WATCH | Children want coronavirus to get lost so they can be kids again

At the start of the pandemic children in Nelson Mandela Bay knew Covid-19 as the “purple germ”, but one year on these same children know more about a disease that can sometimes be “very dangerous”.

Some of Nelson Mandela Bay’s smallest residents have learnt to cope extremely well and though wearing a mask to school every day can be annoying, they do it.

Most children can’t wait for the day they can play with their friends freely and breathe in peace.

Gia-Ariella Derrocks, 8, of Parsons Hill, doesn’t like how life is with Covid-19 but understands the disease is “highly contagious”.

Asked what it was like wearing a mask to school every day, she said it was often hard to breathe in the classroom.

The most annoying thing for her was that she could not touch and play with her friends.

“You can hardly touch your friends with anything. When you want to play something and it is holding hands, you can’t do that,” she said.

Amaan Williams, 8, of Malabar, still believes the coronavirus is “something green”.

He said wearing a mask every day was “irritating”.

“The virus is boring and we have to wear masks all the time. I can’t breathe.”

Wiser than his years, Qhawe Mbabela, 10, of Walmer, said the virus had completely changed his life, but more so for people with comorbidities who had become very vulnerable.

For him, wearing a mask day in and day out was like suffocating in a glass box for six hours.

Asked why, he said: “It doesn’t allow us to breathe like we used to and it doesn’t give us  freedom to breathe.”

Absolutely “everything” about the coronavirus bothered him.

“I miss going to my friends’ houses and not worrying about where they have been and just not worrying about anything. I miss being free to have fun.”

Qhawe yearned for life to go back to normal.

Yucca Scholtz, 6, of Mangold Park, said the coronavirus was a different type of germ, not like the other germs in the world.

Yucca said her mask “sweated” a lot.

She missed hugging and sharing her food, and said sanitising all the time could be a pain.

“Corona makes me sad,” she said.

“I want it to go away because it’s too terrible. Everyone has to wear a mask and I don’t want other people to get sick.”

HeraldLIVE