I’m sure I’ve seen something in the last few days about not requiring whole school bubbles to isolate after one tests positive. I can understand the logic, given the disruption to children’s education, but it does kind of undermine the notion of a bubble.

Whether such an approach is workable (how do you reliably identify a kid’s actual contacts for up to several days beforehand?) and sensible (if you miss any, will you simply allow it to spread unchecked) is something I cannot answer.

Here in the North East it has been decimating some schools since in the NE it is very much a young person's surge.If one person in a bubble is found to be positive, the whole bubble is sent home. This led to 30,000 confirmed cases sending 600,000 pupils home, the vast majority not having Covid. However the school year ends in the next fortnight, some fee paying schools are already at the end of term, and traditionally the last week of school for secondary students is a bit informal. From what I can make out there is an element of just giving up on this for the final couple of weeks.

But for pupils in England at least "bubbles" will end in September when they return to school. There will be two early school Lateral Flow testing events at the start of term, to minimise early disruption when pupils being to mingle again, and from then on the whole system is transferred to NHS T&T to treat young people like adult groups. So children will stay off school if they have a postiive PCR (following on from any Lateral Flow or display of symptoms). Very close contacts will be expected to isolate, but not entire classes, those vaccinated won't need to isolate unless and until a positive PCR. I truly hope JCVI will allow vaccinations for the 12 years plus group (which MHRA has OK'd) purely to stop kids' education taking any further hammering.

c-w-s, in your opinion is this workable? I’m thinking especially (though not exclusively) for primary kids and those in the first few years of secondary school who tend to be all over each other in a way that adults (hopefully!) are not. Even amongst secondary children, if I cast my mind back that far, I suspect I wouldn’t be able to remember who I was sat next to across multiple subjects/classrooms several days later.

This seems to have gone a bit quiet lately. Given what we now know about Delta, and the impending ending of other NPIs/restrictions, is this looking more likely and how soon might we know?

I have to say, vaccinating children now when they are extremely unlikely to get any significant symptoms seems morally questionable when many countries haven’t even got any vaccine to use for their most vulnerable.

I had forgotten that today is a "Supply" or "Allotted" day in the House of Commons, which means a day handed over for the official opposition to have debates on their terms (Canada has an identical system and naming convention). So Grant Shapps will be making his statement tomorrow, Thursday, not today, unless the business managers change their minds. But the PM has to meet the Liaison Committee for 2 hours (usually any PM's least favourite parliamentary chore) so he may be asked about travel restrictions then or at PMQ at midday. There is a debate on regional airports in Westminster Hall for 09:25 onwards today.

So I think Grant Shapps will be outlining the changes at 12:30 hrs on Thursday. It's also a questions for the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Michael Gove) tomorrow so he may get some relevant questions (for example he's gone one relating to the immuno-surpressed coming out of lockdown, though another minister will be answering it).

I agree with your underlying point on health inequalities KARFA , and this is hardly the first time that a similar situation has occurred. Look at how long it took for affordable HIV/AIDS drugs to be offered to many developing countries (GW Bush did many very foolish things, but PEPFAR is IMO his best legacy), or how many people still die from Malaria every year.

Though I guess the primary reason children would be vaccinated would be not so much about protecting them directly from symptoms* but rather helping to protect those around them by making it easier to reach the population-level immunity threshold (and thereby preventing a debilitating surge of infections and the effect of that on the health service).

* Though I do think 'long Covid' is going to have a bigger long term effect - health and economic - than many are perhaps considering, so this might factor into that as well.

Next week apparently. Children are supposed to get 195 days of schooling per annum. Some have had only 60 days of schooling thanks for lockdowns and repeated bubble infections, while remaining negative to Covid throughout. This is being done to protect the lives of their parents and grandparents, but cannot go on like this, it will cause them - and the UK generally - more harm than it seeks to avoid, in the context of widespread vaccination. So in my view we need to treat this like other diseases - you go out of school if you are ill, but only if you are ill - and vaccinate to minimise the disruption to schooling rather than for their direct medical benefit. Bear in mind in any large school there will be teachers and pupils who will remain vulnerable to infection due to immune suppresion and similar conditions.

My challenge to a rich country would be to make that "both / and" not "either / or".

This statement goes to the crux of the argument. At least it's now being discussed in the context of widespread vaccination, even if SAGE is not being mandated to include such factors in their recommendations and modelling. The sad thing is that the damage, deaths and shortened life expectancy that has been caused by our COVID response has, up to now, not been factored in to our rules and, even now, is only beginning to be hinted at (cf the Saj's statement yesterday that the 5m waiting list figure is only half the story and that it is thought that 9m people have failed to present. If this is fully revealed, I suspect that the history of this period will be completely rewritten.

I think maybe you haven't homed in on the principal child-focused benefit, which is education.

It's not helpful to align strategy in a way that provokes inter-generational tension: we're seeing quite enough of that in the triple-lock pension discussions.

I think you may be reading too much into my post! I was responding solely to KARFA’s comment about the health effects on children. I totally agree with the benefit of keeping children in education, and I certainly wasn’t intending to imply or provoke any kind of inter-generational conflict.

If I remember well, the current outlook is there will be 11bn vaccines produced this year, of which roughly 4bn have been distributed already but there should be enough to go around, so as c-w-s said below it should be doable. Same as the booster shot for cohorts 1-4(6?) in the Autumn.

Nothing from Mr Shapps today then I take it?

And exactly what was predicted is starting: one of the large hospitals is delaying surgeries from now as COVID beds needs to be put back, due to too many hospitalizations.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/h...-b1879646.html

For context COVID admissions in hospitals rised 57% per week in this region:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5seOPRX...jpg&name=large

see above at #6274 tomorrow it is.

Oh I missed that, thank you. I take it this would be a four nations approach as it has been the last couple of months.