“The biggest question mark now is around the reopening of schools“

I get why Cummings & Co are so desperate to get kids back, so that their parents don't have an excuse not to go back to work. But if it's not safe, don't open them ffs. There shouldn't even be a debate around this.

This is the only thing that I'll be a Karen about.  They need to open the schools, for the kids, for the grown ups, for the economy, for the love of God.  If people elect not to send them out of fear or shielding then fine, they shouldn't be punished.  But fucking hell.

Funny how across Europe the surge in cases has occurred after schools shut for summer and not during the couple of months they were open. Perhaps kids aren’t to blame?

"This is it. We are now, give or take, at the absolute limit of how much we can reopen society without a resurgence of coronavirus."

Here's a suggestion. Why not just suck up having a resurgence of coronavirus?

Schools have to reopen. Suppressing the virus is a lower priority than educating children. We know now that the virus isn't especially dangerous to anyone except the old so there is no justification at all for continuing to burn social and economic life and sacrifice the futures of the young to suppress it. Schools must reopen.

don't close the pubs either FAOD

fucking astonishing how willing the government are to be ambiguous about reopening education. fucking outrageous

"No known case of child infecting a teacher" says Mark Woolhouse, a leading epidemiologist and member of the government’s Sage committee. 

Schools will not re-open says biology graduate journalist with no scientific employment. 

Boozed-up people likely the biggest source of this increase. Massive spike in cases on 15 July - oh look - less than 2 weeks after they let everyone go to the pub. Testing has been massively increased since a low of about 300k in the second last week of June to 350,000 last week. How can a rise in the absolute number of cases be any basis for this? 

This govt should at least have the guts to say they caused the deaths of thousands of old people by not protecting them at the outset, and that everything else they have done is largely pointless - they could have just said wash your hands, stay apart and stay home if you are sick (i.e. logical stuff). 

 

"I get why Cummings & Co are so desperate to get kids back, so that their parents don't have an excuse not to go back to work. But if it's not safe, don't open them ffs. There shouldn't even be a debate around this."

Shut the fuck up ducks. You stay indoors if you want to. People can make their own choices. But children shouldn't go without a future just to pander to others' cowardice.

Nobody gives a shit how many working age people get this, or nobody should, save to the extent that they pass it to the vulnerable older cohorts when that might otherwise be preventable.

Omg OMG OMG OMG they are all so fucking wet and nuts 

did anyone read the herd immunity in Mumbai slums article? Covid is a busted flush. It’s phoney baloney and the government are Mad and people are madder 

If you can go to the pub, go to primark you can go to the bloody office and school.

take some responsibility for yourself. Man up. And if you have other issues - weight, smoking, drinking then sort those out as they will pop u off the perch way bloody faster. 
 

It’s absolutely nonsensical

shut the fvcking pubs and garden centres open the schools 
 

you really start to wonder whether these decision makers are even sentient 

Don’t think even Gavin Williamson will be able to do it, BST

interestingly the American teachers unions are making similar dicks of themselves atm, not only suggesting it’s not safe to go back f2f but also suggesting it’s not oh&s for them to teach a full school day on zoom. I mean, ffs?!!

This may come back to haunt me, but I just can’t believe they will do this, knowing the effect it has already had on kids. My kids’ school managed to get three years back for 6 weeks and it was fine. I would rather have to do the small bubble every other day shite plus homeschooling than no school at all 

It’s so so sad. There should be someone looking at all the kids and everything they’ve gone through to delay great uncle Derek from karking it at 95 in death’s waiting room and be fucking ashamed of themselves 

maybe buddy each kid with each coffin dodger and have the dodger record why they’ve fked that kid over for another couple of weeks of Vera lynn while they’re dribbling over their soup.

 

"Tbf if you don’t have kids it’s pretty abstract & hard to understand exactly how catastrophic not going to school is."

presumably they went to school tho (although in duxs case, perhaps not)

people should just start their own neighbourhood charitable schools. I don't think there is any law mandating the closure of private schools.

Nobody doubts that aerosol transmission is possible in enclosed, especially air conditioned environments.

The point is to get over the idea that transmission has to be suppressed at all costs. There are many greater priorities than absolute minimisation of coronavirus transmission.

Not reopening schools is ludicrous, for kids and parents. The mental health of a couple of friends teenage children are suffering terribly having had no social contact for months (their sociabl contact is playing games against each other online). As for the parents, it’s simply impossible to juggle work and children and a lot of mental health issues will arise again with parents if they don’t get schools back not to mention economic fuckery.  
 

my daughters’ nursery has been open since 1 June and is all the way through the holidays. They do temperature checks and have sanitiser etc. They should just be rolling this out in the schools and making parents sign declarations that they won’t take kids in who are unwell etc. 
 

