COVID-19 at 50: An Oral History

Extract from Interview #723, conducted 3 June 2069 

Dr Tom Pritchard & Beth Edwards

TP: When the schools reopened in June 2020, did you go straight back?

BE: Yeah. It wasn’t an easy decision for my parents, because the R-Number was still really high. As it turned out, the Second Wave wasn’t far off.

TP: How did you feel about it all?

BE: Excited. I was eleven and desperate to see my friends. But everything was so different. Classrooms with just 8 desks; all those 2-metre crosses on the floor. You couldn’t even touch the taps when you went to the loo.

TP: And how were playtimes?

BE: Weird. If a kid fell over, the teacher had to get a colleague in full PPE to help them. I thought the kid was being taken away at first, because for me, PPE meant COVID and hospitals and death… That’s when my anxiety got really bad.