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Post by Deleted on Aug 14, 2020 12:39:12 GMT
If we do not get a second wave, the hypothesis, excess deaths above the 5yr average from July are attributable to the deferrement of treatment and would need to be nullified. Excess deaths such as people not going for treatment or indirectly other ways are hard to tell. Also when everyone was staying in this could have reduced day to day fatalaties for example. Also as regards the herd immunity was this with the most vunerable still shielding for it had got to a fair number of those people then if we took 1.5 million people and say applied the 7% fatality rate which the over 80's have roughly in the UK with the peak infection rate of 1/400 approx that is over 2.600 deaths and given the complications that the shielded people had. The death rate was likely to be higher then you have to factor in the several more thousand who would end up in hospital, would need long term treatment and could sadly die of other complications. |
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Post by NeilVHughes on Aug 15, 2020 21:34:41 GMT
Comparing the 7 Day average over the last 2 weeks:
O9-Aug to 15-Aug
Positives: average of 1,088 per day
Tests Carried Out: average of 170,573 per day
02-Aug to 08-Aug
Positives: average of 831 per day
Tests Carried Out: average 170,046 per day
29% increase in positive cases for a 0.3% increase in the number of tests carried out between the last two weeks.
With this trend it is interesting that there has been further easing of restrictions from today. Government must be confident local lockdowns will work whilst allowing the economy to recover in the unaffected areas.
A fine balance as full lockdown is economically unsustainable and will be interesting to see what happens when schools reopen in a few weeks as at the moment the foundation is quite fragile.
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Post by Mark on Aug 15, 2020 21:38:07 GMT
Comparing the 7 Day average over the last 2 weeks: O9-Aug to 15-AugPositives: average of 1,088 per day Tests Carried Out: average of 170,573 per day 02-Aug to 08-AugPositives: average of 831 per day Tests Carried Out: average 170,046 per day 29% increase in positive cases for a 0.3% increase in the number of tests carried out between the last two weeks. With this trend it is interesting that there has been further easing of restrictions from today. Government must be confident local lockdowns will work whilst allowing the economy to recover in the unaffected areas. A fine balance as full lockdown is economically unsustainable and will be interesting to see what happens when schools reopen in a few weeks as at the moment the foundation is quite fragile. And thats why the most important figures now are Hospital admissions - how many people are actually getting seriously ill from this disease. It's all very well to say there's 1000 new cases a day, but are they actually ill or are they asymptomatic or mild symptoms? |
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Post by NeilVHughes on Aug 15, 2020 21:47:35 GMT
Believe symptoms primarily drive the requests for a test as most people are not tested routinely even in Hospitals and Care Homes and therefore asymptomatics are unlikely to be tested.
The number of positive tests are the numbers the Government use to justify quarantine on return from high risk Countries and therefore must have some value.
Believe the survivability rate has increased but these numbers indicates that the virus is becoming more prevalent and the at risk groups need to continue to be vigilant.
Hospital admissions has stabilised at around 100 in line with the stabilisation of positives at around 800 a few weeks ago and it will be interesting if this increase in positives will correlate with admissions in a few weeks time.
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Post by theatreian on Aug 15, 2020 21:53:14 GMT
The impression i am getting is that the increase in cases is in the younger population who have a better chance of less serious illness with covid, hence the not increased hospital admissions or increase in deaths. Early days though and we all still need to be careful and carrying on with the measures in place even if we are out and about more.
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Post by justinj on Aug 15, 2020 22:35:39 GMT
There is also a lot more targeted testing especially with track and trace hence the number of positives are likely to be higher.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 16, 2020 14:10:27 GMT
In response to recent posts. The increase in the number of cases could well sadly lead to more hospital admissions in the next few weeks as some who are infected may not recover. I fully agree that it may be younger people getting infected but if they are asymptomatic they could potentially be infecting older and more "vulnerable" family and friends. Also we could have a group of idiots who haven't been taking things seriously going to a pub and potentially putting older customers at risk.
