Are we deploying our forces most effectively in all-out war against coronavirus?

We are invoking the spirit of 1940 in the coronavirus crisis, but does the present deployment of our men and women really bear comparison with mobilisation for total war?

There is much agitation over a shortage of tests which can leave ICU specialists and other medical staff unavailable for duty if a family member develops Covid-like symptoms.

As we approach the peak of the crisis, could not such key personnel pre-emptively isolate from their families rather than risk having to isolate with them? There are abundant hotel rooms lying empty which would facilitate this.

There are other essential roles (distribution of food, childcare, domiciliary care and harvesting of crops) to which new workers could more quickly adapt. Yet many furloughed employees have been taken onto the public payroll to do nothing, with the express intention of their not seeking alternative employment. Shouldn’t they be on call to join or replace those in essential work?

There are two ways in which some replacement of frontline workers may be desirable. One is to use workers whose family circumstances allow them the highest degree of isolation, minimising the risk of them becoming infected and thus liable to infect those they work with. The other reason is to minimise the risk of a worker who does become infected then being added to the number of casualties needing hospitalisation at this critical time and perhaps even dying.

We know that vulnerability to becoming critically ill varies greatly from person to person and we have a distressingly large and growing body of data telling us how particular characteristics influence the chances of needing a ventilator and of dying. This could be combined with personal medical records to generate individual risk scores. One and a half million people have been ordered into the highest level of isolation, but this is a fraction of those with one or more of the known risk factors. A more nuanced risk scoring would suggest who to pull out of the front line and who to draft in to replace them.

JOHN RISELEY Harcourt Drive, Harrogate

Jeane Freeman’s rebuke to John Mason, MSP, when he said that people should “take risks and trust in Jesus” (Neil Barber, Letters, 4 April) has a particularly apposite historical pandemic parallel.

When the third cholera one arrived in Britain in 1853, the Edinburgh Presbytery asked the Home Secretary, Lord Palmerston, to declare a day of national fasting.

His reply, published in The Scotsman on 29 October, was: “Make civic improvements in impoverished neighbourhoods which, if allowed to remain, will infallibly breed pestilence, and be fruitful in death, in spite of all the fastings of a united but inactive nation. When man has done his utmost for his own safety then it is time to invoke the blessing of heaven.”

HUGH PENNINGTON Carlton Place, Aberdeen