Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

Despite a dash of what is becoming trademark Guardian sensationalism, this is pretty good: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/07/what-are-the-risks-of-england-unlocking-in-the-covid-third-wave

To add to the mask talk. Two weeks ago the mask mandate was lifted here, Spain, and you no longer need to wear a mask at all times outside, only when inside. Yet nearly everyone is still wearing one outside in town.

Here in NL it was lifted completely two weeks ago (I think public transport is the only place it's still required), and we're already back to being stared at if you wear one in the supermarket.

I think in a few weeks NL is going to be a good example of not opening up rapidly.

Not a teacher or a parent but I live with a teacher... The school they work at is a v expensive international school, it was closed Feb-May 2020 (would have been closed most of Feb anyway due to the holidays), a few teachers were trapped outside the country for the end of last school year but this school year has been totally normal for the kids - all lessons in person, on campus, with the correct teachers etc.

Now the IB results came out yesterday and the results are quite.... surprising. It looks like there's been some grade inflation to make up for the fact that many kids globally couldn't attend school or sit exams this last year. The kids here haven't had that disruption but still benefit from extra points. Not their fault, but it seems unfair for all the students who aren't in the same position.

I don't quite understand what's going on there.

Sure my birth place has an anarchistic streak but it's normally tempered by its practical and light socialist streak, not ATM it seems.

At least vaccination is catching up...my parents and brother are all double / single vaccinated.

You got yours already I hope?

Yep, echo this for Valencia. I wear mine out unless there is no-one else in sight, and that is pretty much the behaviour of everyone who lives here. To clarify, here it is "no need to wear a mask outside if you can maintain distance of 1.5m from other people".

It's becoming increasingly easier to spot the tourists since they apparently don't give a fuck.

It's really hard to know how the situation should have been handled re: exams (other than having a different system, but you can't really do that on the fly in the middle of a pandemic). But nonetheless, the outcomes are going to be pretty bonkers.

Thanks for this. I'm glad we (in HE) don't have (inter)national exams...
Someone else mentioned syllabus - think that was the word I should have used. I wonder if it's really necessary for kids to know about the Plantagenets (for example) balanced against the negatives of any kind of catch-up teaching. I guess the real problem is to do with what comes up in exams. Mind you I do still occasionally break out the trigonometry.

This is how I feel, I don't really mind that my child has missed out on learning Jekyll and Hyde and don't think she needs catch up sessions to learn it, provided that she won't be disadvantaged when it comes to her GCSE results for not knowing it. Math and Science I feel differently.

I do have sympathy for the teachers and exam board though as I don't believe it will be possible to achieve a 'fair' solution for everyone, so my only hope is they can come up with the least unfair solution to not put disadvantaged pupils at a further disadvantage.

I think we’re really touching on a slightly different subject, namely what should be taught in schools and why. I’m an academic by training, and fairly fundamentally believe in knowledge for its own sake, and instilling a love of learning. The useful skills aren’t really subject specific. It’s more (in the humanities) about learning to research, to balance competing viewpoints, to summarise complex information, to assess the validity of different accounts, to write fluently and to present your own views and arguments intelligently. Those things are absolutely transferrable. The actual specifics of why Edward II was deposed won’t help anyone, but hopefully some people find it interesting and can think intelligently about the parallels between that situation and today.

And if we’re talking about catch up teaching, we’re really talking about catching up syllabus content, which does contain things like the Plantagenets. Moreover, none of the GCSE specifications will prescribe a certain order of teaching (though the route through some is much more obvious than others), so the exam boards can’t just say ‘don’t teach X, just do Y’, as some people will have taught X already, for example.

To really complicate things, all GCSEs have Assessment Objectives (AOs), which are tied into key skills. For example, 2 different history syllabuses might teach 2 different periods, but are still ultimately looking to assess students’ ability to interpret sources and estimate their reliability. In this year’s TAGs, schools could reduce content but still had to assess the AOs in much the same way, which actually backwards engineers a lot of the content back in, if that makes sense. For instance, one AO in the humanities is often comparison. If only one of the units has a comparative focus, it’s very hard to assess comparison without teaching that unit, even if the board has said it’s no longer compulsory.

