How is it safer to meet family in a pub?
TRY as I might, I am unable to understand why the only contact that I can have with my family, who would never even consider coming anywhere near us if they thought there was any chance that they could pass on Covid-19 to us, is to stand behind the firmly closed front gate while they loiter on the pavement.
In the brief period when they were allowed to enter our premises, we ensured that we maintained the necessary distancing and disinfection procedures.
We were all safer than we would be if we were to now meet up where the politicians want us to, in the local pubs and restaurants where, my family tell me, there is scant regard for the rules and no evidence that there is any attempt to police the flaunting of them.
We would all be at considerably higher risk, if the spread of the virus is as alarming as they are suggesting, of contracting it by meeting in the local south Stockport venues near our home, where there seems to be no social distancing, than we are by meeting, at least in our garden.
I am a responsible member of the community but I feel that I am being penalised, even demonised, when those citizens who do not behave responsibly are being pandered to.
And, worryingly, I feel I am coming to the end of what I can take in the face of such injustice. My family is all that I want in this situation.
I can put up with all other necessary privations but I need my family.
We would be safe with each other, because we love each other too much to take risks.
K. Penney, via email
A job for real professionals
I DON’T understand why a security company has been given what should surely be a healthcare job.
If it is about disease surely the people to deal with it are medics and the NHS?
Community health screening, testing and treatment would surely be a better done if it had professionals who can recognise and diagnose what they are looking at.
If it is a question of capacity and equipment, then perhaps it would be a good idea to focus NHS work on disease prevention rather than just mitigating it once it presents at hospital.
Some years ago I was talking to a doctor who had run a mission hospital in rural Africa. They could do basics on site such as maternity, accident and emergency, and treatment of TB and malnutrition. Asked what expensive kit he would like paid for by funding from abroad and he said a couple of Toyota pickups to go out down dirt roads for community health outreach. It was cost effective as a way of promoting health, adaptable, and enabled people to stay economically active rather than drain family resources being sick.
Manchester is not rural Africa, but the principle is the same.
This is a topic for the longer term, but the hiring and paying of health money to a commercial profitdriven business is symptomatic of the normalisation of privatisation of our NHS.
I think it’s high time this stopped; we need to keep our NHS public because lives are at stake. Concerned Healthcare Professional
Council, don’t blame TfGM
THANKS are due to your reporter Charlotte Cox for her article “Public transport’s slow recovery, but where are the masks?” (M.E.N., August 14).
The final sentence of this makes depressing reading – “the cycling surge appears to be on the wane, although they are still 6pc above the annual average.”
Manchester council has failed to seize the opportunity to be bold and imaginative in support of the many people in this city who do not own a car and would like an alternative to getting back onto buses and trams, on which mask-wearing is not being enforced.
However, the lack of real support for cycling and walking goes back before the coronavirus.
In his investigation of the Hyde Road widening, local member of the so-called ‘cycling lobby’ Sam Tate discovered, via a Freedom of Information Act request to Transport for Greater Manchester, that a bid to the Mayor’s Challenge Fund would not succeed in its current form.
TfGM told Manchester council there was ‘a lack of integration into the wider network, and very poor value for money, asking 10 times as much per kilometre as the Wilmslow Road cycleways.’
The damning assessment concluded – “historical lack of interest in committing to this project via other funding streams” and Manchester council was “advised not to submit in current status pre submission”.
You can read the grim details on his website https://samvironment. blogspot.com/
Manchester council seems not to have listened; the bid was submitted largely unchanged and – as they’d been warned – failed.
Meanwhile, the council persists with carefully-worded statements which try to shift the blame onto TfGM.
It shouldn’t be up to persistent citizens like Sam Tate to ferret out this malpractice.
Calum McFarlane, Climate Emergency Manchester