READER’S PICTURE

James Wickenden from Partridge Green spotted this seal enjoying the sun on the River Adur near Henfield last week. He first spotted the seal – which he has affectionately nicknamed Neil – while on a rubber dinghy trip. He said: “He’s been there a few days. He was very inquisitive and followed us in the boat home! We followed the river back on foot with a camera the next day and found him lounging in the sun with plenty of fish bones next to him. Haven’t seen him for a few days now, so I hope he’s made it back to sea OK.”

containment measures in the crucial early stages (mass testing, contact tracing, quarantine facilities, protective gear for medics and care workers, etc.) and just let the virus spread. It turns out that this was a horrifying mistake for two reasons.

First: It has caused one of the worst outbreaks in the world resulting in the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of our most vulnerable citizens.

Second: Allowing the virus to spread has made containment vastly more difficult than it ever needed to be, requiring a longer lockdown than other countries and inflicting much more damage to the economy than containing it from the onset.

Not only has this Tory government put tens of thousands of people into early graves, Johnson’s ‘Superman of Capitalism’ delusion will end up bankrupting thousands of businesses, destroying millions of jobs and appreciably eroding the value of all our pension savings.

But not content with escalating a health scare to a full-blown human and economic crisis, Johnson’s lamentable failure to sack

Dominic Cummings for a clear breach of the lockdown rules has decimated the Government’s entire ‘stay at home’ message.

Millions will now travel, ‘reasonably and legally’, to visit extended family for support with childcare, so further spreading the virus far and wide. This means that a second spike is almost inevitable, with yet more death and economic hardship for the entire nation.

In the annals of British history, it is hard to find so damaging a failure of government, affecting so many people, since King Harold lost the Battle of Hastings.

If Boris Johnson had an ounce of integrity, he would resign for such calamitous errors of judgement. Moreover we should be told who authored the bizarre Greenwich speech and who signed off on it. It would be most surprising if Cummings had nothing to do with it.

By complete contrast, New Zealand did implement essential containment measures in the crucial early stages and has incurred just 21 deaths to the coronavirus. This week New Zealand announced it no longer has any hospital patients being treated for

Covid-19 – an announcement that came on the fifth straight day on which no new cases had been reported.

This is what ‘success’ looks like and it was achieved by a democratic socialist government. Is there another lesson here for the British people?

as they run up and down the road.

How 6ft is supposed to stop you getting the virus baffles me, as when people smoke, you can see their exhalation (and smell it) from 50ft away, so one is inhaling their germs.

Everyone should be wearing masks to reduce the vapour droplets. See Japan; they wear them extensively and the rate of infection and death far lower even though the population is predominantly ‘old’.

I fear the idea here was that we didn’t need a fire brigade until we had a fire. We have plenty of experience in this country of plagues and isolation measures, why be surprised now?

It would have been far safer to shut the borders for three weeks, stop the virus dead in its tracks and then only let people enter the country once they had been in isolation for the prerequisite period.

Now we have endured very restrictive measures, people have lost their jobs and we will not get back to an easy life for some while to come. One trusts that there will be measures in place for when it happens again – whenever that may be.

The children off school