As. said above, if you can now shop, go abroad, meet other people, open pubs and restaurants, you can go to school. 

DW everyone on this thread, these anecdotes of the problems we, our families and friends are suffering are not 'data' or 'evidence', so they aren't real and nothing bad is happening

I presume that the 3 Ducks approach is just being contrary.  Because  the willingness to sacrifice children’s education is just lamentably bizarre.

close pubs, close garden centres.  Oh no, old people like those.  Let’s keep closed anything the young and parents like.  We are in Brextard land.
 

I've generally been sympathetic to governments trying to manage risks and I've kept faith in the rough consensus that some sort of social distancing and lockdown of some degree is/was needed to protect the most vulnerable.

However, there's no f*****g way that schools should be shut in September. Teachers really have been the most workshy essential worker to date. Schools need to re-open, kids education will be harmed. If it comes to it, we should be locking away at risk adults not at risk kids.

CALM YOURSELVES

this is just the opinion of the BC fvcking C.

no politician has said this.

and even if they have to pick and choose over restrictions no one is going to put pubs ahead of schools (except Laz mebbe?)

i knew rof would lose the plot over this opinion piece.

CALM YOURSELVES

this is just the opinion of the BC fvcking C.

no politician has said this.

and even if they have to pick and choose over restrictions no one is going to put pubs ahead of schools (except Laz mebbe?)

i knew rof would lose the plot over this opinion piece.

er,  sorry, what?

on what basis do you nominate me as someone who would put keeping pubs open ahead of schools?

have u read anything I've posted, ever?

FAOD I think both should be wide open

I have been against the shut down and in favour or the Swedish solution even before Sweden came up with it. We are not doing the greater good with our current balance.

Agree Lydia 

I know a teacher who’s just bragging about her free time, zero social distancing etc but bleating about school Being too dangerous 

her kid is in nursery full time 

she has an au pair 

 

she’s a dick 

Her husband works for a fund and she tried to use his ‘keyworker’ status for something or other 

they also got the au pair during lockdown despite making so much noise about lockdown life etc

i really don’t like her. 

I don't have any skin in the game, but as a former student, I think it is criminal to keep schools shut.

This is really robbing children of the human experience and will hurt them for the rest of their lives. Not to mention the impact on families who will be unable to work while doing home schooling and child care duties.

It’s bigger than that Canadian

its a safe space for a lot of vulnerable children

its the only hot meal, or only meal

its the only chance at some kind of levelling out of the rank inequalities in our society 

it’s socialisation, to see friends and peers and get away from family situations

opportunity to exercise, to draw, to write, to paint, to read, to create, to learn, to be quiet or to be noisy, to use the internet or computer - all of this non exhaustive list may or may not be available to you at home but will be at school. 

 

 

 

There’s a lot less sympathy for working + childcare I think now. So of course for working parents it’s an absolute shit show. They’re utterly exhausted and broken and kids are pacified and by and large no one has a great deal 

Here's a suggestion. Why not just suck up having a resurgence of coronavirus?

I mean I know it’s just laz being laz but surely this is the stupidest thing ever proposed on rof?

Nope, if I had my way I would :

suggest those vulnerable stayed at home 

let people take responsibility for themselves

keep stuff open

 

its just not a very fatal disease for 99.99% of the population see Mumbai slums for reference 

Nobody is having a fun time from this shitshow. But it’s impossible not to conclude that Dombodge is gaming this for maximum effect by picking on people to bludgeon them into submission. 

OB:

suggest those vulnerable stayed at home

could you expand? 

I get the libertarian funzies but in practice, imagine I’m a 28 year old single mum (two kids) on minimum wage who has an underlying condition that means I’m likely to die if I get covid

what should my employer have to do to allow me to not leave my kids orphans? What should the govt have to do? What should society in general do?

or is the answer “fvck all”?

Such a hypothetical person would be equally likely to die from any of the circulating viruses around, and I doubt would have a job. Your straw woman doesn't exist 

my point hools is that it’s easy to say “just open everything up and let the rona go wild” if you assume the “vulnerable” are middle class boomers who can all get Ocado deliveries on demand

its harder to justify if you reckon with the fact that in reality, by “letting it spread” and “suggesting the vulnerable stay at home” you’re just condemning poor people and minorities to an ugly death bc everyone else would be inconvenienced

clergs goes on about the elderly dying alone bc of lockdown - what do you think happens if we release lockdown, nobody wears masks and covid spreads exponentially throughout the U.K.?

do you think they would have the genuine option of deciding to “take responsibility for themselves”? sounds to me like they’d have a worse time of it  

we are a society - we all have to make sacrifices to protect everyone else

its a fvcking deadly pandemic

It is not a 'deadly pandemic'

this is exactly why posters keep making fun of you for your 50 deaths prediction

ofc it’s a deadly pandemic

just admit you were (and are) wrong!

jesus wept

Chill I don't actually give a fuck what you think of me 

but 3.3% of deaths in the U.K. were due to coronavirus last week

we are shitting to bed over nothing 

Nurses do sometimes catch diseases. We used to have the balls to just say this came with the territory, although we do what we can to prevent it.

