Corbyn was not perfect. He was closer to to the Labour heart than Blair.
Back to Boris. He has put his head over the parapet on returning to schools. He seems to have the backing of scientists and other national leaders. I will say that at this point that he seems to have got that right. Not necessarily about going back to school, but about taking advise and listening to others.
There you go I said something good about him.
Well, well - maybe his time off has enabled him to consider how he ought to be behaving. Better late than never...
We'll see - certainly it's important that children should get back to school, as long as it's as safe as can be for them, for their parents, and for the staff.
Yes, but we're talking about the Labour party, which has only been extreme left in the fevered imaginations of the far right press.
What is "extreme left" is another function of the Overton window. From where Telford stands, Mr. Corbyn is "extreme left", and everyone to the left of Mr. Corbyn is off in la-la land somewhere.
The only person to the left of Corbyn is buried in Highgate cemetary
Aaaaaaand we're back to unsubstantiated bollocks.
Are you suggesting that I am wrong about the cemetary ?
I'm not going to give you the satisfaction of playing the victim here by giving you the benefit of the doubt that this incredibly stupid question is a genuine response which could only come from an incredibly stupid person.
You know exactly what I mean.
What you mean is that you think I am an incredibly stupid person who asks stupid questions. Thanks for that
1) Everyone knows you're referring to Karl Marx. No one is questioning the simple fact that Marx is buried in a famous London cemetery.
2) You will find a very wide range of views on here about Mr Corbyn from big supporters (I know at least one), to those who think he’s responsible for both Brexit and Johnson's success. I, personally have some significant issues with Corbyn but was a 'supporter,' purely because I (very accurately) predicted what a Johnson government would look like. Personal perspectives on Corbyn and not pertinent.
3) Corbyn's policy positions were mainstream left in both European terms and historical British terms (pre-1980).
Thus, UNLESS YOU CARE TO PROVIDE SOME EVIDENCE TO BACK UP YOUR ASSERTION, the idea that Corbyn is just to the right of Marx, is just nonsense. (No matter how proud you might be by the clever way you phrased it).
The irony is that there is a real discussion to be had here. Namely that some people argue the reason we have the ignorant buffoon as PM is that Corbyn was (in the minds of much of electorate) an even worse choice. FWIW I don't think that's either true (that Corbyn would have been worse) nor a decisive factor in the election - that was Brexit.
But you see, all of that's beside the point because:
a) If we accept the hypothesis that However bad Johnson is, at least he's not Corbyn that is the worst possible excuse for the abject failure of Johnson in essentially every aspect of his role as PM.
and b) You have provided literally no justification for that hypothesis other than the assertion that "Corbyn is a Marxist." You want to run with that? fine. Show us some evidence to support that.
The reason for the ire in response to your posts is not that people love Corbyn (that's a minority here*) is that you keep stating the same thing and then not backing it up when being challenged on it.
It's really simple: You want to argue that whatever anyone might write on this thread about Johnson's failures, we could be much worse off if he'd lost the election? Go ahead, just provide some support for that argument.
Although you'd also have to go further and explain how that's an excuse for ineptitude, as well.
The passive-aggressive nonsense cuts no ice.
AFZ
*I suspect no-one here actually 'loves-Corbyn' so much as passionately agrees with his policy platform.
Edit: X-posted with Alan
Am I not allowed to distrust someone without a lengthy explanation?
I trust Corbyn as much as any Labour leader since he entered Parliament in 1983. None of them gave him any sort of job in government or in a shadow cabinet.
1) Everyone knows you're referring to Karl Marx. No one is questioning the simple fact that Marx is buried in a famous London cemetery.
2) You will find a very wide range of views on here about Mr Corbyn from big supporters (I know at least one), to those who think he’s responsible for both Brexit and Johnson's success. I, personally have some significant issues with Corbyn but was a 'supporter,' purely because I (very accurately) predicted what a Johnson government would look like. Personal perspectives on Corbyn and not pertinent.
3) Corbyn's policy positions were mainstream left in both European terms and historical British terms (pre-1980).
Thus, UNLESS YOU CARE TO PROVIDE SOME EVIDENCE TO BACK UP YOUR ASSERTION, the idea that Corbyn is just to the right of Marx, is just nonsense. (No matter how proud you might be by the clever way you phrased it).
