Letters - Saturday, March 28, 2020

As our lives change thanks to coronavirus, we must try to look at the lessons we can learn from what must be nature’s way of telling us all to slow down.

One of the most important lessons to be learned, in my opinion, is that people are not designed to be hemmed in together and in big numbers.

So I hope decision-makers will take heed and use the time of isolation to analyse what they have helped create in our community – a raft of huge, sprawling housing estates, lack of real accessible countryside and bursting schools.

Instead, they must consider why we have green fields in the first place, to produce food and also to help our mental wellbeing by being allowed to escape and breathe in clean air, and not be knocked out by light pollution.

The decision-makers in our towns and cities simply have to rethink how they want villages, towns and cities to look, and not just think of the money to be made.

A smaller number of housing estates, with plenty of green space, is needed to allow people to have some space.

As we are all surely learning, health and people are more important than money and buildings.

Bernie Smith

address supplied

VIRUS

Why no testing for disease?

The Prime Minister is increasingly looking weak and indecisive.

Stephen Glover wrote in the Daily Mail that “every significant new measure has had to be wrung from Boris Johnson, and then it is too late!”

Promises are made and then ignored.

Protective equipment and clothing for front line NHS staff has been promised for weeks.

Staff have become infected and the NHS damaged because of the lack of this equipment.

Whilst the Government becomes ever more authoritarian in its attempt to control the coronavirus, it ignores the key World Health Organisation recommendation to substantially increase testing for the virus.

The Government has been promising more coronavirus testing for months.

Only now, in the midst of the totally predictable health crisis, are they promising to buy millions of tests. Yet they are still talking of FOUR more weeks before testing 25,000 a day.

Jeremy Hunt, the highly experienced former Health Secretary, has warned that “lack of testing means we have lost track of the virus.”

We don’t know who has the virus or where the next outbreak will appear.

No testing has been done outside of hospital since the March 13!

Countries which have been more successful in achieving control in this virus, for example Germany, (with a far lower death rate than Britain) and South Korea, both have much higher levels of testing.

They are even employing drive-through testing for the virus to speed up the process.

South Korea routinely tests 20,000 people a day.

Increased testing would show the British people the Government is deeply concerned about the situation and taking action.

Instead we just get lectures and recommendations. Empty rhetoric!

Now an unproven prototype from Brexit supporter James Dyson is welcomed (10,000) yet the earlier offer of 5,000 from an established British manufacturer was ignored!

A successful coronavirus strategy involves testing, quarantining positive cases and tracing of their contacts, and then isolating those contacts in turn.

It is simple and straightforward.

Other countries are doing this and protecting their precious health staff with protective clothing.

Why aren’t we?

Andrew Milroy

via email

VIRUS

What is exit strategy for virus

Does anyone in Government have an exit strategy in the fight against the coronavirus?

I hear all sorts of policies that may be put into place but no one has explained how or when we will get back to normal.

Unless the virus is totally eliminated, surely it will return once we do get back to normal, then what?

Alan Lowe

Lytham St Annes