Schools closed until March/April? (part 4) **Mod warning in OP 22/01**

Theboinkmaster

rainbowtrout wrote: »

And what agenda is that? Are you veering into conspiracy theory territory?

Ah jaysus do i have to point out the obvious??!

- government agenda = cover their arses and blame new strain on December case rise rather than admit they opened up too much of the country too soon. They managed the message so bad basically telling everyone to go mad for December that we'd be in lockdown again in Jan.

- media agenda = negative sensationalist headlines draw in clicks/readers - COVID-19 has been a huge positive for media outlets, RTE viewerships and web visits significantly increased thanks to their negative propaganda

The Wordress

Theboinkmaster wrote: »

Where's the scientific data to support this? Link?

Sorry I will rephrase that as I read the article again.

Just 3 days ago, Dr.Colm Henry said that our transmission rates are now 10 times higher than what they were in December.

Theboinkmaster

wirelessdude01 wrote: »

So what's their agenda?

Answered below, this is quite concerning some of you don't see the government and media agendas throughout this pandemic.

Quite depressing really.

Theboinkmaster

The Wordress wrote: »

Sorry I will rephrase that as I read the article again.

Just 3 days ago, Dr.Colm Henry said that our transmission rates are now 10 times higher than what they were in December.

Yes that's true - but is that because of these new strains or the fact that a large section of the population went absolutely mad for the month of December and acted as if COVID did not exist - indoor dining, parties etc.

HSE were reporting some people had personal contacts of 30+.

Just look at what happened in Belmullet - was that because of the new strains? No it wasn't.

Inquitus

So we are looking at no likely return to Classrooms until after Easter according to articles in the press from the last couple of days? My kids will have driven me mad by then!

wirelessdude01

Theboinkmaster wrote: »

Just look at what happened in Belmullet - was that because of the new strains? No it wasn't.

More than likely the new strain did indeed. The amount of people from North Mayo that came home from the UK was frightening. Belmullet and the Erris region in general had a huge number of people home from London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Leeds.

wirelessdude01

Inquitus wrote: »

So we are looking at no likely return to Classrooms until after Easter according to articles in the press from the last couple of days? My kids will have driven me mad by then!

That's Easter '22!!!!

The Wordress

Theboinkmaster wrote: »

Yes that's true - but is that because of these new strains or the fact that a large section of the population went absolutely mad for the month of December and acted as if COVID did not exist - indoor dining, parties etc.

HSE were reporting some people had personal contacts of 30+.

Just look at what happened in Belmullet - was that because of the new strains? No it wasn't.

Your scientific evidence and statistics is coming from where?

A virus has the main aim of staying active and live, of course it is going to mutate and change to do this.

History Queen

Theboinkmaster wrote: »

Any teachers i know are mad to get back to school and are embarrassed by their unions.

I believe the unions will use every excuse they can to delay it TBH.

Why would the unions do this though? You understand that the unions represent teachers surely? Or are you suggesting that the union representatives are on a solo run?

Theboinkmaster

wirelessdude01 wrote: »

More than likely the new strain did indeed. The amount of people from North Mayo that came home from the UK was frightening. Belmullet and the Erris region in general had a huge number of people home from London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Leeds.

Utter nonsense, it's been widely reported what happened there. Night club was open ffs!

Theboinkmaster

The Wordress wrote: »

Your scientific evidence and statistics is coming from where?

A virus has the main aim of staying active and live, of course it is going to mutate and change to do this.

im not denying the existence of new strains, of course there are and have been.

but new strains being cause of January crisis i dont think so, i think it was socialising in December.

wirelessdude01

Theboinkmaster wrote: »

Utter nonsense, it's been widely reported what happened there. Night club was open ffs!

Are you from the area?

Gradius

It's clear as a bell what's going to happen!

Leaving cert will be given away like last year, the schools will reopen for some short period in a month or so before closing again. Nobody is going to school over the summer months.

All the speculation, rumours, arguments, proposals...it's just busy-bodying and nothing more.

There, easy peasy.

Theboinkmaster

For the hysteria around new variants:

ACitizenErased wrote: »

Breaking news from Moderna:
https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1353699891818754048?s=20

Murple

Theboinkmaster wrote: »

Children < 18 are in the lowest risk age group hence why vaccinated last.

If they or parents feel not safe to go in, they don't have to - they can stay at home.

Actually those under 18 are the last group to be vaccinated because there is the least amount of data on effectiveness and side effects for this age group. There would be under 18s who would be very high risk and they will still be last to be vaccinated. At number 7 is people aged 18-54 with certain medical conditions. A 17 year old with the same condition won’t be prioritised.
Pregnant women are also in the last group to be vaccinated for the same reason.
Pregnant women would be higher risk that most health 18-54 year olds but are below them in the priority list.

wirelessdude01

Theboinkmaster wrote: »

For the hysteria around new variants:

Did you read the footnote?

