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.
Children legally have to be in school from age 6 in Germany. And the vast majority of children are in kindergartens from age 3 (there is a legal right to a place from 3), many earlier.
It's not even about losing a term of teaching. It is pretty serious not to see any other children for weeks on end for under 10s.
Meanwhile, yesterday saw a new record death toll in Germany from Covid - 962. The numbers of new infections on the other hand is about the same as last week. I'm not sure if this means that the new variant was already here and was responsible for the rapid rise in the last 3 weeks, and the latest restrictions are now making the numbers level off OR the new variant hasn't taken off here yet, and things are about to get a lot worse. Or maybe the new variant is a bit of a mirage.
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.
If you live in rural areas, like my wife did growing up, you didn't have close friends you hung out with every day. You had your family.
Before Covid, that was the case for tens of thousands of people.
For a few months, that has been the case for all of us.
Not only that, but those few months have been during a time when you can Zoom, when you can play Among Us, when stream Disney on demand.
I'm not saying this is fun.
But this is a few months. And a few months where conditions are far less isolating than half the population endured fifty years ago.
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.
Did you keep her isolated from all other children for those 2 years?
"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."
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.
Is that the best you could come up with, read your posts you self important twit. Big jessie boy with your burning rage yet when answered you just say "boring". Jog on loser.
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.
Again, wrong. 95% of children in Germany between ages 3 and 6 go to kindergarten.
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.
He has offended plenty this last week with his Adolf speech about how he will decide what the people of Scotland want and they will have no say in it. Popular he is not.
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.
Morning Malc. Up and about early today. Personally, it's quite a good day today; the gifts we sent three weeks ago to our family in Thailand have arrived. And a long, cheerful, letter from a much younger cousin in Kiwi-land, who reports that the family is well, and thatches business is doing well.
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?
You lazy git, get off your butt and take them out now and again.
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.
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.
Did you keep her isolated from all other children for those 2 years?
She never went to school but obviously met with lots of people including children her own age. We did lots of travelling and generally had a great life apart from having to go to work now and again.
There is no need to have anyone isolated just now. My grandsons still meet friends , not as ideal as normal life and not as regularly but they are not imprisoned in the house for months on end.
"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."
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if that is the outcome.
Teenagers should, though, be learning a lot of social skills by physical social interaction.
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...
OK, just to explain the issue with your idea:
That would mean continuous teaching from roughly the 1st June to the 18th December. Or rather more than five months.
It just can’t be done. Seven weeks of teaching is as long as anyone can go without a break (in fact, I have always thought the autumn term is too long) as otherwise staff (and many students) will simply collapse.
It’s not like working in an office, where you do light, easy work sitting down in a controlled environment with the opportunity to break off and gossip for five minutes when you need to, and you can book time off to suit yourself. Teaching is an exhausting process where you have to do everything you would do in an office job, and mark, and plan, and control thirty children a large percentage of whom don’t want to be there or do what you tell them.
The nearest equivalent would be office working from home while looking after a toddler, cooking a meal, simultaneously trying to deal with a door to door salesman while fixing a leak in the roof.
You would have to build, I would guess, three two week breaks into that period - one from mid July to the start of August, one from mid September to the end of September, and one in mid-November. Otherwise, literally nobody would turn up to teach and there would be no schooling at all.
So ultimately I don’t think you would gain much time from it. Arguably, it would be the right thing to do longer term - breaking the current 14 weeks up to have no more than three weeks at one time, rather than nearly half in a clump, would have all sorts of benefits - but it isn’t as simple as ‘just move it.’
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.
Morning Malc. Up and about early today. Personally, it's quite a good day today; the gifts we sent three weeks ago to our family in Thailand have arrived. And a long, cheerful, letter from a much younger cousin in Kiwi-land, who reports that the family is well, and thatches business is doing well.
Morning OKC, good to hear you and family are all doing well. Hard to believe the whinging on here from over privileged spoilt brats on here who would have pensioners put down because they get 20 or 30 pounds a month increase. Pathetic to read, hard to believe how spineless and selfish they are nowadays. PS: just getting a few posts in before I start working. I will be ready for any slackers or whingers now my dander is up.
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.
Is that the best you could come up with, read your posts you self important twit. Big jessie boy with your burning rage yet when answered you just say "boring". Jog on loser.
I shall. There are far better things to do on 23rd Dec than listen to poisonous and bitter souls like you. Feel free to bark into the void about how much you hate the English.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
Does he have data to support this novel protocol? Perhaps we could find 30,000 people and run a three-arm comparative study and then determine the answer?
"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.
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.
If you live in rural areas, like my wife did growing up, you didn't have close friends you hung out with every day. You had your family.
Before Covid, that was the case for tens of thousands of people.
For a few months, that has been the case for all of us.
Not only that, but those few months have been during a time when you can Zoom, when you can play Among Us, when stream Disney on demand.
I'm not saying this is fun.
But this is a few months. And a few months where conditions are far less isolating than half the population endured fifty years ago.
Let's say it's a year (March to March-ish).
That's around 10% of a child's life. All they've known.
The equivalent of many years for us lot. And they don't have the benefit of having become cynical old bastards.
Socialising, safeguarding, proper education and more. All absolutely vital for children.
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.
Did you keep her isolated from all other children for those 2 years?
She never went to school but obviously met with lots of people including children her own age. We did lots of travelling and generally had a great life apart from having to go to work now and again.
There is no need to have anyone isolated just now. My grandsons still meet friends , not as ideal as normal life and not as regularly but they are not imprisoned in the house for months on end.
Sure, but if the point of closing schools is to stop children giving each other coronavirus, it does defeat the purpose if they are then meeting "lots of people" (especially with "lots of travelling"). At least in school it's a defined bubble, with distancing rules, staff getting tested every week and automatic contact tracing if there is a case - at least that what it is like in my son's school.
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.
That’s another important point - quite possibly, and particularly in lower income areas, you may get MORE social interaction between kids, as well as a host of other problems, if they aren’t in school all day.
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 an unusually naive post, Ian. Do you honestly think the government cares about evidence? Or indeed, about children?
The reason they have kept schools open is they promised with their shiny new policies that they would be safe, and screamed and shouted and stamped their feet and made actual physical threats when told that they were wrong.
But now the unions have been proven right on every single point, the government cannot afford to be seen to be beaten by them, as they know it will play badly. Plus, being naturally dishonest and stupid, lying and bullying comes naturally to them. That is why we had probably illegal threats made to schools by Nick Gibb, a man whose failure in everything he has tried is total and therefore has a pathological need to be seen to be in control, to stay open even though the government has now had to lock down and suspend reopening.
These people are utter scum. They need to be put on trial and jailed.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
Does he have data to support this novel protocol? Perhaps we could find 30,000 people and run a three-arm comparative study and then determine the answer?
Florey stuck penicillin into one sick policeman, Jenner inoculated one child. Don't be so precious.
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.
If you live in rural areas, like my wife did growing up, you didn't have close friends you hung out with every day. You had your family.
Before Covid, that was the case for tens of thousands of people.
For a few months, that has been the case for all of us.
Not only that, but those few months have been during a time when you can Zoom, when you can play Among Us, when stream Disney on demand.
I'm not saying this is fun.
But this is a few months. And a few months where conditions are far less isolating than half the population endured fifty years ago.
Let's say it's a year (March to March-ish).
That's around 10% of a child's life. All they've known.
The equivalent of many years for us lot. And they don't have the benefit of having become cynical old bastards.
Socialising, safeguarding, proper education and more. All absolutely vital for children.
I wonder if RCS's wife had any brothers or sisters growing up. Loads of children don't nowadays.
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if that is the outcome.
I would. It would mean the DfE admitting they had been lying, and they won’t be able to do that.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
Does he have data to support this novel protocol? Perhaps we could find 30,000 people and run a three-arm comparative study and then determine the answer?
To be fair, and I'm still bitching about delays locally, there's the storage issue. Heavy duty fridges need to be supplied and tested.
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.
This UK Gvt report on lockdown and children looks pretty balanced, flagging the major concerns but also that most families are resilient:
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.
Did you keep her isolated from all other children for those 2 years?