The irony is that there is a real discussion to be had here. Namely that some people argue the reason we have the ignorant buffoon as PM is that Corbyn was (in the minds of much of electorate) an even worse choice. FWIW I don't think that's either true (that Corbyn would have been worse) nor a decisive factor in the election - that was Brexit.
But you see, all of that's beside the point because:
a) If we accept the hypothesis that However bad Johnson is, at least he's not Corbyn that is the worst possible excuse for the abject failure of Johnson in essentially every aspect of his role as PM.
and b) You have provided literally no justification for that hypothesis other than the assertion that "Corbyn is a Marxist." You want to run with that? fine. Show us some evidence to support that.
The reason for the ire in response to your posts is not that people love Corbyn (that's a minority here*) is that you keep stating the same thing and then not backing it up when being challenged on it.
It's really simple: You want to argue that whatever anyone might write on this thread about Johnson's failures, we could be much worse off if he'd lost the election? Go ahead, just provide some support for that argument.
Although you'd also have to go further and explain how that's an excuse for ineptitude, as well.
The passive-aggressive nonsense cuts no ice.
AFZ
*I suspect no-one here actually 'loves-Corbyn' so much as passionately agrees with his policy platform.
Edit: X-posted with Alan
Am I not allowed to distrust someone without a lengthy explanation?
I trust Corbyn as much as any Labour leader since he entered Parliament in 1983. None of them gave him any sort of job in government or in a shadow cabinet.
Distrust is different from the accusation of being "extreme left".
Yes, but we're talking about the Labour party, which has only been extreme left in the fevered imaginations of the far right press.
What is "extreme left" is another function of the Overton window. From where Telford stands, Mr. Corbyn is "extreme left", and everyone to the left of Mr. Corbyn is off in la-la land somewhere.
The only person to the left of Corbyn is buried in Highgate cemetary
Aaaaaaand we're back to unsubstantiated bollocks.
Are you suggesting that I am wrong about the cemetary ?
I'm not going to give you the satisfaction of playing the victim here by giving you the benefit of the doubt that this incredibly stupid question is a genuine response which could only come from an incredibly stupid person.
You know exactly what I mean.
What you mean is that you think I am an incredibly stupid person who asks stupid questions. Thanks for that
No. Quite the opposite.
I think you are probably of normal or higher intelligence but act incredibly stupid and ask incredibly stupid questions, firstly to try to be clever (in the Yorkshire sense, which doesn't actually work because you're not quite clever enough to make stupidity work for you that way) and secondly to provoke people into calling you stupid so you can play the victim.
I believe that you knew perfectly well what I meant, and you knew perfectly well I wasn't claiming that Karl Marx wasn't buried in Highgate Cemetery. However, you mistakenly thought you were being really witty by purposely misunderstanding my post.
Of course, the possibility that you are in fact just very stupid does still exist, but, well, that's up to you.
I think @Telford enjoys winding people up. I’ve noticed he tend to like to say the opposite of what others say. Deliberate or unconscious attention seeking imo.
Yes, but we're talking about the Labour party, which has only been extreme left in the fevered imaginations of the far right press.
What is "extreme left" is another function of the Overton window. From where Telford stands, Mr. Corbyn is "extreme left", and everyone to the left of Mr. Corbyn is off in la-la land somewhere.
The only person to the left of Corbyn is buried in Highgate cemetary
Aaaaaaand we're back to unsubstantiated bollocks.
Are you suggesting that I am wrong about the cemetary ?
I'm not going to give you the satisfaction of playing the victim here by giving you the benefit of the doubt that this incredibly stupid question is a genuine response which could only come from an incredibly stupid person.
You know exactly what I mean.
What you mean is that you think I am an incredibly stupid person who asks stupid questions. Thanks for that
No. Quite the opposite.
I think you are probably of normal or higher intelligence but act incredibly stupid and ask incredibly stupid questions, firstly to try to be clever (in the Yorkshire sense, which doesn't actually work because you're not quite clever enough to make stupidity work for you that way) and secondly to provoke people into calling you stupid so you can play the victim.
I believe that you knew perfectly well what I meant, and you knew perfectly well I wasn't claiming that Karl Marx wasn't buried in Highgate Cemetery. However, you mistakenly thought you were being really witty by purposely misunderstanding my post.
