Princess Mary pulls children out of Switzerland school to return to Denmark amid growing coronavirus

Princess Mary has pulled her children out of boarding school in Switzerland to return home to Denmark, after their homeland went into coronavirus lockdown. 

The 48-year-old mother-of-four and her family released a statement on Friday morning, sharing their decision to ‘return home and stand with the Danes at a time that requires a lot of everyone’.

‘In the light of the increased situation in Denmark in connection with the handling of the spread of COVID-19, the Crown Prince family has decided that the family should return home from Switzerland,’ the statement said.

‘The Crown Prince family finds it most natural to return home and stand with the Danes at a time that requires a lot of everyone and where there is a common responsibility to look after each other.’

The statement continued: ‘On January 6, 2020, their Royal Highnesses Prince Christian, Princess Isabella, Prince Vincent and Princess Josephine began a 12-week school stay at Iemania-Bees in Switzerland.

‘Thus, the school stay will be interrupted before time, and all four children will continue in Denmark, when public institutions open again in Denmark.’ 

Prince Vincent and Princess Josephine began their boarding school stay in January, when Princess Mary described their time there as a ‘gift’ to her children.

‘This is a gift where they can be together about it, and a gift they can have with them for the rest of their lives,’ she said.

Prince Vincent and Princess Josephine are certainly no strangers to their neighbouring nation, having enjoyed yearly ski trips to Verbier where they often stay in their friend Peter Warnøes’s chalet.

Crown Prince Frederik and Princess Mary’s decision to educate their children abroad is likely a result of Prince Frederik, 51, and his brother Prince Joachim, who spend a couple of years studying abroad as teenagers. 

They attended the École des Roches in Normandy, France in the early eighties, and may well have chosen multilingual Switzerland to improve their brood’s language skills.

On Thursday, Denmark became the second country in Europe to go into lockdown, as coronavirus continues to rip across Europe and the rest of the world.  

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen declared that all Danish schools, universities, and kindergartens will be shut for two weeks to slow the spread of the bug.

Tough new measures will also include banning indoor events with 100 or more participants, and sending non-critical public sector employees home.

Private sector workers will also be encouraged to work from home, after the Danish Patient Safety Authority reported 442 new cases this week. The country now has 617 confirmed cases. 

The urgent action follows the World Health Organization’s designation of coronavirus as a pandemic, as it blasted ‘inactive’ governments for fuelling the crisis.