Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Marshmallo]

[vikingTON]

9 minutes ago, Marshmallo said:

I for one am shocked to see respiratory virus Covid-19 spreading in the community through the exact same mechanism as other respiratory viruses like the cold and the flu do every single year, rather than following the 'but the weans cannae spread it!11!' nonsense theory that a few back of a fag packet studies suggested way back in April tbh.

Edited November 13, 2020 by vikingTON

[Szamo's_Ammo]

On 23/09/2020 at 12:35, Billy Jean King said:

On 23/09/2020 at 12:29, Szamo said:

A 26% increase in cases in one day, and they are only going to keep heading in one direction.
Hopefully the pubs closing a couple of hours earlier will help though. 

Why do you keep referring to this mythical elephant when stats show it's clearly shite. You and VT keep plugging a line that the figures debunk daily. Schools are nowhere near the top vector for the current spike but you appear to be willing to perish on this mountain along with your pal from Greenock.

Just popping in to say that I am still perishing on this mountain 7 weeks on.

Help!

Edited November 13, 2020 by Szamo's_Ammo

[vikingTON]

Aye but Benbecula isn't at 700 cases per 100k despite sending their weans to school, so it couldn't possibly be having any effect in Greater Glasgow though.

Edited November 13, 2020 by vikingTON

[Todd_is_God]

1 hour ago, Marshmallo said:

The reasons for this are blindingly obvious.

We were testing only those ill enough to need hospitalised for weeks after closing the schools. Kids are unlikely to need hospital treatment so would fly completely under the radar.

Given what we have seen since they returned it wouldn't surprise me at all if it was rife in schools in Feb and March and it was they, rather than outdoor events such as Cheltenham, which were the primary driver of community tramsmission, as the initial introduction to a household. It's just less fashionable to say so.

It would be equally true now too, of course. which is why none of the SG's arbitrary restrictions are having any real effect.

 

Edited November 13, 2020 by Todd_is_God

[NotThePars]

5 hours ago, Rugster said:

I think we’ll manage just fine without an influx of disease ridden arseholes like you. And to be clear, I’m not talking about covid in your case. 

What diseases are you talking about?

1 hour ago, Marshmallo said:

[vikingTON]

24 minutes ago, Todd_is_God said:

 

Given what we have seen since they returned it wouldn't surprise me at all if it was rife in schools in Feb and March and it was they, rather than outdoor events such as Cheltenham, which were the primary driver of community tramsmission, as the initial introduction to a household. It's just less fashionable to say so.

The same SAGE document that says that closing schools would drop the R rate by 0.5 (closing secondary schools alone would contribute a drop of 0.35 FFS) also looks at the impact of restricting outdoor events including 'large gatherings' (Page 4).

Its verdict? A probable total reduction of the R rate of, erm, less than 0.05, with 'high confidence' in that assessment as well. It's a near totally irrelevant factor in the outbreak, yet Clownshoes Leitch and the gang have slapped restrictions on them regardless, while letting the obvious infection factory roll along practically unchanged.

 

[D.A.F.C]

Government really needs to start telling us the truth about schools. 
previous bullshit examples with 180 u turns

ppe

crowds

facemasks 

travel

herd immunity 

following science

testing

etc

[tamthebam]

7 hours ago, Inanimate Carbon Rod said:

use sports centres or something and vaccinate entire towns when we have the stocks of the vaccine. Use field medics, nurses and dental staff, student nurses, fucking vets if they need to, 

 not Mr Chinnery for me, thanks.

[Honest_Man#1]

3 hours ago, Billy Jean King said:

4 hours ago, virginton said:

There's mixing of literally thirty households at a time in a single room over 30 hours per week, involving thousands of people in the affected areas. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what is responsible for those 'stubbornly high' rates of community transmission then even though the SG is too cowardly to admit it.

That's the same Scotland wide so seems unlikely to be the root cause of the problems in Glasgow but don't let that spoil your crusade.

This is just getting embarrassing now. At least the rest of the gang have slithered off to hide since it’s become indisputably clear that it’s schools driving infection rates, but you can’t help make a further tit of yourself.

[renton]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/health-54937486

Full article is here.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/13november2020#age-analysis-of-the-number-of-people-in-england-who-had-covid-19

ONS study that is one or the article sources is here.

It should be noted from the article and ONS study that:

1) they are careful to note that how much transmission is from the classroom is "unproven and difficult to establish" and further that "The review made clear it was not possible to separate contacts in school from contacts around school including travelling to and from, and socialising afterwards."

2) That there was "significant educational, developmental and mental health harms from schools being closed" 

3) That the primary school age positivity rates seem to have plateaued at a lower level, earlier than secondary school kids which seems consistent with earlier data that younger children don't seem to catch it as much.

4) there appears to be no greater risk of catching it as a school teacher as opposed to any other adult group.

