Shelagh Fogarty responds to caller who says coronavirus is "a problem that doesn't exist"

20 May 2020, 16:32 | Updated: 20 May 2020, 16:37

Shelagh Fogarty took this caller to task after they school lockdown measures have been put in place "for a problem that doesn't exist."

The caller Angela says she wants her daughter to go back to secondary school, as does her daughter, because she hasn't got any health issues.

She suggested that two schools should twin and put together the non-vulnerable children in one school with non-vulnerable teachers, along with social distancing measures, and put the vulnerable children, or children with vulnerable family members, in the other school building.

Angela questioned why people are treating children "like dirt" when they do not transmit the virus, to which Shelagh pointed out it is has not been scientifically clarified whether children are infectious.

Angela said she wants her daughter to go back to school and implement a form of social distancing while having some normality such as allowing her daughter to touch her friend.

Shelagh said this was contradictory and obviously more difficult for school children to social distance than meeting a friend from two metres away in an open space.

"I don't think you're thinking beyond the issue of two individual girls. If the girls go back to school and the parents go back to work and Dad is going into an office and Mum is getting on the tube and then they all get back home in the evening, you cannot vouch for that eight weeks of quarantine because it is over," Shelagh explained.

Angela said that "we're making a problem that's not there", and Shelagh pushed her to clarify: "We can't live two metres away from everybody for the rest of our lives."

Shelagh pointed out that the UK has hundreds of people dying each day: "You cannot say we are acting about a problem that doesn't exist, infection and a lot of it is still out there."