hoping that none of you get it from that one kid
We don't actually know which child it is due to GDPR, which is understandable. To be honest, I'm not worried about it.
But I might be if I lose my sense of taste and smell and start coughing !
I am hoping that as a school you all were using best practices...Everyone wearing mask, washing hands and distancing. The likely hood of anyone else getting it from is lowered drastically if these were in place.
Our school is pretty hot on all the measures. The children don't wear masks {they do in high schools, in publicly accessed areas} but staff have visors if they want them and there is much washing of hands and sanitizing in the building and sanitizers all over the place outside. England's children have never been so clean ! In reality, it's hard to distance because the actual rooms we are in are so small {it's 30 kids to a class} and being England, many of our school buildings are tight, narrow and cramped and weren't built with a future pandemic in mind {!}. Movement is generally one way which means going right around the perimeter of the school just to reach a point that you would ordinarily be at in 16 steps. The different year groups operate at different times and none of them meet so for example those in what you'd call the 5th grade have no contact with the other grades and parents can't come into the school playground without a mask. We have 4 year groups and none of them can cross into the terrotory of another year group. There have been other changes which we've all just taken in our stride. For example, for this 2 week period, we'll be doing the lessons online. That's really odd.
If I actually think about it, a lot of organization has to go into making any environment covid safe and I think the head teacher and those assisting her are doing a pretty neat job.
The dodgy part of this is that all of you went home and were in contact with hundreds of other people before coming back to school and finding out the news ( I am assuming this is how it went down) and if that is the case they and everyone they have been in contact should self quarantine for 14 days and that probably isn't going to happen because it becomes a huge amount of people.
Interestingly, one of the children made a similar point when they were told they wouldn't be coming back for two weeks. It highlights for me some of the achilles heel of the government guidelines. Though I can see very few circumstances in which I'd vote for this government, I'm not one to criticize the govt over their handling of the pandemic because no govt has had to face something like this before, but there have been times when even I've had to call them out and say "Que paso ?" For example, when ministers or advisors clearly flouted lockdown rules that everyone else was expected to live by and there was no kind of censure, it didn't take the prophet Malachi to see that there were going to be a lot of people that were going to flout the rules because of it. And it became harder for scores of parents with older teens to justify why they should observe the rules when those in positions of privilege and power didn't and got away with it.
Or when the govt caved in to pressure to end the lockdown back in May/June, many of us said hold the bus, this is too soon. We appreciate the economic argument and indeed, are affected by it adversely, but we need to go sensibly here. And what happened ? The rates of infection went up to the extent that we are now in a second lockdown. At first it was the death rates that were a bit of a freakout, as they would be, but I remember back in April thinking that it was actually the rates of new infections and where they were occurring that should be the concern. And to connect to the topic at hand, the knock on effect of people working in a and going to a school {that's around 120 kids in the year group, 5 teachers and two teaching assistants} that have to isolate could be huge. But the govt guidelines make little sense. Many of the children in our year group have siblings in other year groups in the school {and, come to think of it, in different high schools} but those siblings aren't having to quarantine. Then there's, as you've pointed out, all of our households. Even with a lockdown in place, many people are still required to go to work, some of whom are the parents of the kids. So the potential for the spread is vast.
It's not hard to see how, from one person, a virus can gain traction in a village, town or city and spread.
