We now have data from mass testing in schools for the first 4 weeks after they fully reopened on March 8th, up to the end of the spring term.
The results suggest that transmission of the virus *has* increased since schools went back .. but mostly amongst staff.
Starting with nurseries and primary schools, the data initially looks rather alarming, with a huge jump in positivity rates the week after schools reopened.
However...
The data is also broken down by role within the school, and we can see that the government started rolling out free lateral flow tests for support and household bubbles to use at home when schools fully reopened.
These are included in the main school test figures!
If you break down positivity rates by role, you can see covid rates are MUCH higher in these bubbles.
Some of this may be genuine, and some of it may be selection bias (people with symptoms using the tests, or people being less likely to report negative results than positives).
If we focus only on staff, whose testing regimen didn't change during this period as far as I know, we can see the proportion of tests reported positive DID rise though, from 0.08% to 0.12%.
(Ignore the mid-Feb bump - it's an artefact caused by much less testing at half term.)
In secondary schools things initially look rather different, with overall positivity rates staying low when schools reopened, before exploding a couple of weeks later.
Again though, this doesn't tell the whole story...
Because in secondary schools pupils are also tested, and their numbers completely dwarf all other testing.
The number of tests used jumped from 350,000 to 830,000 a week as the first pupils were tested prior to returning, then to over 4 million a week when their classes started!
Again, if we break the data down by role, we can see that when pupils returned to school they had lower positivity rates than staff.
This masked the fact that positivity rates for staff were already rising the week that schools reopened, before that could have had any impact.
Again, if we focus only on staff, there's a significant rise in positivity rates, from 0.05% to 0.1%.
Positivity was already rising as schools fully reopened, after a February half term dip, and continued climbing for two weeks after millions of children returned to classrooms.
Meanwhile we can see that actually very few children tested positive when they returned to school.
Positivity bottomed out at 0.047%, barely above the lateral flow tests' false positive rate, which is now believed to be 0.03%.
A couple of weeks later though, rates rose rapidly.
So is this proof that covid IS spreading amongst children in schools? Unfortunately it's not clear, because testing hasn't been consistent.
When pupils first returned they were tested three times under supervision in school.
After that they started testing themselves at home.
If we go back to the testing data, we can see that the number of test results reported by pupils dropped sharply a week and a half after they returned to school. Just as home testing began.
Either some children stopped using the tests and/or they didn't report all their results.
Either of these could skew positivity rates.
You're more likely to use a home test if you're not feeling well (whereas nobody with symptoms should have gone to school to get tested).
And if you do take a test you're (hopefully) more likely to report the result if it's positive.
In fact, even the first round of testing in schools was far from perfect. Although the results were reported, about 12% of tests taken in the first two weeks after schools reopened weren't registered.
Meaning that for over a million tests we have no way of knowing who took them!
The rate for positive tests is a bit lower - 452 positive results (8-9% of the total) weren't properly registered in the first two weeks.
You'd hope these children were still sent home to self-isolate. But even if they were, they may not have been contact traced because of this.
Other issues that may affect the data include:
- Staff who were previously working at home returning to school, increasing their exposure.
- Changes in access to confirmatory PCR testing reducing the number of false positives.
- Whether false positives are more likely at home.
This all makes it hard to say for sure what's happening.
Rates amongst staff have definitely risen since schools fully reopened, but levelled out at the end of March.
Rates also seem to have risen in pupils a week or two later, but this might be skewed by changes in testing.
The good news is that although positivity rates from mass testing in schools have risen significantly since schools fully reopened, they're still very low overall - about 1 in 1,000 at the end of March - and if anything rates amongst staff seem to have levelled off recently.
All of the graphs above are my own, based on data from the Tests Conducted spreadsheet that's released alongside the weekly Test & Trace report.
Last week Andrew Bridgen claimed Ukraine might be working on a dirty bomb to use in a "false flag" attack in Europe. Unsurprisingly his comments have now been amplified by the Russian military and state media, and echoed back by Russian assets and useful idiots here in the UK. 🧵
Andrew Bridgen had an "incredibly productive" meeting with the Russian ambassador in London earlier this year.
