Schools and Covid 19 (part 5) **Mod warnings in OP**

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932030#Comment_117932030

Does anyone who uses the term gaslighting actually know what it means?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932080#Comment_117932080

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/long-covid-is-overblown-and-often-something-else-says-oxford-professor-x62ghkt3c

Surely we all know tons of adults and children suffering from "Long Covid".

The truth is anyone who expresses feeling anything less than perfect after covid, whether linked or not, is counted as "Long Covid". This over-counting seriously undermines those actually suffering post viral conditions after covid who are a much smaller number than the hype.

Snooker Loopy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932131#Comment_117932131

I know exactly what gaslighting means, thanks. It means somebody trying to cod you that something is true when they know it isn't. It means ridicule of well founded concern.

The below graph is what is happening in England at the moment, you can see how Covid among children of school going age is rocketing.

The claim is being made by Norma Foley, Philip Nolan etc. that schools will not be a mass spreader of Covid. But look at what's happening in England. The inescapable conclusion is they are.

So how can our authorities make this claim when the evidence from England says otherwise?

Another inescapable conclusion as far as I can see is that it has effectively been decided that children of school going age should go into schools and get Covid - unvaccinated - in large numbers.

Nobody in authority here - or in the UK - will admit to that. But I cannot see how it is not the case. The ideology is "it's time for the kids to take one for the team".

That to me is indefensible.

josip

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932080#Comment_117932080

20 a week sounds a lot, but the US is a big country.

Children account for at most 0.25% of US Covid deaths.

https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-infections/children-and-covid-19-state-level-data-report/

Snooker Loopy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932161#Comment_117932161

That to me comes across as a blasé dismissal. Again, gaslighting. It's telling people "you don't have "Long Covid", you're imagining it. Bell has done some good for sure with his work on the AZ vaccine. But I don't see how he's in any position at all to dismiss what people are suffering from.

Snooker Loopy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932263#Comment_117932263

It is a big country, but why would we dismiss that children are dying from Covid? And why would we dismiss illness? And why would we dismiss that having a large amount of Covid running around younger age groups has knock on effects for other age groups? Parents can catch Covid from children. Grandparents can catch it.

josip

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932283#Comment_117932283

A meteorite could come through the roof right now and flatten me. I suppose we shouldn't dismiss that?

Or someone might put novichok on our door handle. Or I might find a funnelweb in the dunny.

Vaccinating kids for their own benefit is ok. Vaccinating them for the benefit of others isn't.

FishOnABike

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932372#Comment_117932372

Vaccinating for the benefit of others is a large part of the reason for vaccinations.

Having a large percentage of a population vaccinated denies a pathogen the opportunity to spread or maintain a pool of infected hosts in a population.

It is why we have eradicated diseases like smallpox, all but eradicated polio and made once common childhood illnesses like measles, uncommon.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932265#Comment_117932265

The exact opposite of the point I made. People who are genuinely suffering long term effects are being dismissed as the same as those who are not feeling 100% 30 days after diagnoses, irrespective of the cause. The overcounting is what is in fact dismissing the suffering of people, not the pointing out that taking 8 weeks for your smell to come back is not long term suffering. Look at any of the reports on long covid. They give a headline figure, talk in detail about relatively few serious post viral conditions and then talk to usually "any symptoms more the 30 days post recovery" as counting as long covid. Its a dragnet that takes in anyone feeling anyway under par on a day they fill in a questionnaire. None of the studies reported that I have seen does any head to head analysis of the rate of similar experiences with other viruses or in a control population with no covid

Snooker Loopy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932372#Comment_117932372

That's not a good faith argument. It's a blasé dismissal of a serious virus which is likely to rampage through schools, as is happening in England.

The point of vaccination is multi-fold. It benefits the vaccinated person themselves, and society. If you are vaccinated you are less likely to contract Covid. And you are less likely again to contract Covid in a scenario where everybody is vaccinated. If you're unfortunate enough to catch Covid while vaccinated, you're likely to be infectious for a shorter period of time than if you caught it while unvaccinated. Your symptoms are much more likely to be less. It's all a virtuous circle.

Vaccines will protect people less in a scenario where there are a lot of unvaccinated people, and/or Covid is circulating widely.

The rationale for vaccinating children is the exact same as the rationale for vaccinating younger adults. The risk of death and long term illness from Covid is much lower for young adults than it is for older age groups. But that doesn't mean that vaccination for younger adults wasn't highly recommended. It's the same for children.

The benefit is personal, but also societal.

Cumulative effect is the operative phrase. Every fully vaccinated person is a grain of rice. The more grains of rice you have, the more chance of tipping the scales in the way we want.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932235#Comment_117932235

Gaslighting in fact means creating a false narrative to ridicule or make someone question their reality.