5) That there was signs of increase in prevelance in the general population before the schools went back.

Taken together there is enough wiggle room in those conclusions for policy makers to keep the schools going. They can point to increased care in and around schools to avoid mixing - in Scotland tier 3 areas older age kids (16 and over?) Need to wear masks now in classrooms. As well as pointing out that other sectors of society are also responsible and that they can modify those to push down infections.

point 2 is a bit of a strawman, since up here at least the idea would be to use blended learning, but obviously there are doubts as to how effectively the syllabus can be delivered under that mode, and whether you avoid those severe issues highlighted in the report.

from the ONS data, positivity rates in schools have dropped since the English half term, it will be interesting to see if that starts to creep up in the next week again, or whether it has broken enough infection chains to make it harder to re-establish in short time frames.

the idea seems to be that they can find enough R value drops elsewhere to get the virus under control without disrupting the schools. They might not be wrong: R is supposedly, probablistically under 1 now, in Scotland, and test positivity has been slowly dropping to 5.7% in the last day or so. Although several LAs you can clearly see a reduction in decay, and even a rise in the second week of November. 

it does seem likely that they could go to blended learning and break some of the infection chains sooner. Again though, household mixing rules were more severe in large parts of Scotland for longer, so it may be that breaking the chains there is effective enough, if not optimal from a purely public health point of view.

having said that, I do think they should have put the 16+ age groups into blended learning at least until January. They should have been planning for it as soon as it became obvious how easy it was spreading through Uni halls, and they should have put that plan in place over the October break. I was disappointed but not surprised that they didn't. The rest of the school cohort you could leave unaffected and I think, based on the data, that you would reduce the majority of risk.

Blended learning is one of two levers they have left. The other is retail.  Blended learning they would need to roll out nationally. Given that there are real concerns that blended learning would have negative  effects on children's life chances, and given that Covid seems to have a far worse preveleance in higher deprivation areas, and that there is already an educational bias in terms of outcomes vs deprivation, then doing blended learning in the tier system would be likely to only further bake in that bias.

Retail you can modify by tier, and that's basically the tier 4 lever. I am concerned that, despite large changes in shopping behaviour towards online retail, that as we enter into the busiest shopping period of the year, the liklihood of driving large case loads in that sector becomes inevitable unless you can drive base case loads down enough to weather that effect. Given you'd probably need to stay in tier 4 for at least a couple of weeks we are getting near to the point where you can no longer deploy tier 4 without absolutely fucking the retail sector over.

so, tl;dr? I still don't think they should shut schools, and I don't think blended learning is necessary across all age groups. I do think it is desirable for the older groups to go into blended learning, yet they are the cohorts with the most to lose, given they are at the sharp end of their school education. We seem to have a precarious hold on the virus but that won't last unless we do something else quickly to weather Christmas. So it's either modify the schools now, or shut retail for a couple of weeks or both, unless they can get mass testing up here fast, like in Liverpool to find and remove infections quickly.

Edited November 14, 2020 by renton

[bendan]

21 minutes ago, renton said:

 

 

having said that, I do think they should have put the 16+ age groups into blended learning at least until January. They should have been planning for it as soon as it became obvious how easy it was spreading through Uni halls, and they should have put that plan in place over the October break. I was disappointed but not surprised that they didn't. The rest of the school cohort you could leave unaffected and I think, based on the data, that you would reduce the majority of risk.

Blended learning is one of two levers they have left. The other is retail.  Blended learning they would need to roll out nationally. Given that there are real concerns that blended learning would have negative  effects on children's life chances, and given that Covid seems to have a far worse preveleance in higher deprivation areas, and that there is already an educational bias in terms of outcomes vs deprivation, then doing blended learning in the tier system would be likely to only further bake in that bias.

Retail you can modify by tier, and that's basically the tier 4 lever. I am concerned that, despite large changes in shopping behaviour towards online retail, that as we enter into the busiest shopping period of the year, the liklihood of driving large case loads in that sector becomes inevitable unless you can drive base case loads down enough to weather that effect. Given you'd probably need to stay in tier 4 for at least a couple of weeks we are getting near to the point where you can no longer deploy tier 4 without absolutely fucking the retail sector over.

so, tl;dr? I still don't think they should shut schools, and I don't think blended learning is necessary across all age groups. I do think it is desirable for the older groups to go into blended learning, yet they are the cohorts with the most to lose, given they are at the sharp end of their school education. We seem to have a precarious hold on the virus but that won't last unless we do something else quickly to weather Christmas. So it's either modify the schools now, or shut retail for a couple of weeks or both, unless they can get mass testing up here fast, like in Liverpool to find and remove infections quickly.

 

Obviously long term blended learning would have an impact on outcomes for the students, but for a few weeks, having had time to set stuff up beforehand?

