For anxious parents of school going kids in the US, especially the under 12s, it’s like 2020 all over again. The highly transmissible Delta variant is a huge wild card, Covid-19 cases in children are up 84 per cent in the past week, with 72,000 kids testing positive for the virus, and the battle lines are getting redrawn, once again, between schools, government and communities.

Doctors are raising the alarm. “I will say what I’m hearing from my paediatrician colleagues and particularly in areas where infection rates are high is that they are seeing very sick kids,” Lee Savio Beers, President of the American Academy of Paediatrics, said. The troubling data is coming in as US schools are readying to open their doors for the Fall term.