This will make a lot of people very happy.
Children under the age of 10 in Switzerland have been told that they can hug their grandparents as the country starts to ease some of its coronavirus measures.
The health ministry’s infectious diseases chief Daniel Koch said scientists concluded that children that young do not transmit the virus.
Koch said the original advice against “mixing generations” and keeping distance between children and their grandparents was made when they knew less about how the virus was transmitted.
“Young children are not infected and do not transmit the virus,” he said. “They just don’t have the receptors to catch the disease.”
He said the meetings should be brief and should not involve babysitting and emphasised only children under 10 should be permitted contact, not older children or teenagers.
“We are talking about brief contact with grandchildren, not get-togethers with the entire family, babysitting, or spending time with the kids outside the home”, he said.
The new advice came after consultation with experts at Universities in Zurich, Bern and Geneva, and was reported by Swiss broadcaster SRF.
Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead of the World Health Organisation’s emergencies programme, said the agency is looking into whether grandparents can safely hug their grandchildren without risk of contracting the coronavirus.