There doesn't seem to have been undue concern about the rising numbers in the UK from either of the four nations. Scotland and Wales have been more cautious than Boris and I'd expect Ms Sturgeon to act proactively if she thought things were spiraling out of control North of the Border etc.
Hopefully the testings in local clusters is working more effectively and this does account for some of the rise in recent cases. Also a large local outbreak which in some cases can be over 100 cases can also push the daily figures up.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 16, 2020 21:08:11 GMT
Indirectly Covid related. But watching the BBC News just there was an entitled student with a placard protesting their exam results. The placard had you'r instead of you're. If that person is protesting about their English Language or Literature A-Level results I wouldn't hold out much hope.
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Post by talkingheads on Aug 16, 2020 21:14:01 GMT
Indirectly Covid related. But watching the BBC News just there was an entitled student with a placard protesting their exam results. The placard had you'r instead of you're. If that person is protesting about their English Language or Literature A-Level results I wouldn't hold out much hope. That is so incredibly condescending. What makes you assume they're entitled? Students have been downgraded on exams they didn't sit, they actually have the right to be entitled to answers. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 16, 2020 21:31:17 GMT
Indirectly Covid related. But watching the BBC News just there was an entitled student with a placard protesting their exam results. The placard had you'r instead of you're. If that person is protesting about their English Language or Literature A-Level results I wouldn't hold out much hope. That is so incredibly condescending. What makes you assume they're entitled? Students have been downgraded on exams they didn't sit, they actually have the right to be entitled to answers. Exam results needed to be balanced out. Would it have been fair to give this year's Exam class higher grades than last year. Next year's Exam classes have missed a big chunk of education already. How will their results be affected. A lot of people younger people think they know best. I did when I was their age. Considering that 4 and 5 year olds went back to school on 1st June in hindsight students could have likely sat their GCSEs or A-Levels or have been given the chance to sit or accept awarded grades. I was joking about the person's spelling as they were probably after a Uni place and just mocking the snowflake generation. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 16, 2020 23:14:47 GMT
That is so incredibly condescending. What makes you assume they're entitled? Students have been downgraded on exams they didn't sit, they actually have the right to be entitled to answers. Exam results needed to be balanced out. Would it have been fair to give this year's Exam class higher grades than last year. Next year's Exam classes have missed a big chunk of education already. How will their results be affected. A lot of people younger people think they know best. I did when I was their age. Considering that 4 and 5 year olds went back to school on 1st June in hindsight students could have likely sat their GCSEs or A-Levels or have been given the chance to sit or accept awarded grades.        I was joking about the person's spelling as they were probably after a Uni place and just mocking the snowflake generation. And you've just done it again, how about trying to have a bit of positivity and empathy instead of using unnecessary insults like "snowflake generation"? It's really, really immature. |
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Post by theglenbucklaird on Aug 17, 2020 8:51:49 GMT
That is so incredibly condescending. What makes you assume they're entitled? Students have been downgraded on exams they didn't sit, they actually have the right to be entitled to answers. Exam results needed to be balanced out. Would it have been fair to give this year's Exam class higher grades than last year. Next year's Exam classes have missed a big chunk of education already. How will their results be affected. A lot of people younger people think they know best. I did when I was their age. Considering that 4 and 5 year olds went back to school on 1st June in hindsight students could have likely sat their GCSEs or A-Levels or have been given the chance to sit or accept awarded grades. I was joking about the person's spelling as they were probably after a Uni place and just mocking the snowflake generation. Come on mate, that post is terrible. Government playing their now time honoured trick. Let's see how sh*te we can be. Nasty party, a very nasty party. |
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Post by Someone in a tree on Aug 17, 2020 11:29:05 GMT