I'm mystified as to why there still appears no plan to shut down schools for longer at Christmas. In Edinburgh, the kids are still supposed to go to school on Monday and Tuesday the 21st and 22nd of December. So instead of having schools shut from noon on the previous Friday, we lose four days of potential shut-down just so kids can sit and basically watch videos together for a day and a half. It's also the shortest winter break for several years, at exactly two weeks. What on earth is the point? Can't we just add a week or two on in June/July next year?

 

 

[renton]

2 minutes ago, bendan said:

 

Obviously long term blended learning would have an impact on outcomes for the students, but for a few weeks, having had time to set stuff up beforehand?

I'm mystified as to why there still appears no plan to shut down schools for longer at Christmas. In Edinburgh, the kids are still supposed to go to school on Monday and Tuesday the 21st and 22nd of December. So instead of having schools shut from noon on the previous Friday, we lose four days of potential shut-down just so kids can sit and basically watch videos together for a day and a half. It's also the shortest winter break for several years, at exactly two weeks. What on earth is the point? Can't we just add a week or two on in June/July next year?

 

 

Yeah, that'd certainly help you'd think, although you probably need to be driving cases down now, not in a month's time. The opportunity, now lost, might have been a 4 week midterm with time added back in next summer.

Tier 4 for some places feels inevitable at this point, though more broadly the strategy seems to be to cling on by our fingernails for the vaccine.

[Todd_is_God]

34 minutes ago, renton said:

It should be noted from the article and ONS study that:

1) they are careful to note that how much transmission is from the classroom is "unproven and difficult to establish" and further that "The review made clear it was not possible to separate contacts in school from contacts around school including travelling to and from, and socialising afterwards."

They can fire stuff like this in the bin. They can't decide it's definitely hospitality etc that is the issue because people went out in the previous 7 days, but that it is unproven and difficult to apply the same criteria to a scenario where a person goes to the same place for 5 days in the same time frame.

It staggers me that not only do they think it's ok to peddle pish like that, but that journalists and large swathes of the public accept it.

Inconsistancies like that could be overlooked if A) the restrictions in place were having an obvious positive effect, and B) we were talking about a month's worth of them, not about to enter the 9th month with the end not in sight anytime soon.

 

[renton]

4 minutes ago, Todd_is_God said:

They can fire stuff like this in the bin. They can't decide it's definitely hospitality etc that is the issue because people went out in the previous 7 days, but that it is unproven and difficult to apply the same criteria to a scenario where a person goes to the same place for 5 days in the same time frame.

It staggers me that not only do they think it's ok to peddle pish like that, but that journalists and large swathes of the public accept it.

Inconsistancies like that could be overlooked if A) the restrictions in place were having an obvious positive effect, and B) we were talking about a month's worth of them, not about to enter the 9th month with the end not in sight anytime soon.

 

It's not an unreasonable point they are making. The risk factors associated with different room layouts and behaviours will count. I suspect the socialising aspect outside of classrooms, to and from home might be fairly significant even. Though there is not much you could do about that, and stopping kids going to school might still be the only effective remedy.

The restrictions have done something. You only have to look at the differences between Scotland and England to observed that different restrictions over different time frames have changed the trajectory of the virus. The question becomes one of whether the restrictions are optimal, from a public health and societal point of view.

Obviously, from a purely public health point of view, the ideal scenario would be to lock everyone up for 6 weeks, zero contact with anyone else. 

[Steven W]

On 12/11/2020 at 07:18, Steven W said:

Both Inverness and Elgin matches this n the league cup this week were behind closed doors, despite having been in tier 1 for over a week now. Since the move to the tiered system that's only one of the four matches that have government permission to have fans (restricted) actually have any there (And even that had the same amount as a pilot event a couple of months previous)

Elgin have an u20 friendly v Strathspey on Sunday - behind closed doors (couldn't think of a better match to have a test event at if you wanted to go down that route).

Look forward to the Glasgow clubs getting the same treatment when (if?) they ever reach tier 1....

A wee update on this as I keep my beady eye on events.

Inverness play at home today but will have no fans allowed despite being placed in Tier 1 nearly a fortnight ago. They have however been given approval for (from JRG?) 300 fans for their game v Raith in the league.

So still no progress in exceeding the 300 pilot event amount.

Lossiemouth have a friendly today had had said fans would be allowed before subsequently withdrawing that statement and giving no reason why.

[welshbairn]

43 minutes ago, Steven W said:

Lossiemouth have a friendly today had had said fans would be allowed before subsequently withdrawing that statement and giving no reason why.