Of course, the possibility that you are in fact just very stupid does still exist, but, well, that's up to you.
You really need to lighten up and stop taking things so seriously
I think @Telford enjoys winding people up. I’ve noticed he tend to like to say the opposite of what others say. Deliberate or unconscious attention seeking imo.
It works too. 🤔🧐
Sorry. But I am not going to agree with you. It is not my intention to wind people up. I just want to say what I think on any given subject. Some say I am passive aggressive but just a few years ago I didn't even know what this meant.
@Telford - You don’t need to know what passive aggressive means to employ it life long.
My Grandma did.
Being assertive and emotionally open is not always easy. When standing up for yourself is difficult, passive-aggression might seem like an easier way to deal with your emotions without having to confront the problem. It can then simply become a habit taken forward to other areas of your life (eg online discussions) Playing the victim can be part of it too. My Grandma was a master at that, especially when we had visitors!
Anyway, we digress.
Back to de Pfeffel and his mishandling of ... everything.
He has the cheek to mention ‘moral duty’. He wouldn’t know a moral course of action if he fell over it.
“Prime minister tries to reassert his grip over education after days of chaos, saying risk of contracting virus in schools is ‘very small’.”
Oooh! I bet he's glad it's in Scotland - and therefore not his fault (directly).
I'll point out, for those that don't know, that schools in England haven't gone back yet. So Scotland gets to play Covid guineapig by virtue of having a term that starts typically a couple of weeks or so earlier than England.
I'll also note that my local schools (in the US) are starting this term entirely virtually, and despite this, one local high school has closed its building twice in the last month, because someone who has been in the building has tested positive for Covid.
They've only had janitorial staff and a small number of teachers in the building.
@Telford - You don’t need to know what passive aggressive means to employ it life long.
My Grandma did.
Being assertive and emotionally open is not always easy. When standing up for yourself is difficult, passive-aggression might seem like an easier way to deal with your emotions without having to confront the problem. It can then simply become a habit taken forward to other areas of your life (eg online discussions) Playing the victim can be part of it too. My Grandma was a master at that, especially when we had visitors!
I claim the right to reply to your allegations
When someone is bullied, are they playing the victim if they complain?
Back to de Pfeffel and his mishandling of ... everything.
He has the cheek to mention ‘moral duty’. He wouldn’t know a moral course of action if he fell over it.
“Prime minister tries to reassert his grip over education after days of chaos, saying risk of contracting virus in schools is ‘very small’.”
Yes, I forgot, there's always moral faux-outrage to fall back on.
Have you anything useful to say without using foul language ?
Have you anything useful to say at all? You didn't exactly indicate that you did when you pissed irrelevant sneering crap all over the thread I started in All Saints.
Stop being so fucking superior. It ill befits you.
Yes, I forgot, there's always moral faux-outrage to fall back on.
Have you anything useful to say without using foul language ?
Have you anything useful to say at all? You didn't exactly indicate that you did when you pissed irrelevant sneering crap all over the thread I started in All Saints.
Stop being so fucking superior. It ill befits you.
At 6.08pm I made a relevant post about COVID in a Scottish school. A poster replied by slapping himself on the head. Don't blame me for starting this nonsense. That was all down to you at 6.15pm.
Telford said (at 609pm): This sounds to me like a disregard for social distancing in the staff room and at least one of them probably took the virus into the school.
At 6.08pm I made a relevant post about COVID in a Scottish school. A poster replied by slapping himself on the head. Don't blame me for starting this nonsense. That was all down to you at 6.15pm.
I suspect that our shipmate from Zog was amazed at the idiocy displayed in your statement.
This sounds to me like a disregard for social distancing in the staff room and at least one of them probably took the virus into the school.
(It's now up to 21 staff, two pupils, and four others in the community.)
Yes, obviously a person (probably a teacher) brought the virus into the school. The virus does not magically appear in schools - it comes in with infected people who are not showing symptoms and don't know that they are infected.
It seems likely (given that so many staff have it, and few pupils so far) that a staff room was the nexus of the transmission.
You assert that this is probably because the staff weren't taking the required precautions in the staff room, based on no evidence beyond the fact that a lot of staff are infected. It could also be that the staff are following the advice perfectly, and the advice is insufficient to prevent transmission.
