Schools closed until February? (part 3)

meeeeh wrote: »

I didn't say there is no difference. Children in spring were almost imprisoned, no playgrounds were open and no sports activities. They mingle much more now so transmissions will be higher just not high enough to worry about schools.

However at the end of April 40k tests per week were done and criteria for testing was different. I think it's clear first wave was much worse here than second wave (unlike in big parts of Central Europe which dealt with first wave well and got cocky) and less testing was done. I dislike comparisons which don't take test rate and criteria into account. Health minister was guilty of that too when he announced that deaths among those testing positive is 90% down in comparisons to spring and forgot to mention that asymptomatic people are tested now and in spring only people with whole plethora of symptoms were tested.

JDD wrote: »

Don't forget, a third of the workforce are still working as normal - i.e. not furloughed and not working from home. So a huge chunk of parents are still working in factories, distribution centres, supermarkets, health care workers, teachers, call centre and bank branch workers etc etc,

I'm not saying that the majority of kids who test positive are catching it from their parents, but that has to count as a proportion of the infections.

Having said that, I absolutely agree that schools are not magical places where covid does not occur. I think if the HSE changed their policy to carry out these three steps:
- Test the entire class when a positive case is identified;
- Ensure that siblings are kept home the minute their brother and sister shows symptoms and/or their brother or sister is identified as a close contact, rather than waiting for the brother or sisters positive result; and
- speeding up the time between a positive test and identifying close contacts;

Then I think we would have much less infections at the moment, and shops and restaurants and pubs would be able to open fully on the run up to Christmas.

I know that's lots of disruption for a school. You could have one positive case in 1st class, and all of a sudden 25 children from that class are sent home, along with every sibling of each of those 25 students. So you could have 50 children sent home for two days because of one positive test. If you have three positive cases in the school that have come in in different classes, well that would shut down most small schools entirely. I think this is why the HSE have been quite restrictive in how they have defined close contacts within schools.

On balance though, it seems like a better idea to widen the close contract criteria if we want to keep infections in the community to a minimum, and open the rest of the economy as much as possible.

I am the first to say that a child's education is hugely important, and more important than opening restaurants and pubs, even considering the damage to the economy and to people's livelihoods. But I think some school disruption is worth it if it makes a significant difference in stopping community spread. There is a balance to be struck here, and I think we have tilted a little too far in the direction of protecting education, to the detriment of every other part of our economy.