She never went to school but obviously met with lots of people including children her own age. We did lots of travelling and generally had a great life apart from having to go to work now and again.
There is no need to have anyone isolated just now. My grandsons still meet friends , not as ideal as normal life and not as regularly but they are not imprisoned in the house for months on end.
Sure, but if the point of closing schools is to stop children giving each other coronavirus, it does defeat the purpose if they are then meeting "lots of people" (especially with "lots of travelling"). At least in school it's a defined bubble, with distancing rules, staff getting tested every week and automatic contact tracing if there is a case - at least that what it is like in my son's school.
Staff are not being tested every week, nor are there distancing rules for children. Even if there were, this funny thing called the ‘start and end of the school day’ would make them unenforceable.
There was a post the other day about how the impact of no deal had been analyzed from all angles, how come they missed the basic needs of people stuck in a three day traffic jam, toilets, wash facilities and food to name a few. If this is typical of their planning ability god help you
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 an unusually naive post, Ian. Do you honestly think the government cares about evidence? Or indeed, about children?
The reason they have kept schools open is they promised with their shiny new policies that they would be safe, and screamed and shouted and stamped their feet and made actual physical threats when told that they were wrong.
But now the unions have been proven right on every single point, the government cannot afford to be seen to be beaten by them, as they know it will play badly. Plus, being naturally dishonest and stupid, lying and bullying comes naturally to them. That is why we had probably illegal threats made to schools by Nick Gibb, a man whose failure in everything he has tried is total and therefore has a pathological need to be seen to be in control, to stay open even though the government has now had to lock down and suspend reopening.
These people are utter scum. They need to be put on trial and jailed.
Having a bad day? Or (virtual) drinking with Malc?
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 an unusually naive post, Ian. Do you honestly think the government cares about evidence? Or indeed, about children?
The reason they have kept schools open is they promised with their shiny new policies that they would be safe, and screamed and shouted and stamped their feet and made actual physical threats when told that they were wrong.
But now the unions have been proven right on every single point, the government cannot afford to be seen to be beaten by them, as they know it will play badly. Plus, being naturally dishonest and stupid, lying and bullying comes naturally to them. That is why we had probably illegal threats made to schools by Nick Gibb, a man whose failure in everything he has tried is total and therefore has a pathological need to be seen to be in control, to stay open even though the government has now had to lock down and suspend reopening.
These people are utter scum. They need to be put on trial and jailed.
Having a bad day? Or (virtual) drinking with Malc?
I’m stating facts. That’s irrelevant to the time of day.
I am quite deeply frustrated at the ignorance and naivety displayed on this thread proposing simplistic solutions to complex problems, but the fact that the DfE as an organisation is dangerous, corrupt from top to bottom and doesn’t contain a single person of ability in it is separate and a real ongoing issue in this country.
Hacker had the right idea. Abolish it. It couldn’t make matters worse and might make them better.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
Does he have data to support this novel protocol? Perhaps we could find 30,000 people and run a three-arm comparative study and then determine the answer?
Florey stuck penicillin into one sick policeman, Jenner inoculated one child. Don't be so precious.
The How to Vaccinate the World podcast dealt with this on its last episode. People are very reluctant to deviate from the trial design.
It is certainly a dilemma but the easiest way (for them) is to "follow the science". I can't see that changing.
Whether it should or not is I'm sure a fertile PB topic.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
Does he have data to support this novel protocol? Perhaps we could find 30,000 people and run a three-arm comparative study and then determine the answer?
To be fair, and I'm still bitching about delays locally, there's the storage issue. Heavy duty fridges need to be supplied and tested.
I have heard a story through the grapevine (not from Leics) about a hospital that ruined a batch of vaccine through incorrect storage.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
Does he have data to support this novel protocol? Perhaps we could find 30,000 people and run a three-arm comparative study and then determine the answer?
To be fair, and I'm still bitching about delays locally, there's the storage issue. Heavy duty fridges need to be supplied and tested.
And I'm assuming you don't live in sub-Saharan Africa.
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.
Having school open is much more likely to have grandparents in the childcare chain.
As schools being open is to allow people to go back to work/work expects people to come in so grandparents have to pickup the slack.
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 an unusually naive post, Ian. Do you honestly think the government cares about evidence? Or indeed, about children?
The reason they have kept schools open is they promised with their shiny new policies that they would be safe, and screamed and shouted and stamped their feet and made actual physical threats when told that they were wrong.
But now the unions have been proven right on every single point, the government cannot afford to be seen to be beaten by them, as they know it will play badly. Plus, being naturally dishonest and stupid, lying and bullying comes naturally to them. That is why we had probably illegal threats made to schools by Nick Gibb, a man whose failure in everything he has tried is total and therefore has a pathological need to be seen to be in control, to stay open even though the government has now had to lock down and suspend reopening.
These people are utter scum. They need to be put on trial and jailed.
Having a bad day? Or (virtual) drinking with Malc?
I’m stating facts. That’s irrelevant to the time of day.
I am quite deeply frustrated at the ignorance and naivety displayed on this thread proposing simplistic solutions to complex problems, but the fact that the DfE as an organisation is dangerous, corrupt from top to bottom and doesn’t contain a single person of ability in it is separate and a real ongoing issue in this country.
Hacker had the right idea. Abolish it. It couldn’t make matters worse and might make them better.
I think it is pretty obvious thinking that children especially of primary age should stay in school.
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 an unusually naive post, Ian. Do you honestly think the government cares about evidence? Or indeed, about children?
The reason they have kept schools open is they promised with their shiny new policies that they would be safe, and screamed and shouted and stamped their feet and made actual physical threats when told that they were wrong.
But now the unions have been proven right on every single point, the government cannot afford to be seen to be beaten by them, as they know it will play badly. Plus, being naturally dishonest and stupid, lying and bullying comes naturally to them. That is why we had probably illegal threats made to schools by Nick Gibb, a man whose failure in everything he has tried is total and therefore has a pathological need to be seen to be in control, to stay open even though the government has now had to lock down and suspend reopening.
These people are utter scum. They need to be put on trial and jailed.
Having a bad day? Or (virtual) drinking with Malc?
I think many of us are having a bad time right now. Even those of us who breezed through lockdown, as I feel that I did. Losing the family Christmas is a big sacrifice, and I know how it is affecting my mother in particular. Seeing all the Londoners who have come down here regardless is particularly annoying, as is knowing that all the government had to do was sustain the earlier restrictions for two or three weeks into December and we’d be looking forward to a very happy few days, instead of this.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
Does he have data to support this novel protocol? Perhaps we could find 30,000 people and run a three-arm comparative study and then determine the answer?
To be fair, and I'm still bitching about delays locally, there's the storage issue. Heavy duty fridges need to be supplied and tested.
And I'm assuming you don't live in sub-Saharan Africa.
See Dr F's post at 8.11. You just don't turn a fridge on and it drops to the required temperature. (-80deg C)
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...
OK, just to explain the issue with your idea:
That would mean continuous teaching from roughly the 1st June to the 18th December. Or rather more than five months.
It just can’t be done. Seven weeks of teaching is as long as anyone can go without a break (in fact, I have always thought the autumn term is too long) as otherwise staff (and many students) will simply collapse.
It’s not like working in an office, where you do light, easy work sitting down in a controlled environment with the opportunity to break off and gossip for five minutes when you need to, and you can book time off to suit yourself. Teaching is an exhausting process where you have to do everything you would do in an office job, and mark, and plan, and control thirty children a large percentage of whom don’t want to be there or do what you tell them.
The nearest equivalent would be office working from home while looking after a toddler, cooking a meal, simultaneously trying to deal with a door to door salesman while fixing a leak in the roof.
You would have to build, I would guess, three two week breaks into that period - one from mid July to the start of August, one from mid September to the end of September, and one in mid-November. Otherwise, literally nobody would turn up to teach and there would be no schooling at all.
So ultimately I don’t think you would gain much time from it. Arguably, it would be the right thing to do longer term - breaking the current 14 weeks up to have no more than three weeks at one time, rather than nearly half in a clump, would have all sorts of benefits - but it isn’t as simple as ‘just move it.’
When I moved school from Solihull to Atlanta, GA in 1975 I found out what a long term was like. In Dekalb County, school was eight to three, with no half terms, and only a week off at Christmas and Easter, and 3 months off in the summer. It worked fine.
