Death toll
First, I would like to agree with two of Alan Wright's comments in his letter in the Echo recently.
Yes, the vaccine rollout has been a tremendous success mainly due to the decision to let the grownups, sorry, the NHS take charge.
How different things might have been if they’d made the same decision about Test, Track and Trace.
I agree, the EU's vaccination programme has been shambolic.
Furthermore, European politicians' conduct in trying to deflect criticism over the past weeks was shocking.
However, his crass dismissal of Ged Taylor's claim that the UK's death toll was the highest in the world by boasting we are now second, was unbelievable.
The Uk's Deaths Per Million (DPM) score stands at 1,857 so let me cherry-pick some statistics of my own and tell you England’s DPM now stands at 1,971.
So Alan, where does this figure stand in your table?
For clarity, Scotland has 1,386, Wales 1,744 and Northern Ireland 1,109.
New Zealand, another island state with a similar population to that of Scotland, comes in at five (DPM).
Perhaps, Jacinda Ardern closing their borders before they had suffered a single death may have had something to do with it?
Let's look at Japan, again, another island state, with double the UK's population.
Their DPM score is 71; our figures are shocking whichever way you look at them.
This is especially so after the World Health Organisation reported that the United States of America and the United Kingdom were both best placed of all other nations to handle a pandemic.
But, there again, they didn't take Donald Trump and Boris Johnson into account, did they?
“Help look for these endearing creatures, or their signs, this
spring.”