Distancing risks causing more harm

LIKE most sensible people in this country, I take the Covid threat seriously – too many people have lost their lives to sensibly do otherwise.

But the Covid cause is badly undermined by so much evidence of highly defensive decision-making by too many people in a position to influence our lives.

I am not allowed to enter my GP practice to pick up routine paperwork, even though I am without Covid symptoms and prepared to wear a face mask, sanitise my hands, and practise social distancing.

Instead, I have to stand outside and have my conversation via the intercom, where all others waiting hear my query. In turn, I become privy via the booming intercom to personal details of a fellow excludee waiting in in the cold, and wonder why we cannot be allowed inside.

I am only allowed to enter the council recycling depot with two other cars, even though there is patently ample space for more, and everything is being done in the open air where we know things are safer. Everybody knows this is daft, but it appears to have become a sacred cow.

And when I visit my bank (HSBC – soon to be closing) I find that someone in charge seems to have misread the two-metre social distancing rule and decided instead to roughly double it for good measure. So again we wait outside, this time in the drizzle, even though there is no need to do so.

Such practice risks doing much more harm than good. It makes me, and I suspect others, feel tempted to chuck away the mask and throw caution to the wind, perhaps even finding something in common with the Tory right wing for the very first time in my life.

And that, for someone with strong liberal values and a lifetime of commitment to the public sector, would be very bad news indeed.

Ashton. He was with his father, Prof John Ashton, former Director of Public Health in the North West, and a past president of the Faculty of Public Health in the London Royal College of Physicians.

Both were concerned by the centralisation of public health prevention in combating the emerging epidemic and were emphatic that such measures should be arranged locally.

Prof Ashton (pictured) subsequently forcibly expressed these views on BBC Question Time and was chastised for his contrary opinion to the national goal.

This week, all householders have received an encouraging letter from the Mayor, Joe Anderson and Matt Ashton, urging us to remain vigilant and indicating how local measures have led to our city having notably fewer cases than other cities and conurbations in the North West.

I congratulate the local team.