Wait, so primary schools in Tier 4 areas that are not mentioned on that list Nef posted are reopening as normal next week? Wtaf?
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Yes apparently so. And to answer a question upthread, the London boroughs threatened with legal action before Christmas are not included in the list.Comment
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FFS.Originally posted by ChrisJ View Post
Completely unnecessary to be in a classroom. It's increasing the risk but as the head she's allowed to.
We've had SLT doing 'learning walks' and they come and cross into the students' area, touch books and basically spy on the teacher. All whilst being unmasked.
Good luck and stay as safe as possible.
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We're in Greenwich, it's Tier 4 but the primaries are OK to open.Originally posted by Patrick Thistle View Post
It makes no sense.
It'll all change again before Monday.Comment
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The USA has reached 20 million confirmed cases of Covid-19.Comment
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I apologise in advance if this is a touchy topic for any of OTF's teachers, but... why aren't teachers on strike? I've been wondering this since September. Is there some sort of dastardly no-strike clause in the contracts?
As for religion, I'm for burning the Cabinet in a wicker man to propitiate Crom. Can't do any harm.Comment
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Fear. Poor leadership from the top.Originally posted by delicatemoth View Post
We believe that if went to an indicative ballot at our school we wouldn't get the support and that would weaken our position, and it's weak enough as it is.
I think the days of a militant union in education are long gone I'm afraid.
Could you imagine what the press and media would say if anyone went on strike in this pandemic?Comment
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Thanks AE. I'm really sorry you're all in such a shitty position.Comment
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Johnson's astrologist must have told him 49 is unlucky, because Redbridge has since been added to make it a nice round 50.
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If a union cared about what the press said, they'd never achieve anything...Originally posted by Antepli Ejderha View Post
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The reasonably successful Covid response in Australia has been down to the individual states as that cunt Morrison was keen on the Johnson/Trump herd immunity approach but the states basically told him to get fucked and did their own thing; border closures/lock downs/masks etc. Having said that, the state that appeared to be most aligned with Morrison's approach (NSW) has a new outbreak that, whilst it's small compared to what's happening overseas, is spreading and growing. The NSW Premier refuses to mandate masks* and is allowing the NY cricket test against India to go ahead at the SCG with a crowd of 20-30 thousand expected. Meanwhile Morrison is nowhere to be seeen (similar to 12 months ago when the country was burning), although I suspect he may be pulling the strings in NSW, given it's turning into a cluster-fuck. He is the king of cluster-fucks.
*I had to visit my local shopping centre the other day and I estimate <5% of people were wearing masks. Same on public transport when I last used it earlier this month.Even the bus drivers were not wearing masks. I had a woman ask me to take off my mask because 'I can't hear you' when we were in the queue at the bank and I just shouted louder but she apparently still couldn't hear me so I just turned away. Perhaps a hearing check at the doctor is in order.Last edited by willie1foot; 30-12-2020, 22:03.Comment
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It could be worse, up until September we were rarely in and I was working from home. I've not been furloughed or made redundant. There are many people working in higher risk jobs or who have no choice but to do risky jobs.Originally posted by delicatemoth View PostComment
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As is every other piece Yong has done on the pandemic, this is very good
https://twitter.com/edyong209/status/1343912631258804229
It also touches on the question of post-vaccination infectiousness
What happens next with SARS-CoV-2 depends on how our immune systems react to the vaccines, and whether the virus evolves in response. Both factors are notoriously hard to predict, because the immune system (as immunologists like to remind people) is very complicated, and evolution (as biologists often note) is cleverer than you.
Immunity lasts a lifetime for some viral diseases, such as chicken pox and measles, but wears off much earlier for others. There are four mild coronaviruses that cause common colds, and the immune system only remembers how to deal with them for less than a year. By contrast, immunity against the deadlier coronaviruses behind MERS and SARS lasts for several years.
SARS-CoV-2 likely falls somewhere in the middle. So far, most infections seem to trigger immune memory that persists for at least six months, although a small number of people have been reinfected. Iwasaki, the Yale immunologist, expects that COVID-19 vaccines will lead to longer and stronger immunity than natural infections, since vaccines lack the tricks that the virus itself uses to evade and delay the immune system. “The immunity may not last a lifetime, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we had to give a booster vaccine in a few years,” Iwasaki said. “But right now that’s not the major concern.”Comment
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The USA has exceeded 350,000 deaths.Comment
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Thanks for linking to the Ed Yong article, UA, it was excellent.
And I fear that the lessons from this pandemic will be mostly ignored in the UK and US.Comment
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Though this is the relevant paragraph for post-vaccination infectiousness:
Herd immunity is frequently misunderstood. It is not a force field. Outbreaks can still begin in communities with herd immunity if someone brings the virus in, but they will die out on their own because every unvaccinated person is surrounded by enough vaccinated people that the virus will struggle to reach new hosts. Or at least that’s how it works in theory. In practice, there are two complications. First, the theory assumes that the vaccines prevent infected people from passing on the virus—and it’s still unclear whether they do. If they don’t at all, the endgame becomes harder, because vaccinated people might unwittingly spread the virus. But this is more of a theoretical concern than a likely one: Vaccines that are 95 percent effective at preventing symptoms would be expected to “reduce the rate of transmission significantly,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale.Comment
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There were 14,804 deaths worldwide attributed to Covid-19 yesterday, by far the deadliest day to date.Comment
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Without the Christmas effect yet showing up
Rather terrifyingComment
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The only things that kill more people each day worldwide than that are cancer and heart attacks.Comment
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Hopefully there won't be too much of a Christmas effect in London at least, given that the Christmas easing never applied here. But of course there were all those people who left before the Tier 4 switchover..Originally posted by ursus arctos View PostComment
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And those who mixed ignoring the rules. I'm also hoping the effect will turn out to be less than I had feared. We'll see.Comment
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I'm hoping that schools being closed might counteract Christmas mixing, but I still think the numbers are likely to rise.
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Re: teachers striking, what AE said. Plus, while we're not like nurses or doctors, there's still a feeling that we're there to care for the children and it's a big emotional barrier to get over. At my old place, I was one of two who supported the one-day strikes a few years back (in a 7-class primary), partly because some colleagues were in unions that were not striking and partly because some were just not in unions. There's a worrying number of younger teachers in primary who aren't unionised now.
This morning my wife had a message from a former colleague now the head of a 4-class primary school. They've had 5 staff off with covid, some of whom are still too ill to return. She's unable to process being told to open.Comment
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