The Political Thread

[Richard]

Funnily enough, testing for Covid doesn't stop you catching it.

[sheridan]

Seating changes daily. And we already know Alpha (let alone Delta) spreads throughout a classroom sized room within a few hours. With the eradication of masks abs bubbles (no reason to drop the latter in primaries, but many have already switched to whole-school assemblies), it now feels inevitable that everyone with a primary aged kid will have a much higher likelihood of catching COVID within months at best. Notably, Williamson has already shifted the blame for this to parents for not testing enough.

Not to mention those who sit near somebody with a primary school age kid when at work...  There's a well-known trend for people calling in to work sick in early September - children pick up diseases (and variants) while on summer holidays, transmit it to each other at school, take it home to their family, then the family take it along with them to work - so a few days after the schools go back, working people (whether or not they have children) are ill.  I can't see that COVID is going to improve any of that.

[IndigoPrime]

Yep. And there's yet another issue here—actually two. 1. Delta often presents with initial symptoms indistinguishable from a cold—the kind of cold you tend to see blaze around schools (especially primaries) at the start of every term. 2. Have you tried doing a home test on an infant? It's not fun. Moreover, it's probably not always accurate.

So we now have Williamson pre-blaming parents for a new wave of COVID, for not testing enough, despite: testing not stopping COVID's spread; testing not being easy/even always possible with young children; testing showing YOU ALREADY HAVE COVID and have therefore already likely spread it; schools removing bubbles and all other protections; schools receiving precisely fuck-all assistance from the government in terms of making classrooms safer. Oh, and people are ditching masks at speed, which is the one simple thing everyone can easily do that can slow COVID spread.

I'll be bloody amazed if we're not in lockdown again by half term. (Or perhaps the government's plan now is back to herd immunity—let it rip through the country and hope that plus vaccines does enough, and then look all sad on TV when another 100,000 British people are dead. Meanwhile, many other countries will again look on in horror at the UK not even doing the bare basics to slow COVID, and question the country's flatlined vaccine take-up that was once hailed as "world leading".)

[sheridan]

Yep. And there's yet another issue here—actually two. 1. Delta often presents with initial symptoms indistinguishable from a cold—the kind of cold you tend to see blaze around schools (especially primaries) at the start of every term. 2. Have you tried doing a home test on an infant? It's not fun. Moreover, it's probably not always accurate.

So we now have Williamson pre-blaming parents for a new wave of COVID, for not testing enough, despite: testing not stopping COVID's spread; testing not being easy/even always possible with young children; testing showing YOU ALREADY HAVE COVID and have therefore already likely spread it; schools removing bubbles and all other protections; schools receiving precisely fuck-all assistance from the government in terms of making classrooms safer. Oh, and people are ditching masks at speed, which is the one simple thing everyone can easily do that can slow COVID spread.

I'll be bloody amazed if we're not in lockdown again by half term. (Or perhaps the government's plan now is back to herd immunity—let it rip through the country and hope that plus vaccines does enough, and then look all sad on TV when another 100,000 British people are dead. Meanwhile, many other countries will again look on in horror at the UK not even doing the bare basics to slow COVID, and question the country's flatlined vaccine take-up that was once hailed as "world leading".)

I'd really love for you to be proved wrong, but I'm not that hopeful :-(

[Jim_Campbell]

I'll be bloody amazed if we're not in lockdown again by half term. (Or perhaps the government's plan now is back to herd immunity—let it rip through the country and hope that plus vaccines does enough, and then look all sad on TV when another 100,000 British people are dead. Meanwhile, many other countries will again look on in horror at the UK not even doing the bare basics to slow COVID, and question the country's flatlined vaccine take-up that was once hailed as "world leading".)

I'll bet cold, hard cash that there will be a public enquiry somewhere down the line, and that the Tories will stack it with cronies from the private healthcare lobby. The thing will be framed in terms of the 'failure of the NHS', which will be judged to be systemic and have cost tens of thousands of lives. Under cover of 'never allowing such a failure again', the handing off of great chunks of healthcare to the private sector will be accelerated.

I'm not sure if this is their real underlying intent, or they've just spotted it as a handy secondary effect of pursing a herd immunity policy by infection, rather than vaccination.

[Proudhuff]

I'll be bloody amazed if we're not in lockdown again by half term. (Or perhaps the government's plan now is back to herd immunity—let it rip through the country and hope that plus vaccines does enough, and then look all sad on TV when another 100,000 British people are dead. Meanwhile, many other countries will again look on in horror at the UK not even doing the bare basics to slow COVID, and question the country's flatlined vaccine take-up that was once hailed as "world leading".)

I'll bet cold, hard cash that there will be a public enquiry somewhere down the line, and that the Tories will stack it with cronies from the private healthcare lobby. The thing will be framed in terms of the 'failure of the NHS', which will be judged to be systemic and have cost tens of thousands of lives. Under cover of 'never allowing such a failure again', the handing off of great chunks of healthcare to the private sector will be accelerated.

