to ensure schools' rapid testing can be set up successfully. (we can see a little why it was sudden now, but breathing space will be no bad thing). - Option for secondary schools to run part remote where they are set up for that. Teaching should continue for all pupils but a lot more discretion given as to how - the central question being can they teach their pupils well enough by that mode. - Parents encouraged to minimise childrens' current bus use.
I like the idea that T5 could be like March lockdown, but I wouldn't deploy that yet (T4 with the schools off for Xmad is pretty close to this).
If the principal remaining causes of transmission are supermarket shopping and schools, and we cannot stop the former because the home delivery capacity of the nation won't keep everybody fed, then why don't we simply dispense with the game of kiddie hokey-cokey and go back to remote learning?
The sooner the kids are out of circulation, the sooner the disease (hopefully) comes under control, and the earlier we can start to let people back out again once the vaccination programme is well advanced? If we can get the caseload right the way down then it might be possible to, for example, get children back to school once we've got as far as jabbing all the over 70s and the shielders, rather than needing to wait until we've got down as far as the over 60s or over 55s, because the hospitals are still too full to risk it?
You do realise there are kids who desperately NEED school, not just for learning, but for socialising, maturing, interacting, growing up? Blithely closing down the schools, for months at a time, is mad. And doing it to save the old?
Moreover, if you close the schools you shutter the economy in a particularly vicious way. It means millions of parents have to stay home to look after the kids. It is a brutal blow to economic activity.
This is why the government - which has got many things wrong - has rightly striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost.
Again, the myth that children are being cruelly sacrificed to grant demented octogenarians an extra six months of life.
The issue isn't that we must save the elderly at any cost, it's that if the disease makes enough people sick at once then the healthcare system will implode, and take down anybody - young and old alike - who needs treatment for everything.
The Government has striven to keep the schools open at almost any cost. Almost. They're prepared to shut down the whole of hospitality, any retailers we can get by without, leisure facilities which benefit millions by providing health-improving exercise and force extended families to stay physically apart for months on end, as well as to ruin people's Christmas plans at the last minute - and yet, the Tier 4 advice still permits in-person tuition to continue. It will be practically the last thing to go. Nobody wants it to go. If it wasn't absolutely necessary then I wouldn't want it to go.
This all comes down to a calculation about how many people have to suffer and die in order that kids can keep going to school, which is the sort of trade off we make all the time in society. A certain number of people, including children of course, die on the roads every year because we don't reimpose the Red Flag Act. The social benefits of saving those lives would be outweighed by the damage caused to others, so we let them die. It's simply my contention that making children put up with remote learning for two, three, four months is less bad than the consequences of allowing schools to resume their function as coronavirus petri dishes, when the disease is running rampant in large swathes of the land and the new variant is liable to spread everywhere in the fullness of time. It's the least worst option.
I've argued a lot with you of late, but that's a really excellent post.
It’s weakness is that it conjures up remote learning as if it’s always some middle class kid sitting up in his or her bedroom learning via a new laptop.
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
That's a fair point.
*BUT*
Here in Los Angeles, schools have been closed since March. They have successfully distributed laptops to all students. (We passed, because we have our own.)
Kids are doing OK. Not all, sure. And younger kids are finding it harder. But they're doing OK.
Before CV19, there were people - thousands in the UK alone - who were too remote from their local school. And you know, they turned out OK.
There's this bonkers fear that anything that deviates from just how things have been the last few years will cause some kind of massive harm. Humans are resilient. We do ok.
Social inequalities in schooling will only grow as a result.
Also, closed schools don't seem to have controlled the epidemic in LA, even without the presence of mutant Covid-19.
That's a different point.
Los Angeles - like many US cities - has a CV19 problem. People in low end jobs - in delivery, in retail, in kitchens, in factories - they have to go to work.
Nogotowork. Nogetpaid.
And this is an expensive place to live.
It's hard working these jobs safely. But there's no safety net. So you do it.
Wealthy, middle class, people: by and large they can work from home on their laptops.
But the question was about schools.
In many places - like Germany - kids don't go to school until they're 7. So, is losing one term, when you're a little kid, that serious? And older kids can remote learn.
I'm nit denying there are challenges. I'm merely asking you not to overstate them.
It is nothing for children , I took my daughter out of school and she spent 2 years living it up in California, improved her life skills, swimming ability and generally had a great couple of years. Came back and 2 years later got all her O Levels / highers and degree etc with little problem. Learnt far more than she ever would have in school.
