Hell to pay

Surfing the web today – well, all right: gazing at the BBC website – I find one of those quotes which makes me think, what the actual flip is he on about. How about this one: The health secretary (Matt Hancock) says schools are safe but adds, talking about closures in London and the South East “when schools are open we know that spreads the disease more”. Allow me to translate that one for you. Hancock says schools are safe but when they are open COVID spreads more. I’m glad that’s clear.

Then, I listened to Nicky Campbell’s 5 Live phone when assorted callers rang up attacking teachers for being worried about teaching in schools. They must have heard Hancock’s advice, or perhaps just the bit that said “schools are safe” and not the bit that says that maybe they aren’t after all. I’m with the teachers.

For most pupils, schools are safe. Few children get ill from the virus and very few die, but they are not exempt from either. Teachers, as you might have guessed, are older than schoolchildren and often do get very ill from the virus and many have already died. For some odd reason, the government rarely says this.

If you’re, say, a teacher in your sixties at a state secondary school, you live by the same rules as everyone else. You see as few people as possible in your private life, you socially distance, you do not meet up with people from outside your household indoors. You stay at home. Except when you are at work and you are potentially in contact with over a thousand people from different households. In an area of high COVID incidence how can Hancock, or anyone else, say that schools are safe?

According to my dictionary, ‘safe’ means ‘Protected from or not exposed to danger or risk; not likely to be harmed or lost.‘ It could be that the words doing the heavy lifting in this definition are ‘not likely to be harmed or lost.’ I thought safe might literally mean ‘protected from or not exposed to danger or risk’, but apparently it’s more nuanced than that. Safe means unlikely to be unsafe. Thanks for clearing that one up.

I don’t even feel safe in my own life, which involves entering the households of third parties for lengthy periods or being in a busy office. I’d hate to think how I’d feel if I was in the same building as over a thousand people who, according to the evidence, are the age group most likely to spread the virus and, frankly, make older people ill and maybe even kill them.

In fairness, any government would struggle to deal with COVID-19 but few could surely do a worse job than this one. Boris Johnson chose his ministers on the basis of their blind loyalty to his hard Brexit and certainly not for ability. How else could you possibly explain Gavin Williamson still being education secretary?

Today, Hancock says schools are simultaneously safe and unsafe. Who knows what he will be saying tomorrow? Figuratively, it’s the dither and muddle that kills you. Literally, it’s the virus but Johnson’s dithering and muddle just make things worse. And if this virus eventually catches up with me and puts me six feet under, there will be hell to pay. Literally.