Prepared for the worst

✒ I WOULD have thought that being a senior citizen R L Smith would have heard of the saying “Prepare for the worst, hope for the best”.

Our wonderful health service and the government were quite right to build the Nightingale Hospitals and mortuaries to “prepare for the worst”.

Don’t forget that in the early stages of the Covid-19 outbreak thousands of people were dying each day from this terrible virus for which we had no vaccine.

Yes there might have been a degree of panic, and with hindsight some things might have been done better but nobody’s perfect.

Faced with a crisis like this, the outcome of which could not be predicted, money comes bottom of the list.

We are all lucky to live in a country that cares about us in this way and it is only thanks to the swift action by our scientists developing a vaccine, and having the National

Health Service already in place to administer not one dose but two to everybody, that the Nightingale Hospitals and temporary mortuaries were not needed. And if we all behave sensibly let’s hope they never will be.

I don’t think we have anything to complain about. We should be glad we live here in this country and not in one of the many parts of the world where the pandemic is still raging out of control because of inaction, or lack of means by their governments to deal with it.

I expect that if R L Smith had caught the virus himself and there was no hospital bed available for him he would now be complaining about that.

P Collins Bristol