HOW on earth have we had to reach the current drastic spread of Covid-19 before real effort is being put into the measures needed to fight it? Did Boris and co rely on the “British Bulldog” syndrome, the “we are British, we can cope” attitude? Unfortunately the virus was not impressed, and certainly not intimidated.

We had weeks of warning from the rapid spread in China, even before the weeks of warning from Italy, yet waited until there was a case here before taking things seriously.

Surely all that time could have been used to put essential measures in place? Could the Army not have been put on standby, with their medical teams and facilities prepared?

Could supplies of test kits, protective clothing, sanitisers, ventilators etc not have been stockpiled, or even distributed to all hospitals and medical centres to be instantly available?

Instead, doctors and nurses are treating infected patients without any protection for themselves and potentially taking the virus home, increasing the number of people needing treatment while themselves decreasing the number of NHS staff on duty to care for them. Now volunteers have been begged to come forward to help the embattled NHS.

Without testing, who knows how many of them already have the virus without symptoms and have already spread it?

Add in the chronic shortages in NHS provision through austerity, the lunatic system that forbids asylum seekers, who may be medically qualified from working and the huge numbers of EU citizens who had planned to spend their lives here working in our health and care sectors, whom the Tory Government were delighted to see leave after Brexit.

Were there even some medics in the group recently deported to Jamaica? Recent Tory policy has deprived us of a valuable workforce.

What price now all Boris’s headline-grabbing announcements – the bridge to Ireland, levelling up the north, free broadband, the brilliant future outside the EU etc?

This Government has, to my mind, already caused a fair number of unnecessary deaths and will be responsible for a good many more. But then, we’ve got Brexit done, all these foreign scroungers have been sent packing, and a few old folk dying is a price worth paying, what? Just a bit of collateral damage.

Utterly despicable! I just hope those who voted for these charlatans are happy with the result.

P Davidson, Falkirk

WHILE sections of the NHS are understandably under a lot of pressure right now due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this is not a universal picture. The closure of GP surgeries and reduction in in-patient activity has left many departments with little or nothing to do. Despite this, NHS management insist the full complement of staff in these departments attend their place of work in hospitals or go unpaid.

The advice to the general population is that they must only attend work if it is absolutely essential. We are bombarded by messages telling us all to “stay at home for the NHS” in order to slow the spread of the virus and lessen the pressure on those at the front line of the fight against it. Yet here we have the NHS essentially saying “don’t do as I do, do as I say”. By insisting staff with little to do and nothing in the way of redeployable skills enter a high-risk zone such as a hospital unnecessarily, they are increasing the risk of infection for the members of staff, their families and the community at large. In the current crisis this is madness.

Obviously the services these departments provide need to be maintained, but the huge drop in workload means that not all staff need to be there at all times to cover it. Rotas should be instigated that ensure there are enough staff to cover the workload on any given day while allowing them to remain in their homes the rest of the time, thus reducing the chances of the virus infecting them and others.

Hospitals are the most dangerous places to be in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. Italy and Spain demonstrate this. More than almost anywhere else the number of people populating them should be kept to a minimum, with only those who are essential manning them. By insisting thousands of staff with little to do attend them far more frequently than necessary, NHS management are putting us all at greater risk.

Stuart Allan, Perth