Indirectly Covid related. But watching the BBC News just there was an entitled student with a placard protesting their exam results. The placard had you'r instead of you're. If that person is protesting about their English Language or Literature A-Level results I wouldn't hold out much hope. I am diagnosed with dyslexia and I have two BA degrees. Yet I make mistakes all the time |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2020 11:32:10 GMT
Exam results needed to be balanced out. Would it have been fair to give this year's Exam class higher grades than last year. Next year's Exam classes have missed a big chunk of education already. How will their results be affected. A lot of people younger people think they know best. I did when I was their age. Considering that 4 and 5 year olds went back to school on 1st June in hindsight students could have likely sat their GCSEs or A-Levels or have been given the chance to sit or accept awarded grades. I was joking about the person's spelling as they were probably after a Uni place and just mocking the snowflake generation. Come on mate, that post is terrible. Government playing their now time honoured trick. Let's see how sh*te we can be. Nasty party, a very nasty party. It's ironic that certain political parties can be bashed on here but when anything is said about any other demographic everyone is up in arms. There is no easy solution to this and to whilst to compare a school's average grades other a number of years it may make sense and be fair if the predicted grades were several % higher than previous years to take them down. This could disadvantage certain gifted pupils. I'd like to see the predicted grades vs previous year grades to know how different they were. We have to use predicted grades as mock exams could have been set to different standards or be an amalgamation of previous year's papers which it would be possible pupils may well have seen We didn't know what the state of the pandemic would have been in June and in hindsight Exams could have been sat apart from vunerable students who could hae been given a predicted mark. Having a choice of to sit the exam or a predicted mark would have been a big decision for any student to make and to be given the choice of using the higher mark would have given them an unfair advantage on other years. You couldn't have an "on the day decision" as schools wouldn't know how many would turn up. There would have been wasted work by teachers and exam authorities. The only way I could have seen this working would have been if they had been given the choice and the flexability on a subject by subject basis. So if they were taking 4 A-Levels. They might choose to sit 2 and have predicted grades for the other two or sit all four or have predicted grades for all 4. I think a lot would have split their choices and having the chance to just concentrate their revision on two subjects or less. The GCSE results will no doubt create even more issues as that year will be going into A-Levels within 2 weeks of their results coming out so have less time than the A-Level students to decide on change of plans. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2020 11:36:07 GMT
Indirectly Covid related. But watching the BBC News just there was an entitled student with a placard protesting their exam results. The placard had you'r instead of you're. If that person is protesting about their English Language or Literature A-Level results I wouldn't hold out much hope. I am diagnosed with dyslexia and I have two BA degrees. Yet I make mistakes all the time Could have been the case but your and you're is a mistake a lot of people do make and you often see it in print journalism. I once offered to help a dyslexic group with their speling and they replied by letter no you cant. |
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Post by theglenbucklaird on Aug 17, 2020 11:43:54 GMT
Come on mate, that post is terrible. Government playing their now time honoured trick. Let's see how sh*te we can be. Nasty party, a very nasty party. It's ironic that certain political parties can be bashed on here but when anything is said about any other demographic everyone is up in arms. There is no easy solution to this and to whilst to compare a school's average grades other a number of years it may make sense and be fair if the predicted grades were several % higher than previous years to take them down. This could disadvantage certain gifted pupils. I'd like to see the predicted grades vs previous year grades to know how different they were. We have to use predicted grades as mock exams could have been set to different standards or be an amalgamation of previous year's papers which it would be possible pupils may well have seen We didn't know what the state of the pandemic would have been in June and in hindsight Exams could have been sat apart from vunerable students who could hae been given a predicted mark. Having a choice of to sit the exam or a predicted mark would have been a big decision for any student to make and to be given the choice of using the higher mark would have given them an unfair advantage on other