But it doesn't really matter which one is true for the purposes of this discussion. The staff at Kingspark School have the same information that teachers all across the UK have. There's no reason a priori to expect them to behave differently from teachers anywhere else. Which means that, as more schools open up, you should expect to get more such clusters.
Trying to blame the teachers with "well, they weren't doing it right" doesn't help, from the point of view of predicting what will happen elsewhere, because if it's true that "they weren't doing it right", it's probably also true that other places will do it wrong in the same way.
It is, actually, interesting to know what the staff actually did - what precautions were in place, and how they were followed, because it's quite obvious that whatever happened doesn't prevent Covid transmission, so if you have a policy that says "Do what the Kingspark staff actually did, and you'll be safe" then you're now provably wrong.
(Kingspark is a school for children with complex support needs. It may not represent a normal school environment, either for staff or pupils.)
@Leorning Cniht said 'Kingspark is a school for children with complex support needs. It may not represent a normal school environment, either for staff or pupils'.
Might that mean that the ratio of adults to children is different to that in the average school?
Either way, it rather casts yet further doubt on the wisdom of the Lord Protector's almost fanatic desire to get everyone back to skool...
At 6.08pm I made a relevant post about COVID in a Scottish school.
Correction, at 6.08pm you made a post accusing teachers of being responsible for an unfortunate outbreak of a disease that's raging through the country. Instead of noting that this indicates the difficulty of maintaining social distancing and hygiene within the constraints of a school environment, and that while the coronavirus is in circulation this will mean that there will inevitably be outbreaks linked to places where people gather for extended periods of time you chose to jump up and attack the teachers for what you imagine must be their failure. It's just bad luck, an unfortunate intersection of the fact that coronavirus is still more common in the population that it needs be if we'd (as in, everyone in the country) maintained proper social distancing for longer and the fact that school buildings are not built to accommodate staff and students in an environment where maintaining a minimum 2m distancing and avoiding touching common surfaces is possible.
A poster replied by slapping himself on the head.
A very mild response to your attack on the teachers concerned.
@Leorning Cniht said 'Kingspark is a school for children with complex support needs. It may not represent a normal school environment, either for staff or pupils'.
Might that mean that the ratio of adults to children is different to that in the average school?
I'd think so, yes, although I'd think it still has more pupils than staff, so a ratio of 21 infected staff to two pupils is still a strongly staff-dominated group.
Mr. Google tells me that it has 180 or so pupils across all years. I am unable to find it's total staff complement listed anywhere.
Telford remember this Hell. It is ok to do the things people are doing here. If you don’t like it then stick to other boards. Hell is not a nice place.
school buildings are not built to accommodate staff and students in an environment where maintaining a minimum 2m distancing and avoiding touching common surfaces is possible.
I agree with everything you wrote, except that this implies that maintaining a 2m distance and not sharing touch surfaces is sufficient to prevent transmission. Those are reasonable precautions for casual contacts (passing people in supermarkets etc.) but I don't think they're sufficient for longer-term contact (eg. sharing an office / staff room / classroom with someone).
At any rate, knowing what those teachers actually did is interesting, because it tells us that it's not sufficient. If you want to continue to operate schools, you need to do better than that.
school buildings are not built to accommodate staff and students in an environment where maintaining a minimum 2m distancing and avoiding touching common surfaces is possible.
I agree with everything you wrote, except that this implies that maintaining a 2m distance and not sharing touch surfaces is sufficient to prevent transmission.
My apologies, that wasn't my intention. It was just a very short statement as part of a longer post. There are no measures we can take that will be sufficient to prevent transmission. Steps that can help reduce transmission include maintaining physical distance, and other physical barriers between people, frequent hand washing and cleaning of surfaces, wearing masks in crowded locations, working from home where possible etc. None of which were part of the specifications given to the architects when our school buildings were constructed.
Which is why de Pfeffel is utterly wrong to pronounce going back to school as safe.
Surely he knows that it will only be a matter of time before he’s proven to be wrong?
At minimum schools should be open for pupils one week on, one week off, with testing at the end of each week ‘on’. Online learning for the pupils on the week off - with laptops and broadband provided for all who don’t have it.
