It’s taken the UK authorities an uncomfortably long time to realise that they needed to close schools and colleges. Once again most of the rest of the world twigged to this one early on in the cycle. Yes, I realise the argument is that by keeping children at home you inevitably take key workers out of the very jobs which make them key, yes, they lose education and might start running amok on the streets and generally adding to the situation.

One of my daughters is even more miffed that the ‘A’ Levels have now along withe GSCSE’s been cancelled. Fairly typically, the government issues an edict (bit like Brexit) only then to start thinking about the mechanics of how this will or not work. Over twenty four hours later there is no clarification on how this will be implemented. One senior academic was speaking today saying it would most probably be unjust for many students to miss their A levels and cause great difficulty with university admissions for next year. If indeed we are all back to strength by the end of September.

My daughter is now left with the prospect that tomorrow may be her last day at school, ever. In March not the middle of the summer, she’s devastated. As the exam boards have not responded to the decision yet I still think there may be a chance that the exams could, in some form still happen. For the time being should she carry on from home and try to complete the course or just give up? Bit of a mess.

I should think like everyone else I’ve been reading up as much about this sorry state as possible and the more I look the more the statistics just don’t seem to add up. According to one source which stated that seasonal flu can affect up to one Billion people with mortality rates of 115,000 to 650,000 in any one year. we don’t seem with CV19 to have got anywhere close to those levels and normally no one takes any real measures to mitigate the possibility of flu, no denying it’s a very nasty thing to catch. Whilst flu is still with us this year as every year and Covid19 is on top of that and a novel virus to which we have no imune response the statistics and particularly the projected mortality rates especially for the UK going up from 100,000 to 250,000 with up to 14,000 per day at times succumbing to the virus do seem overly alarmist. It would be like the final scenes in ‘Amadeus’ where the bodies are thrown into the limed ‘Plague-pits’ and no one wants that in the 21st century wherever in the world you live.