I'm not sure if this is their real underlying intent, or they've just spotted it as a handy secondary effect of pursing a herd immunity policy by infection, rather than vaccination.

I'd really love for you to be proved wrong, but I'm not that hopeful :-(

[Barrington Boots]

I'll be bloody amazed if we're not in lockdown again by half term. (Or perhaps the government's plan now is back to herd immunity—let it rip through the country and hope that plus vaccines does enough, and then look all sad on TV when another 100,000 British people are dead. Meanwhile, many other countries will again look on in horror at the UK not even doing the bare basics to slow COVID, and question the country's flatlined vaccine take-up that was once hailed as "world leading".)

I'll bet cold, hard cash that there will be a public enquiry somewhere down the line, and that the Tories will stack it with cronies from the private healthcare lobby. The thing will be framed in terms of the 'failure of the NHS', which will be judged to be systemic and have cost tens of thousands of lives. Under cover of 'never allowing such a failure again', the handing off of great chunks of healthcare to the private sector will be accelerated.

I'm not sure if this is their real underlying intent, or they've just spotted it as a handy secondary effect of pursing a herd immunity policy by infection, rather than vaccination.

My wife works in the NHS and this is more or less what she and many of her colleagues think is going to happen too.
There'll be no accountability for these guys, just backhanders from private healthcare providers and not a thought given to the dead in their wake.

[Jim_Campbell]

My wife works in the NHS and this is more or less what she and many of her colleagues think is going to happen too.
There'll be no accountability for these guys, just backhanders from private healthcare providers and not a thought given to the dead in their wake.

Sadly, you only have to look at their willingness to weaponise the Grenfell inquiry to see the template, which spent an awful lot of time trying to blame the Fire Service and, despite the existence of 'smoking gun' emails clearly showing that there were people who knew the cladding was dangerous and rejected safer options as too expensive, has resulted in not one person being brought up on criminal charges so far.

Look after your cronies and scapegoat some poor bastards doing a difficult and dangerous job.

[Funt Solo]

University of Oxford QCovid Risk Calculator.

For me this calculator returns an absolute risk of a COVID-19 associated death as 1 in 7299 (without my heart condition it returns 1 in 9901).

Factoring this up for the population of the UK (and assuming they were all clones of you), that would be 9131 deaths over 90 days. That's the equivalent of 710 deaths per week, which is significantly above the current 115 rolling weekly average death rate.

Also, the calculator only takes into account deaths - it ignores the pressure of hospitalizations on an over-stretched health service, the danger from allowing the virus free reign to mutate to a more dangerous form (as it did already with Delta) and the effects of long Covid.

[Jim_Campbell]

the current 115 rolling weekly average death rate.

I'm pretty sure that number is the daily total, taken as a rolling average over the previous seven-days.

[Funt Solo]

Oh - so that would make it currently 805 - probably because not everyone IS a clone of Shark.

Another important point to note is that the chance of death has been reduced over time by the vaccination program - so each person vaccinated has improved Shark's chance of survival.

No need to thank us, Shark. You're welcome.

[Jim_Campbell]

probably because not everyone IS a clone of Shark.

Sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads...

[Funt Solo]

Another great movie - this Political Thread is doing a bang up job of recommending movies.

Although, following the plot, that would be The Legendary Sea Bass.

[Tjm86]

Seating changes daily. And we already know Alpha (let alone Delta) spreads throughout a classroom sized room within a few hours. With the eradication of masks abs bubbles (no reason to drop the latter in primaries, but many have already switched to whole-school assemblies), it now feels inevitable that everyone with a primary aged kid will have a much higher likelihood of catching COVID within months at best. Notably, Williamson has already shifted the blame for this to parents for not testing enough.

To be honest most schools have long had a 'seating plan only' policy to make life easier.  Assemblies have been done via Teams / Zoom for the most part with some whole year group assemblies outside during the fine weather.  Our daughter's school is keeping masks in communal spaces  but limiting use in classrooms.  To be honest now that I'm out of teaching (Praise The Lord!!!!!) I'm not quite so clued up but there does appear to be a shift toward trying to 'normalise' as much as is practical.

Given that Scotland has seen an uptick with their schools returning it is probably fair to say that England and Wales will see similar developments over the next few weeks.  To be honest though last year the majority of cases in our school were down to community rather than school transmission.  As you say though, Williamson is trying to shift the focus as ever.  Then again how many people ever pay attention to him?

[IndigoPrime]

Then again how many people ever pay attention to him?

But the issue is how much schools try to normalise. Ideally, we'd have vaccinated 12+ over the summer to help secondaries function normally and then just put up with bubbles in primary for a term or two. (Let's face it: that isn't a major issue for the most part.) But this headlong rush back to the status quo isn't going to end well. Too many people are acting like COVID is over. The numbers are significantly higher than they were at this time last year, and yet the Tories have done fuck-all for schools.