Apparently someone unconnected to the club contacted the SFA after reading this article, who then phoned the club telling them it had to be BCD as the protocols hadn't been agreed. It does seem a bit amateurish as set out below.

https://www.northern-scot.co.uk/sport/fans-can-attend-moray-football-match-on-saturday-as-lossiemouth-are-given-go-ahead-to-stage-test-event-at-their-friendly-against-deveronside-218271/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter 

[Todd_is_God]

47 minutes ago, renton said:

It's not an unreasonable point they are making.

Of course it is. If spending a couple of hours in a 'covid secure' venue having dinner and a few drinks is being blamed for the spread, to the extent they were forcibly closed, and now have restrictions on what they can sell along with reduced operating hours, it's ludicrous to suggest spending hours per day in classrooms which are not 'covid secure' is "unproven" and "difficult to establish."

[peasy23]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/health-54937486
Full article is here.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/13november2020#age-analysis-of-the-number-of-people-in-england-who-had-covid-19
ONS study that is one or the article sources is here.
It should be noted from the article and ONS study that:
1) they are careful to note that how much transmission is from the classroom is "unproven and difficult to establish" and further that "The review made clear it was not possible to separate contacts in school from contacts around school including travelling to and from, and socialising afterwards."
2) That there was "significant educational, developmental and mental health harms from schools being closed" 
3) That the primary school age positivity rates seem to have plateaued at a lower level, earlier than secondary school kids which seems consistent with earlier data that younger children don't seem to catch it as much.
4) there appears to be no greater risk of catching it as a school teacher as opposed to any other adult group.
5) That there was signs of increase in prevelance in the general population before the schools went back.
Taken together there is enough wiggle room in those conclusions for policy makers to keep the schools going. They can point to increased care in and around schools to avoid mixing - in Scotland tier 3 areas older age kids (16 and over?) Need to wear masks now in classrooms. As well as pointing out that other sectors of society are also responsible and that they can modify those to push down infections.
point 2 is a bit of a strawman, since up here at least the idea would be to use blended learning, but obviously there are doubts as to how effectively the syllabus can be delivered under that mode, and whether you avoid those severe issues highlighted in the report.
from the ONS data, positivity rates in schools have dropped since the English half term, it will be interesting to see if that starts to creep up in the next week again, or whether it has broken enough infection chains to make it harder to re-establish in short time frames.
the idea seems to be that they can find enough R value drops elsewhere to get the virus under control without disrupting the schools. They might not be wrong: R is supposedly, probablistically under 1 now, in Scotland, and test positivity has been slowly dropping to 5.7% in the last day or so. Although several LAs you can clearly see a reduction in decay, and even a rise in the second week of November. 
it does seem likely that they could go to blended learning and break some of the infection chains sooner. Again though, household mixing rules were more severe in large parts of Scotland for longer, so it may be that breaking the chains there is effective enough, if not optimal from a purely public health point of view.
having said that, I do think they should have put the 16+ age groups into blended learning at least until January. They should have been planning for it as soon as it became obvious how easy it was spreading through Uni halls, and they should have put that plan in place over the October break. I was disappointed but not surprised that they didn't. The rest of the school cohort you could leave unaffected and I think, based on the data, that you would reduce the majority of risk.
Blended learning is one of two levers they have left. The other is retail.  Blended learning they would need to roll out nationally. Given that there are real concerns that blended learning would have negative  effects on children's life chances, and given that Covid seems to have a far worse preveleance in higher deprivation areas, and that there is already an educational bias in terms of outcomes vs deprivation, then doing blended learning in the tier system would be likely to only further bake in that bias.
Retail you can modify by tier, and that's basically the tier 4 lever. I am concerned that, despite large changes in shopping behaviour towards online retail, that as we enter into the busiest shopping period of the year, the liklihood of driving large case loads in that sector becomes inevitable unless you can drive base case loads down enough to weather that effect. Given you'd probably need to stay in tier 4 for at least a couple of weeks we are getting near to the point where you can no longer deploy tier 4 without absolutely fucking the retail sector over.
so, tl;dr? I still don't think they should shut schools, and I don't think blended learning is necessary across all age groups. I do think it is desirable for the older groups to go into blended learning, yet they are the cohorts with the most to lose, given they are at the sharp end of their school education. We seem to have a precarious hold on the virus but that won't last unless we do something else quickly to weather Christmas. So it's either modify the schools now, or shut retail for a couple of weeks or both, unless they can get mass testing up here fast, like in Liverpool to find and remove infections quickly.

I would bet there is as much transmission between teenagers outside of school as there is in them if the groups of teenagers I've seen hanging about at night are anything to go by. At least in school they will be forced to abide by some guidelines, no chance of that once they step out the gate.

[ddfg]

Has any data from Test and Protect been published in respect of the locations where transmissions are taking place?

Whilst it may be unpopular why are we still able to buy alcohol. If alcohol related inhibitions are seen as a driver of spreading the virus why close licenced premises where some degree of control and time limits are in place but allow the much maligned house party to continue unabated.