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 an unusually naive post, Ian. Do you honestly think the government cares about evidence? Or indeed, about children?
The reason they have kept schools open is they promised with their shiny new policies that they would be safe, and screamed and shouted and stamped their feet and made actual physical threats when told that they were wrong.
But now the unions have been proven right on every single point, the government cannot afford to be seen to be beaten by them, as they know it will play badly. Plus, being naturally dishonest and stupid, lying and bullying comes naturally to them. That is why we had probably illegal threats made to schools by Nick Gibb, a man whose failure in everything he has tried is total and therefore has a pathological need to be seen to be in control, to stay open even though the government has now had to lock down and suspend reopening.
These people are utter scum. They need to be put on trial and jailed.
Having a bad day? Or (virtual) drinking with Malc?
I think many of us are having a bad time right now. Even those of us who breezed through lockdown, as I feel that I did. Losing the family Christmas is a big sacrifice, and I know how it is affecting my mother in particular. Seeing all the Londoners who have come down here regardless is particularly annoying, as is knowing that all the government had to do was sustain the earlier restrictions for two or three weeks into December and we’d be looking forward to a very happy few days, instead of this.
We're on the run in. Look at it as the final sprint at the end of the 26-mile marathon.
That said when I ran the marathon I rounded the last bend and thought I'd sprint in and found that my body was not in agreement and I stayed the exact same pace until the finishing line.
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...
OK, just to explain the issue with your idea:
That would mean continuous teaching from roughly the 1st June to the 18th December. Or rather more than five months.
It just can’t be done. Seven weeks of teaching is as long as anyone can go without a break (in fact, I have always thought the autumn term is too long) as otherwise staff (and many students) will simply collapse.
It’s not like working in an office, where you do light, easy work sitting down in a controlled environment with the opportunity to break off and gossip for five minutes when you need to, and you can book time off to suit yourself. Teaching is an exhausting process where you have to do everything you would do in an office job, and mark, and plan, and control thirty children a large percentage of whom don’t want to be there or do what you tell them.
The nearest equivalent would be office working from home while looking after a toddler, cooking a meal, simultaneously trying to deal with a door to door salesman while fixing a leak in the roof.
You would have to build, I would guess, three two week breaks into that period - one from mid July to the start of August, one from mid September to the end of September, and one in mid-November. Otherwise, literally nobody would turn up to teach and there would be no schooling at all.
So ultimately I don’t think you would gain much time from it. Arguably, it would be the right thing to do longer term - breaking the current 14 weeks up to have no more than three weeks at one time, rather than nearly half in a clump, would have all sorts of benefits - but it isn’t as simple as ‘just move it.’
Perhaps it's time to question the purpose of the educational system. I have five degrees, my wife and both my sons two each. We don't seem to be any more prosperous than my parents were. They, like most people then, left school at fifteen with no qualifications.
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 an unusually naive post, Ian. Do you honestly think the government cares about evidence? Or indeed, about children?
The reason they have kept schools open is they promised with their shiny new policies that they would be safe, and screamed and shouted and stamped their feet and made actual physical threats when told that they were wrong.
But now the unions have been proven right on every single point, the government cannot afford to be seen to be beaten by them, as they know it will play badly. Plus, being naturally dishonest and stupid, lying and bullying comes naturally to them. That is why we had probably illegal threats made to schools by Nick Gibb, a man whose failure in everything he has tried is total and therefore has a pathological need to be seen to be in control, to stay open even though the government has now had to lock down and suspend reopening.
These people are utter scum. They need to be put on trial and jailed.
Having a bad day? Or (virtual) drinking with Malc?
I think many of us are having a bad time right now. Even those of us who breezed through lockdown, as I feel that I did. Losing the family Christmas is a big sacrifice, and I know how it is affecting my mother in particular. Seeing all the Londoners who have come down here regardless is particularly annoying, as is knowing that all the government had to do was sustain the earlier restrictions for two or three weeks into December and we’d be looking forward to a very happy few days, instead of this.
Fair point. Our Christmas will be just Mrs C and me, instead of the family do we normally have. First time, in the (almost) 60 years since we married, that it's been 'just us".
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
Does he have data to support this novel protocol? Perhaps we could find 30,000 people and run a three-arm comparative study and then determine the answer?
To be fair, and I'm still bitching about delays locally, there's the storage issue. Heavy duty fridges need to be supplied and tested.
And I'm assuming you don't live in sub-Saharan Africa.
See Dr F's post at 8.11. You just don't turn a fridge on and it drops to the required temperature. (-80deg C)
That's my point. We are worrying about cold chains here in the UK. What about in Africa?
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.
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...
OK, just to explain the issue with your idea:
That would mean continuous teaching from roughly the 1st June to the 18th December. Or rather more than five months.
It just can’t be done. Seven weeks of teaching is as long as anyone can go without a break (in fact, I have always thought the autumn term is too long) as otherwise staff (and many students) will simply collapse.
It’s not like working in an office, where you do light, easy work sitting down in a controlled environment with the opportunity to break off and gossip for five minutes when you need to, and you can book time off to suit yourself. Teaching is an exhausting process where you have to do everything you would do in an office job, and mark, and plan, and control thirty children a large percentage of whom don’t want to be there or do what you tell them.
The nearest equivalent would be office working from home while looking after a toddler, cooking a meal, simultaneously trying to deal with a door to door salesman while fixing a leak in the roof.
You would have to build, I would guess, three two week breaks into that period - one from mid July to the start of August, one from mid September to the end of September, and one in mid-November. Otherwise, literally nobody would turn up to teach and there would be no schooling at all.
So ultimately I don’t think you would gain much time from it. Arguably, it would be the right thing to do longer term - breaking the current 14 weeks up to have no more than three weeks at one time, rather than nearly half in a clump, would have all sorts of benefits - but it isn’t as simple as ‘just move it.’
That sounds gruelling. Anyway how do you log onto PB whilst no one is looking? I think there must be Labour laws mandating time to so do.
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.
Did you keep her isolated from all other children for those 2 years?
She never went to school but obviously met with lots of people including children her own age. We did lots of travelling and generally had a great life apart from having to go to work now and again.
There is no need to have anyone isolated just now. My grandsons still meet friends , not as ideal as normal life and not as regularly but they are not imprisoned in the house for months on end.
Sure, but if the point of closing schools is to stop children giving each other coronavirus, it does defeat the purpose if they are then meeting "lots of people" (especially with "lots of travelling"). At least in school it's a defined bubble, with distancing rules, staff getting tested every week and automatic contact tracing if there is a case - at least that what it is like in my son's school.
Kamski, my example was from 1988, nothing to do with Covid, just fact that missing school did not mean children had to be badly affected.
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 an unusually naive post, Ian. Do you honestly think the government cares about evidence? Or indeed, about children?
The reason they have kept schools open is they promised with their shiny new policies that they would be safe, and screamed and shouted and stamped their feet and made actual physical threats when told that they were wrong.
But now the unions have been proven right on every single point, the government cannot afford to be seen to be beaten by them, as they know it will play badly. Plus, being naturally dishonest and stupid, lying and bullying comes naturally to them. That is why we had probably illegal threats made to schools by Nick Gibb, a man whose failure in everything he has tried is total and therefore has a pathological need to be seen to be in control, to stay open even though the government has now had to lock down and suspend reopening.
These people are utter scum. They need to be put on trial and jailed.
Having a bad day? Or (virtual) drinking with Malc?
I’m stating facts. That’s irrelevant to the time of day.
I am quite deeply frustrated at the ignorance and naivety displayed on this thread proposing simplistic solutions to complex problems, but the fact that the DfE as an organisation is dangerous, corrupt from top to bottom and doesn’t contain a single person of ability in it is separate and a real ongoing issue in this country.
Hacker had the right idea. Abolish it. It couldn’t make matters worse and might make them better.
I think it is pretty obvious thinking that children especially of primary age should stay in school.
I credit the government with understanding this.
Unions, Nick Gibb, DfE, etc all details.
Then you do not understand this government. How often do I have to explain, they do not care about children. They’ve demonstrated that amply over many years, on governance, on exams, on Covid itself. They care about being in charge and being seen to ‘win.’
