'Makes me sick': Disturbing images reveal unusual detail as children return to school
Heartbreaking images of a small number of children in a school playground demonstrates exactly how the coronavirus has changed the way we live.
Photos of two to three-year-olds returning back to nursery school have sparked powerful reactions as the world continues to battle the coronavirus.
Journalist Lionel Top, who works for French news outlet BMF TV, shared photos on his Twitter of the sad scenes earlier this week.
"The children are coming back today (a small part of them rather). Very strange, even disturbing atmosphere....” he said.
The series of images are of children in Tourcoing, a town on the French-Belgian border, according to The Scottish Sun.
They show the children sitting in their own squares in the quad to ensure they continue to practise social distancing.
Les enfants font leur rentrée aujourd’hui (un petite partie d’entre-eux plutôt).
Ambiance très étrange, voire dérangeante... pic.twitter.com/g91y5hLatJ— Lionel Top (@lioneltop) May 12, 2020
"To ensure that distances are respected, while taking advantage of recreation, the educational team has drawn squares on the ground for the little ones. The children play, dance, jump, laugh together ... but from this square," Top said in a tweet.
"The photos are striking and most of the reactions on Twitter show the same emotion, that of a school which does not correspond to what we know, but the children ... were not 'unhappy'.”
Top also said to imagine how the teachers felt if photos like these saddened the wider community.
“It makes me sick, you can’t imagine – an institute told me,” he tweeted.
In other photos, a teacher wearing a face mask stands in front of three students who are socially distancing with empty desks behind them and another shows a group of teachers donning masks – one with a face shield – with children kept away from each other.
One boy is seen sitting against the wall on one of the crosses marking the safe distance.
A woman shared one of the pictures and said the image was “a heartbreak”.
“Let’s not call it ‘school’,” she said.
According to Johns Hopkins University, there are more than 178,000 cases in France and just over 27,000 deaths.
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