Those posing the view than an increased rate in unvaccinated 5 to 14 year olds relative to vaccinated older groups, is somehow suggestive of a massive problem with covid in schools and poses a severe public health risk strikes me as being more like gasllighting than actually pointing out that hospitalisations are low are remain low, the severity of he virus within kids as akin to that in vaccinated populations or even lower and that the rate of increase in kids is actually modest.

Snooker Loopy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932531#Comment_117932531

Hospitalisations in Ireland do remain low in comparison to what they were at the peak but because the virus continues to circulate widely among younger age groups, it still inevitably filters up towards older age groups and causes illness and death. And great as the vaccines are, they are not foolproof. That's why the UK is still averaging 143 deaths per day.

The case for the vaccination of children seems pretty clear cut to me - personal benefit and societal benefit.

If we are lucky, when all age groups are vaccinated, there will be no more younger age groups for Delta to concentrate in and it will fade away - although what happens then would still be uncertain.

Society needs to move on at this point and that is what we are doing. Covid is harmless to kids for the most part. Its pretty harmless in general now with 90% vaccinated and tiny hospital numbers. We just need to accept the fact that people will catch it.

But if people want, they can keep their kids off school and look at other options like home schooling etc.

@[Deleted User]

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932572#Comment_117932572

The case for vaccinating children, once the data is available, is clear to me also. The virus however is never going away and as much as it pains me to say it @[Deleted User] is now right in his view.

seamus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932161#Comment_117932161

Indeed, this has been my bugbear with "Long Covid" for at least a year now, and nobody seemed interested in addressing it.

Until this month, there were basically no data collection exercises on Long Covid that included comparative or control data.

They all involved talking to people who have had Covid and asking them "Have you had one or more of these really common complaints in the 6 months since Covid" or "Would you rate your general health worse than it was before covid".

They didn't ask the same questions of people who haven't had covid. Which casts doubt over whether Long Covid even exists. I know it does, because post-viral fatigue is a thing.

But I'm pretty sure if you asked the general public who haven't had Covid, a huge amount of them will tell you that they too have experienced persistent headaches, fatigue, brain fog & joint pain at some point over the last 6 months.

And when you consider that the majority of patients hospitalised with covid are older people, I'll bet a lot of money that if you survey random 70+ year olds and ask them if their health has declined in the last 12 months, nearly all of them will say it has. Covid or no covid.

One study came out this month, which did perform this comparative analysis (on teenagers), and bore out my skepticism. 3 months after testing negative for Covid, more than half of those surveyed, reported having experienced one of a list of common symptoms.

If we compare the covid and non-covid groups and disregard the baseline, about 13% of those who test positive for covid will experience symptoms at some point (not persistently) in the 3 months after testing positive.

The good news is that the study found no difference in mental health or wellbeing outcomes. This suggests that even for the 13% who experienced extra symptoms, they were not sufficiently intense to impact their lives.

The study also notes that the response level was very low, which further suggests that 13% is a pessimistic number due to selection bias.

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-798316/v1

Snooker Loopy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932610#Comment_117932610

We don't know that yet. Only time will tell. No country has reached 90% vaccination or thereabouts, or more. We're only at 73%. What is clear is that vaccinations benefit the person and they benefit society. It seems clear to me that one of the major reasons, perhaps by far the major reason our Covid case figures have not exploded since Delta arrived in the way that many people (including myself) suspected they would, is mass vaccination.

If it is the case that Covid becomes endemic, it is in general much less bad to get Covid while vaccinated than unvaccinated.

josip

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932684#Comment_117932684

UAE and Portugal are thereabouts. Gibraltar have hit it out of the park.

seamus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932283#Comment_117932283

According to the CDC, 554 children (0-18) in the US have died of Covid since April 2020.

It sounds like a lot, but when you strip it back, that's a crude death rate of 0.47 deaths per 100,000 children per year.

For comparison:

• Benign cancers: 0.2
• Septicaemia: 0.4
• Influenza & Pneumonia: 0.6
• Heart Disease: 1
• Malignant cancers: 2
• Suicide: 2.8
• Murder: 2.8
• Accidents: 8.1

We shouldn't ignore covid deaths in children, but we shouldn't lose our mind over it either. Nobody vaccinates their kids against the 'flu. Nobody worries about masks and hand sanitisers and CO2 monitors in schools to keep 'flu at bay.

Considering that 'flu is and always has been less transmissible than Covid, that 0.6 'flu deaths per 100k children in the US means that catching the 'flu is considerably more dangerous to children than Covid.

