Health authorities in the United Kingdom are mulling schools closure and large scale quarantine of families as the country prepares to enter the second phase of its Coronavirus containment strategy.
Chief Scientific Adviser to the government Sir Patrick Vallance, the measures will be required should the UK move from the current phase into what it calls the delayed phase where the country will seek to delay any explosion in the virus outbreak especially during the winter when health facilities are expected to be fully stretched.
The announcement is causing deep anxiety in Nigerian parents of the over 10,540 Nigerian students studying in universities in the UK. Thousands others of Nigerian origin are in primary and secondary schools there as well.
According to one parent in Lagos, “this is disconcerting news for us parents. As you would imagine, there are younger ones who will need support once their schools are closed and this means that parents must now go to bed each night not knowing if they would have to head to the UK the next morning to fetch their children.”
There are about 458,490 foreign students in the UK. The number of Nigerian students in the UK has been falling a high of 18,020 in 2013 to 17,920 in 2014, 17,405 in 2015, 12,655 in 2016 and 10540 in 2018.