Even people with zero interest in politics would love nothing better than to see him hanging on Westminster Bridge.
Not true, in fact a disgusting comment.
Roger poisons political debate and discredits the site with those kind of comments.
Have to say he is one of my favourite posters.
Of course he is.
Unfortunately if you have a bit of life about you and are not a whiner you are not very popular. Some real lightweight jessie boys on here with ideas well above their stations and abilities.
Comments
It is remarkable how many on the right seem to hang on his every word.
They wouldn't have liked Eric Blair as PM.
Jesus the SNP aren't even very left wing, they've been allowed to pretend they were left wing for years because Labour has never bothered to oppose.
Like Brexit, Labour needs to neutralise Independence and then attack the SNP on policy. Blair got this years ago
In 1348 we did not have the ability to create vaccines against the Black Death (the first vaccine from dead plague bacteria was created in 1890). In 2020 we have the technology to create vaccines against COVID-19, but it takes so long that there is still no end in sight.
Speed is of the essence in dealing with an epidemic. We need to explore every way of rolling the vaccines out faster, and Tony Blair's suggestion is well worth considering. The fact that to do this means following a slow and bureaucratic process involving large committees of experts illustrates that we are currently just not organised to develop vaccines quickly.
This could become critical if ever Disease X appears, possibly out of the African rain forests. This would spread like COVID and have a death rate like Ebola. We will really need vaccines available fast when/if this happens.
Effectively transplanting the school hols to Winter will be total shit for all concerned, both in and of itself and because the long Summer holiday will bite the dust at the point that everybody will be desperate for it, but we can always grant staff and pupils alike forgiveness from the no holiday in term time edicts for a week, so that they can still go somewhere in this country (because foreign holidays will probably need longer than that to open up properly again.)
It's imperfect, but 2021 is going to be a pretty bloody far from perfect year, so...
Johnson Does Lockdown 2: still open for business
Johnson Does Lockdown 3: they keep on coming
Groucho Marx-12 children!!
Mrs Rosenbloom-Yes 12 children. I love my husband.
Groucho Marx-I love my cigar but I take it out once in a while.
Supporting Independence is a disaster for Labour.
People that want it will just vote SNP anyway and if you don't you'll not bother or vote Tory.
Then the question about how you look to English/Welsh voters. Strategically opposing but supporting devolution (including for England) is the best play.
Labour needs to make it clear it won't work with the SNP, even if in reality it does
But I can't see it happening because of the teaching unions (and also all the other people who support schools being open).
I know schools near me were actually planning to ADD an extra week to the next summer holidays to account for an extra week of term they did after lockdown 1 to make up for some of the lost time in the original extended school closure.
It's normally a curiously unbalanced affair. There are half a dozen teams from small Caribbean islands, three US, five Mexican and one Canadian team.
And every year, a Mexican team wins.
This year, it's Tigres vs LAFC.
LAFC has knocked out three Mexican teams, including reigning Liga MX Champion Leon, along the way.
Could this be the year when a US team (admittedly one packed with South Americans) wins?
Of course he was pretty happy. It was the most left wing government he experienced in the UK. But wasn't radical enough for his tastes.
And as for people who support schools being open no matter what, just say the schools will be open but at a different time than usual. Offer them the choice between face-to-face learning now accompanied by mass carnage, Zoom now, or a break now and face-to-face learning later in the year, and they might actually see the benefits of the latter (after moaning loudly for a few weeks.)
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/home-flow-tests-cleared-but-come-with-warning-853vmqp7x
Only the British “capitulate”!
I mean, who’s ever heard of the French surrendering?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-55412825#:~:text=The GMB union said Nottingham,parked outside its city depot.
Quebec only stayed in Canada ultimately because of ultra devomax
Lab 41
Tories 37
Here we fucking go!
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/22/trump-final-loyalty-test-election-450183
It’s a gambit that even Republican leaders and those around Trump concede is doomed to fail, given the makeup of Congress. But that’s not the only point, according to GOP lawmakers, Trump advisers and Republican operatives.
The objections will also force Republicans in Congress to go on record voting to affirm Biden’s victory — acknowledging the outcome and likely inflaming Trump’s diehard supporters, a crucial GOP faction that has joined the president in denying the election results. Republican strategists and Trump allies inside and outside Washington said Trump’s core supporters will remember how their lawmakers vote on Jan. 6....
