Schools should be getting more help

SHOULD we be worried about the latest schools Covid data? At first glance it looks alarming. Wales has recorded more than 10,000 Covid cases among school-age children since pupils and staff returned earlier this month.

That’s the highest number of monthly Covid cases for schools since Public Health Wales started recording this data in September 2020.

That said, Covid cases in schools fell in every local education authority area in the past one to six days. Or, as PHW puts it more cautiously, they have “levelled”.

There is a problem here. What looks like a one-to-six-day fall can change as there is a lag in returned results. Many more positive results may be reported for the last one-to -six days in coming days. If that’s the case, they’ll be added on later.

The data for this period could look different next week. That’s the problem with data. It’s a slippery thing.

Our gaze now needs to turn from bald case rates data (surely bound to rise among age groups more frequently tested?) to looking at the effect.

Dr Chris Williams, epidemiologist at PHW is clear the rise in cases among young people is expected. They’re not vaccinated and, like most of us, have been mixing more since August.

Crucially, Dr Williams says the rise in cases among the young has not prompted a corresponding rise in serious illness from Covid, hospitalisations or deaths, across all age groups.

He admits he cannot criticise the young for going out and mixing at events like festivals and meeting friends over the summer.

It is time now to learn to live with a virus that will become endemic. Young people and children need to be in education, socialising and living their lives. We need balance now. Letting them do this does not appear to be causing a public health crisis such as that we had before the vaccine.

But schools must get more support. The high case rate is causing high staff and pupil absence. More are home-learning and absent than at any time, some heads say. There is a shortage of supply cover.

School and college leaders and staff are rightly angry. They have been left to deal with this without the support they need from TTP and Welsh Government. Heads report working weekends doing the work of TTP. They cannot be expected to plan for the new curriculum and other important matters at the same time as dealing with this.

Schools need more support.