We need to separate two distinct failures: 1/Schools stayed closed longer than they needed to bec the govt failed to put in strong mitigation measures to make them safe 2/Johnson failed to invest properly in helping children recover – a failure that led Sir Kevan Collins to resign as “catch‑up tsar”

There are other important factors too. Nearly 40% of pupils are from minority ethnic backgrounds. Many lived in communities disproportionately exposed to covid-19, with higher risks of severe illness and death before vaccines. Children do not live in isolation from their families/grandparents.

But it was never simply a question of “should schools be open or shut?” during the pandemic. The key question pre‑vaccine was: were schools safe enough to be open - for teachers, vulnerable children and whole communities – given the wholly inadequate mitigations the Johnson government put in place.

As someone who sat on the Education Policy Institute’s working group on disadvantage gaps during covid, I’m under no illusions about the enormous educational and psychological harms of school closures – especially for working‑class and BME children. Those impacts are real and must not be downplayed.

Hey @lewisgoodall.com here is our Lancet article on Long COVID. Happy to chat. www.thelancet.com/action/showP...

FGS … We wrote this right at the beginning. For many of us, it never was. However we also knew that a failure to interupt transmission would kill on a massive scale. www.bmj.com/content/369/...

Mitigating the wider health effects of covid-19 pandemic response

Countries worldwide have implemented strict controls on movement in response to the covid-19 pandemic. The aim is to cut transmission by reducing close contact (box 1), but the measures have profound ...

bmj.com

And we also calculated that imposing restrictions a week earlier would have saved tens of thousands of lives pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35421094/

Estimating the effects of lockdown timing on COVID-19 cases and deaths in England: A counterfactual modelling study - PubMed

Our modelling supports the claim that the relatively late introduction of social distancing and lockdown measures likely increased the scale, severity, and duration of the first wave of COVID-19 in En...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Try this, Lewis. I would pay particular attention to the section by Peter Hotez. Comparing adult and childhood disease is a common strategy used by those with an agenda on this issue. It is deliberately avoiding the fact that kids are less likely to die, at all. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

COVID-19 and children

science.org

yup. i added this as a separate post - feel free to add more recent papers (the linked one is from 2024)! bsky.app/profile/chri...

Prof Christina Pagel@chrischirp.bsky.social · 5d ago

And on the lab leak hypothesis... While a lab leak has not been disproven (and likely can never be), every piece of positive evidence that has emerged since 2020 about where the outbreak began points to a natural origin from the Wuhan wet market. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Also eally surprised to see @lewisgoodall.com 'just asking legitimate questions' about the covid lab leak theory. We really are well past that point now.

4. Support for children in disadvantaged communities, inc devices, connectivity, food, safe spaces to learn, catch-up teaching 5. Dedicated and planned mental health and social support if school closures become necessary 6. Build capacity to generate evidence more rapidly for the next time 11/12

2. Clean indoor air: helpful in a pandemic and good for health and learning at all times (and not just in schools but other buildings too) 3. Effective public health measures: testing, contact tracing, support for isolation, communication, etc 10/12

Keeping schools open is a goal not a policy. A blanket "never close schools" is a bad lesson. I suggest these: 1. Do not prejudge next pandemic which will be a different virus and could have very different age profile of who it attacks 9/12

And covid was not harmless to children. Being at lower risk than adults does not mean harmless. There was acute illness needing hospital, late onset rare but serious inflammatory disease, Long Covid and 13,000 UK children who lost a parent. (more details in substack post at end) 8/12

In fact, modelling on contact and case data estimated that if schools had remained open during the final Jan-March 2021 lockdown, it would barely have brought R below 1. I've already written about that devastating wave in which 87,000 people died. 7/12 christinapagel.substack.com/p/the-uk-cov...

