After receiving some worrying and potentially serious health news, it is inevitable one casts a tired eye back over recent history and reviews what could have been done differently to avoid such an outcome.
Where on earth, for example, did I manage to pick up the blasted coronavirus having barely being out of my house for the last couple of weeks?
Apart from fleeting visits to shops and an occasional and brief trip to a pub – both with no or extremely fleeting social contact – trips out of the house have been little more than strolls in nearby parks with the family. For much of the rest of the time – like so many others – I have been camping in my living room, working from home.
One can never be sure, of course, but after considering all the options, the overwhelmingly likely source is the school which my two daughters, eight and five, attend.
At first, I cast my curious eye upon the girls as the most likely culprits; both have had mild colds, was that the nascent virus in our house?
But, in a letter from Public Health England in September, distributed by our school, parents were told:
‘Your child does not need a test if they have a runny nose, are sneezing or feeling unwell but do not have a temperature, cough or loss of, or change in, sense of smell or taste because these are not normally symptoms of coronavirus’
The bold passage is PHE’s so, perhaps, after all, the girls are innocent; though it must be said that the symptoms of this virus seem to be multifarious and the list is augmented on a regular basis.
But what about the daily routine of taking them to school and collecting them afterwards, where scores of parents gather, most not wearing masks and with social distancing almost impossible to maintain?
We have tried to avoid the queues, arriving late both morning and afternoon to avoid the standing around in a line along the pavement; my wife and I have always worn masks during these trips and we try and stay two metres from other parents. But, with the nature of the buildings and busy roads and the behaviour of some other parents, sometimes getting closer to other people than one intends is unavoidable.
It is this gathering of people, the majority of whom we do not know – and we know even less about the risks to which they are exposed – that must be the mostly likely root of my infection.
I received my positive result 51 hours after an in-person test was taken on Friday 16th. I had been feeling really unwell the day before – too unwell to walk uphill for ¾ of a mile – but was grateful that there was a testing site not too far away. I was told that, if I received no results after 48 hours, to ring and chase. And so I did. During this phone call, I was informed that I need not try and pursue my result until 5 days had elapsed. I had to wonder just how many people I might infect – and how many more might they infect – were I to get on with my life normally for those five days. This certainly hammered home the uselessness of large-scale testing if obtaining results and tracing contacts lags so very far behind.
Fortunately, I did not have to wait for five days. The next step, after receiving the bad news, was that I had to complete the government’s test and trace questionnaire.
There seemed no obvious place to record ‘gathering at the school gates’ as a ‘new activity outside your home’. There is an ‘add workplace or school’ section but again, the inevitable gathering of crowds of parents outside school gates – visible close to so many primary schools in particular, whilst the children are being slowly and carefully funnelled into their classroom bubbles – is not mentioned.
It is possible to work around these constrictions and, under ‘other’, I submitted the queue as the most likely source of the virus.
But without a dedicated channel, it surely makes it much harder to gather the statistics and monitor whether schools are the likely source of infections? This couldn't be a policy decision by any chance?
We were thrilled when the children finally returned, full time, to school in September after six months of being stuck at home, but the potential risks of infection through school have been consistently downplayed by the government.
Test and trace boss, Baroness Dido Harding, told a Commons select committee, that no modelling had predicted there might be a surge in cases as schools went back in September. Blaming the government advisory group SAGE for the modelling, Lady Harding told the science and technology committee:
'I don’t think anybody was expecting to see the really sizeable increase in demand that we’ve seen over the course of the last few weeks. In none of the modelling was that expected.'
At which point, a weary nation guffawed in unison. Whoever imagined that, with hundreds of thousands of children and young people criss-crossing our roads and transport system, and flocking to new towns and cities around the country, there might be – there would inevitably be – an upsurge of infections?
I am not suggesting that the great return to education should not have happened. But, for many, it is hard to stomach that there sometimes appears to have been so very little planning for this exceptionally important and predictable development.
Daily risks have to be taken; schools and universities must stay open; but everything should be done to monitor the movement of Covid-19 if we are going to learn to live with it. Unless test-trace-isolate works as a triumvirate – the three in one in indivisible union – then there will be no chance for us. And unless we recognise that daily life – including the crowds gathering at the school gates – is, for many, a very likely source of infection, then we may as well give up.
Surely we are weary of boasts about numbers of tests and panic about pubs and must recognise other obvious threats? Otherwise, we are surely in danger of listing our possible sources of infection according to whether or not they might be politically awkward.
Note
I should say that it seems we have escaped with an exceedingly mild version of the virus as I suffered from unpleasant symptoms for just a day, have now only a slight cough and the rest of the family doing even better.
Now we are planning lots of games, films and books for the next two weeks and thank you for all the lovely comments
