Covid-distancing and social solidarity needed against new virus variant
National Education Union joint general secretary Kevin Courtney has called for the start of the second school term to be delayed to 18 January to give time and space for the government's proposal for mass testing in schools to be organised.
Lisa Nandy, for the Labour Party leadership, has opposed the proposal to delay to 18 January. But even for people sceptical about the idea of closing schools in October-November (Wales did that, and its lockdown was much less effective than others that kept schools open), the spread of the new virus variant gives good reason to support the NEU call. In fact, to support longer closures and a full lockdown comparable to spring 2020's.
On 30 December, the "Independent SAGE" group of scientists called for a new lockdown and for schools to close for at least a month. "We are no longer in the same pandemic we were in up to December. The very rapid rise of cases in London, the South East and East of England under restrictions that previously kept growth much slower, highlights the need for a radical rethink... "
The Independent SAGE also implies calls for:
- Full isolation pay for all
- Publicly-provided quarantine accommodation
That is good. Activists will press the labour movement to redouble efforts for those measures of social solidarity, and for:
- Bring social care into the public sector
- A public-health test-trace operation, in place of the Serco-Deloitte contracted-out mess
- Emergency public ownership of private hospitals and of NHS supplies and logistics
- Workers' control of workplace virus curbs
But Independent SAGE's stated criteria for ending (or, apparently, even easing) a new lockdown are unworkable; that "all those with the disease and in contact with them are isolated, with support where necessary" and there is "managed isolation" for a quarantine period of all arrivals from abroad. In a foreseeable future of months, the UK's public health system lacks the means even to know how many infected, contacted, and arriving people are self-isolating fully. (As far as we do know, fewer than 20% of those testing positive, let alone contacts and arrivals, are self-isolating properly).
A more workable criterion would be to start easing the lockdown once the infection curve turns down again (and do it step by step, as many European countries did successfully in mid-2020 until the foolish July reopening of bars, cafés, and tourist industries). Schools, especially primary schools, should be priorities for reopening, as they were for example in Denmark back in April.
But Independent SAGE are right that rapid and drastic action is called for, and that we have no comprehensive option other than the old one of lockdown. This time it must be accompanied by full isolation pay, requisitioning of PPE supplies and private hospitals, and bringing social care into the public sector.
Infections are rising fast across the UK. Viruses mutate all the time, and no union or government can control that. The new variant VUI-202012/01 spreads faster. The government says, maybe 70% faster.
Even the strict lockdowns of March-April brought only a slow decrease (average 22% decrease in reported infections per week in the "best" period, 22 April to 2 July; it was about 10% decrease per week in the November lockdown).
Add a 70% more transmission to such slow decrease, and you get a rising rate of infection, if a big majority of the cases are the new variant.
And being more transmissible also makes new variants outpace old variants, and come to be dominant even when they start with only one case. According to the WHO on 31 December, this has already happened once, though less dramatically. "A variant of SARS-Cov-2 with a D614G substitution in the gene encoding the spike protein emerged in late January or early February 2020. Over a period of several months [this] replaced the initial SARS-Cov-2 strain identified in China and... became... dominant... The strain with the D614G substitution has increased infectivity and transmission".
The new variant may not be as much as 70% faster to transmit. More people will have some immunity now, through having Covid already with or without symptoms, and that will slow transmission. As vaccinations spread, over 2021, and especially as they spread into younger sections of the population, that should slow transmission further. We don't know how much, because we don't know how much the vaccine inhibits transmission as well as inhibiting symptoms, but the vaccinations could slow transmissions too.
It's certain that infection rates will be high for some weeks yet. It is probable that they will be rising for a good few weeks or even months. It is possible that they will be rising for even longer than that. We still have no reliable general method to depress transmission other than the clumsy and costly age-old one of covid-distancing.
Certainly universities should go online, or almost all online, as they did in spring. Probably lockdown-level measures of covid-distancing will be needed for months yet.
Schools are an essential service. School closures (especially of primary and lower secondary schools) are a last resort - because such closures have great social costs; because school-aged children suffer less from Covid than adults and especially older adults; because where schools have been open adult school workers, unlike health workers, care workers, bus workers, etc. have not had above-average Covid rates. On the balance of the evidence since early 2020, school closures add relatively little to the transmission-reducing effect of a package of distancing policies.
But probably by now we are in "last resort" territory. We are scrabbling for even marginal additions to transmission-reduction.
GCSE and A Level exams scheduled for summer 2021 should be cancelled now. GCSEs require no replacements (16 year olds should simply be allowed to enter whatever apprenticeships or further study they want). A levels do need temporary makeshift replacement pending a (needed) drastic revision of the university system. That makeshift should be worked out now, in consultation with teachers, to get something that minimises the disadvantage for students from worse-off backgrounds who mostly will have lost more school time already and are often short of the technology, resources, quiet space (and confidence) needed to study online from home.
Frequent and quick-response mass testing, where everyone in a workplace or campus is tested twice a week and has to show a negative test result to enter, does seem to be effective. It has worked relatively well, for example, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in the USA, producing much lower rates of infection on its campus than in the surrounding area. It may help schools to reopen earlier than otherwise.
But the NEU - and head teachers' associations too - are right to say that it needs to be well-organised, with adequate trained staff to administer and process the tests, and the Tory government is nowhere near giving schools the resources to do that by early January.
For the months ahead, when they reopen, schools also need extra funding for the virus-precaution measures which should have been installed already: running rotas and conscripting extra accommodation to reduce class sizes, fixing ventilation, hiring extra regular staff to cover staff absences and avoid bringing new people into the school. They need extra funding now to distribute laptops and hire extra staff for online teaching.
Botched mass testing may even be counterproductive. Many scientists have argued that the government's one-off mass population testing in Liverpool was a useless publicity stunt. There have been claims that the one-off population mass testing in Slovakia in early November was effective, but the statistics since then su
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