Meanwhile, the children suffer and the staff and their families are put in genuine danger as a result of their actions - e.g. deciding staff do not need to isolate when there is a Covid case in the classroom, even if that child was just one metre away. Or do you not care about that?
Nobody *wants* to close schools, although too many people think it funny to make that claim because they are basically nasty. But at the moment, nobody has come up with a way to open them safely
The unions got this. They said what was proposed was unworkable and unsafe, They’ve been proved right. The government have lied, bullied, harassed, used legal threats and generally behaved like criminal lunatics to cover up their failure. They deserve no credit. None. Only jail terms.
Edit - the only way to open schools safely right now would be ‘Nightingale’ schools, with much smaller classes, staffed by newly retired or supply teachers. Not an ideal scenario, but it would have done the trick for twelve months. The government refused to consider that because they didn’t want to pay for it. It’s fine to throw money at serial failures like Harding, but not to pay to keep staff and children safe.
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.
Did you keep her isolated from all other children for those 2 years?
She never went to school but obviously met with lots of people including children her own age. We did lots of travelling and generally had a great life apart from having to go to work now and again.
There is no need to have anyone isolated just now. My grandsons still meet friends , not as ideal as normal life and not as regularly but they are not imprisoned in the house for months on end.
Sure, but if the point of closing schools is to stop children giving each other coronavirus, it does defeat the purpose if they are then meeting "lots of people" (especially with "lots of travelling"). At least in school it's a defined bubble, with distancing rules, staff getting tested every week and automatic contact tracing if there is a case - at least that what it is like in my son's school.
Kamski, my example was from 1988, nothing to do with Covid, just fact that missing school did not mean children had to be badly affected.
Missing school and going on holiday is I'm sure every child's dream Malc.
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.
Is that the best you could come up with, read your posts you self important twit. Big jessie boy with your burning rage yet when answered you just say "boring". Jog on loser.
I shall. There are far better things to do on 23rd Dec than listen to poisonous and bitter souls like you. Feel free to bark into the void about how much you hate the English.
Typical loser , try to make out I hate "the English" because I prove you are a whining over privileged tosser. I was not aware of what nationality you were you half witted cretin.
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...
OK, just to explain the issue with your idea:
That would mean continuous teaching from roughly the 1st June to the 18th December. Or rather more than five months.
It just can’t be done. Seven weeks of teaching is as long as anyone can go without a break (in fact, I have always thought the autumn term is too long) as otherwise staff (and many students) will simply collapse.
It’s not like working in an office, where you do light, easy work sitting down in a controlled environment with the opportunity to break off and gossip for five minutes when you need to, and you can book time off to suit yourself. Teaching is an exhausting process where you have to do everything you would do in an office job, and mark, and plan, and control thirty children a large percentage of whom don’t want to be there or do what you tell them.
The nearest equivalent would be office working from home while looking after a toddler, cooking a meal, simultaneously trying to deal with a door to door salesman while fixing a leak in the roof.
You would have to build, I would guess, three two week breaks into that period - one from mid July to the start of August, one from mid September to the end of September, and one in mid-November. Otherwise, literally nobody would turn up to teach and there would be no schooling at all.
So ultimately I don’t think you would gain much time from it. Arguably, it would be the right thing to do longer term - breaking the current 14 weeks up to have no more than three weeks at one time, rather than nearly half in a clump, would have all sorts of benefits - but it isn’t as simple as ‘just move it.’
That sounds gruelling. Anyway how do you log onto PB whilst no one is looking? I think there must be Labour laws mandating time to so do.
I don’t. That’s why I’m not on between 7.30 and about 6-7 in the evening when I stop work.
My contract states I must not undertake any other activities during the school day, except during my half hour lunch break. Just as it mandates I may not take time off during terms for any reason other than certified illness.
Can I also reiterate, press reports aside, for all the reasons I have said I will very surprised if schools close. Again, not because the government care about children, as they don’t,nor because they hate teachers, although they do, but because they can’t bear to admit how badly they’ve cocked up. It’s going to be their belated understanding of the Northern Ireland protocol on speed.
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.
Did you keep her isolated from all other children for those 2 years?
She never went to school but obviously met with lots of people including children her own age. We did lots of travelling and generally had a great life apart from having to go to work now and again.
There is no need to have anyone isolated just now. My grandsons still meet friends , not as ideal as normal life and not as regularly but they are not imprisoned in the house for months on end.
Sure, but if the point of closing schools is to stop children giving each other coronavirus, it does defeat the purpose if they are then meeting "lots of people" (especially with "lots of travelling"). At least in school it's a defined bubble, with distancing rules, staff getting tested every week and automatic contact tracing if there is a case - at least that what it is like in my son's school.
Kamski, my example was from 1988, nothing to do with Covid, just fact that missing school did not mean children had to be badly affected.
I agree, but I thought we were talking about children missing school to stop spreading coronavirus, not missing school in order to travel lots and meet lots of people!
Nothing about the situation is funny, except when Johnson’s touch makes it darkly ridiculous. He has a quality of anti-gravitas that extends to the whole cabinet. Their collective inadequacy is hiding in plain sight. It is not even hiding. It fills the screen completely, obscuring even the memory of competent administration.
Unmooring from facts proved to be a successful model, at least in campaign terms. Last December’s election victory seemed to confirm that Johnson’s methods would work. Brexit would be done. The distant shore that had been Britain’s natural political habitat for generations could be forgotten. There was no going back. That confidence deferred any sense of urgency about bridging the gap between the leadership qualities needed for responsible government and the character of the prime minister. Johnson and reality had competed for the loyalty of the Tory party and Johnson had won by a landslide.
Then the coronavirus turned up and the challenge it posed was qualitatively different to the political problems associated with Brexit. In theory, the value of EU membership to Britain could be empirically measured but the numbers could be disputed. Mostly the argument played out in the realms of culture, history and identity, where rival sides can dig ever deeper into rival trenches without hitting a bedrock of hard science.
That was not the case with a virus. And in a pandemic, the consequences of bad government are felt fast. The Tory leader’s Brexit repertoire of rhetorical flummery has no utility when people need urgent, practical guidance. The disease could not be tamed by optimism. The tide that swept Johnson to power marooned him on a fantasy island. The public messages he issues by way of reassurance have started to look more like distress flares.
"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."
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 an unusually naive post, Ian. Do you honestly think the government cares about evidence? Or indeed, about children?
The reason they have kept schools open is they promised with their shiny new policies that they would be safe, and screamed and shouted and stamped their feet and made actual physical threats when told that they were wrong.
But now the unions have been proven right on every single point, the government cannot afford to be seen to be beaten by them, as they know it will play badly. Plus, being naturally dishonest and stupid, lying and bullying comes naturally to them. That is why we had probably illegal threats made to schools by Nick Gibb, a man whose failure in everything he has tried is total and therefore has a pathological need to be seen to be in control, to stay open even though the government has now had to lock down and suspend reopening.
These people are utter scum. They need to be put on trial and jailed.
Having a bad day? Or (virtual) drinking with Malc?
I’m stating facts. That’s irrelevant to the time of day.
I am quite deeply frustrated at the ignorance and naivety displayed on this thread proposing simplistic solutions to complex problems, but the fact that the DfE as an organisation is dangerous, corrupt from top to bottom and doesn’t contain a single person of ability in it is separate and a real ongoing issue in this country.
Hacker had the right idea. Abolish it. It couldn’t make matters worse and might make them better.
I think it is pretty obvious thinking that children especially of primary age should stay in school.
I credit the government with understanding this.
Unions, Nick Gibb, DfE, etc all details.
Then you do not understand this government. How often do I have to explain, they do not care about children. They’ve demonstrated that amply over many years, on governance, on exams, on Covid itself. They care about being in charge and being seen to ‘win.’
Meanwhile, the children suffer and the staff and their families are put in genuine danger as a result of their actions - e.g. deciding staff do not need to isolate when there is a Covid case in the classroom, even if that child was just one metre away. Or do you not care about that?