554 child deaths in 18 months from Covid. In 2019, 434 children died from 'flu in 12 months. Nearly 20% more deadly, even though 75% less tranmissible. Where is the panic over that?

Snooker Loopy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932796#Comment_117932796

Long Covid is a very significant concern. I do not know how Long Covid tallies with helping children's education.

Then there's the societal aspect of it. If Covid is circulating widely among unvaccinated schoolchildren, that filters upwards. It's why the UK is still averaging 143 deaths per day.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117933204#Comment_117933204

Its unclear what your expectation or proposal is though?

We have a vaccine that most people have taken. There is really nothing more that can be done...

Snooker Loopy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117933320#Comment_117933320

Well I've already said that if I had a child of school going age I would be doing everything possible to keep them out of school until they are vaccinated. Because I don't believe schools are safe. I think the Government and Philip Nolan are giving false assurances that they are not in a position to give.

We kept schools shut before because of Covid. Unfortunately I don't believe the rationale for keeping them shut then has gone away, it strongly looks to me like it has intensified.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932726#Comment_117932726

To be quite honest, i think micro states like Gibraltar should be excluded from general stats. That's a statistical anomaly. They only have 33,701 people on the island and that vaccination rate doesn't even make any sense.

seamus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117933609#Comment_117933609

I tend to agree. It would be different if Gibraltar were sovereign, but they're not. The UK can airdrop 100 military medics in, vaccinate the entire population in a week and then leave again. If it were sovereign, Gibraltar probably wouldn't even have 100 military personnel in total, never mind medics.

josip

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117933609#Comment_117933609

Yeah I always like quoting Gibraltar for this. I assume that a lot of the Spanish who work there took advantage of earlier vaccination opportunities.

History Queen

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932577#Comment_117932577

I agree to an extent but if parents can be alerted about headlice/chickenpox/slappedcheek etc ina childcare/school setting why can't we still be alerted about covid cases so that we can take action if we feel the need to?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117934020#Comment_117934020

The problem is that people are irrational when it comes to Covid. Mention the word and everyone will pull their kids out of school until they are convinced its safe.

Can only assume that is why they don't want to tell people.

iamwhoiam

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117934176#Comment_117934176

I dont think it’s irrational to at least be informed if your child is a close contact . They can then choose to do what is right for their situation . For example choose not to visit an eldery relative or choose to do an antigen test before they go to dance class etc

Snooker Loopy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117934176#Comment_117934176

And why should they not have the right to pull their kids out of school if they don't think it's safe?

It would seem very rational to me.

"Not telling people" isn't transparent and neither is it honest. It's deceitful.

TomOnBoard

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117934290#Comment_117934290

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117933415#Comment_117933415

Any parent has the right to pull their child out of school if they feel it is unsafe, or if they feel that they are being misled by the authorities as to facts and policies regarding Covid in Schools.

Foley and her Dept have not acted in a trustworthy manner and it is wise to question their intentions. NPHET's imminent changed strategy in respect of close contacts flies in the face of previous strategy and also ought to be questioned. The "Trust Me" attitude that worked 12-18 months ago no longer prevails today .

That said, the morbidity/mortality landscape has changed utterly. 73% of the population is fully vaxxed, which massively reduces the overall risk of serious illness or death. The 2020 strategy of keeping kids out of school was not as much about preventing Covid infecting the kids - it was more about preventing spread among older and vulnerable cohorts. The kids were never hugely affected by the disease, and this has only changed marginally with Delta, although transmissability has increased many fold. At this stage, most/all of those at risk of serious illness/death have been fully vaxxed, IF they chose to be so. Similarly, most/all teachers have also been fully vaxxed, if THEY chose to be. Accordingly, the school landscape has changed a lot. However, Foley's assurances around safety in schools are largely empty - witness the promises around CO2 monitors... What an absolute faff- whats going to happen when the cold weather hits and windows cant be left open all day???

So, now anyone with kids in school and vulnerable/immuno-compromised ppl at home is very wise to remain on high alert. Indeed, with the contact tracing changes incoming, they'd need to be even more alert. For everyone else, its a matter of risk tolerance and balancing risk vs reward. I do feel the authorities have quietly decided that the general population is as well- protected as possible, so testing & isolation among school-going children is no longer viable. Its now up to ppl to decide for themselves. IMO, it is a poor approach given the continued unforgivable lack of State support for antigen testing, and that is definitely a NPHET failing. The reliance on a PCR-only strategy, with a 'one per county' testing centre is simply wrong and arrogant!

@seamus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117933415#Comment_117933415

Would you have argued that children should not go to school if not vaccinated against influenza. Because that is more serious in kids as per the data from @seamus