With mass testing of schoolchildren happening every week – and the fact that those testing positive and their contacts are required to self-isolate – it is not surprising that more than 200,000 children were at home isolating at the end of last week, according to official estimates. MailOnline has the details.
More than nine in 10 pupils attended schools in England last week – but a growing number of children were self-isolating at home due to possible contact with COVID-19 cases, Government figures show.
Attendance in state schools last week was the highest it has been at any point during the pandemic, the Department for Education (DfE) analysis shows.
But the data suggests that 169,000 pupils were out of class and self-isolating on Thursday last week due to potential contact with a case of coronavirus.
The DfE estimates that approximately 2% of all state school pupils on roll – up to 201,000 children – did not attend school for COVID-19 related reasons on March 18th, up from 1% on March 11th.
This includes 127,000 pupils who have been self-isolating due to a potential contact with a COVID-19 case from inside the educational setting, and a further 42,000 pupils who were self-isolating due to a possible contact outside of school.
Meanwhile, 21,000 pupils were absent because they suspected they had COVID-19, 7,000 were off after testing positive for COVID-19, and 4,000 were absent as their school was closed due to Covid-19 reasons.
Secondary schools in England were given flexibility to stagger the return of their pupils between March 8th and 12th as these students were being asked to take voluntary COVID-19 tests on site as part of their return.
Overall, attendance in state schools was 91% on March 18th, up from 89% on March 11th – when some secondary schools were still phasing in the return of pupils due to the logistics of mass testing.
Around 89% of secondary school pupils were in class on March 18th – a similar proportion to the start of the second week of schools reopening in England.
But attendance in primary schools fell to 93% on Thursday last week from 95% the previous week, the figures show.
Perhaps most shocking is that 200,000+ were self-isolating last week even though just 0.067% of the millions of tests carried out came back positive. Given that this is below the estimated false positive rate of the lateral flow tests of 0.32% (the FPR can differ by age group and is thought to be lower in younger people), this suggests almost all of the positives are not real infections, or at least not contagious.
The Government’s refusal to allow confirmatory testing, either by PCR or by a second lateral flow test, prevents many of these false positives being identified and the needless harm of self-isolation being avoided.
If the Government is going to insist on continuing the pandemic-perpetuating practice of mass testing, the least it can do is allow the escape route of a second test for the victims of the imperfect tests.
The Mail report is worth reading in full.
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Typo: Is the Twitter Event “Saturday, Jan 8th” (as stated above, or on Saturday Jan 7th or Sunday Jan 8th”?
The Twitter link says “tomorrow” which as of this writing is Sunday Jan 8th.
Very well articulated, thank you.
Please correct typo – ‘Noble prize winners’
It is perfectly clear that we need a Nuremberg II set of trials of those accused of these horrendous Crimes Against Humanity – worse crimes outside of actual wartime atrocities are hard to imagine.
But there’s a limit to what any such investigations and trials can achieve. The fact is, the vast majority of people willingly and even enthusiastically went along with this narrative, even though it was patently absurd from the outset. Are they to be put on trial too?
The Great Barrington Declaration actually came comparatively late in the late as regards suppression of arguments. In the early days (e.g. March 2020) anyone questioning the narrative was accused of being callously selfish, of ‘just wanting people to die’, and even of being a murderer.
When so many people are just so gullible – led like dumb asses, their stupidity being their rings through the nose – what hope is there for our society?
Sorry, much as I detest the perpetrators of this shitshow, what hope is there when so many people in our society have actively abandoned the ideas and principles which a minority of the rest of us regard as fundamental to life itself?
That is the mass formation I guess. Until established wrongdoings have been widely admitted and accepted, that point where a critical mass changes the perception that crimes have been committed, we can’t move on with any principles. That limit of where do we draw that line even within the ‘only following orders’ precedent? Who can we fault for being under the propagandised mass formation psychosis? I haven’t the answers and I’m neither equipped intellectually nor qualified to make those decisions but I would’ve thought in a general consensus those who were given responsibility and didn’t act in good faith when they knew of obvious inconsistencies within their profession and said nothing, they need to at least argue their case and then potentially be held accountable in some respect. Others that might miss that threshold are only to live with their decisions once the dust settles for us all to be able to move on and never make the same mistakes again.
Interesting where the line should be drawn between the culpable and merely stupid. My feeling is it has to be pretty high up the food chain, or otherwise we couldn’t afford the jails.