Nobody *wants* to close schools, although too many people think it funny to make that claim because they are basically nasty. But at the moment, nobody has come up with a way to open them safely
The unions got this. They said what was proposed was unworkable and unsafe, They’ve been proved right. The government have lied, bullied, harassed, used legal threats and generally behaved like criminal lunatics to cover up their failure. They deserve no credit. None. Only jail terms.
Edit - the only way to open schools safely right now would be ‘Nightingale’ schools, with much smaller classes, staffed by newly retired or supply teachers. Not an ideal scenario, but it would have done the trick for twelve months. The government refused to consider that because they didn’t want to pay for it. It’s fine to throw money at serial failures like Harding, but not to pay to keep staff and children safe.
Surely the "about children" in your first sentence is superfluous. They don't care about anyone other than themselves, their friends and their patrons.
Schools have been a serious conduit for spreading the Pox. With Mrs RP teaching in one local primary school, daughter in another and son in the secondary academy all three schools have been riddled with it. At multiple points both primary schools were borderline on having sufficient staff still fit for work to be able to stay open. All three schools sent multiple bubbles home several times.
Teachers have been on the literal front line all term. You cannot socially distance in a school. Kids literally crushed into classrooms not designed for "covid-secure" seating layouts. Our children need educating, but the cost of doing so has been high - and that was before the Boris Bug turned up and supercharged case numbers.
What we know from these irresponsible wazzocks we call a government is that they will make the wrong decision against scientific advice, mock people saying they have got it wrong, then do a massive last second u-turn and claim they were always following the science. For all that Sturgeon was a tit for taking her mask off at that wake, at least her government has had more of a clue about how to strategise, plan and communicate.
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 an unusually naive post, Ian. Do you honestly think the government cares about evidence? Or indeed, about children?
The reason they have kept schools open is they promised with their shiny new policies that they would be safe, and screamed and shouted and stamped their feet and made actual physical threats when told that they were wrong.
But now the unions have been proven right on every single point, the government cannot afford to be seen to be beaten by them, as they know it will play badly. Plus, being naturally dishonest and stupid, lying and bullying comes naturally to them. That is why we had probably illegal threats made to schools by Nick Gibb, a man whose failure in everything he has tried is total and therefore has a pathological need to be seen to be in control, to stay open even though the government has now had to lock down and suspend reopening.
These people are utter scum. They need to be put on trial and jailed.
Having a bad day? Or (virtual) drinking with Malc?
I’m stating facts. That’s irrelevant to the time of day.
I am quite deeply frustrated at the ignorance and naivety displayed on this thread proposing simplistic solutions to complex problems, but the fact that the DfE as an organisation is dangerous, corrupt from top to bottom and doesn’t contain a single person of ability in it is separate and a real ongoing issue in this country.
Hacker had the right idea. Abolish it. It couldn’t make matters worse and might make them better.
You get criticised for the endless partisan retweets. And yet you keep posting comedy gold like this. It isn't just the government contradicting itself one interview to the next. Its the same screamingly corrupt minister contradicting himself one interview to the next.
Never mind the government not having an agreed policy or even a line to take, Jenrich can't even remember what he said half an hour earlier.
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 an unusually naive post, Ian. Do you honestly think the government cares about evidence? Or indeed, about children?
The reason they have kept schools open is they promised with their shiny new policies that they would be safe, and screamed and shouted and stamped their feet and made actual physical threats when told that they were wrong.
But now the unions have been proven right on every single point, the government cannot afford to be seen to be beaten by them, as they know it will play badly. Plus, being naturally dishonest and stupid, lying and bullying comes naturally to them. That is why we had probably illegal threats made to schools by Nick Gibb, a man whose failure in everything he has tried is total and therefore has a pathological need to be seen to be in control, to stay open even though the government has now had to lock down and suspend reopening.
These people are utter scum. They need to be put on trial and jailed.
Having a bad day? Or (virtual) drinking with Malc?
I’m stating facts. That’s irrelevant to the time of day.
I am quite deeply frustrated at the ignorance and naivety displayed on this thread proposing simplistic solutions to complex problems, but the fact that the DfE as an organisation is dangerous, corrupt from top to bottom and doesn’t contain a single person of ability in it is separate and a real ongoing issue in this country.
Hacker had the right idea. Abolish it. It couldn’t make matters worse and might make them better.
They don't like facts , they don't know how to look after their children for more than an hour. They are too used to other people having to do it for them so they can whinge at the coffee machine about how tough work is and their house has only gone up 50K this year or they need another holiday. WTF do they have children and expect everybody else to look after them.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
Does he have data to support this novel protocol? Perhaps we could find 30,000 people and run a three-arm comparative study and then determine the answer?
To be fair, and I'm still bitching about delays locally, there's the storage issue. Heavy duty fridges need to be supplied and tested.
I have heard a story through the grapevine (not from Leics) about a hospital that ruined a batch of vaccine through incorrect storage.
Can I also reiterate, press reports aside, for all the reasons I have said I will very surprised if schools close. Again, not because the government care about children, as they don’t,nor because they hate teachers, although they do, but because they can’t bear to admit how badly they’ve cocked up. It’s going to be their belated understanding of the Northern Ireland protocol on speed.
Maybe that's the answer.
Boris should just pass a law, or write a letter saying "Notwithstanding the evidence that Covid-19 exists, I don't want it to. So I say it doesn't exist and I'm the bally Prime Minister."
It's what he seems to do for everything else.
(And my learned friend is right about schools. Of course. I'll just add the point that the choice isn't schools open or closed, it's schools closed in a systematic planned way, or schools closing piecemeal as they collapse under the weight of absences.)
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...
OK, just to explain the issue with your idea:
That would mean continuous teaching from roughly the 1st June to the 18th December. Or rather more than five months.
It just can’t be done. Seven weeks of teaching is as long as anyone can go without a break (in fact, I have always thought the autumn term is too long) as otherwise staff (and many students) will simply collapse.
It’s not like working in an office, where you do light, easy work sitting down in a controlled environment with the opportunity to break off and gossip for five minutes when you need to, and you can book time off to suit yourself. Teaching is an exhausting process where you have to do everything you would do in an office job, and mark, and plan, and control thirty children a large percentage of whom don’t want to be there or do what you tell them.
The nearest equivalent would be office working from home while looking after a toddler, cooking a meal, simultaneously trying to deal with a door to door salesman while fixing a leak in the roof.
You would have to build, I would guess, three two week breaks into that period - one from mid July to the start of August, one from mid September to the end of September, and one in mid-November. Otherwise, literally nobody would turn up to teach and there would be no schooling at all.
So ultimately I don’t think you would gain much time from it. Arguably, it would be the right thing to do longer term - breaking the current 14 weeks up to have no more than three weeks at one time, rather than nearly half in a clump, would have all sorts of benefits - but it isn’t as simple as ‘just move it.’
That sounds gruelling. Anyway how do you log onto PB whilst no one is looking? I think there must be Labour laws mandating time to so do.
I don’t. That’s why I’m not on between 7.30 and about 6-7 in the evening when I stop work.
My contract states I must not undertake any other activities during the school day, except during my half hour lunch break. Just as it mandates I may not take time off during terms for any reason other than certified illness.
Off topic
I was being facetious. My late father was a maths teacher. Even when he was Deputy Head of a comp, both he and the Head had mandated teaching time (although the Head, not much) and he would return home with a pile of exercise books to go through each night, and this was in the days before formal written lesson planning was expected.
It must also be frustrating too, that as everyone went to school, everyone "knows" how to be a teacher
Can I also reiterate, press reports aside, for all the reasons I have said I will very surprised if schools close. Again, not because the government care about children, as they don’t,nor because they hate teachers, although they do, but because they can’t bear to admit how badly they’ve cocked up. It’s going to be their belated understanding of the Northern Ireland protocol on speed.
Maybe that's the answer.
Boris should just pass a law, or write a letter saying "Notwithstanding the evidence that Covid-19 exists, I don't want it to. So I say it doesn't exist and I'm the bally Prime Minister."
It's what he seems to do for everything else.
(And my learned friend is right about schools. Of course. I'll just add the point that the choice isn't schools open or closed, it's schools closed in a systematic planned way, or schools closing piecemeal as they collapse under the weight of absences.)
Close the schools intentionally and you need to sort out exams.