That’s do-able and safer (not safe, but much better) - all it lacks is political will.
One wonders quite why he is so insistent that it's *safe*, when just about everyone else has reservations...
Clearly everybody would like it to be safe. And the fact that our children all troop off to school for the day is built in to the structure of our society. If children are to have all their parents at work, then there has to be somewhere for the children to be. I think it's also fair to say that if schools go virtual, then single parents and the lower-earning of working couples are likely to be the ones that get shafted the most, and they're probably mostly women.
I don't think anyone is disputing this - but asserting that it's safe is the same kind of wishful thinking as Mr. Trump saying that the virus "will just go away".
The thing that I think is still missing from this discussion is any attempt at being quantitative. @Alan Cresswell points out a number of things that reduce the risk of Covid transmission. But nobody has a clear idea of how effective they are.
Suppose you're in a classroom with an infected person, with no safeguards. The data suggests that after about an hour, you've probably got Covid-19. Now put a mask on the person, and keep everyone 6 feet apart. How long can you be in that same classroom before you expect to have Covid-19 now? I haven't seen any good answers.
There's lots of talk about "if you have to do this, here are some sensible measures that will reduce the risk" but very little quantifiable talk about whether we should do this.
There's lots of talk about "if you have to do this, here are some sensible measures that will reduce the risk" but very little quantifiable talk about whether we should do this.
That's because there isn't the data needed to make a quantitative assessment. There might be enough data to make some sensible statements that the risks to children of staying at home (which include long term impacts on school work, mental and emotional health from not seeing friends, possible unnoticed abuse ...) are less than going to school - which is what the chief medical officers are saying. I've not seen anything on the news coverage of the decision over the last few days on the risks to staff and parents.
Of course a message "it's safer to send children to school than keep them at home" is a very different one to "it's safe to send children to school".
That's because there isn't the data needed to make a quantitative assessment.
No, but there should be more data than there was - we should be able to place some better bounds on what is possible. We've had several months where functional countries have had a track-and-trace system in place. In principle, those systems know how long an infected person was in contact with a contact, how close they were, whether masks were worn, and whether the contact subsequently developed Covid.
That dataset lets you make sensible comments about this kind of thing, but I haven't seen any attempt to do this. Is there something I've missed?
There might be enough data to make some sensible statements that the risks to children of staying at home (which include long term impacts on school work, mental and emotional health from not seeing friends, possible unnoticed abuse ...) are less than going to school - which is what the chief medical officers are saying.
I don't see how, because we haven't got any data about the long-term impacts of remote schooling. There's plenty of data about the effect of missing some days of school in the context where your classmates don't miss school, but that's not the same as everyone missing school, and it's not the same as remote school.
And it's also harder to apply at the individual level. Different kids will handle remote school very differently. Many parents will have a good sense of whether their kids are doing well with remote school, or not. On the other hand, very little that parents know about their kids affects their risk of catching Covid-19, because that's largely determined by the behaviour of their classmates and their classmates' families, so a global risk model is more directly relevant.
(There's two different questions - whether schools, in general, should go back, and whether a particular family should send their particular child back. They don't necessarily have the same answer.)
Telford said (at 609pm): This sounds to me like a disregard for social distancing in the staff room and at least one of them probably took the virus into the school.
Yet another unsubstantiated supposition...
No wonder others are getting exasperated.
Do you seriously think that 17 teachers got infected in the classroom ?
At 6.08pm I made a relevant post about COVID in a Scottish school.
Correction, at 6.08pm you made a post accusing teachers of being responsible for an unfortunate outbreak of a disease that's raging through the country. Instead of noting that this indicates the difficulty of maintaining social distancing and hygiene within the constraints of a school environment, and that while the coronavirus is in circulation this will mean that there will inevitably be outbreaks linked to places where people gather for extended periods of time you chose to jump up and attack the teachers for what you imagine must be their failure. It's just bad luck, an unfortunate intersection of the fact that coronavirus is still more common in the population that it needs be if we'd (as in, everyone in the country) maintained proper social distancing for longer and the fact that school buildings are not built to accommodate staff and students in an environment where maintaining a minimum 2m distancing and avoiding touching common surfaces is possible.
A poster replied by slapping himself on the head.
A very mild response to your attack on the teachers concerned.