Theboinkmaster

wirelessdude01 wrote: »

Did you read the footnote?

I did.

Crocodile Booze

Theboinkmaster wrote: »

For the hysteria around new variants:

Huh? What hysteria? And what's that specifically got to do with schools and this thread?
Only hysteria I can sense is from you.

Theboinkmaster

Crocodile Booze wrote: »

Huh? What hysteria? And what's that specifically got to do with schools and this thread?
Only hysteria I can sense is from you.

There is obvious media hysteria around new variants and this has been mentioned by teacher unions a lot recently.

So it's relevant as strains are being used as a reason to delay re-opening schools.

Theboinkmaster

Crocodile Booze wrote: »

Only hysteria I can sense is from you.

How am i being hysterical

Icyseanfitz

Theboinkmaster wrote: »

There is obvious media hysteria around new variants and this has been mentioned by teacher unions a lot recently.

So it's relevant as strains are being used as a reason to delay re-opening schools.

People are worried about the new strains because they are exactly that, new, we have next to no data on them and what they could do or not do or what vaccines will work and to what extent. Just because there is a lack of data does not mean we should stick our heads in the sand and hope for the best, the original strain was bad enough, we don't need to potentially spread a worse version of it.

As for Christmas, have you considered it was a combination of the uk variation and increased socialisation, or does it have to be one or the other.

am_zarathustra

Chopper Dave wrote: »

You might be right but should we not stop using the scheduled holidays as a benchmark (this year anyway). What you might end up with is those kids who go back last (i.e. non exam Secondary Students) are also the kids who will finish for Summer Holidays first (usually end May if you don't have exams).

Surely there's a case for extending the term into June or even July to compensate for all the time lost. Otherwise these kids will only have had five weeks in school before September. Same for the primary kids too and if the term gets extended then it might reduce demand for foreign travel, etc. It would also be easier to ventilate the schools in June than it would be if schools were open now.

Teachers could reasonably expect to be compensated for the extra weeks in the class but lets have that conversation. It would be in their interest as much as the students to use the time to catch up on lost teaching time in both 2020 and 2021.

I'm off several hours of online teaching. All my classes are bang on my scheme for the year. Enjoying the live classes, great in maths! No bother to them to be honest. They'll need their breaks will the quantity of work some are handing in.

MerlinSouthDub wrote: »

Yes, it's too early to tell and caution is the right approach. We should know more pretty quickly. It's encouraging that early estimates of 70% more transmissible seem well wide of the mark. We shall see.

As an aside, I do think that:
1) In the UK, they used the new strain as a cover story to justify a new lockdown (when they had promised there wouldn't be one)
2) In Ireland, the new strain was used an excuse for the bad decision to re-open for Christmas.

But the politics of it shouldn't distract us from the fact that it is a new strain, and it may behave differently

A new, more transmissible strain will make containment more difficult. N95 masks already being brought in in Germany as mandatory, under the assumption that very small amount so aerosolisation along with the increased binding will lead to more cases. This is fairly basic evolutionary theory to be honest, it's what the scientists HAVE been warning us about. All organisms have a molecular clock, virsues have brutally quick ones....the more infections the more variants we will see. Some will be less transmissible, these will die out, some will be more transmissible and by genetic drift and active selection these will thrive.

Of the professional scientist I know, and it's my background so its the majority of my friends, no one of them are taking the variants lightly, the hope is the external target proteins won't mutate (spike proteins) fast enough to make the vaccine irrelevent but, to be clear, with enough infections and time they will mutate.......that's just the way viruses are. Keeping rates low buys us time to vaccinate to get copy numbers low, to prevent mutations and to suppress mutations that already exist.

I hope all the people calling for NPHET to be ignored and calling them facists and all sorts before christmas now realise hat the scientists aren't out to get anyone, they just had a better idea of what would happen.

TTLF

Socialization in December certainly played a huge part of the community transmission, no doubts. But the UK variant was also a new issue.

Say we didn't have the UK variant at all, it didn't exist. We would probably be half the case numbers at the peak VS the current peak, considering it transmits way easier, we know this.

Mass amounts of people came/travelled to Ireland from the UK before Christmas. Think about it, London/SE quickly said they're going into lockdown tomorrow at 4pm on the 21st, tons of people fled to parts of Northern England to see their families and a few people even I know travelled home to Ireland because they didn't want to spend a grim Christmas stuck in their London apartment alone.

The fact we had opened up society didn't help the already growing community transmission. The UK variant definitely accelerated it more than it could've been. We probably would've only seen 3000-4000 positive swabs a day at peak if the UK variant didn't exist, compared to the 6000-7000 we saw in the end.

