Quarantining children is a dangerous fiasco
IThere is no justification for the raft of measures imposed on people who are least vulnerable to the virus, but pay the highest social cost
Even the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health thinks mass testing in schools should end
have gained a newfound respect for the Oxford-astrazeneca nerds after my Covid-addled eight-year-old breathed directly into my face on Monday to prove she had brushed her teeth before bedtime.
Well, you could hardly blame the kid for forgetting she has a highly infectious disease spread by airborne transmission since she has had no symptoms whatsoever.
Thanks to the miracles worked by those men and women in white coats, my double-jabbed husband and I have stayed negative despite spending the past two weeks living in a den of plague.
First our eldest got it. At 12 going on 21, she happily ensconced herself in her room with an Amazon Fire TV Stick and a stash of Pot Noodles and we barely saw her for the obligatory 10 days. Indeed, we hardly noticed the difference between her being in self-isolation and what used to be known as “family time”.
Being the sort of people who separate their recycling, we diligently followed the Government (and school) advice to lateral flow-test our other two children daily, as well as ourselves. Lo and behold our youngest, Little Miss Mentadent, got the dreaded double line less than a week later, swiftly followed by our 11-year-old son.
We did try to separate the blighters, honest, but how the hell are you supposed to self-isolate an eight year old? Since coronavirus is now ripping through secondary schools, what’s to say they didn’t get it from an asymptomatic classmate or a child whose parents don’t separate their recycling? We will never know.
What is certain, however, is that they have now lost another month of school between them, despite there being nothing seriously wrong with any of them. The eldest had a mild sore throat, the boy has had a bit of a cough – but under normal circumstances they would have been sent on their way with an Ultrabalm pocket pack, and possibly some Tunes if I was feeling really generous. (As a doctor’s daughter I practically had to be decapitated to miss a day of school – and even then my father would probably have applied Steri-strips while insisting “you absolutely don’t need stitches”.)
The sheer ridiculousness of having to homeschool three otherwise healthy children could not have been better demonstrated than by the repeated calls I had to field from NHS T and T (Test and trace? Track and trace? Don’t test me on it, I’ve lost track) – even though, again, being responsible citizens, we had already told anyone who needed to know.
As well as discovering that “T and T” cannot actually test, track or trace school contacts (eh?), I was also informed that “for safeguarding reasons”, I could not report all of my children’s “other” close contacts at the same time, even though they solely comprised my husband and me (and possibly the cat, although “close” is probably overstating it). Apparently, I could only do it separately. Three times. For a minimum of 25 minutes per call. “For safeguarding reasons”, I refused.
How much is this service still costing the taxpayer? And why are we still testing asymptomatic children at all? My husband and I are far from the only parents not to have caught coronavirus from their infected offspring.
According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, the percentage of people currently testing positive is highest in secondary school pupils at around 7 per cent but just 1.2 per cent in those aged 35 to 49. The infection rate in the over-50s is half that, at 0.6 per cent.
So even though Covid-19 is seemingly spreading like wildfire through the Snapchat generation – old Facebooker farts like us aren’t catching it anywhere near the same rate thanks to the success of the vaccination rollout. I accept that the Year 7 to 11-ers may be overrepresented in the charts because we are testing them more – but that in itself begs the question: why?
Why, when children are at far less risk of being hospitalised and dying from coronavirus, are we treating them like we are still in peak pandemic mode? Adults aren’t being obliged to take two lateral flow tests a week, so why are children?
All of this also raises the bigger question of what the point of continued mass testing really is when the only route back to normality is to treat Covid as we would any other endemic disease.
The revelation that 43,000 people are thought to have been given incorrect negative PCR results by an Nhs-sanctioned laboratory in Wolverhampton rather suggests that the whole system is not fit for purpose.
What we can say for certain is that almost two years on from the March 2020 lockdown, children continue to carry the burden of a disease that doesn’t even affect them – when nearly 80 per cent of the population over 12 have been double-jabbed. It makes no sense.
Children obviously shouldn’t be in school if they are actually ill. But rather than keeping healthy children at home, we should be entering a phase where we accept that Covid is here to stay, that unvaccinated children are predominantly going to catch and spread it but that it’s okay because the success of the vaccine rollout means we have protected not just the vulnerable and the immuno-suppressed but the overwhelming majority of teachers and parents.
Even the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health thinks mass testing in schools should end, arguing that it is causing unnecessary chaos, spreading needless fear and adversely affecting children’s mental health.
Miriam Cates, the MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, has rightly argued that mass testing in schools is “utterly pointless” and “just another example of treating children as second class citizens”. A number of health experts have also quite reasonably asked what evidence there is to show that this sledgehammer to crack a nut approach is actually stopping transmission and infection.
This week, Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, highlighted another problem with the status quo – ongoing unexplained absence in schools.
With one in 40 pupils missing school due to Covid last week, up from around one in 80 at the start of the school term, Mr Zahawi has warned headteachers that extended coronavirus absences must be curbed. Clearly recognising that a lack of schooling has a more significant negative impact on children than Covid itself, he said attending school was “a national priority” and essential for children’s “well-being and long-term development”.
Well, if that is the case, minister, why are you actively continuing to keep children away from the classroom?
The long-term knock-on effect of all this absenteeism should not be overlooked.
According to the Centre for Social Justice think tank, nearly 100,000 children failed to return to schools full-time after they reopened. These pupils remain unaccounted for. They are the lost children of lockdown. I shudder to think how many of them have become vulnerable to local gangs or dangerous home environments.
Meanwhile, the pandemic has caused a surge of kids to vanish from the school roll. Officials do not know how many pupils are home-schooled, or why. No register is kept. But the best guess is 75,000 pupils, a figure that surged by almost 40 per cent last year.
So we have at least 175,000 children who can’t be tracked or traced, which rather makes a mockery of every single infuriating phone call I have received this week.