Originally Posted by
Optimistic Nick
Yep.
My 2-year old's nursery re-opened last week. We had a letter explaining the measures that they were taking, but the basic position was: "you can't get children to socially distance, so we won't be doing it amongst the kids. Nor are we going to wear face masks, because it will just scare them". Instead they are trying to keep the kids in mini groups which do not interact with one another. So my son has 4 or 5 kids in his mini group, and amongst themselves they pretty much carry on as before. In addition they are doing a hell of a lot of cleaning, and a focus on washing hands. (it is working - he will happily spend 5 minutes washing his hands now). They are pretty vigilant when it comes to distancing amongst the adults/parents, though.
Obviously nursery is a different beast to schools: the staff to child ratio is 3-1 in nursery, and ten times that in a school. But I did have some respect for the nursery for deciding not to even try. Which, it seems, is also the policy for every supermarket I've been to during lockdown- I've yet to go to one where staff made any discernible effort to maintain distance from each other or the customers. Although by far and away the most flagrant breaches of the social distancing rules I've seen have been hospital staff, sat in huge groups eating their lunch right at the peak of the outbreak. Even my builders made token attempts to stay 2m apart, which is really quite difficult when you are lifting a bath which is 1.8m long.