Keep the schools "open" and you don't need to sort out exams immediately - that can wait until the issue becomes unavoidable in May.
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?
You get criticised for the endless partisan retweets. And yet you keep posting comedy gold like this. It isn't just the government contradicting itself one interview to the next. Its the same screamingly corrupt minister contradicting himself one interview to the next.
Never mind the government not having an agreed policy or even a line to take, Jenrich can't even remember what he said half an hour earlier.
For once I have some sympathy with the hapless minister. Who - even in Johnson's own Cabinet - would be willing to bet that the PM wont suddenly change the plans of millions with 48 hours notice, given the track record to date?
I suspect he gave the truthful answer at 7:45 and was immediately contacted by Allegra and told to change tack and be clearer.
Edit: So I think we can be sure there will be a sudden change to xmas arrangements by 5pm tonight.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
Does he have data to support this novel protocol? Perhaps we could find 30,000 people and run a three-arm comparative study and then determine the answer?
Florey stuck penicillin into one sick policeman, Jenner inoculated one child. Don't be so precious.
The How to Vaccinate the World podcast dealt with this on its last episode. People are very reluctant to deviate from the trial design.
It is certainly a dilemma but the easiest way (for them) is to "follow the science". I can't see that changing.
Whether it should or not is I'm sure a fertile PB topic.
I was surprised by the immunologist on R4 this morning who claimed it was a no brainer as the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine single dose is 90%.
What he didn't note was that rate of effectiveness is only demonstrated for the period between the first and second dose. We have no data at all for any longer time period.
There's certainly a case to be made, but not dishonestly or stupidly.
Yep, everyone to be either tested or prove they are vaccinated before getting on a international flight. Will likely be standard everywhere in the next couple of months.
There’s definitely going to be some structural changes around business travel though, as people have learned to work remotely this year without a massive drop in productivity.
Vaccination starts is Spain 27/12 each recipient will get a card proving they have had it with the necessary details on it. Those who refuse will not be forced to have it but will be ‘encouraged’ to take part in a survey to find out why. The UK gov will regret not issuing vaccination certificates down the line.
You get criticised for the endless partisan retweets. And yet you keep posting comedy gold like this. It isn't just the government contradicting itself one interview to the next. Its the same screamingly corrupt minister contradicting himself one interview to the next.
Never mind the government not having an agreed policy or even a line to take, Jenrich can't even remember what he said half an hour earlier.
For once I have some sympathy with the hapless minister. Who - even in Johnson's own Cabinet - would be willing to bet that the PM wont suddenly change the plans of millions with 48 hours notice, given the track record to date?
I suspect he gave the truthful answer at 7:45 and was immediately contacted by Allegra and told to change tack and be clearer.
Edit: So I think we can be sure there will be a sudden change to xmas arrangements by 5pm tonight.
One might give such benefit of the doubt to a minister who isn't dishonest or corrupt.
You get criticised for the endless partisan retweets. And yet you keep posting comedy gold like this. It isn't just the government contradicting itself one interview to the next. Its the same screamingly corrupt minister contradicting himself one interview to the next.
Never mind the government not having an agreed policy or even a line to take, Jenrich can't even remember what he said half an hour earlier.
For once I have some sympathy with the hapless minister. Who - even in Johnson's own Cabinet - would be willing to bet that the PM wont suddenly change the plans of millions with 48 hours notice, given the track record to date?
I suspect he gave the truthful answer at 7:45 and was immediately contacted by Allegra and told to change tack and be clearer.
Edit: So I think we can be sure there will be a sudden change to xmas arrangements by 5pm tonight.
One might give such benefit of the doubt to a minister who isn't dishonest or corrupt.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
I have to say what he was saying worried me. The stuff he was saying came into the category of the bleeding obvious for evaluation. I just hope Boris isn't sitting there asking his cabinet if anyone had thought of this stuff.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
Does he have data to support this novel protocol? Perhaps we could find 30,000 people and run a three-arm comparative study and then determine the answer?
Florey stuck penicillin into one sick policeman, Jenner inoculated one child. Don't be so precious.
The How to Vaccinate the World podcast dealt with this on its last episode. People are very reluctant to deviate from the trial design.
It is certainly a dilemma but the easiest way (for them) is to "follow the science". I can't see that changing.
Whether it should or not is I'm sure a fertile PB topic.
I was surprised by the immunologist on R4 this morning who claimed it was a no brainer as the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine single dose is 90%.
What he didn't note was that rate of effectiveness is only demonstrated for the period between the first and second dose. We have no data at all for any longer time period.
There's certainly a case to be made, but not dishonestly or stupidly.
You don't get time in a R4 Today slot to caveat absolutely everything. And what you don't note is that the rate of effectiveness of a second dose is only demonstrated for the period between whenever second doses have been given, and now. We have no data at all for any longer time period.
Can I also reiterate, press reports aside, for all the reasons I have said I will very surprised if schools close. Again, not because the government care about children, as they don’t,nor because they hate teachers, although they do, but because they can’t bear to admit how badly they’ve cocked up. It’s going to be their belated understanding of the Northern Ireland protocol on speed.
Maybe that's the answer.
Boris should just pass a law, or write a letter saying "Notwithstanding the evidence that Covid-19 exists, I don't want it to. So I say it doesn't exist and I'm the bally Prime Minister."
It's what he seems to do for everything else.
(And my learned friend is right about schools. Of course. I'll just add the point that the choice isn't schools open or closed, it's schools closed in a systematic planned way, or schools closing piecemeal as they collapse under the weight of absences.)
Close the schools intentionally and you need to sort out exams.
Keep the schools "open" and you don't need to sort out exams immediately - that can wait until the issue becomes unavoidable in May.
I upset some of our valued friends here last time I likened the government's approach to governing to that of a stereotypical teenager.
But the idea that a problem postponed is always a problem solved is fundamentally adolescent.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
Does he have data to support this novel protocol? Perhaps we could find 30,000 people and run a three-arm comparative study and then determine the answer?
Florey stuck penicillin into one sick policeman, Jenner inoculated one child. Don't be so precious.
The How to Vaccinate the World podcast dealt with this on its last episode. People are very reluctant to deviate from the trial design.
It is certainly a dilemma but the easiest way (for them) is to "follow the science". I can't see that changing.
Whether it should or not is I'm sure a fertile PB topic.
I was surprised by the immunologist on R4 this morning who claimed it was a no brainer as the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine single dose is 90%.
What he didn't note was that rate of effectiveness is only demonstrated for the period between the first and second dose. We have no data at all for any longer time period.
There's certainly a case to be made, but not dishonestly or stupidly.
You don't get time in a R4 Today slot to caveat absolutely everything. And what you don't note is that the rate of effectiveness of a second dose is only demonstrated for the period between whenever second doses have been given, and now. We have no data at all for any longer time period.
A lot longer than 21 days, though. He had plenty of time, particularly as he was on to make the case for the single dose.
And it's a basic point, not "caveating absolutely everything'.
Wow. What a long thread. Re yesterday's question, courtesy of Dan Hannan, of what we will be singing when Brexit is done and we are finally free, I think this musicalization of the iconic Stewart Lee routine - "Coming over here" - featuring the man himself must be a contender -
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
I have to say what he was saying worried me. The stuff he was saying came into the category of the bleeding obvious for evaluation. I just hope Boris isn't sitting there asking his cabinet if anyone had thought of this stuff.
We were overtaken on absolute numbers by the US within the first two days and have just been overtaken by Israel proportionately. We have a stream of good news stories about early progress but also a lot of GP practices ready to go saying they cannot get supply. Meanwhile that page I linked to the other day with the full US deployment plan showed how quickly they got the Pfzier out from Michigan all across the States.
What worries me is that, without significantly ramped up capacity, in January our progress in terms of new people vaccinated will grind to a halt as the whole exercise switches into giving the second doses to December's half million.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
What he's not saying is how you break it to those half a million plus that have had one dose and had thought that when they get their second one they will be much better covered - but not until. How much worry do you want to give them? Especially as by their very nature they are the most vulnerable to dying from the disease?
His approach should only be even thought about if you have a cast iron, 100% certainty that those doses for the second jab for those who have had the first are going to arrive. I wish I had his certainty that other countries will not try to muscle in and nick those doses out from under us.
