A rare, coronavirus-linked inflammatory disease is spreading among children. Reopening schools now would be ludicrous

Some spectacularly stupid narratives have emerged from the pandemic that Britain is at the European epicentre of. The ones surrounding schools are a case in point. They make it very clear that it isn’t just on matters concerning Brexit that this country and its government excel themselves in all-round s**t-headery.

The story goes something like this: Teachers, and especially teaching assistants who get paid 39p and a packet of fruit gums if they’re lucky, aren’t really people so we can send the kids back because they’re clear; they don’t get Covid-19. So let’s chuck ‘em in together, and let them do what kids do; get mucky, hug each other, spit at each other, and sometimes at their teachers and teaching assistants (who aren’t people, see above). They need to learn! And (more to the point) get out from under our feet. If that means their educators have to take one for the team, so be it. This is a war, dammit.

Except, it seems that maybe children can get burned by the virus. Rarely, it should be said. Covid-19 is a much bigger issue for their grandparents (and we seem to have forgotten that they’re people too).

But it has recently emerged that a number of kids are getting hit, and in a quite nasty way, from a rare inflammatory disease that can prove fatal.

"This shouldn't stop parents letting their children exit lockdown," Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said.

Yes, OK, it’s probably true that the bigger risk posed by allowing them to emerge blinking into the sunlight has four wheels, an exhaust pipe, and a muttonhead holding a mobile phone in one hand at the wheel.

But the striking thing about the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which I can speak to having dealt with six weeks of surreally weird and unpleasant sickness, is how much we don’t know.

The short little strand of RNA that encodes it is having an effect on human beings that those of a religious bent might describe as “demonic”.

The emergence of inflammatory disease among children is just the latest in a series of unexpected twists. They outdo anything M. Knight “Sixth Sense” Shyamalan has yet conceived.

There is also little confidence that children won’t spread the thing to their families and spark a fresh round of cases. Let’s not forget that.

Combine all this with a government characterised by a murderous mixture of callousness and incompetence, and is it any wonder that a change.org petition calling for parents to be given the option to keep their children at home has topped 500,000 signatures and counting?

Is it any wonder that teachers’ unions have baulked in the face of ministers wagging their fingers and talking at them?

If I were working for the National Education Union or NASUWT, the Teachers’ Union, I’d be paying close attention to Section 44 of the 1996 Employment Rights Act. It confers the right to walk out without detriment on employees who first raise health and safety concerns.

They may have to make use of it because it doesn’t appear that the government is minded to listen, just as it didn’t when people were screaming “care homes, care homes, care homes”. Thousands of dead residents and their carers stand as mute testimony to that.

In the meantime, we’ve been treated to a dismal parade of headlines falsely accusing unions of being wreckers for daring to raise the issue of their members' health, and perhaps now the health of the children they teach, and of their families. It doesn’t take an epidemiologist to guess who’s been feeding spin to the writers of the stories they appear above.

And then there's Denmark. Denmark has reopened its schools, as the BBC was keen to show us this morning. The crucial difference between Denmark and the UK, however, is that Denmark got to grips with the issue early.

It didn’t have a prime minister who waltzed around pooh-poohing the danger and shaking hands with people to show just what a tough guy he was.

It hasn’t racked up a death toll topped only by that of the US.

It also has smaller class sizes, and has handled schools reopening with care. The ministers in Denmark's government appear to have engaged their brains.

Children’s education matters and they would surely benefit from being able to get back into the classroom. I’ve watched my own kids struggle while working through an online curriculum, so I can see that clearly.

It is also the case that some people are being left on the horns of a horrible dilemma with the government’s “partial and conditional” lifting of the lockdown. Some bosses are already showing a lamentable lack of sympathy over their inability to access childcare.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the first order of business should be keeping people safe, and alive.

There may be solutions to the challenges faced by schools. But finding them demands engagement and flexibility and there isn’t much sign of that in Whitehall at the moment.

The NASUWT’s call for the government to “step back” from its June 1 partial reopening plan is therefore well made.