How do you think that all these teachers got infected ?
Telford remember this Hell. It is ok to do the things people are doing here. If you don’t like it then stick to other boards. Hell is not a nice place.
It's not a nice place because of the way that some people behave.
Do you seriously think that 17 teachers got infected in the classroom ?
That's not the question you should be asking. It's whether or not they got infected at work. And the answer to that is pretty much categorically Yes.
An employer owes a duty of care to their employees throughout the whole of their workplace. If they've socially distanced the canteen, but the production line hasn't, they got infected at work. If they've socially distance the production line, but not the staff room, they got infected at work. If they've done both, but the changing room hasn't, then they got infected at work.
And if they get infected at work, the employer has to close the workplace again until they make better provisions for their employees not to get sick while they work there.
This is an often nasty, sometimes debilitating, occasionally fatal virus with a reservoir in the general population. There's an outbreak at these people's place of work. And all you can do (like the government) is blame them for catching it.
How do you think that all these teachers got infected ?
I don't know. No one knows. Only an idiot jumps to a conclusion such as this is "a disregard for social distancing in the staff room". But, I'm going to state that I would say bad luck is a more reasonable explanation than the teachers broke the hygiene guidelines.
How do you think that all these teachers got infected ?
I don't know. No one knows. Only an idiot jumps to a conclusion such as this is "a disregard for social distancing in the staff room". But, I'm going to state that I would say bad luck is a more reasonable explanation than the teachers broke the hygiene guidelines.
It's certainly possible. It's possible that the measures that were in place would have been adequate in a normal condition, but there was an unusually virulent person in the school, and they were unlucky that he was there.
It's also possible that the measures in place were insufficient.
(From a safety-at-work point of view, if the staff are breaking the safety rules, it means your safety system is insufficient.)
How do you think that all these teachers got infected ?
I don't know. No one knows. Only an idiot jumps to a conclusion such as this is "a disregard for social distancing in the staff room". But, I'm going to state that I would say bad luck is a more reasonable explanation than the teachers broke the hygiene guidelines.
Do you suspect that some teachers caught it off other teachers
How do you think that all these teachers got infected ?
I don't know. No one knows. Only an idiot jumps to a conclusion such as this is "a disregard for social distancing in the staff room". But, I'm going to state that I would say bad luck is a more reasonable explanation than the teachers broke the hygiene guidelines.
Do you suspect that some teachers caught it off other teachers
Probably. That doesn't mean that the teachers were disregarding social distancing requirements.
Comments
Back to Boris. He has put his head over the parapet on returning to schools. He seems to have the backing of scientists and other national leaders. I will say that at this point that he seems to have got that right. Not necessarily about going back to school, but about taking advise and listening to others.
There you go I said something good about him.
Well, well - maybe his time off has enabled him to consider how he ought to be behaving. Better late than never...
We'll see - certainly it's important that children should get back to school, as long as it's as safe as can be for them, for their parents, and for the staff.
What you mean is that you think I am an incredibly stupid person who asks stupid questions. Thanks for that
Am I not allowed to distrust someone without a lengthy explanation?
I trust Corbyn as much as any Labour leader since he entered Parliament in 1983. None of them gave him any sort of job in government or in a shadow cabinet.
Distrust is different from the accusation of being "extreme left".
No. Quite the opposite.
I think you are probably of normal or higher intelligence but act incredibly stupid and ask incredibly stupid questions, firstly to try to be clever (in the Yorkshire sense, which doesn't actually work because you're not quite clever enough to make stupidity work for you that way) and secondly to provoke people into calling you stupid so you can play the victim.
I believe that you knew perfectly well what I meant, and you knew perfectly well I wasn't claiming that Karl Marx wasn't buried in Highgate Cemetery. However, you mistakenly thought you were being really witty by purposely misunderstanding my post.
Of course, the possibility that you are in fact just very stupid does still exist, but, well, that's up to you.
It works too. 🤔🧐
Perhaps I'd best crack open another bottle of WINE...
You really need to lighten up and stop taking things so seriously
Sorry. But I am not going to agree with you. It is not my intention to wind people up. I just want to say what I think on any given subject. Some say I am passive aggressive but just a few years ago I didn't even know what this meant.
My Grandma did.
