From what I've seen it appears that roughly 40% of children are still in school, which seems far higher than I expected it would be and makes you wonder if 'closing' schools will really have any significant impact. Out of interest, those of you who do work in schools, how does this compare with the numbers you had in during the initial lockdown back in March?
The key works list seems really quite long. At a push I could probably claim to be a key worker and therefore if I had kids send them off to school, despite the fact I am working from home.
I went out for my usual walk after work this evening and the roads did not seem much quieter than they have done over recent weeks. In the first lockdown I think a lot of businesses/organisations just sent staff home regardless of whether they could carry out their jobs. All of the office buildings where I work were closed down, if you were lucky enough to have a laptop then you could do your job from home but for the many who did not then functionality was initially limited to Office 365 apps online.
Now many office buildings have been made 'Covid secure' (although I still wonder how many have adequate ventilation to reduce the risk of airborne transmission) and employers have found ways of working that mean they can bring staff back in. There will not have been the mass sending of staff home like there was last time. I know we still have staff in the office who can do decent amounts of their jobs from home, although it is more efficient being in the office.
I would like to hope that the measures will be enough to bring the R below 1. But I am not convinced that it will fall much below 1 as it did in the first lockdown, especially with the new variant. There also seems to be a growing proportion of the population who just don't care anymore which does not help matters. We really all need to pull together over the next couple of months or this is simply going to go on for much longer than any of us want it to.
I can definitely understand your concerns, but I have a few things I’d like to point out that will hopefully alleviate some of your worries.
With regards to schools and who can go in; it’s worth noting that children are only eligible to attend if
both parents or primary caregivers are key workers. If you could go in with only one key worker parent, then the number eligible would rise quite significantly; if that was the rule, I would technically be allowed to attend sixth form because my mum is a physiotherapist. But as far as I’m aware, the rule is that you are only allowed to attend if you have don’t have at least one parent working at home or can present a compelling case as to why you can’t work from home (e.g. vulnerability).
That does whittle down the numbers quite significantly; I couldn’t give you an exact number, but out of our school of nearly 1500 pupils and probably over 100 staff, my Physics teacher who was working on site said that there were less than 100 people on site today including staff, so that is probably well under 10% of pupils when taking into account that a fair few of that amount would be staff. In fact, it’s said that during the first lockdown last spring, the government actually expected around 20% of pupils to attend school, but the amount ended up at 2%.
My Physics teacher also mentioned that the testing facilities that were originally intended to facilitate the return to school before the lockdown was announced had still been installed, so everyone on the school site now has to get periodically tested.
There’s also another major thing we have now that didn’t exist last March; vaccines. Even though the amount of people currently vaccinated is far from enough to induce herd immunity,
1.3 million people have already had their first dose of vaccine in the United Kingdom, including 23% of all over-80s. This is using the Pfizer vaccine alone, so now that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved and has entered circulation, which the government has far more doses of and is far more practical to roll out, the speed of the rollout should increase substantially in the coming weeks. Loads of new vaccination centres are set to open across the country over the next week, and with the government’s new chosen dosage strategy, many, many people should be at least partially protected fairly soon.
From what Boris has said, I get the impression that the measures alone are not what the government is relying upon to get the R number below 1 and the strain on the NHS down. Vaccination will play a substantial role, too, as well as things like test-and-trace which didn’t exist in March.
