Independent schools are hopping mad. Several really ancient ones have closed already. There seem to be arbitrary rules about what percentage of pupils are allowed to return into class which, since the independents already have smaller class sizes. So allowing 25% of a class which, when full, only numbers 15 is quite different to 25% of a class of 35 pupils. The independents are challenging the government (cannot recall how) but they plan to have all years return to school in September and putting in place their own track and trace processes as well as hygiene measures etc.
Academies are also aiming to get back. This ludicrous 2m social distancing rule is making everything so much more difficult. Businesses are on the verge of going bust because they cannot operate with that sort of constraint. Schools will struggle too - they are doing awful things like having kids in little social bubbles and trying to keep them apart in the playground. To be honest, it feels like we have this dreadful disease, and we are using it as an excuse to punish our children by isolating them from their friends and impeding their education so that we can be absolutely confident that they will not catch it asymptomatically and inadvertently pass it on to us. What a society!
As for the 2m rule, aparently the govt is considering reducing it to match up with WHO guidelines of 1m. That is what many other countries have and they have no great outbreaks. But they are going to take 3 weeks to think about it! How many hospitality businesses will close in the interim. How many thousands of staff will lose their livelihoods. It doesn't bear thinking about.
Then you have the discredited Professor Ferguson who piped up, about a week ago, saying something like the fatalities would have been halved had we locked down a week earlier. Fortunately the SAGE papers are being made available and it turns out that he was on SAGE when they definitely did not recomment that Boris Johnson initiate the lockdown. Quite the reverse, they recommended that social distancing measures (which in now seems were having a measurable affect based on when the peak occurred) be continued. Professor Ferguson's imperial college paper which put the frighteners on everybody by suggesting that if no changes to behaviour were undertaken, 200,000 fatalities might occur also mentioned the word lockdown only once, and in the context that we should not need to impose it.
The Imperial College code for the program was eventually released. That was a joke! It originally consisted of one long line of code (bad coding practice) and they held off releasing it until they'd had time to improve it a little (but not much). Nevertheless, when other universities (Edinburgh?) tried to run it, they found that the same input variables could produce estimated fatalities that varied by 80,000 between one run and the next. i.e. the model was worse than useless. And this was the thing that scared the government into imposing lockdown.
I can see how it helped for the first 3 weeks. Everyone was scared that the NHS would be overwhelmed like the health service in Italy.
Well it wasn't. So we should have started to release lockdown much sooner.
We now have young people (who would be hardly affected by the virus) who are ineligible for the furlough scheme due to their 0hour contracts committing suicide and leaving behind family and children. How desperate must you feel to do that.
Yet still the government dithers.
Finally there is a little more information at a regional level. Milton Keynes (my nearest big place) has had no new positive tests the entire month of June. The rate in the community is well below 1 in 1600. The virus is concentrated in care homes and hospitals.
This morning I took a look at the coronavirus legislation. Turns out that this week they modified it to make it an offence to gather more than 6 people. Like that is going to make any difference to the thousands who are demonstrating #blacklivesmatter after the dreadful killing of George Floyd by a US police officer which was filmed and shared on social media. There were even MPs joining in the illegal marches and protests in London. Feels like one rule for them and one for everyone else. If you are participating in a 'woke' campaign, then you can ignore the rules.
Then there is the 14 day quarantine for everyone coming into this country from abroad. Everyone that is, apart from the people most likely to spread the virus - people who commute between countries like lorry drivers and people who live in one country yet work in another. Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. What is laughable is that New Zealand, where they have shut the borders and eradicated the virus, allowed two women to fly in from the UK on compassionate grounds (a parent was dying). Believe it or not, they were tested on arrival and found to have the virus! So we in the UK are exporting it! There is much lobbying from MPs and a court case from the airlines to try to get the government to reverse this stupid ruling. I hope they succeed and soon otherwise this will be the first Conservative government ever to completely trash the country's economy beyond all recognition.
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