Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
THE SHOPPING
Prince Andrew accuser fears she has virus Host of strategies to leave lockdown ..but none is easy
PRINCE Andrew sex accuser Virginia Giuffre has been admitted to hospital with symptoms of coronavirus.
The mum-of-three tweeted a selfie from her bed in Australia wearing a face mask as she awaited her results.
She wrote: “Having trouble breathing, fever and cough. Getting tested... praying it’s not positive.”
Responding to well-wishers, she added: “I just hate hospitals, have had quite a few bad experiences in my time.”
Kirby Sommers, who says she was “a former sex slave to a billionaire” and who has written about Giuffre’s claimed abuser Jeffrey Epstein, sent her a message of support. “You’ve pulled through so much and have done it with such grace. Coronavirus doesn’t stand a chance with you,” she wrote.
Giuffre’s admittance to hospital, thought to be near her home in Cairns, Queensland, comes just weeks after she returned from Covid-19 hotspot Italy.
The 36-year-old has repeatedly said convicted sex offender Epstein forced her to have sex with the Duke of York, 60, when she was a teenager.
Andrew has vehemently denied her allegations, saying during a car crash BBC Newsnight interview he could not recall ever meeting her.
Epstein, 66, committed suicide in jail last August as he awaited trial for underage sex trafficking.
BRITAIN has been living under lockdown for 17 long days and discussion is now turning to how we get out.
Our death rate seems set to peak imminently. At the weekend, Government advisor, epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London, suggested it could be within the next seven to 10 days.
Understandably, the questions about what happens when that dreaded curve flattens, are building.
Boris Johnson initially said lockdown would be reviewed after the Easter weekend, but foreign secretary Dominic Raab has insisted it is too early to discuss an “exit strategy”, and health secretary Matt Hancock has agreed.
And England’s Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty has stressed it is not yet possible to “call the point” at which we start to relax lockdown.
A Senior Whitehall source said: “If you talk to the Treasury, they’ll tell you we can do this for another month, two months tops, before we start doing damage to the economy that we won’t be able to undo.
“But Health and Downing Street are holding firm – this will last as long as it needs to last until we think we can keep the deaths as low as possible.”
But our appetite for greater freedoms is being whetted by the tempting noises being made by our European neighbours.
Austria looks set to become the first EU country to publicly announce plans to lift some restrictions from April 14, with a second phase from May 1. In Denmark,