Preparations lacking ahead of reopening

I was surprised to read that the St Catherine’s Hospice shops were still devising protocols for their reopening.

With three months of lockdown and an avalanche of regulations and recommendations descending on the population, I would have thought there would have been adequate time and resources for preparations to be made already – including liaison with volunteers.

There appears to be a similar situation developing with our closed public libraries (still being partly funded by ongoing taxation).

There is a certain lassitude creeping into parts of our society now and with schools, colleges and universities barely functioning and the libraries firmly shut, I think we are well on the way to an educational crisis as well as an economic one. Not great news for the future.

In fact, the lockdown has been catastrophic in many ways and could probably have been avoided by using other measures (protection of vulnerable groups, social distancing, track, trace and test).

It is especially interesting that the figures continue to fall at the same time as control measures are being quite quickly reduced – without any sign of a second ‘spike’.

This resonates with the view that viruses follow their own infection profile, being eventually curtailed by growing biological resistance in the community and the formation of less virulent strains.

Either way, I am sure that we will never respond in this way again.

Kevin Leighton Scarborough