Telling us to wait and see is not a great way to make us feel better
After a pupil at her son’s school tested positive for the virus, Georgina Allen tells what happened next
ARTHUR, my 16-year-old son, had just left the house to get the bus to his school in Torbay when I heard. A friend was messaging to see if I had picked up an email from Churston Ferrers Grammar to say it was shut because of a suspected case of Covid-19. I went to call Arthur back and my phone started pinging again, and hasn’t really stopped since.
At first, it was comments from other parents. All were quite jokey about needing to wear hazmat suits to meet up for a drink, and how ridiculous it all was – but after we heard that another four schools in the area had also closed, we began to get worried.
I’m a town councillor, so I got on to the councillor messenger group and told them. We don’t have anything in place to deal with this, we quickly realised. But what do you do? The school had sent very stark messages basically repeating Public Health England (PHE) advice about washing hands and not panicking. Other than that, it was much a question of wait and see. It felt baffling and confusing, but I reassured myself it would be very unlikely that this pupil would test positive for the virus anyway.
Rumours started swirling. We decided through Messenger and Facebook that the pupil must be from Totnes, where we live – based on the fact that the cluster of schools closed was down this way. Arthur had a cough. What did this mean? Could the suspected case have been on the bus with him? I mentioned it on Facebook, and immediately had people telling me to call 111 or the doctor. But he’d had a cough for at least a week. Was that before infection?
I phoned my niece, who works for PHE. She went through protocol about how PHE would respond. If Arthur had been in close contact with the infected person, PHE would call and tell me what to do. But how long would we have to wait? Did we have to stay away from other people until then? We’d had Sunday lunch with my 88-year-old mother the day before. Was she now at risk?
We were all sent an email to say that a student at the school had tested positive for Covid-19. It simply said that all people who’d had contact with the person are being identified, and will be contacted to advise whether they need to exclude themselves from school, and any other action. The PHE, we were told, will advise whether any tests are required for contacts who report symptoms, but no timescale was given. We were just told to make sure we follow the public health advice: catch coughs and sneezes with a tissue, dispose of the tissue in a bin immediately, then wash your hands with soap and water or hand sanitiser, and wash your hands frequently.
There was a Twitter update at 2pm from the Department of Health to say that as of 9am that morning, a case had been confirmed in Devon, then we heard on Devon Live that two linked cases had been confirmed. Both people who’d tested positive had been in northern Italy recently. We started wildly speculating: were they siblings? Was it the parent of the pupil? I bumped into someone I know, and gave them a hug, then thought about their heart condition, and pulled back.
Arthur’s friends came back to my house. Were they infecting each other? Later, I met up with some other parents in a pub. We shouldn’t have been there. The jokes about panic buying had stopped. We were left thinking about the elderly parents and vulnerable people we’d had contact with. The general feeling was that this wait-and-see approach was confusing.
The school is still shut for deep cleaning, and work has been set for our children on Google Classroom. We still don’t know who the pupil is, or how long we have to wait for PHE to get in touch with all possible “contacts”. We’re still just following the general advice. We’re still waiting and seeing. It isn’t a great feeling.