UK government set to reveals is plans isolate new arrivals for two weeks; independent Sage committee warns against schools reopening
- Full story: Priti Patel to outline quarantine rules for travellers to UK
- More than 30,000 pubs and restaurants could stay shut after lockdown
- Global coronavirus updates - live
- Coronavirus latest: at a glance
- See all our coronavirus coverage
A straw poll of Unison members working in schools in England found that the vast majority remain concerned over the safety of their workplaces opening to more pupils on 1 June.
Unison said its members had been “shut out” of the debate over reopening, and that the government has not modelled the impact on support staff such as teaching assistants who tend to be older, and are more likely to come from black and minority ethnic communities or disadvantaged backgrounds.
There’s little confidence in ministers’ plans, that’s clear to see. Staff, parents and schools aren’t ready to go back without reassurances that safety is the number one priority.
Unions want to work with ministers to make schools as safe as possible, so that parents, their children and staff will want to return. But the rush to get some schools open to meet an arbitrary date isn’t at all helpful.
Sir Paul Nurse, the chief executive of the Francis Crick Institute and and 2001 Nobel laureate for medicine, has delivered a scathing attack on the the government’s handling of the crisis.
Do we have a proper governance system here that can combine scientific knowledge with political action? The question I’m constantly asking myself is, who is actually in charge of the decisions? Who is developing the strategy and the operation and implementation of that strategy? Is it ministers? Is it Public Health England, the NHS, the Office of Life Sciences, Sage? I don’t know. But more importantly, do they know?
We have lions on the front line of clinical care. We need lions also in the leadership so that we can actually really drive this forward.
Everybody involved not just the politicians, the scientists, and the doctors. We’re all making mistakes. And we have to try and learn from what mistakes have been made up until now.
To get a better, more sensible way forward we we have to tackle two main issues. One is to get a much clearer, publicly presented strategy as to what we’re actually trying to do and the evidence upon which it is based. We’re not getting that in communications. Maybe there’s strategy there, I don’t see it. And we need to know what the scientific evidence led to that.
We’ve been allowing care workers to be in the wards who are potentially infected, infecting patients, infecting themselves, and as a consequence, making hospitals potentially unsafe places to be. We have to see a changed strategy there that is reliant upon the real evidence
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2WTGbPv
