Toby Young Toby Young

How to get into a club and on to a plane

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Disaster struck the Young family last Friday. My 12-year-old son Charlie woke up with a temperature. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t matter, but we were in the Dolomites and due to fly back to England from Venice later that day. On the flight out, we’d all had our temperature checked with an infrared thermometer pointed at our foreheads, and there was a similar policy in place at Marco Polo airport for our return journey. Would Charlie’s fever mean none of us would be allowed to board the plane? And would we be interned in some ghastly Travelodge for 14 days?

The responsible thing would have been to remain in Italy until Charlie recovered, just in case he had the virus. But changing the flights would have cost an arm and a leg, and the risk of Charlie infecting any other passengers was practically zero. For one thing, I’m fairly sure he’s already had Covid. He returned from a school ski trip to northern Italy in February and had all the symptoms. For another, there isn’t a single proven case anywhere in the world of a child transmitting the infection to an adult. That’s one of the things that makes the skittishness of the teaching unions about reopening schools so infuriating. Their members are more likely to be killed in a road traffic accident than catch coronavirus from a child and die.

‘Okay, Charlie, put your mask on,’ I whispered. ‘And whatever you do, don’t sneeze’

The first thing we did was stop at a pharmacy in Cortina and get a bottle of Nurofen. I dosed Charlie up and hoped for the best, but two hours later he was still pretty feverish. He also had a runny nose and was sneezing repeatedly, so was unlikely to be missed by the checkers wielding their temperature guns.

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