years. You couldn't have an "on the day decision" as schools wouldn't know how many would turn up. There would have been wasted work by teachers and exam authorities. The only way I could have seen this working would have been if they had been given the choice and the flexability on a subject by subject basis. So if they were taking 4 A-Levels. They might choose to sit 2 and have predicted grades for the other two or sit all four or have predicted grades for all 4. I think a lot would have split their choices and having the chance to just concentrate their revision on two subjects or less. The GCSE results will no doubt create even more issues as that year will be going into A-Levels within 2 weeks of their results coming out so have less time than the A-Level students to decide on change of plans. So you were sticking up for a political party?? They could try being better. Yep, that would help us all |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2020 11:46:43 GMT
It's ironic that certain political parties can be bashed on here but when anything is said about any other demographic everyone is up in arms. There is no easy solution to this and to whilst to compare a school's average grades other a number of years it may make sense and be fair if the predicted grades were several % higher than previous years to take them down. This could disadvantage certain gifted pupils. I'd like to see the predicted grades vs previous year grades to know how different they were. We have to use predicted grades as mock exams could have been set to different standards or be an amalgamation of previous year's papers which it would be possible pupils may well have seen We didn't know what the state of the pandemic would have been in June and in hindsight Exams could have been sat apart from vunerable students who could hae been given a predicted mark. Having a choice of to sit the exam or a predicted mark would have been a big decision for any student to make and to be given the choice of using the higher mark would have given them an unfair advantage on other years. You couldn't have an "on the day decision" as schools wouldn't know how many would turn up. There would have been wasted work by teachers and exam authorities. The only way I could have seen this working would have been if they had been given the choice and the flexability on a subject by subject basis. So if they were taking 4 A-Levels. They might choose to sit 2 and have predicted grades for the other two or sit all four or have predicted grades for all 4. I think a lot would have split their choices and having the chance to just concentrate their revision on two subjects or less. The GCSE results will no doubt create even more issues as that year will be going into A-Levels within 2 weeks of their results coming out so have less time than the A-Level students to decide on change of plans. So you were sticking up for a political party?? They could try being better. Yep, that would help us all Well we won the election. I wonder if it was a relative of Diane Abbott who wrote the placard. It wasn't her psycho son though! |
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Post by princeton on Aug 17, 2020 12:46:53 GMT
And with a bit of racism and sexism they are gone! Oh how this 55-year old snowflake will miss their jokes about refugees and enthusiam for Jim Davidson videos.
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Post by Sam on Aug 17, 2020 13:02:47 GMT
I don't think making them take the exams in June would have been much fairer since they hadn't been in schools for months at that point. Sure there has been distance learning, but I'm sure that the way in which schools have been managing this varies drastically, and would again create divides.
It's a difficult situation and there isn't really any fair way of managing it.
I did not go to a good school. It was in special measures when I was there and I know full well that my GCSE results dragged the average in my year-group up, when I had 18 passes and others didn't get 5. Equally some of our predicted grades were nonsense compared to our results. Our IT top set got lower grades than the lower set, because we had a different teacher and had been taught our coursework wrong. Most people in my class got Es and Us in the coursework and our exams dragged our grades back up a bit. I think I went from an E in my coursework to a C overall. Had that been this year it would be a completely different story.
My understanding is that the algorithm is based on the teacher's rankings and the past performance of the school, but the top student one year does not equal the top the next.
There should have been more elements to the algorithm like the mock grades and the teachers predictions. Hopefully the appeals process will incorporate these and come to more of an average.
Maybe there needs to be a more formal mock process in future (with the exam boards providing the papers) and teachers need to evidence any predicted grades to account for these and any other circumstances.