Even now, where it's probably the dominant strain here and in the UK, the UK are struggling indefinitely with the new strain, we are too, maybe not as much since we have a smaller population, but we could be 2-3 weeks behind anything good or bad that occurs to them, and on top of that our ICU isn't looking good right now as is. Boris announced schools there will probably be closed until Easter by the looks of it. Although don't quote me on that, I need to put more research into it.

am_zarathustra

TTLF wrote: »

Socialization in December certainly played a huge part of the community transmission, no doubts. But the UK variant was also a new issue.

Say we didn't have the UK variant at all, it didn't exist. We would probably be half the case numbers at the peak VS the current peak, considering it transmits way easier, we know this.

Mass amounts of people came/travelled to Ireland from the UK before Christmas. Think about it, London/SE quickly said they're going into lockdown tomorrow at 4pm on the 21st, tons of people fled to parts of Northern England to see their families and a few people even I know travelled home to Ireland because they didn't want to spend a grim Christmas stuck in their London apartment alone.

The fact we had opened up society didn't help the already growing community transmission. The UK variant definitely accelerated it more than it could've been. We probably would've only seen 3000-4000 positive swabs a day at peak if the UK variant didn't exist, compared to the 6000-7000 we saw in the end.

Even now, where it's probably the dominant strain here and in the UK, the UK are struggling indefinitely with the new strain, we are too, maybe not as much since we have a smaller population, but we could be 2-3 weeks behind anything good or bad that occurs to them, and on top of that our ICU isn't looking good right now as is. Boris announced schools there will probably be closed until Easter by the looks of it. Although don't quote me on that, I need to put more research into it.

Data is hard to keep up with with the new strains!!

In the last few days there were three new studies (one by The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, one by Imperial College London, and one by University of Exeter) that all showed that the uk strain is more deadly by about 1.65 fold. Now the caveat here is that the vaccine does work as well as normal against this strain (we think so far) and this is based off the 10% genotyping of strains, so viral strain is known in 10% of deaths with covid. Hard to see there being a bias that takes 1.65 to no fold difference and more data will help but any decent scientist would be betting on a virus that can be lethal with a better binding affinity being more lethal.

I'd be more worried about the SA variant given the initial data on that

Leftwaffe

Theboinkmaster wrote: »

There is obvious media hysteria around new variants and this has been mentioned by teacher unions a lot recently.

So it's relevant as strains are being used as a reason to delay re-opening schools.

They are susceptible to vaccines which is great. But nobody in the school setting is vaccinated? Odd comments.

The UK strain will spread like wildfire if we reopen with current t cases numbers and lack of contact tracing.

redmgar

Cases will be at near 1000 today, the talk of schools being off for another 6 weeks is ridiculous.
I would say mid term is more likely.

Gradius

redmgar wrote: »

Cases will be at near 1000 today, the talk of schools being off for another 6 weeks is ridiculous.
I would say mid term is more likely.

I'll say it again, the leaving cert will be given away like last year, schools will reopen for a short while in some mickey mouse manner, then close shortly afterwards until September.

It's not crystal-ball stuff. Just relax and let them talk about their maybes and probably's and what-if's. It's just filling time for them.

khalessi

Murple wrote: »

Actually those under 18 are the last group to be vaccinated because there is the least amount of data on effectiveness and side effects for this age group. There would be under 18s who would be very high risk and they will still be last to be vaccinated. At number 7 is people aged 18-54 with certain medical conditions. A 17 year old with the same condition won’t be prioritised.
Pregnant women are also in the last group to be vaccinated for the same reason.
Pregnant women would be higher risk that most health 18-54 year olds but are below them in the priority list.

Yup this is a huge issue, niece 17 with CF wont be prioritised due to age

am_zarathustra

khalessi wrote: »

Yup this is a huge issue, niece 17 with CF wont be prioritised due to age

Is this for definite or because they are about the release the phase trials for this age group? Might just be waiting on the safety data to add them hopefully. 12-18 and then younger are done last in vaccine trials. I hope, for your niece, that thats it!

Stateofyou

Theboinkmaster wrote: »

a) there is no scientific evidence that new strains are more transmissible or damaging - isn't it interesting they appeared the exact same month as the country went mental over the Christmas period? I'm very dubious around these new strains - need to see a lot more scientific data not anecdotes.

b) So the "they can stay at home if scared" line has nothing to do with anything - I never said this, don't put words in my mouth.

A. FALSE. Just do a simple google search. I'm not doing that for you. You're "very dubious" about new strains? LOL. That's what viruses NORMALLY do. I'm surprised you don't know this, I thought everyone did. Just look at all the common cold/flu strains... :rolleyes:

b) "so they can stay" home is what you said, the scared is implied as that is almost always the meaning behind those that use that line.