Since then he's claimed Rishi Sunak called the election to avoid being a wartime PM, and that Ukraine's planning a "false flag" nuclear attack in Europe "like 9/11". 😳
Meanwhile Russian assets and useful idiots here in the UK have been amplifying these claims of false flag attacks and dirty bombs.
John and Irina Mappin at least are known to have visited the Russian embassy recently, and all frequently share Russian propaganda on social media.
Reform's manifesto (or "contract") panders to conspiracy theorists, falsely linking covid vaccines to excess deaths and pledging to "reject" the WEF, WHO and digital currencies.
Unsurprising, given many of their supporters and candidates have rather odd views on these topics. 🧵
Nigel Farage and his Reform Party recently got an endorsement from Laurence Fox of the similarly named Reclaim Party.
Farage even recorded a video with Fox, who has repeatedly compared the Pride flag to the Swastika and promoted Islamophobia.
With friends like these...
Laurence Fox's fiancée also took selfies with Farage while out supporting him in Clacton.
She's recently claimed (amongst many other things) that the pandemic didn't happen and that "they" manipulate the weather to rob us of vital Vitamin D. Right before a heat wave started. 🤦♂️
Reform's candidate in Edinburgh South West, Ian Harper, was a vocal backer of ivermectin, and the grifters and frauds who promoted it as a cure for covid. In his bio for Reform, he talks about a "globalist agenda" seeking to "collapse society".
Not the worst thing he's said. 🧵
Ian Harper's first Twitter account was suspended, and he's now locked his second (presumably to stop voters seeing it). Luckily the internet (and its archives) remembers.
Most of his pandemic posts seem to consist of vastly exaggerated claims about the wonders of ivermectin. 🙄
Unsurprisingly Reform's Ian Harper was an enthusiastic supporter of Tess Lawrie, founder of a British group called BIRD which promoted the dewormer ivermectin as a miracle "cure" for covid, much of it based on flawed or outright fraudulent studies.
Reform's candidate in Twickenham is a member of anti-vax misinformation group HART. In leaked chat logs, Alex Starling called vaccinating children "a perverted abomination", and talked about sneaking HART content and campaigns into articles he wrote for UK news site Reaction. 🧵
If you've not come across them before, HART identify as "a group of highly qualified doctors, scientists and other experts" who just "question the narrative". But many of their members believe covid vaccines were designed to depopulate the Earth! 😳
Alex Starling fit right in at HART, calling wearing masks at school "depraved cruelty" and vaccinating children against covid "a perverted abomination". He also repeatedly suggested covid vaccines work in the same way lions "work" on a herd of zebras, "by taking out the weakest".
John Mappin appeared on Russian TV at the weekend, claiming the British public doesn't support Ukraine. Because he spoke to a few friends, and they all love Russia too. 🤷♂️
Mappin often retweets Putin's propaganda, and last year claimed he could instantly end the Ukraine war. 🤔
Russian asset / useful idiot John Mappin has also been out campaigning for Nigel Farage in Clacton-on-Sea. Haven't they suffered enough already?
Mappin previously backed Andrew Bridgen, after the MP compared covid vaccines to the Holocaust. Just the man you want on your side. 🤦♂️
John Mappin rather optimistically claimed afterwards that Nigel Farage is going to be Prime Minister, hailing him for "one of the most brilliant and sanest speeches in this island's history". 🤪
But then he's already fallen for Scientology, QAnon, and covid conspiracy theories.
The BMJ has had to issue a statement after everyone from The Telegraph and former Brexit Minister David Davis to anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists claimed that covid vaccines may be responsible for excess deaths, based on a dubious study published in @BMJPublicHealth. 🧵
The Telegraph's @sarahknapton has a history of this. Two years ago she tried to blame excess deaths (including some covid deaths!) on lockdowns, with a clickbait headline that the article (behind a paywall) failed to support. This is more of the same.
As for the BMJ article that inspired all of this, it simply takes excess death data from 47 "western" countries (ranging from the US and UK to Australia and New Zealand to Bulgaria and Moldova), adds them all up, then engages in a lot of vague arm waving.