Being assertive and emotionally open is not always easy. When standing up for yourself is difficult, passive-aggression might seem like an easier way to deal with your emotions without having to confront the problem. It can then simply become a habit taken forward to other areas of your life (eg online discussions) Playing the victim can be part of it too. My Grandma was a master at that, especially when we had visitors!
Anyway, we digress.
Back to de Pfeffel and his mishandling of ... everything.
He has the cheek to mention ‘moral duty’. He wouldn’t know a moral course of action if he fell over it.
“Prime minister tries to reassert his grip over education after days of chaos, saying risk of contracting virus in schools is ‘very small’.”
He needs to look at what’s happening on Scotland - 17 teachers in one school have become infected in the last week - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-53886277
If that happens up and down the country we’re in for another rapid U turn.
I'll point out, for those that don't know, that schools in England haven't gone back yet. So Scotland gets to play Covid guineapig by virtue of having a term that starts typically a couple of weeks or so earlier than England.
I'll also note that my local schools (in the US) are starting this term entirely virtually, and despite this, one local high school has closed its building twice in the last month, because someone who has been in the building has tested positive for Covid.
They've only had janitorial staff and a small number of teachers in the building.
When someone is bullied, are they playing the victim if they complain?
This sounds to me like a disregard for social distancing in the staff room and at least one of them probably took the virus into the school.
Do we need to know about your self abuse ?
Must...resist....
No, fuck it. Open goal.
As opposed to your open mental masturbation on here, you mean?
Disgusting response. I was refering to the fact that the poster was slapping his forehead. Get a grip.
Have you anything useful to say without using foul language ?
Have you anything useful to say at all? You didn't exactly indicate that you did when you pissed irrelevant sneering crap all over the thread I started in All Saints.
Stop being so fucking superior. It ill befits you.
At 6.08pm I made a relevant post about COVID in a Scottish school. A poster replied by slapping himself on the head. Don't blame me for starting this nonsense. That was all down to you at 6.15pm.
This sounds to me like a disregard for social distancing in the staff room and at least one of them probably took the virus into the school.
Yet another unsubstantiated supposition...
No wonder others are getting exasperated.
I suspect that our shipmate from Zog was amazed at the idiocy displayed in your statement.
To recap,
(It's now up to 21 staff, two pupils, and four others in the community.)
Yes, obviously a person (probably a teacher) brought the virus into the school. The virus does not magically appear in schools - it comes in with infected people who are not showing symptoms and don't know that they are infected.
It seems likely (given that so many staff have it, and few pupils so far) that a staff room was the nexus of the transmission.
You assert that this is probably because the staff weren't taking the required precautions in the staff room, based on no evidence beyond the fact that a lot of staff are infected. It could also be that the staff are following the advice perfectly, and the advice is insufficient to prevent transmission.
But it doesn't really matter which one is true for the purposes of this discussion. The staff at Kingspark School have the same information that teachers all across the UK have. There's no reason a priori to expect them to behave differently from teachers anywhere else. Which means that, as more schools open up, you should expect to get more such clusters.
Trying to blame the teachers with "well, they weren't doing it right" doesn't help, from the point of view of predicting what will happen elsewhere, because if it's true that "they weren't doing it right", it's probably also true that other places will do it wrong in the same way.
It is, actually, interesting to know what the staff actually did - what precautions were in place, and how they were followed, because it's quite obvious that whatever happened doesn't prevent Covid transmission, so if you have a policy that says "Do what the Kingspark staff actually did, and you'll be safe" then you're now provably wrong.
(Kingspark is a school for children with complex support needs. It may not represent a normal school environment, either for staff or pupils.)
Might that mean that the ratio of adults to children is different to that in the average school?
Either way, it rather casts yet further doubt on the wisdom of the Lord Protector's almost fanatic desire to get everyone back to skool...
A very mild response to your attack on the teachers concerned.
I'd think so, yes, although I'd think it still has more pupils than staff, so a ratio of 21 infected staff to two pupils is still a strongly staff-dominated group.
Mr. Google tells me that it has 180 or so pupils across all years. I am unable to find it's total staff complement listed anywhere.