Most of the minions – the useful idiots – should be left to live their lives quietly, with the more reflective among them aware that they’d been put to a test and failed.
I’m clear on one thing though: lessons have to be irrevocably learned, and that means facing up to what we’ve done and going through the concomitant pain.
The scariest thing for me in this whole debacle was seeing so many people I knew to be intelligent and open-minded swallowing the propaganda whole, without the slightest attempt at critical analysis. Glib parallels with the 1930s easily come to mind, and we are now seeing this same scenario played out over the climate ‘crisis’ and the war in Ukraine.
In the quote variously attributed to Hitler and Goebbels “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” it seems the word ‘eventually’ may be redundant. This strategy worked for the powers that be from day 1 of the pandemic.
I don’t think most people would accept that the burden of guilt and appropriate punishment between Hermann Göring on one hand and some German youth put into a uniform and given a rifle in 1945, were quite equivalent.
Those who headed up this disaster with relish (for example Professor Pantsdown Ferguson of “reaised we could get away with it” fame. But also whoever appointed him despite the fact that he had a long record of absolute incompetence. Or Fauci. Those people must go on trial.
To the author:
I believe the twitter account of ‘TCW – Defending Freedom’ is still closed, could you perhaps exert some pressure to have the account unlocked?
I frequently test the waters by asking friends, family, other doctors, if they have heard of the Great Barrington Declaration, the WEF, Klaus Schwab, etc.
I am yet to meet anyone who has heard of these, other than my few red-pilled friends.
Despite Twitter opening up, most social media and all MSM merrily continue the censorship leaving the vast majority of the populace blissfully ignorant of what’s really happening in the world.
That’s perfectly true.
Many, quite intelligent people are quite prepared themselves to accept that things here in 2023 are obviously seriously amiss. Some have crackpot theories about what should be done ( often involving slime like Kneel Starmer), but very few are willing, or perhaps able, to look deeply into what is going on.
Obviously, not a new phenomenon. How many extremely intelligent Jews in early 1938 could see which way the wind was blowing and get the Hell out? Dreadful. Should you just blame them for being unable to control their hope that basic humanity would in the end, save them?
Absolutely true… The times I’ve mentioned some of the above have seen me being called a conspiracy theorist, a fantasist and willing to believe anything I read on the internet. It would seem that, as a reasonably intelligent person, I’ve lost the plot. The conversation is swiftly moved on to something else.
Sadly I seem to have no red-pilled friends but my husband now knows who Klaus Schwab is… He doesn’t believe that the WEF could expect their plans to come to fruition. It’s one of a few elephants that we live with.
My husband says I believe everything I read – my silent response to him is at least I read… Hs is very well educated and believes and trusts the establishment and doesn’t want to think that anything is amiss, however one of his friends has told him that he believes everyone who has been vaccinated will be dead in 5 years. I said I hoped that wouldn’t be the case…(husband 3 x jabs, terrible headaches with the AZ) so we live with elephants too.
I didn’t think I would be alone. My husband is well educated too but reads the MSM and watches BBC News. However, he has also taken to watching GB News recently and has learned a few things from it. We never discuss the vaccinations – he’s had 2 – and he must have heard about the unwanted side-effects of them. His own health has been compromised but it’s explained away by the fact that heart issues are A Thing in his family, The fact that in his case his issues didn’t appear until after his second vaccination is never mentioned.
I have told him about the concern about the vaccines’ effect on fertility and the spike protein appearing to concentrate in ovaries. This is something I find worrying as one of my sons and his wife are planning to have a baby in the near future and the possibility of infertility is something I’m very aware of. However, said son and his wife are vaccinated up to hilt and I’m not an interfering mother-in-law so there’s nothing I can do and certainly nothing that I will say. Another elephant to ignore!
And now they’re turning their attention to climate change…
Government used fear and the tool was MINDSPACE practised by psychologists from the benign sounding Nudge Unit.
“Truth”————–A judgement or proposition that is true. A statement in accord with reality. ————-Now who could possibly disagree with “Truth”? —Apparently this happened on a regular basis in places like Twitter to such an extent that statements in accord with reality were often not permitted. ——Are we to assume this state of affairs no longer exists?
Well argued article, short and hard hitting. Thanks.
A “Hallelujah!” Feature. Thankyou. I have saved this with all the other features and articles that I have gathered over the last 3 years. A historical record of one of the most infamous periods in human history. And yet it continues. 3 years down the clown road and many STILL believing the propaganda machine. The cork is slowly coming out now….Surely!