Just like soldiers sometimes get shot, although again the army does what it can to avoid that.

None of this should mean that a generation of children are not educated.

What spurius said 

the thing that is funny/enraging is the you don't care brigade is that they don't care about anyone else but themselves, and are happy to fuck over the lives of millions of children as long as they feel 'safe'

the thing that is funny/enraging about the “oh do you care brigade” is that they don't care about anyone else but themselves, and are happy to fuck over the lives of hundreds of thousands of:

- elderly

- people with underlying conditions

- frontline healthcare workers

- bame people

as long as they get to go about their lives as normal and feel 'safe'

I mean honestly do you listen to yourself sometimes?

the uk has had the worst excess deaths in europe

we should have locked the fuck down early (properly, not the bullshit way Boris implemented it) but now that we haven’t we need to recognise we fucked it from the start and do what we can to deal

yes maybe we cant open schools as early as we wanted to (we fucked it up)

maybe everyone needs to wear masks everywhere (we fucked it up)

maybe there will need to be local lockdowns, on no notice, in any area (we fucked it up)

it’s literally everyone doing what we can to protect the most vulnerable in our society and not just shrugging and throwing them to the wolves because we feel it’s unfair

jesus some of y’all need a primer on what it means to be a member of a society  

Many of the most vulnerable in society are completely fucked by lockdown.

Personally I'm more concerned about the poor, those who have lost their jobs, the children who weren't being checked on by social services or don't get lunch because they are not at school, instead stuck at home with parents who can't look after them... than the old or sick who are vulnerable to a whole range of diseases anyway.

There's also the fact brought out by the Imperial College that lockdowns don't actually save lives. They merely postpone the virus transmission into the future, and resultant deaths from the infections. The only way lockdowns save lives is if the healthcare system is overwhelmed and can't handle treating people, OR we do them until a cure/vaccine/herd immunity is found.

For these reasons, we initially did lockdown to flatten the curve, not eliminate covid deaths entirely.

Now we've moved on to local lockdowns in perpetiuty and not letting any gatherings take place...I guess to prevent overwhelming the NHS or to slow deaths from the virus until a cure is found some day? But the cost is too great versus what is gained as we'll soon find out.

Thanks for the good points Oyster about keeping kids from schools. I guess people here in favour of keeping kids from school don't care enough about those points relative to the fear of covid.

And the economic impact of the lockdowns is targeting the worst able to handle the loss of jobs and incomes. Unlike 2008, this is leaving the professional, white collar workers relatively unharmed for now. They'll get it one day, but nothing like what is about to be unleashed on the working class in the service industry.

I'm with the school reopeners.  It's appalling what's being done to children and their futures through the lockdown.  I'd rather give up the various easings I benefit from (restaurants, pubs, ability to go abroad, meeting friends indoors) and have the schools open if that's what's necessary.

FAOD I don't have any children.

than the old or sick who are vulnerable to a whole range of diseases anyway.

i assume by “sick” you mean people in their 30s/40s with underlying conditions so fine (I appreciate rof doesn’t care about anyone over 60)

i am concerned about all the people you mention as well spurius - it’s not a zero sum game - so maybe the best plan is to a) wear a fvcking mask and b) lobby the government to do its job and provide support for those most in need (in a way they admittedly haven’t bothered over the last ten years)

instead of pushing to open up the country as though we are not in the middle of an historic pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people within four months 

just a thought 

And the economic impact of the lockdowns is targeting the worst able to handle the loss of jobs and incomes.
 

canadian - as we open up and head towards a new normal i think it’s increasingly clear that the impact of the covid virus (from a medical perspective) falls disproportionately on the working class/minorities and the pushback is from the Delingpoles/Karens who don’t like having to wear masks to go to Sainsburys

the wealthy oldies can choose to shield if they want to

its pretty obscene

Feelingchill just a thought

This isn't just a bad quarter economically, it's the worst quarter ever recorded in human history. Unemployment hitting 20% is not unthinkable once furlough ends. Millions in the UK could find themselves unable to feed their families. Picture homelessness skyrocketing, crime and substance abuse through the roof, the gulf between the rich and poor becoming magnitudes worse than it already is leading to civil unrest the likes of which we've never seen..it's not out of the realm the way we're going.

