My child has been extremely ill from long Covid, I am horrified the government is ending social distancing

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‘Six weeks after our daughter developed Covid, she developed a range of serious symptoms that are still there 15 months later, and chronic every day’ (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

As a parent of a child who has been extremely ill for 15 months after her Covid infection, I am horrified and heartbroken seeing the reckless and negligent approach the government is about to take in abolishing all social distancing measures in society and particularly in schools.

Yes, most children have mild symptoms from Covid. It is what happens weeks, or sometimes months later that is very worrying.

We had a very mild version of the virus in the family. So mild, in fact, that we didn’t know we had had it until antibody tests confirmed it later. Six weeks after our daughter developed Covid, she developed a range of serious symptoms that are still there 15 months later, and chronic every day. She suffers from tachycardia, unstable blood pressure, extreme nausea, headaches, visual disturbances, hair loss, skin rash, muscle and joint aches and breathlessness, amongst other things.

She has been diagnosed with long Covid and post-Covid autonomic dysfunction. Her doctors can do nothing but try to support her through the symptoms and none of them can say when or if she will get better.

She is one of many thousands of children affected in this way. In fact, the Office for National Statistics has reported around 8 per cent of infected children develop this condition after Covid.

The actual number is likely significantly higher as the ONS only count cases that have had a positive PCR test, not cases confirmed by antigen testing. Considering the tsunami of child Covid cases we are about to see, the number of children who will find themselves in our daughter's position will be staggering. Our daughter's education has been severely affected during this time – her attendance rate has been approximately 30 per cent over the past year and she has only been able to achieve that by using a wheelchair.

She used to be a competitive gymnast before she got ill, now she struggles to get up the stairs. This virus has ruined her life.

What right does our government have to play Russian roulette with children's health? When will the voices of the children who are sick long term be heard? How can we willingly expose our children, the most precious things we have and the future of this country, to a virus of which the long-term effects are completely unknown?

As a community, parents of long-Covid kids are utterly terrified and cannot quite believe what is about to happen.

We can start by giving access to vaccines for children over 12 right now, to protect them before the autumn term starts. We must also keep face coverings in secondary schools and continue testing children on a weekly basis, plus increase ventilation in classrooms and install CO2 monitors.

We must do everything we can to avoid our children getting infected in the first place. Anything else is a breach of their human rights.

Marie Sherman Berkshire

Paying fines

You previously reported that the Home Office has paid out millions of pounds in compensation to people who were illegally kept in detention camps.

On Friday, Southern Water was fined £90m for illegally discharging untreated sewage into the sea off the south coast. The judge specifically required the fine to be paid out of profits and not to be paid by increasing customers’ water charges.

When government departments foul up, surely it is reasonable that the costs of such incompetence is paid for, at least in part, by the senior civil servants and government ministers responsible for these repeated errors of judgement?

As it is, the taxpayer picks up the bill and, apart from a brief period of bad press coverage, those responsible carry on as if nothing has happened. Perhaps if monetary sanctions were applied to these functionaries it would focus the mind in future.

Patrick Cleary

Gloucestershire

Cycling history

I counted about 16 stories about the forthcoming Euros fixture between England and Italy in Saturday’s edition of The Independent. But, today’s biggest sporting news was that the Tour de France record of the world’s greatest cyclist, Eddy Merckx, had been equalled by Britain’s greatest ever cyclist, Mark Cavendish.

It attracted half a column and a couple of pictures. But, Cavendish’s return to the Tour is a fairytale story during what has been, so far at least, an electrifying race. It’s as if Southgate didn’t just return to manage the team of which he had been a member, but came back, played and this time scored the winning goal.

Philip Morgan Audley

Triple lock

The pressure is building on the chancellor to drop the triple lock on pensions. I have no objection to him doing that, even though we are still one of the lowest paid in Europe and I have paid my National Insurance for more than 40 years. My only condition to this U-turn would be that the money saved is given to all the heroes of the NHS.

Peter Morrell  Scarborough

Lobster rights

The government’s intention to include decapod crustaceans (crabs, lobsters and prawns) and cephalopod molluscs (octopus and squid) in the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill comes not before time. The evidence that these species have the capacity to suffer is strong. They deserve better protection.

Sadly, unlike for mammals and birds, for many aspects of crustaceans’s and cephalopods’s lives, including the way they are killed for food, we lack the knowledge to know how to treat them humanely. Their anatomy and physiology is fundamentally different from other species and in many cases poorly understood.

We know that live boiling is likely to be bad for crustacean welfare, and a ban would be welcome, but what is the humane way to kill a lobster or crab? Electrical stunning has been proposed and may be humane, but research to ensure pain-free loss of consciousness and scale these methods up for the industrial processing of these species is essential – most crustaceans are not killed one by one in restaurants but processed in factories.

At the Humane Slaughter Association, we are funding scientific research to determine the most humane ways to stun crabs, lobsters, octopus and squid. Only with the results of such research will we be able to meaningfully protect the welfare of crustaceans and cephalopods at slaughter.

It is to be hoped that following acknowledgement of animal sentience government, alongside organisations like ours, will support the necessary research to ensure we really can protect the welfare of all sentient animals through all stages of their lives.

Huw Golledge (chief executive officer) and Alick Simmons (chair) Humane Slaughter Association, Hertfordshire

Inclusive football

How united is the United Kingdom? If the devolved handling of the pandemic were not sufficient evidence that the sutures are loose, the Euros tend to confirm that 900 years (Wales), 300 years (Scotland) and 100 years (Northern Ireland) are insufficient lengths of time to foster complete unity.

By adding the suggestion of a bank holiday to celebrate the anticipated soccer success of England and, by implication, the failure of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, we should debate whether, in place of four nations, it is time for inclusivity and a UK team, emulating Italy (150 years) and Germany (150 and, more recently, 32 years).

Ian Reid Kilnwick