| At my 10-year-old son’s soccer training this week, one kid was absent with COVID-19. It had been a while since the last spate of cases in the team, so – somewhat unusually – our touchline chat turned to the pandemic.
It’s a tale of parents scrambling to manage the competing demands of work versus children who are either ill, or bored. Of schools struggling to fill gaps as teachers catch the bug from their pupils. And of the basic worry: are the kids alright?The delta variant whipped through when schools went back after the northern hemisphere summer. There was another perceptible pass-through just before Christmas – delta, omicron, who knows? – alongside a COVID-19- like cold that everyone else got.
So English school-age children, though probably uniquely resilient, are also uniquely vulnerable to infection.The result is a prevalent, but widely underreported, crisis in the school system. Absent kids, absent teachers, but with less capacity to deliver the elaborate online learning and support than during lockdown, when we were all in it together.
We parents react to the pretty much weekly news of yet another positive case in our kids’ classes with a bit of a shrug. And our children have become used to having nasal cavities probed and prodded.