“This will be the new cause of the right,” said one Trump-allied GOP operative, who predicted Trump would leave office on Jan. 20 but keep animating his base with a slow drip of information to fuel election-fraud theories he’s pushing. “Joe Biden will take the oath of office and then his problems begin”....
Trump has made no secret of his plans to remain a political force after he leaves office. His closest campaign advisers have relaunched a consulting firm that aims to keep Trump’s hold on Republican politics in 2022 and beyond — with a particular focus on primary challenges to Republicans Trump has clashed with in recent months.'
I also look at this from the north as well. Case numbers are steady-ish, relatively low, and very low prevalence of b the variant.
So, the thing is also when to act nationally and when locally. I don't see need for a national lockdown now, but we've got to be prepared to move faster than we have before when the numbers develop.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/22/tier-4-widened-boxing-day/
The supermarket chain’s move, which was announced in an email to customers, it said was to make sure the products do not run out. Shoppers will be allowed to buy up to three of each item."
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/tesco-buying-limits-products-eggs-rice-soap-toilet-roll-covid-b446395.html
The reality we are dealing with is that school is, for many kids, providing both essential childcare so that parents are able to get out and do their jobs, and providing a refuge from home environments that are simply unsuitable for remote learning, and often unpleasant in a whole variety of ways.
It is the emerging evidence of the consequences from the earlier lockdown when kids were forced to be at home that has informed the government making it the absolutely last thing they want to do again.
In good news this morning, Pfizer vaccines have started arriving in the sandpit
*BUT*
Here in Los Angeles, schools have been closed since March. They have successfully distributed laptops to all students. (We passed, because we have our own.)
Kids are doing OK. Not all, sure. And younger kids are finding it harder. But they're doing OK.
Before CV19, there were people - thousands in the UK alone - who were too remote from their local school. And you know, they turned out OK.
There's this bonkers fear that anything that deviates from just how things have been the last few years will cause some kind of massive harm. Humans are resilient. We do ok.
And Francis, yes, I fear so.
However, given present circumstances, what do we do? Besides anything else, if the hospitals buckle under the strain then sick children will suffer and die from delayed or withdrawn treatment, along with the rest of the population.
For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not one of the people who thinks that every child has a wonderful and supportive home learning experience, with good quality provision in a conducive environment. That's very far from the truth. We also discussed last night if there was anything that could be done to tip the balance back in favour of getting as much face-to-face teaching done as possible, and came up with the idea that we scrap the long school Summer holidays next year and bring the leave forward into the period immediately after Christmas instead. That's also far from ideal for all sorts of reasons, but if there's no school at all until mid-February, and then catch-up time through July and August (which should, pray God, be late enough in the year for the Plague to finally be under some kind of control and have the classrooms up and running again,) then that ought to do undo a lot of the damage from a Winter lockdown.
Anyway, we can do our best to get creative and help children as much as possible, but at the end of the day if sending them home is the only tool we have left to tackle the spiralling caseload then it'll have to be done. And it would be far better if the decision were to be taken now than if it were to be forced by events a few weeks down the line, with the result that it starts later but then has to last longer.
Blackrock’s quite casual inference that kids must continue paying the price fills me with a burning a rage. How much more do you want them to give?
They’ve already missed out on 3 months of education when normally a a few days truancy results in a fine. I can tell you first hand what almost a year of sub par social interaction does to them. Their malleable minds are being bent ever further by social media as what else is there? They’re inheriting the consequences of another £450bn of debt monetisation that will only serve to make it harder to eventually earn their way to prosperity versus all the happy asset holders that preside here. Do you know how heartbreaking it is for a 3 year to look sadly into your masked face at the school gate and ask when his teacher will be able to see your face? And all this without focusing on the kids in the section of society that Marcus Rashford champions, who in a lot of cases have had things unimaginably bad in 2020.
If you’re really that worries about supercovid, all members of any household with a +60yr old should go into a Tier 10 until that person is vaccinated. No leaving the home at all, except for medical appointments. Such households with school age children and teachers should be moved up to the very top of the priority list for vaccination. By the end of Jan we’d have vaxxed all health workers, all at risk teachers and all vulnerable people living with kids.
Everyone else can sensibly go about their business in whatever geographic tier is most appropriate.