I sincerely hope Starmer is biding his time. But it doesn’t look like it.
Depressing.
Starmer has a real problem with presentation. I reckon he’s clever at politics and policy, and is a strategic thinker. He’s put Labour in a much better place, already, when it comes to the culture wars, devolution, patriotism, Brexit, and so on. And he’s kept mostly everyone on board.
Trouble is he has good words to say, but he can’t say them. Jesus effing Christ he’s boring. He’s like a talking coffin lid on TV. You could give him the best joke in the world and he would deliver it like a boiler repairman describing your minor boiler problems.
And the more people see this, the less interested they are. They’d rather watch Boris being an idiot with amusingly mad hair. In an age of limited attention spans and 3 second opinion-formations, based on tweets and YouTube, this really matters. I don’t see how it is solvable. This is what Starmer is.
I think he has another problem too - sincerity.
He knows he has to say all the right words about patriotism and nationhood, but I don't think he really believes them. In all other respects he's a North London left-liberal and we all know what they're like.
For all his faults, I think Tony Blair was a patriot (although a trendy, cool Britannia, hip-type) and Gordon Brown is certainly a proud Briton.
Far too many of the Labour frontbench just seem to dislike their own country, and England in particular, and want it superseded, totally remade, or dissolved supernationally.
Soft-Tories and Red-Wallers are very attuned to sniffing out and detecting this.
Can I also reiterate, press reports aside, for all the reasons I have said I will very surprised if schools close. Again, not because the government care about children, as they don’t,nor because they hate teachers, although they do, but because they can’t bear to admit how badly they’ve cocked up. It’s going to be their belated understanding of the Northern Ireland protocol on speed.
Maybe that's the answer.
Boris should just pass a law, or write a letter saying "Notwithstanding the evidence that Covid-19 exists, I don't want it to. So I say it doesn't exist and I'm the bally Prime Minister."
It's what he seems to do for everything else.
(And my learned friend is right about schools. Of course. I'll just add the point that the choice isn't schools open or closed, it's schools closed in a systematic planned way, or schools closing piecemeal as they collapse under the weight of absences.)
Close the schools intentionally and you need to sort out exams.
Keep the schools "open" and you don't need to sort out exams immediately - that can wait until the issue becomes unavoidable in May.
I upset some of our valued friends here last time I likened the government's approach to governing to that of a stereotypical teenager.
But the idea that a problem postponed is always a problem solved is fundamentally adolescent.
Remember our PM is Boris (if you leave things long enough the solution presents itself) Johnson.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
Does he have data to support this novel protocol? Perhaps we could find 30,000 people and run a three-arm comparative study and then determine the answer?
Florey stuck penicillin into one sick policeman, Jenner inoculated one child. Don't be so precious.
The How to Vaccinate the World podcast dealt with this on its last episode. People are very reluctant to deviate from the trial design.
It is certainly a dilemma but the easiest way (for them) is to "follow the science". I can't see that changing.
Whether it should or not is I'm sure a fertile PB topic.
I was surprised by the immunologist on R4 this morning who claimed it was a no brainer as the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine single dose is 90%.
What he didn't note was that rate of effectiveness is only demonstrated for the period between the first and second dose. We have no data at all for any longer time period.
There's certainly a case to be made, but not dishonestly or stupidly.
You don't get time in a R4 Today slot to caveat absolutely everything. And what you don't note is that the rate of effectiveness of a second dose is only demonstrated for the period between whenever second doses have been given, and now. We have no data at all for any longer time period.
A lot longer than 21 days, though. He had plenty of time, particularly as he was on to make the case for the single dose.
And it's a basic point, not "caveating absolutely everything'.
It is inherently unlikely that the effect drops from 90% to zero on day 22. You set a very low bar for dishonest and stupid.
Interesting - heard very little reluctance in Guernsey to getting vaccinated (despite being similarly effective in control) - indeed most ant-vaxxer social media posts get promptly, roundly and broadly ridiculed:
A poll by local newspaper The Straits Times in early December found that 48% of respondents said they will get a vaccine when it is available and 34% will wait six to 12 months.
Blair making a good case for managing the vaccination faster, on R4 now. We do risk our achievement in getting them authorised negated by a lacklustre deployment.
Does he have data to support this novel protocol? Perhaps we could find 30,000 people and run a three-arm comparative study and then determine the answer?
Florey stuck penicillin into one sick policeman, Jenner inoculated one child. Don't be so precious.
Where there is an unmet medical need different thresholds apply.
It is why we were able to accelerate the development of the Coronavirus vaccines (despite the naysayers saying it wasn't possible, had never been done before).
Now we have a choice between (a) vaccinate X people with a proven protocol that works in 90-95% of cases or (b) vaccinate 2X people with an unproven protocol that may not offer sufficient protection and would restrict out ability to do (a).
Comments
It's not even about losing a term of teaching. It is pretty serious not to see any other children for weeks on end for under 10s.
Meanwhile, yesterday saw a new record death toll in Germany from Covid - 962. The numbers of new infections on the other hand is about the same as last week. I'm not sure if this means that the new variant was already here and was responsible for the rapid rise in the last 3 weeks, and the latest restrictions are now making the numbers level off OR the new variant hasn't taken off here yet, and things are about to get a lot worse. Or maybe the new variant is a bit of a mirage.
Before Covid, that was the case for tens of thousands of people.
For a few months, that has been the case for all of us.
Not only that, but those few months have been during a time when you can Zoom, when you can play Among Us, when stream Disney on demand.
I'm not saying this is fun.
But this is a few months. And a few months where conditions are far less isolating than half the population endured fifty years ago.
Personally, it's quite a good day today; the gifts we sent three weeks ago to our family in Thailand have arrived. And a long, cheerful, letter from a much younger cousin in Kiwi-land, who reports that the family is well, and thatches business is doing well.
There is no need to have anyone isolated just now. My grandsons still meet friends , not as ideal as normal life and not as regularly but they are not imprisoned in the house for months on end.
If they had said - sorry guys, it's been a really shit year and we can't afford to pay you a bonus then people would have grumbled but got on with it.
"Have a free potato" is just insulting and iconic
That would mean continuous teaching from roughly the 1st June to the 18th December. Or rather more than five months.
It just can’t be done. Seven weeks of teaching is as long as anyone can go without a break (in fact, I have always thought the autumn term is too long) as otherwise staff (and many students) will simply collapse.
It’s not like working in an office, where you do light, easy work sitting down in a controlled environment with the opportunity to break off and gossip for five minutes when you need to, and you can book time off to suit yourself. Teaching is an exhausting process where you have to do everything you would do in an office job, and mark, and plan, and control thirty children a large percentage of whom don’t want to be there or do what you tell them.
The nearest equivalent would be office working from home while looking after a toddler, cooking a meal, simultaneously trying to deal with a door to door salesman while fixing a leak in the roof.
You would have to build, I would guess, three two week breaks into that period - one from mid July to the start of August, one from mid September to the end of September, and one in mid-November. Otherwise, literally nobody would turn up to teach and there would be no schooling at all.
So ultimately I don’t think you would gain much time from it. Arguably, it would be the right thing to do longer term - breaking the current 14 weeks up to have no more than three weeks at one time, rather than nearly half in a clump, would have all sorts of benefits - but it isn’t as simple as ‘just move it.’
PS: just getting a few posts in before I start working. I will be ready for any slackers or whingers now my dander is up.
That's around 10% of a child's life. All they've known.
The equivalent of many years for us lot. And they don't have the benefit of having become cynical old bastards.
Socialising, safeguarding, proper education and more. All absolutely vital for children.
The reason they have kept schools open is they promised with their shiny new policies that they would be safe, and screamed and shouted and stamped their feet and made actual physical threats when told that they were wrong.
But now the unions have been proven right on every single point, the government cannot afford to be seen to be beaten by them, as they know it will play badly. Plus, being naturally dishonest and stupid, lying and bullying comes naturally to them. That is why we had probably illegal threats made to schools by Nick Gibb, a man whose failure in everything he has tried is total and therefore has a pathological need to be seen to be in control, to stay open even though the government has now had to lock down and suspend reopening.