I agree with everything you wrote, except that this implies that maintaining a 2m distance and not sharing touch surfaces is sufficient to prevent transmission. Those are reasonable precautions for casual contacts (passing people in supermarkets etc.) but I don't think they're sufficient for longer-term contact (eg. sharing an office / staff room / classroom with someone).
At any rate, knowing what those teachers actually did is interesting, because it tells us that it's not sufficient. If you want to continue to operate schools, you need to do better than that.
Surely he knows that it will only be a matter of time before he’s proven to be wrong?
At minimum schools should be open for pupils one week on, one week off, with testing at the end of each week ‘on’. Online learning for the pupils on the week off - with laptops and broadband provided for all who don’t have it.
That’s do-able and safer (not safe, but much better) - all it lacks is political will.
Because the line has to go up.
Clearly everybody would like it to be safe. And the fact that our children all troop off to school for the day is built in to the structure of our society. If children are to have all their parents at work, then there has to be somewhere for the children to be. I think it's also fair to say that if schools go virtual, then single parents and the lower-earning of working couples are likely to be the ones that get shafted the most, and they're probably mostly women.
I don't think anyone is disputing this - but asserting that it's safe is the same kind of wishful thinking as Mr. Trump saying that the virus "will just go away".
The thing that I think is still missing from this discussion is any attempt at being quantitative. @Alan Cresswell points out a number of things that reduce the risk of Covid transmission. But nobody has a clear idea of how effective they are.
Suppose you're in a classroom with an infected person, with no safeguards. The data suggests that after about an hour, you've probably got Covid-19. Now put a mask on the person, and keep everyone 6 feet apart. How long can you be in that same classroom before you expect to have Covid-19 now? I haven't seen any good answers.
There's lots of talk about "if you have to do this, here are some sensible measures that will reduce the risk" but very little quantifiable talk about whether we should do this.
Of course a message "it's safer to send children to school than keep them at home" is a very different one to "it's safe to send children to school".
No, but there should be more data than there was - we should be able to place some better bounds on what is possible. We've had several months where functional countries have had a track-and-trace system in place. In principle, those systems know how long an infected person was in contact with a contact, how close they were, whether masks were worn, and whether the contact subsequently developed Covid.
That dataset lets you make sensible comments about this kind of thing, but I haven't seen any attempt to do this. Is there something I've missed?
I don't see how, because we haven't got any data about the long-term impacts of remote schooling. There's plenty of data about the effect of missing some days of school in the context where your classmates don't miss school, but that's not the same as everyone missing school, and it's not the same as remote school.
And it's also harder to apply at the individual level. Different kids will handle remote school very differently. Many parents will have a good sense of whether their kids are doing well with remote school, or not. On the other hand, very little that parents know about their kids affects their risk of catching Covid-19, because that's largely determined by the behaviour of their classmates and their classmates' families, so a global risk model is more directly relevant.
(There's two different questions - whether schools, in general, should go back, and whether a particular family should send their particular child back. They don't necessarily have the same answer.)
Do you seriously think that 17 teachers got infected in the classroom ? How do you think that all these teachers got infected ?
It's not a nice place because of the way that some people behave.
Outraged and Insulted of Shropshire has spoken!
(But, as usual, without comprehension - whether deliberately so or not, I couldn't say).
That's not the question you should be asking. It's whether or not they got infected at work. And the answer to that is pretty much categorically Yes.
An employer owes a duty of care to their employees throughout the whole of their workplace. If they've socially distanced the canteen, but the production line hasn't, they got infected at work. If they've socially distance the production line, but not the staff room, they got infected at work. If they've done both, but the changing room hasn't, then they got infected at work.
And if they get infected at work, the employer has to close the workplace again until they make better provisions for their employees not to get sick while they work there.
This is an often nasty, sometimes debilitating, occasionally fatal virus with a reservoir in the general population. There's an outbreak at these people's place of work. And all you can do (like the government) is blame them for catching it.
It's certainly possible. It's possible that the measures that were in place would have been adequate in a normal condition, but there was an unusually virulent person in the school, and they were unlucky that he was there.
It's also possible that the measures in place were insufficient.
(From a safety-at-work point of view, if the staff are breaking the safety rules, it means your safety system is insufficient.)
Do you suspect that some teachers caught it off other teachers
I don't know. Doing so is normally met with a one line non-sequitor.
No. I have better things to do.
Precisely.