The UK Covid Inquiry has laid bare the avoidable horror of the second Covid wave

It is becoming ever clearer both how devastating the second wave of winter 2020/21 was, and how much of that devastation could have been avoided.

christinapagel.substack.com

We did in fact try lockdown with schools fully open in November 2020. It worked initially, but cases in London & SE started rising again *before* lockdown even ended, because of new variant Alpha. Lockdown with schools open was not enough! 6/12

After 1st wave, we didn't run summer catch up programmes or improve ventilation in schools - we didn't even try until 2021, months after the last school closures. We didn't recommend masks (let alone good masks) in classrooms until after the last school closures. 5/12

Several studies have since shown definitely that children and schools contribute signficantly to transmission. In Sweden (with no formal lockdown), parents and teachers of pupils at school had higher infection rates. Children live with and are taught by adults. Many are vulnerable adults. 4/12

March 2020: no testing, no treatment, no vaccine, admissions doubling every 3 to 4 days. Countries ahead of us closed schools alongside everything else, so nobody had evidence separating the two. We didn't know much about Covid in children and nothing about long term impact 3/12

@lewisgoodall.com / @jonsopel1.bsky.social said "I am not sure that even in the first lockdown, school closures for any length of time were a price worth paying." But no discussion of the alternative. The alternative was never "schools open and everything else the same". 2/12

🧵On @thenewsagents.co.uk yesterday, school closures and the lab leak theory were offered as two examples of legitimate questions that were hard to ask. Both have in fact been asked constantly since 2020. But here's a thread on why I think they were wrong and dangerous on school closures 1/12

Everybody who is reading this survived Covid. Not everyone did.

Prof Christina Pagel@chrischirp.bsky.social · 5d ago

🧵On @thenewsagents.co.uk yesterday, school closures and the lab leak theory were offered as two examples of legitimate questions that were hard to ask. Both have in fact been asked constantly since 2020. But here's a thread on why I think they were wrong and dangerous on school closures 1/12

Excited to say that I'll be presenter's friend on Inside Science tomorrow covering an extravaganza of maths related stories from mathematical monkeys to mathematical machines. Give it a listen at 16:30 on Thursday on BBC Radio 4:

Radio 4 - Listen Live - BBC Sounds

Listen live to Radio 4 on BBC Sounds

bbc.co.uk

That's not good.

Robin Bisson@robinbisson.bsky.social · 2w ago

Almost exactly 6 months ago, RPN was leaked a document presented to STFC staff that said the council had to reduce spending by £162m by 2029-30 That kicked off months of debate on how cuts would be made But only now has it become clear the total cost savings needed over 4 years is in fact £684m 🧵

Full story in today's Research Fortnight: www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

STFC’s true cost overrun revealed as nearly £700m - Research Professional News

Exclusive: Figure calls into question transparency from UKRI leadership amid cuts to science facilities

researchprofessionalnews.com

Almost exactly 6 months ago, RPN was leaked a document presented to STFC staff that said the council had to reduce spending by £162m by 2029-30 That kicked off months of debate on how cuts would be made But only now has it become clear the total cost savings needed over 4 years is in fact £684m 🧵

Andy Burnham wants a “cost of living government” that makes life’s essentials more affordable. Free, independent advice services are essential to delivering that - helping millions every year & easing pressure on public services. Read @adviceuk.bsky.social letter to the PM 👇https://bit.ly/3TeGeVQ

Here's the link for anyone who wants to read the full interim report, the screenshots above are from the conclusion: www.gov.uk/government/p...

Independent review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism: interim report

gov.uk

I know I've not been about much (sorry, lots going on), but when I see this craven proliferation of outright disinformation targeting our amazing #NHS I make an exception. Proliferation of lies like this should at least be grounds to strip this vile, self-named toad of his title?

Remember Streeting's review into whether young people are being overdiagnosed with ADHD, autism, and mental health issues? Well, the interim report is out, and there's a reason the media are silent on it (spoiler: it proves what a lot of us have been saying all along)