Question/thoughts wrt the steep increases in Kent/London and schools.
Schools have been open with little mitigation against virus spread (despite schools and teachers best efforts, I hasten to add).
It's been known right from the start that school age children and teenagers are more often asymptomatic, lightly symptomatic or differently symptomatic than the Big Three symptoms.
We currently have got at least two urbanites children tested positive, picked up through testing that would not qualify them for symptomatic testing.
It was highlighted (sorry to bang on about my man Christian Drosten again, but that's were I got the info from) that this could very easily to an outbreak running undetected through a school for a long period (don't quote me on the time- let's say two weeks).
So when you pick up the first case via a "classically" symptomatic person - parent/student, this could have long been seeded into different year groups via siblings. Basically by the time you spot it, it's long run out of control like wildfire. Isn't that possibly exactly what happened here?
And it's suddenly so visible compared to the north of England because cases in the SE were relatively low for a while. And in the north, schools were already running with just a couple of year groups in school because everyone else was isolating (anecdotally heard from urban parent), so cases had a chance to level off or drop off.
Could that not lead to the exact picture we are seeing without the virus necessarily being more transmissable per se(among young people or otherwise)?
Not wedded to this idea, just thinking out loud.
Also thought it was very interesting what
kenny g noted with the spread along commuting routes (could of course be correlation not causation, but thought it was worth investigating, especially given how little we really know about spread on public transport).
One of the hugest failures (in an admittedly extremely crowded field), has been imo to define the symptoms for suspected covid so narrowly. Fair enough if there needs to be some gate-keeping for testing, because these can't be scaled up indefinitely, but given that IT HAS BEEN KNOWN SINCE ABOUT APRIL (pardon the caps) how differently this can present, especially in younger people, this has been absolute insanity.
I nearly fell off my chair when irc Hancock said something about we need to learn to distinguish between covid and just a cold sometime in September. Probably because he was worried about people "shirking" school and work. Do we fuck!, I wanted to scream. No, we needed to learn to stay the fuck at home with any sore throat, unusual headache or muscle ache, or gastro symptoms!
(A fresh and unhappy reminder was at work on Saturday when a colleague told me, just by way of conversation, about her sore throat with a very hoarse voice. And I was like, mate, have you got covid, I think you should go home. It then came to the absurd situation where my manager and I were arguing - she was nice about it, but I was very upset - about company policy which was basically following government policy on the Big Three, surrounded by throngs of Christmas shoppers in the street. Only for the whole thing to be locked down an hour later anyway. AND THAT'S WHY YOU FUCKING CUNTS! (pardon the caps, again).
Great, you saved a couple of days sick pay. Well done.
I seem to be angry again.