It would be possible to re-design syllabuses to address the AOs in a more concise way, but in reality it takes 2-3 years minimum for a syllabus to go from conception to teaching, via Ofqual approval. That’s too long to be useful in the present situation. Even if by some miracle everyone got their heads together right now, and Ofqual just waved it through, it would be very, very hard to get a useful scheme of work for September, with a full syllabus, suggested resources, sample assessment materials, etc.

Finally, as it’s education, everyone’s an expert (my pet peeve) and the actual teachers are never consulted on any changes. So just because we think something is sensible (or not) seems to make no difference whatsoever.

Yeah. I mean I'm tall and blonde, people speak English to me before I can even open my mouth!

That's a shame @tb weird how cultures cause different reactions.

I have some inside track on the TAGs, and I can say with some confidence that some expensive, North London independent schools are going to be awarding 100% grade 8 and 9s to their pupils.

This sounds staggering, until you think about it. Exam content was reduced, and the system of assessment made more holistic, so as not to disadvantage students who had had very disrupted learning over the pandemic. The flipside of this is you have kids who literally did not miss a lesson, with highly involved parents, sitting assessments that are much more compartmentalised and marked in a way that is more generous. The results are predictable: extraordinary but, according to the new 'rules', legitimate grades.

What you will be left with is a great number of disadvantaged students who will get the grade they would normally have got, for example, but more privileged ones who are now sitting on higher grades. And if anything, that disparity will be greater than usual.

There's no obvious solution to this, but it's a good insight into various social inequalities and how the education system can either solve or perpetuate them.

If you want

a) a reason to keep wearing masks after 19/7
b) a reminder that nature is chaotically evil and wants us to suffer

we've just had our first "Norovirus - take care" email at work (NHS hospital) since December 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/07/ireland-and-northern-ireland-raise-alarm-about-english-covid-plans?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Boris, can we not?

Hospitalisation slowly rising here, slow unlocking going on. Vaccination rate is higher in NI compared to England, ROI catching up, even with all that nobody wants to go "full unlock".

Whittys reasoning it's better to have a peak now rather than later doesn't come into play.

That's normally the "winter" vomiting bug isn't it? Lovely... think we had it once, not fun :/

Nature: You are all an open source open os project, all the best! ;)

That's normally the "winter" vomiting bug isn't it? Lovely... think we had it once, not fun :/

Peaks late winter yeah, but always been a summer/warm autumn thing when it visited our household. Having kids is fun. Norovirus isn't stopped by alcohol gel, too.

Having germ incubators is fun

FTFY

My godson tested positive a couple of days ago. He's quite unwell, fever, vomiting, sore, swollen throat and finding it hard to breathe... He's isolated in his bedroom, rest of the family are negative for now... My sis and her partner have both been vaccinated and my niece tested positive before Christmas...

I'm sure he'll be absolutely fine but still a bit worrying... He's a student and has been out and about loads in the past few weeks... Was refusing the vaccine, apparently he wants it now... 🤦🏻‍♂️

We had a little Delta variant spike here in QLD but that seems to be under control now, NSW not having such an easy time of it... Egg on face for the NSW state premier, pride comes before a fall, eh?

A lot of experts think we’re doing the wrong thing

https://inews.co.uk/news/health/lockdown-easing-100-scientists-accuse-government-of-dangerous-and-unethical-experiment-over-19-july-easing-1091316

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01589-0/fulltext

Hope he’s on the mend soon, looks like a lot of young people over here could be heading the same way too

Thanks, me too... He's in deepest Tooting, silly lad has been raving it up...

Aptly read this, this morning, by chief of NHS Trust, Chris Hopton (guardian)

The bit that was really striking for me yesterday... was they were saying they were really getting quite worried about the number of unvaccinated young people who were getting mild Covid symptoms because they caught Covid, but then quite quickly afterwards were developing much more severe long Covid-type symptoms.

And we just don’t know exactly how this is going to pan out so we just need to be careful about recognising the risks that we’re running here. It’s not just about hospitalisations, it’s actually potentially people having really quite serious long-term conditions once they have caught Covid.

This pisses me off, looks like shielding being reintroduced for the summer, so that will be my mum missing another summer due to incompetence in leadership
https://twitter.com/tnewtondunn/status/1412904748362182661

Oh and they are considering charging for LFT from the end of the month
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/covid-lateral-flow-test-charged-b1879797.html

All because the Tory party don't have any discipline under Johnson...