Compared to what could quite easily happen, the 40-50k deaths we've incurred (roughly on par with a bad flu season honestly) are going to seem like a walk in the park. You may think I'm doom mongering, but so are you by calling us all granny killers for wanting to send kids back to school and open the economy up again.

http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/news/commissioning/flu-and-cold-weather-contributed-towards-50000-excess-winter-deaths-last-year/20037896.article

 

This is so not a medical crisis anymore and much more an economic and social crisis. I wish people would get to thinking in that way. Excess deaths have been negative for 5 weeks running now.

"However, as the first wave of Covid deaths has declined, the trend has reversed, with lower than average deaths reported for five weeks in a row."

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jul/28/why-deaths-wales-england-below-five-year-average-covid-19-ons

I have no problem wearing a mask.

The vulnerable people I was talking about are being fucked by lockdown.

Your suggestion to "lobby the government" is pointless and absurd.

This is a thread about whether or not to send kids back to school. So your suggestion is we keep them at home and lobby the government to help kids?

sorry canadian - I wasn’t actually disagreeing with you 

i agree those are the risks but the risks of “opening up” are huge as well (and impact on all the vulnerable classes I’ve mentioned above, not just the grannies)

Unemployment hitting 20% is not unthinkable once furlough ends. Millions in the UK could find themselves unable to feed their families

Yup well the govt needs to extend furlough and support those who are struggling (should have been doing that for years but if there’s an excuse now, so much the better)

Millions in the UK could find themselves unable to feed their families. Picture homelessness skyrocketing, crime and substance abuse through the roof, the gulf between the rich and poor becoming magnitudes worse than it already is leading to civil unrest the likes of which we've never seen

agreed again - but this is literally the trajectory of the last ten years without corona

 

im really most annoyed at the middle class lawyers on this board (understandable ofc) whose view is set on “gosh how can I deal in September if they won’t take Tarquin and Amelia off my hands when I can’t work from home any more” when the real issue is a single mum whose options will be - “do I go to work at my minimum wage job where the customers are dicks about masks (and if I get covid my kids are orphaned) or keep them back from school and get a criminal record (and can’t rent or get a better job for ten years)?”

Excess deaths have been negative for 5 weeks running now.

well we’ve had spikes in cases in many areas (and will, on an ongoing basis, for the next 18 months or more) 

can’t ignore that

My point is your suggestions are meaningless bollocks. You live in fairyland. Extend the furlough indeed. Who is going to pay for that? The books already aren't going to balance.

Your suggestions would completely fuck the single mum you are talking about. Why on earth would she die of covid in her 20s or 30s? Her risk is miniscule.

So the russians are money laundering. And in your mind that dirty money should be seized and used to pay for our covid deficit? Eh? That money belongs to the russian public.

Tax avoidance is a less daft point (and I agree with you) but you're still living in fairyland. Get real.

"close pubs, close garden centres.  Oh no, old people like those."

Opening pubs was insanity.

Garden centres borderline, given outdoor areas/ indoor ventilation etc, but better just to have left them closed tbh. 

feelingchill 

you are a massive exaggerand and exactly the kind of moral coward who is driving britain into the ground

firstly, no, I am not “just being laz”, I am odeadlt serious and once again being ROF’s most sensible and perceptive commentator on this issue. 

Just sucking up a resurgence of the vuvu is a thoroughly sensible idea and indeed our only option if we want society to function. 

To give an example of your exaggeration - there is no underlying condition that means a 28yo is “likely to” die of covid-19. The considerable majority of people in every age and health category who catch covid-19 have died, and barely a single 28 year old in the whole god damned country has died, you flake. The fact that you talk in these terms indicates that your emotions have taken over your consideration of the issues

It is perfectly viable to shield the vulnerable in any event. If people can establish that they are in a truly vulnerable health category then the costs of furloughing them and providing state support for them to isolate is, palpably, much much less than the cost of icing the entire economy for an indefinite period. That you don’t seem to appreciate this indicates that among all your other cognitive deficits is a complete ignorance of economic reality.

in any event m88 you will sadly be disappointed because the debate is clearly swinging toward the vuvusceptic camp and Williamson has, previously, promised the schools will reopen. Get ready to suck it up.

“yes maybe we cant open schools as early as we wanted to (we fucked it up)

maybe everyone needs to wear masks everywhere (we fucked it up)

maybe there will need to be local lockdowns, on no notice, in any area (we fucked it up)”

And yet none of these things is going to happen! So it’s going to be a disappointing time for you and the other vuvutwats.

This whole affair has been the death of my relationship with the British Left, who these days are nothing but a bunch of social media shriekers with the same kind of raw sewage slipping out of their rotten-toothed gobs as feelingchill. I’m a right wing pro EU populist these days. We need a British Bolsonaro.