We make our choices as a society on who we move heaven and earth to protect and we always find a way to do so. With £450bn of QE, a £15k buy-to-let tax cut, and blunt lockdowns with little to no risk segmentation by age for a disease that does not affect the young, we have clearly made ours. And it it saddens me to my core.
The poll in the header shows how little true enthusiasm there is for Brexit.
I'm also not sure vaccinating children is viable. Pfizer's vaccine hasn't been tested on under 18's. So schools become big viral vectors and that then impinges on the whole of society including parents and carers as well as the elderly.
There's no easy solution to this and losing one's temper over it is as bad as doing so in the classroom.
I have a school age child, by the way.
Also, closed schools don't seem to have controlled the epidemic in LA, even without the presence of mutant Covid-19.
Logically, with much of the economy already having been shut down and masks and social distancing implemented, there's not very much left that we can do to cut down transmission. Places of worship are still permitted to hold services, so that's one obvious target, but most people aren't religious. We could shut down manufacturing and construction, but that would crush the tax base to little useful effect (most of that kind of work takes place outdoors, or in indoor settings where you do not have thirty people clustered together in a small room.) We could shut down essential retail, but clearly the capacity to home deliver to the whole nation doesn't exist so everybody would soon begin to starve. That leaves the schools and universities.
You can get as angry as you like about the way in which society, in more general terms, keeps prioritising the interests of the old over the young, and I agree with you about that. The pension triple lock is utterly indefensible by any measure except one: that politicians are terrified of scrapping it because the old are numerous, getting more numerous by the year, and they vote in large numbers. The "but I paid my taxes!" tendency amongst the grey vote - what I refer to as the stickbangers - will defend their interest by picking whichever party will stuff their mouths with gold. The resulting age divide in politics is frightening: the intergenerational contract has broken down. But how is bathing the country in a vat of Covid going to solve that problem? A public health cataclysm (which will inflict huge collateral damage on the young and the middle-aged, as well as killing a lot of older and medically vulnerable people) is not the answer.
What I think could be a good compromise is for secondary to go to remote working. They are old enough and good enough with technology for it to work. The older ones can tend to stay at home alone if parents need to work. Primary go into school still. They are easier to bubble and they tend to have less social interactions. Finally keep pre-school settings open. Trying to work with toddlers around is almost impossible.
Just keeping secondary schools as remote work would.impact R significantly. Certainly anecdotally in recent weeks it has been far more secondary schools with cases rather than primary. I am in a T4 area.
Shameful
In fact I am going to take time out as I cannot accept such hate
Los Angeles - like many US cities - has a CV19 problem. People in low end jobs - in delivery, in retail, in kitchens, in factories - they have to go to work.
Nogotowork. Nogetpaid.
And this is an expensive place to live.
It's hard working these jobs safely. But there's no safety net. So you do it.
Wealthy, middle class, people: by and large they can work from home on their laptops.
But the question was about schools.
In many places - like Germany - kids don't go to school until they're 7. So, is losing one term, when you're a little kid, that serious? And older kids can remote learn.
I'm nit denying there are challenges. I'm merely asking you not to overstate them.
As I have said before you obviously know nothing of Scotland , have likely never been there and are an immature thick cretinous Labour drone.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/scientific-brief-emerging-variant.html
https://twitter.com/questauthority/status/1341538373412990979
Whining gits would rather be talking pish at the coffee machine about their latest purchases or how much their house price has gone up rather than actually being a parent. Get a backbone and a life, it is not all about you.
Sorry, but no. There are things that are important to do right.
They - by and large - turn out fine.
The problems of the low waged in LA are not greatly less here. People have to work in some jobs, not least in healthcare where many have young children.
I am amongst the most anti-education on this site, and have long been suspicious of what school does to people and its usage as policing social conformity, but even I would blanch at complete closure.
Extending the Christmas break is probably inevitable, at least for secondary schools. Once again our government is acting too late. Announcing that before the break up would have meant that some work could have been set and planning done. The usual incompetence has manifested though.
I think tarring and feathering of a debagged BoZo is all that is required.
(Don't worry about Ebola. Look at Marburg's Disease if you want to scare yourself. Mutate it to include respiratory transmission - there is an argument that some people make that this was actually the Black Death vs. Yersinia pestis transmitted bubonic plague. Read the following if you don't want to sleep tonight:
https://pmj.bmj.com/content/81/955/315 )
That's nothing. That's negligible. That will have next to no impact on life outcomes.