Parents are reporting that they are being told that children are not being tested when they try to book a coronavirus test for their child.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson told the SKWAWKBOX that it is not true that children are being denied testing. However, health insiders say that it is true that many children are being turned away and that the rationing is driven by the government’s desire to reduce its widely-condemned backlog and delays – and to mask the incidence of the virus among children.
More than 500 schools have now been hit by coronavirus outbreaks, with England far in the lead in spite of its schools returning later than other UK nations. Children have been shown to carry the same viral load as adults and to transmit the virus within the school environment.
Public health officials have also reported that children over ten are now as at risk as adults, while SAGE scientists say that the second wave is rapidly becoming exponential.
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It looks like the government is in full spectrum truth denial on the virus now,but they have told so many lies I suppose they have no choice now.What will be instructive is if they get away with it,(and there is nothing to suggest they won’t)what that says about the state of the UK.What it will leave behind for sure is a deadly feeling among many in the country that the government cannot be trusted on important matters,and that is not something easily recovered.
You have to admire the way Skwawkbox immediately condemns the government but has complete faith in sage scientists. The fact is scientists are people and just like anyone else they automatically defend their own dogma.
As John Thatcher says, the governments actions are the proper response when testing isn’t universal. I have some sympathy for them because the media, including Skwawkbox is set on terrifying people, so you have many thousands of perfectly healthy hypochondriacs constantly booking tests for themselves and their families.
If you want to castigate the Tories there are legitimate ways to do it. For instance, complain about how they outsourced testing, a typical way the Tories use to line their friends pockets with wonga. While the NHS have been sitting on their arses, they could have been implementing a mass testing regime, along with universities…instead of which, we have universities like Edinburgh and Imperial College trying their hardest to shut the country down (I wonder who funds their research?). See Skwawky, you could be doing real journalism instead of parroting the liberal Guardian line.
Politicians defend dogma, scientists defend science. There is a distinct difference. Science is achieved by pier reviewed papers. Political dogma is the use of often undeclared bias and fitted to suit the end game.
How dogmatic. Once scientists, funded by an NGO/corporate body reach a scientific conclusion that sits with their sponsors, politics takes over, particularly when working in a competative environment where speed is the essence and the winner takes all. They are people first and foremost. Just look at Edinburgh university’s totally United front across all sciences including social sciences and how to frame the debate and shepherd public opinion. That isn’t science, it’s politics.
lundiel “…instead of which, we have universities like Edinburgh and Imperial College trying their hardest to shut the country down (I wonder who funds their research?).”
The clear implication being that “who[ever] funds their research” has something to gain from shutting the country down.
Who would that be then? Trump? Kim Jong-un? Bill Gates? He seems to be Boogeyman Number One among you deniers – presumably he’s flipped out and thinks he’ll sell more crap software when everyone’s out of work, broke and struck stupid by fear of the piss-weak little virus he made (that’s nowhere near as bad as the ‘flu anyway) – right?
Genius.
You are a useful idiot for multi-national pharmaceuticals McNiven. Edinburgh and Imperial are making fortunes out of this. Their international recognition is because they are funded by multi-nationals and WHA (which is funded by NGOs and pharmaceutics).That idiot epidemiologist at Imperial has massively overestimated every model he has ever produced costing the country billions, like when we ordered 2,000,000 doses of Tamiflue which were never used and had to be destroyed. There are plenty of scientists who have come to different conclusions to our chosen ones. If we were tackling this virus properly, we would be using government labs and universities for study into the virus and producing a vaccine. We would also be doing it in conjunction with any other country who wished to join, make all findings open-source and take out no patents. As it is, if Russia or China developed a vaccine and offered to share it with us we would turn them down and likely accuse them of stealing our work or claim their vaccine wouldn’t work.
In conclusion you and those like you are narrow minded, susceptible tools who are fully behind the government on everything except lockdown. In this you are totally on message with the big-pharma funded social scientists, drug companies and those who want a total economic reset in their favour.
The precautionary principle REQUIRES that one prepare for the worst possible case.
Otherwise there are shortages of essentials like PPE, beds, ventilators, NHS staff etc. – ring any bells?
The fact that fewer people died in previous outbreaks than anticipated is a success – it’s evidence of competence except in the tiny minds of clueless virus deniers like you.
Incompetence would be to underestimate possible deaths and be massively unprepared and boastfully reckless – like the Tories cutting corners and causing vastly more deaths in the UK than in comparable countries.
And fucktards like you give comfort to them by muddying the waters.
PS. It should have read illiberal Guardian. And ‘the fear of death’ is probably the strongest emotion we have….It’s easily manipulated.
Well it’s actually an instinct (and the STRONGEST instinct) – ie survival, both individual and as a species – and is present in all animal species – and fear of death is the other side of that coin and, as you say, can be easily manipulated by the PTB. And the PTB in Blighty just spent the last five years or so exploiting those fears (which of course can be easily ‘triggered’ given the Holocaust) in a large section of the Jewish community in their quest to demolish any possibility of Jeremy winning a GE and forming a government, and Blair did the same with Iraq/Saddam Hussein and his Big – Nazi-type – Lie about WMD, to name just TWO examples
I would disagree about survival being the greatest instinct.Ask the majority of parents and “If they would sacrifice their lives for the love of the Children and the answer is yes..!Love overides all..!and has been the driver of all thats worth fighting for.
Agreed. Which is why I said probably.
What a cop-out you are lundiel.
Not even the courage of your own convictions – or whoever’s convictions they are that you’re selling today, you fucking fraud.
Profound Joseph – and (as a lefty) I have to hope it is correct, ie Hope is as powerful as Fear.
The number of new coronavirus cases is now doubling every week in England as the virus threatens to spin out of control.
An official study for the government estimates Covid-19 took just 7.7 days to ‘double’ between August 22 and September 7.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/breaking-coronavirus-cases-now-doubling-22667035
Getting kids back to school was easy compared with what will come next
Over the past week, nearly 9 million children have returned to school across England and Wales amid much excitement and uncertainty. Everyone wants children to be able to continue learning without interruption, but current government school reopening guidelines fail to incorporate a crucial lesson we’ve learned in the past six months: the risk of so-called aerosol transmission by people without symptoms, now understood to be a major mode by which the virus is shared. The government’s U-turns have amplified the sense of uncertainty around this virus. But there is much we do know about how it spreads.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/07/kids-school-covid-19-infections