School closures will lay bare the private struggles so many of us endure | Zoe Williams

The likely coronavirus response will disrupt family life and show just how many children, parents and grandparents need care

There is an unlovely 20-second gap, in the parenting experience, between any given negative event and a sense of solidarity kicking in: the quick thrill of "I'm all right, Jack". Toddlers, screaming in the supermarket? Not my circus, not my monkeys. Schools closing down for two months straight, which realistically would mean the Easter holidays rolling into September, the world transformed into one endless summer? My kids are 12 and 10, and I work from home. What could possibly be more clement, I thought? It'll be like having co-workers, except in pyjamas.

This was only fleeting, before the calamity kicked in. The disruption caused by mass school closures would be simply unmatched by any freak event in living memory: no flood, no ash cloud, no financial crash comes close to losing so much of the workforce to childcare, and for so long. We have some experience of multiple schools closing across a number of regions, for norovirus; that tended to be for no more than a couple of days, for deep cleaning. We know what it's like to have snow days dispersed across a few counties, or for the whole country to seize up after a strong wind (if you can remember as far back as 1987). Few economic effects were observed, and none talked about, because the disruption was absorbed into each individual family, as misfortunes tend to be.

Related: Charities preparing to feed children if schools shut over coronavirus

The World Health Organization is recommending that people take simple precautions to reduce exposure to and transmission of the Wuhan coronavirus, for which there is no specific cure or vaccine.

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