LIKE a lot of people, our festive season was less than normal this year. The run up to Christmas was a stressfest, trying to reduce mixing as much as possible so we could avoid sickness and have my extremely clinically vulnerable mum, who has just completed a cancer treatment, over for dinner on the big day.
There was a moment on Christmas Eve night I will never forget. My son developed symptoms as the festive music played and beautiful turkey aroma started wafting through the house.
I sat in the car waiting for him outside one of the Covid testing centres and Sinead O'Connor's Silent Night came on the radio. I looked at the queue of people standing waiting to go in to get tested. I looked at the Covid test centre staff giving up this special night with their families to help people get sorted. I looked around at the worried relatives waiting in cars wondering if Christmas was now cancelled and I felt a lump in my throat.
This was never how it was meant to be. It has been such a hard year for everyone and here we all were, a time that is sacred and meant to be special, a time when families traditionally get together being forced apart, a time when people – instructed by songs of old – to forget our worries for the day, were worried and anxious and sick.
My boy tested negative, it was just an ordinary sickness. But we took no chances. The family dinner with Mum was scaled down to just me and her, greatly socially distanced in her kitchen.
New Year was a blur of lateral flow tests and PCRs as my teenager's friends and colleagues at work tested positive and my boys got sick themselves. Entire extended family groups fell with illness. Friends had to isolate by themselves at home on Christmas Day, feeling sick and miserable.
We managed to escape Covid, but everywhere we looked someone we knew was testing positive. I can't remember a more collectively stressful festive season and now we look ahead to January, the return to schools, more sickness and no doubt disruption to our school and working life due to this relentless virus.
Pupils will be returning to the classrooms today and the rest of this week. With the numbers of infections at an all-time high, this will place enormous pressure on our education system.
Schools aren't these magic places that infections respect, entire classes are going to get sick with the hugely transmissible variant and those kids are going to bring it back to vulnerable family members. Teachers, some of them also vulnerable, are going to get sick, classes will be cancelled and we will have periods of remote learning.
Principals are looking down the barrel of an absolute nightmare and are pleading for help. This week, one principal said they are facing a "complete disaster" another suggested we take this week as a remote learning week as a means of breaking huge transmission rates that exploded over Christmas and giving our schools the best chance of staying open and operational.
Bringing children into classrooms just a week after Christmas celebrations and just two days after New Year celebrations in the midst of a virus surge is indeed a recipe for disaster.
As the principal of St Cecilia's College in Derry, Martine Mulhern, very rightly pointed out, some families who are still protecting vulnerable loved ones, like ourselves, had very low-key celebrations, if any, because they were aware of the damage the virus could inflict on them.
Other families gathered in great numbers and partied like the pandemic is over, putting themselves at greater risk of infection, with little fear of the virus as it might not impact on them too greatly.
The children of both those family groups will be sitting side by side in classrooms this week and we are told to expect a surge of cases as our health service already struggles to cope.
Martine, a principal of a school who has navigated her staff and students through this pandemic for the last two years and knows what she is talking about, has suggested a circuit breaker of one week remote teaching.
I realise this is a fluid situation, but the education authorities should have had a plan in place before now for this type of move. They should have allowed parents to prepare, should have systems put in place for vulnerable children, kids of key workers and measures for SEN children.
Who knows what kind of scenario will play out over the next few weeks. We may just hold on, try to get through it as best we can and hope and pray that this comes to an end sometime soon.
