No care for people who can’t wear mask

I should explain that I have severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and knew that this Government’s face mask legislation was going to cause me problems.

I have, since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, tried to find masks that didn’t make me feel as if I was drowning where I couldn’t get enough air into my body. All failed.

So when I heard a Public Health England spokesperson say on LBC that we should contact our doctors about face mask exemptions, I contacted a doctor at my local surgery

but she was baffled and insisted they had received no advice from PHE concerning exemptions.

I gave up, but then a few days later, the same advice was repeated by none other than Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, again on radio.

This time I spoke to a senior doctor at the surgery, who insisted that he has had no communication from anyone about exemptions but he has had several of his patients who also suffer COPD ring him telling him they had also heard this and he had started writing letters explaining why we can’t wear masks.

Today, the first day of mask wearing, I went to a Morrisons supermarket to do my weekly shop with the letter. I have to say, from the lad on the door through to the lady on checkout, their staff were brilliant. However, I had at least a dozen customers, mostly men, stop in front of me and aggressively point to their masks. I pointed out to them my letter from my doctor; some said sorry, others just walked on until I met an angry man I would estimate to be in his 40s, who blocked my progress and used quite a lot of swearing at me to make his point.

I must admit I swore back, not as badly, and pushed past him to the queue to the tills, giving up on my shopping a quarter of the way through.

It’s obvious that Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and PHE have given no thought about this. There are no certificates, and they have left us people with lung conditions to face this sort of abuse without a care for our wellbeing. I dread to think what will happen to people more vulnerable than myself.