Syringes for Sussex

sir – Rather than slow down highly efficient centres that are completing the vaccination of 70-year-olds, why not allow them to start vaccinating seniors just across their county border in another health authority where a slow rollout in the over-80s has only just started?

Surely this is a time for health authorities to work together to get as many people vaccinated as soon as possible.

Here in a village on the border between Hampshire and West Sussex, those lucky enough to be registered with a Hampshire GP have all been vaccinated, whereas those registered with a Chichester GP are still waiting (not very patiently).

Professor Elizabeth Juniper Bosham, West Sussex

sir – You report (January 23) Boris Johnson warning that the new variant of the coronavirus is “more deadly”, with the mortality rate being “30 per cent” higher.

However, from the information provided one could say that the survival rate appears to drop from 99 per cent to 98.7 per cent. That is just as true and not quite as alarming. Malcolm Whittle

Newbury, Berkshire

sir – The new variant coronavirus is said to be perhaps 30 per cent deadlier, which sounds frightening. But, put another way (as Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, did on Friday), of 1,000 people that catch the virus, 10 are likely to die with the existing virus and 13 or 14 with the mutant. That doesn’t sound as ominous.

CC Chanides

Brackley, Northamptonshire

sir – Professor Stephen Powis, the national medical director of NHS England (Letters, January 23), gives Covid hospital admission figures of one every 30 seconds on Saturday January 16. It would be enlightening and, hopefully, encouraging to know how many Covid patients were discharged on the same day.

Ken White

Longwick, Buckinghamshire