These people are utter scum. They need to be put on trial and jailed.
https://www.omnicalculator.com/health/vaccine-queue-uk#atrisk
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/effect-of-pandemic-on-childrens-wellbeing-revealed-in-new-report
I am quite deeply frustrated at the ignorance and naivety displayed on this thread proposing simplistic solutions to complex problems, but the fact that the DfE as an organisation is dangerous, corrupt from top to bottom and doesn’t contain a single person of ability in it is separate and a real ongoing issue in this country.
Hacker had the right idea. Abolish it. It couldn’t make matters worse and might make them better.
It is certainly a dilemma but the easiest way (for them) is to "follow the science". I can't see that changing.
Whether it should or not is I'm sure a fertile PB topic.
As schools being open is to allow people to go back to work/work expects people to come in so grandparents have to pickup the slack.
I credit the government with understanding this.
Unions, Nick Gibb, DfE, etc all details.
That said when I ran the marathon I rounded the last bend and thought I'd sprint in and found that my body was not in agreement and I stayed the exact same pace until the finishing line.
Of course, humanity having had COVID first now, probably much shortens vaccine time to market even compared to this year's pace.
Meanwhile, the children suffer and the staff and their families are put in genuine danger as a result of their actions - e.g. deciding staff do not need to isolate when there is a Covid case in the classroom, even if that child was just one metre away. Or do you not care about that?
Nobody *wants* to close schools, although too many people think it funny to make that claim because they are basically nasty. But at the moment, nobody has come up with a way to open them safely
The unions got this. They said what was proposed was unworkable and unsafe, They’ve been proved right. The government have lied, bullied, harassed, used legal threats and generally behaved like criminal lunatics to cover up their failure. They deserve no credit. None. Only jail terms.
Edit - the only way to open schools safely right now would be ‘Nightingale’ schools, with much smaller classes, staffed by newly retired or supply teachers. Not an ideal scenario, but it would have done the trick for twelve months. The government refused to consider that because they didn’t want to pay for it. It’s fine to throw money at serial failures like Harding, but not to pay to keep staff and children safe.
This is not quite that, though, is it.
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZSnWeqF6/
My contract states I must not undertake any other activities during the school day, except during my half hour lunch break. Just as it mandates I may not take time off during terms for any reason other than certified illness.
Morning Malky
Politics is usually pretty quiet by 23rd December. Not this year.
Unmooring from facts proved to be a successful model, at least in campaign terms. Last December’s election victory seemed to confirm that Johnson’s methods would work. Brexit would be done. The distant shore that had been Britain’s natural political habitat for generations could be forgotten. There was no going back. That confidence deferred any sense of urgency about bridging the gap between the leadership qualities needed for responsible government and the character of the prime minister. Johnson and reality had competed for the loyalty of the Tory party and Johnson had won by a landslide.
Then the coronavirus turned up and the challenge it posed was qualitatively different to the political problems associated with Brexit. In theory, the value of EU membership to Britain could be empirically measured but the numbers could be disputed. Mostly the argument played out in the realms of culture, history and identity, where rival sides can dig ever deeper into rival trenches without hitting a bedrock of hard science.
That was not the case with a virus. And in a pandemic, the consequences of bad government are felt fast. The Tory leader’s Brexit repertoire of rhetorical flummery has no utility when people need urgent, practical guidance. The disease could not be tamed by optimism. The tide that swept Johnson to power marooned him on a fantasy island. The public messages he issues by way of reassurance have started to look more like distress flares.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/22/covid-serious-absurd-boris-johnson
https://twitter.com/PippaCrerar/status/1341664137823305729
Schools have been a serious conduit for spreading the Pox. With Mrs RP teaching in one local primary school, daughter in another and son in the secondary academy all three schools have been riddled with it. At multiple points both primary schools were borderline on having sufficient staff still fit for work to be able to stay open. All three schools sent multiple bubbles home several times.
Teachers have been on the literal front line all term. You cannot socially distance in a school. Kids literally crushed into classrooms not designed for "covid-secure" seating layouts. Our children need educating, but the cost of doing so has been high - and that was before the Boris Bug turned up and supercharged case numbers.
What we know from these irresponsible wazzocks we call a government is that they will make the wrong decision against scientific advice, mock people saying they have got it wrong, then do a massive last second u-turn and claim they were always following the science. For all that Sturgeon was a tit for taking her mask off at that wake, at least her government has had more of a clue about how to strategise, plan and communicate.
But they are going to have to be shut because this is current hospital admissions
https://twitter.com/BristOliver/status/1341660951494443009
And remember hospital admissions lag test results by a week so that's going to look a lot worse next Wednesday.
We are going to need those Nightingale hospitals open very soon (except we don't have the staff to run them)
https://twitter.com/iata/status/1341658577484750849?s=21
Never mind the government not having an agreed policy or even a line to take, Jenrich can't even remember what he said half an hour earlier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6O0P74ALLM
Boris should just pass a law, or write a letter saying "Notwithstanding the evidence that Covid-19 exists, I don't want it to. So I say it doesn't exist and I'm the bally Prime Minister."
It's what he seems to do for everything else.
(And my learned friend is right about schools. Of course. I'll just add the point that the choice isn't schools open or closed, it's schools closed in a systematic planned way, or schools closing piecemeal as they collapse under the weight of absences.)
I was being facetious. My late father was a maths teacher. Even when he was Deputy Head of a comp, both he and the Head had mandated teaching time (although the Head, not much) and he would return home with a pile of exercise books to go through each night, and this was in the days before formal written lesson planning was expected.
It must also be frustrating too, that as everyone went to school, everyone "knows" how to be a teacher
Keep the schools "open" and you don't need to sort out exams immediately - that can wait until the issue becomes unavoidable in May.
I suspect he gave the truthful answer at 7:45 and was immediately contacted by Allegra and told to change tack and be clearer.
Edit: So I think we can be sure there will be a sudden change to xmas arrangements by 5pm tonight.
What he didn't note was that rate of effectiveness is only demonstrated for the period between the first and second dose. We have no data at all for any longer time period.
There's certainly a case to be made, but not dishonestly or stupidly.
There’s definitely going to be some structural changes around business travel though, as people have learned to work remotely this year without a massive drop in productivity.
Not with pineapple obviously...
I wonder where he is spending xmas?
Just a thought...
Christmas Eve in the packed bar of the Green Dragon Hotel it is for Bob then.
But the idea that a problem postponed is always a problem solved is fundamentally adolescent.
He had plenty of time, particularly as he was on to make the case for the single dose.
And it's a basic point, not "caveating absolutely everything'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kkOHtniTts
What worries me is that, without significantly ramped up capacity, in January our progress in terms of new people vaccinated will grind to a halt as the whole exercise switches into giving the second doses to December's half million.
https://twitter.com/ReutersUK/status/1341666155933683713?s=20
https://twitter.com/marklewismd/status/1336754605435174912
His approach should only be even thought about if you have a cast iron, 100% certainty that those doses for the second jab for those who have had the first are going to arrive. I wish I had his certainty that other countries will not try to muscle in and nick those doses out from under us.
He knows he has to say all the right words about patriotism and nationhood, but I don't think he really believes them. In all other respects he's a North London left-liberal and we all know what they're like.
For all his faults, I think Tony Blair was a patriot (although a trendy, cool Britannia, hip-type) and Gordon Brown is certainly a proud Briton.
Far too many of the Labour frontbench just seem to dislike their own country, and England in particular, and want it superseded, totally remade, or dissolved supernationally.
Soft-Tories and Red-Wallers are very attuned to sniffing out and detecting this.
A poll by local newspaper The Straits Times in early December found that 48% of respondents said they will get a vaccine when it is available and 34% will wait six to 12 months.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-singapore-vaccine-idUKKBN28X0BP?taid=5fe305e4ca1f440001beef4b&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
It is why we were able to accelerate the development of the Coronavirus vaccines (despite the naysayers saying it wasn't possible, had never been done before).
Now we have a choice between (a) vaccinate X people with a proven protocol that works in 90-95% of cases or (b) vaccinate 2X people with an unproven protocol that may not offer sufficient protection and would restrict out ability to do (a).
"A" clearly wins