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Topic Originator: moviescot
Date: Tue 7 Apr 10:08
Ok so not a lot of evidence that closing schools has an impact.
The problem I see is if you open schools what happens. More cars on the road, school buses back on, all teachers required to work etc. This means extra people working who currently don't need to or can work from home.
Not sure what other schools are doing but in Aberdeen our daughter was getting daily work based upon her normal timetable. Some teachers were using using video calls to keep in touch. To be fair the take up rate on the video calls by the pupils was very poor. Only about 6 or 7 for a class of 20 attending. Our daughter was surprisingly diligent and did all her work but clearly other pupils not so much.
This home schooling has worked well for my daughter and I'm at home too assist.
So I would keep the schools closed until after the summer holidays. Hopefully restrictions generally will be lifted by the summer months so that holidays can be taken at least within Scotland. I can't see any foreign holidays being allowed until at least October time though.
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Topic Originator: Wotsit
Date: Tue 7 Apr 10:26
More folk would be tempted to go to work as well if their kids were going to school.
"Who you are and what you feel comes not just from inside you, but from where you are in the power structure"
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Topic Originator: londonparsfan
Date: Tue 7 Apr 12:29
If we had testing for everyone and ongoing monitoring and we were quarantining those that were sick then we probably could go down repen the schools but we don't.
That may have been a contributing factor to the low incidence of transmission in the SARS review. If nobody or very few people going to school have the virus then there's little to no risk.
From the article:
"Recent modelling studies of Covid-19 predict that school closures alone would prevent only 2%-4% of deaths, many fewer than other social distancing interventions"
So that shows it does reduce the number of deaths and it is a part of a suite of social distancing measures not a stand alone initiative which is pointed out:
"Prof Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, worked on the scientific modelling that the current government advice is based on. He says the Lancet research fails to take into account the impact that school closure can have alongside other lockdown measures.
"When combined with intense social distancing it plays an important role in severing remaining contacts between households and thus ensuring transmission declines," he said"
If we could implement something like this:
https://www.livescience.com/small-italian-town-cuts-coronavirus-cases-testing.html
Then we could probably lift a lot of the lockdowns for everyone.
It's obviously significantly more difficult in upscaling the logistics of testing 3000 in a town to 66 million + in a country but its along the lines of what South Korea has tried to do with a fair degree of success after an initial surge.
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Topic Originator: P
Date: Tue 7 Apr 12:53
Maybe a slightly different take but I would imagine that lockdown measures should ultimately be gradually eased rather than a Big Bang ‘as you were’ approach. With that in mind the schools would be the place to begin - you can exclude older children who’s exam year has been decided to reduce the population returning and you could split age groups by different days to bring them back a day or couple days a week again to keep the numbers down.
Child and spousal abuse behind closed doors is going to be utterly horrific during this lockdown and anything to get an outlet & visibility for vulnerable kids is worth considering.
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Topic Originator: aaaaaaaaaargh
Date: Tue 7 Apr 13:22
The article is surprisingly weak for the Lancet. It's just a very restricted literature review that only has real data from Flu and SARS and nothing for the current coronavirus. Maybe it is designed to encourage people to try to investigate further.
Any comparison with SARS is fairly pointless since the contagiousness of the two viruses appears to be hugely different. The comparisons with flu are probably more accurate here, and they seem to suggest a reasonable impact of school closure.
I don't think schools will open until the governments are sure that the number of cases won't explode afterwards. We may soon be at that point but we don't know. We might already have 200,000 cases in the UK, or we could have more than 10 million. Only when we know the answer to this question will they consider reopening schools.
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Topic Originator: GG Riva
Date: Tue 7 Apr 17:51
Quote:
londonparsfan, Tue 7 Apr 12:29
From the article:
"Recent modelling studies of Covid-19 predict that school closures alone would prevent only 2%-4% of deaths, many fewer than other social distancing interventions"
I saw that too and I'm thinking "only 2% - 4% of deaths" - that's exactly the kind of crap Trump came out with "2%, that's not a lot." Oh yes it is when you have a population of 330 million, you idiot!"
Is sending the kids back to school more important than keeping the death toll as low as we can? This break in their education will not cause our pupils any significant disadvantage. I'm no Brain of Britain, but I started school in this country with no English and almost 3 years late. By the time I moved up to secondary school, I'd caught up with my peers. I also taught a Polish lad, aged 11, who also arrived in Scotland with no English. By the time he'd completed his school education, he had 5 Highers and went to Dundee Uni to study Law.
Not your average Sunday League player.
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Topic Originator: londonparsfan
Date: Tue 7 Apr 18:12
Difficult one to balance but I was assuming there would be some online learning that would be done in the background? If we could keep education ticking along to some degree whilst minimising the risk for everyone else that would be my happy medium.
Ideal scenario for me is test everyone and quarantine everyone that's carrying the virus and go for a phased removal of the lockdown using a risk based approach based on the test data.
Ongoing regular testing to identify newly infected and quarantining for them. As kids/younger people appear to be of a lower risk category I think schooling could be one of the first things reinstated with special precautions for any youngsters with medical conditions that leave them vulnerable to the virus possibly keeping some out of schooling if their ailments are bad enough that going to school could run the risk of them developing a serious illness. You would hope that would be a relatively small number of people.
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Topic Originator: londonparsfan
Date: Tue 7 Apr 18:14
But to answer the question I would choose keeping the death toll low if I could only do one or the other.
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Topic Originator: londonparsfan
Date: Tue 7 Apr 18:15
And just to add I thought 2-4% is a positive as it's better than saving noone so I think we agree there!
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Topic Originator: JTH123
Date: Tue 7 Apr 18:29
I must be missing something here. If we've all to stay in our immediate household groups, not coming within 2m of anyone else then how the hell can this make any sense?
Yesterday I had to review newly issued site risk assessments and method statements for a building project currently on site and there are 2 recurring hazard themes:
Pinchpoints - narrow places like corridors, gates, doorways and lifts etc where social distancing is a risk.
Touchpoints - just as you would imagine, handles, lift buttons, kettles, taps and the like.
How could kids (& staff for that matter) go to school and comply with these things? Obviously if they don't comply then hundreds of thousands and their families become much more at risk than they are now.
Post Edited (Tue 07 Apr 19:33)
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