At the end of the day, there is the option to sit the exams whilst it might set their planned timelines back. I wasn't happy with my A-Level grades and took a year out to work and do retakes, teaching myself. I got much better grades, saved up some money and got where I wanted to go even though it took me a year longer than planned. Same in my career. It took me spending 4 years in a job and company I disliked to get to the job I have now.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2020 14:53:14 GMT
It's a difficult situation and there isn't really any fair way of managing it. Indeed. I'm getting quite annoyed with all the people who are acting like there's an easy answer and the government just needs to do things that way, and it's funny how that way is always the one that gives them an advantage and completely disregards the disadvantage that it brings to others. But the real exams haven't happened and there just isn't any substitute that is going to produce exactly the same results. If there was such a substitute then we wouldn't need to have the exams at all. I would have expected the mock results to be used instead but it seems many schools have completely missed the point of mocks. At my school the mocks were exactly the same as the real exams except they used papers from an earlier year, but reading the news stories over the past few days it looks as though some schools have been telling pupils what questions will be in the mocks or doing other things that subvert the entire purpose of the exams. If you want to make things easier then you can hold exams at any time for that. The point of the mocks is to make the experience real so the actual exam is a familiar experience. Any school that makes the mocks an easier experience is just letting their pupils down. |
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Post by Sam on Aug 17, 2020 15:33:35 GMT
It's a difficult situation and there isn't really any fair way of managing it. Indeed. I'm getting quite annoyed with all the people who are acting like there's an easy answer and the government just needs to do things that way, and it's funny how that way is always the one that gives them an advantage and completely disregards the disadvantage that it brings to others. But the real exams haven't happened and there just isn't any substitute that is going to produce exactly the same results. If there was such a substitute then we wouldn't need to have the exams at all. I would have expected the mock results to be used instead but it seems many schools have completely missed the point of mocks. At my school the mocks were exactly the same as the real exams except they used papers from an earlier year, but reading the news stories over the past few days it looks as though some schools have been telling pupils what questions will be in the mocks or doing other things that subvert the entire purpose of the exams. If you want to make things easier then you can hold exams at any time for that. The point of the mocks is to make the experience real so the actual exam is a familiar experience. Any school that makes the mocks an easier experience is just letting their pupils down. The problem with utilising a past paper is that they're all accessible online, so you run the risk that the student has already seen it. One of the key things I found in my A-Levels was knowing how to answer the questions so I did every past paper possible (some multiple times) as a part of my revision when I did my self study year. That's why I think the only way it can be made fair is if the exam boards provide papers for the mocks, and for them to be sat under exam conditions. You can give the schools the guidelines and the materials, but then you have to trust them to use them properly. |
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Post by lynette on Aug 17, 2020 15:52:11 GMT
Mocks can be taken at different times, do not usually cover the whole syllabus and can be marked hard to encourage..and let’s face it, some of us pulled it out of the bag at the last by working for the last few months which these kids didn't have. And sometimes a subject doesn’t ‘click’ until the end of the two years. But a decent teacher should be able to judge. Looking back at my own efforts back in the dark ages....nah...
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Post by theglenbucklaird on Aug 17, 2020 16:08:34 GMT
I've a friend teaches A-levels in a school in Liverpool. Twenty five pupils in his class and of the twenty five grades he predicted twenty were marked down. Of the eighty percent marked down, fifteen were by one grade and five marked down by two grades. Also shown me a little history of grade prediction success rate which is solid. Sorry Matthew you are going to get annoyed with me. I think this has a couple of simple solutions, but the fairest is teacher grades. The government have made another monumental cock up which has led to the obvious u-turn. Really not very good at government this crew
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Post by TallPaul on Aug 17, 2020 16:13:49 GMT
My teacher predicted I'd get a C in Economics. I only went and got an A, didn't I...not because I worked especially hard, or spent every waking hour revising, but because I'm an economics genius. 🙂 I even finished the exam paper with about an hour to spare!
Went the other way in Maths, mind, so I suppose it all balanced out.
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Post by oxfordsimon on Aug 17, 2020 16:17:57 GMT
Can we stop thinking of the exams situation as being about a Conservative government please? Education is a devolved power and so Scotland (run by the SNP), Wales (run by Labour), NI (run by SF/DUP) have all had to drop the moderated grades as produced by their independent exam bodies. This is not about party politics - as it is politicians of all colours who have overseen this. Teacher predicted grades - www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-49330720 - the historical truth is that they are not accurate which is why Labour wanted to do away with them for University entrance in their last manifesto. Many things have gone wrong - but you cannot pin the blame on Boris or Williamson and then ignore the failures in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff as if they didn't happen. |
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