Readers’ Letters: Boris doesn’t deserve to be the Covid fall guy

That the country wasn't prepared for a pandemic of this nature was obvious. We were aware that something nasty was going on in China but details were clouded in misinformation from that country as they tried to contain it by severe lockdown measures. Poor Boris was obviously going to be the fall guy for everything and the good things he did, such as pushing for a vaccine, have been quietly left to the side.

Even at this late stage I'm not sure whether the lesson is that measures taken were too little too late, just too late or not long enough. The fact Sweden managed to get by with no lockdown surely has to be a priority point for consideration if we are to gain anything useful from the Covid Inquiry. The remainder of the noise is just that, noise and the inevitable blame game aimed at the most visible, while those who are paid to foresee and plan sit quietly in the background out of sight.

I await the next episode of “Who gets the Blame?” Bookmakers have Boris as odds-on favourite.

A Lewis, Coylton, Ayrshire

Testing failures

Your leader of 21 November is spot-on in pointing to political antipathies and discord getting in the way of effective responses during the Covid pandemic. But my big concern as a medical microbiologist is that we are still waiting for the report and recommendations of Module 7 of the Covid Inquiry, about testing. I regard the slowness in the implementation of testing as one of the biggest deficiencies in the management of the pandemic, particularly in its first year, a deficiency that led to many preventable deaths. Because a third of those with the virus have no symptoms but are infectious, testing of staff was the only way to stop them unwittingly carrying the virus into care homes and starting high mortality outbreaks. Big mistakes were a seeming unwillingness to exploit the many existing PCR facilities in research labs, slowness in rolling out lateral flow tests, and focusing testing on those with Covid symptoms.

An accurate PCR test for Covid was designed and publicised within days of the virus being identified in early January 2020. That it presented no technical difficulties was exemplified by research done in conjunction with the British Antarctic Survey in 1994 when we used PCR to study potentially harmful bacteria carried in the throats of staff living in the Signy base on the South Orkney Islands, 375 miles north of the Antarctic Peninsula.

I fear current testing facilities may still fall short when the next pandemic strikes. I hope Module 7 recommendations will provide enough political pressure to ensure the provision of sufficient facilities. Only a fool can predict when the next pandemic will start, but only an idiot will not be ready to respond effectively.

The inadequate implementation of testing in spite of the very rapid and early accumulation of knowledge about the virus is a bigger scandal than the antics of Boris Johnson.

Hugh Pennington, Aberdeen

Young failed?

Sometimes the simplest questions are the most powerful, as, for example, in 2021 when a Freedom of Information request to the Office for National Statistics asked: “Please can you advise on deaths purely from Covid with no other underlying causes?”

The essence of the reply was that in all of 2020 and the first nine months of 2021, a total of 17,371 people had died in England and Wales with Covid listed as the sole cause of death.

This figure is an order of magnitude lower than the various figures we usually hear for Covid deaths and is at a level more typical of influenza. As Professor Mark Woolhouse, the University of Edinburgh epidemiologist, has pointed out: “People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15.”

These facts raise very uncomfortable questions for all parts of the UK: Were the universal lockdowns justifiable? Have we reduced a great many people to penury and grossly disrupted the education of a generation of young people for nothing?

Otto Inglis, Crossgates, Fife

Partial truth

Regarding the ongoing controversy surrounding the plaque on Edinburgh’s Melville Monument, it is surely now an appropriate time for Edinburgh Council to install a new plaque giving a more complete, fair and accurate history of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and of Henry Dundas’s crucial and ultimately successful role in ending the abomination of the Atlantic slave trade.

Cammy Day is no longer the Council Leader, and the late Sir Geoffrey Palmer (who chaired the committee which decided the wording and whom I greatly admired in other respects) is, sadly, no longer with us.

Frankly, the current wording is unfair, biased, partial in both senses, and distorts history, misleading residents and tourists alike. The “bald truth” can mislead if it is not “the whole truth” and can therefore be little different in effect from an outright lie – hence the longstanding legal maxim in our judicial system. It does no credit to Edinburgh or the Council, and I am surprised that our capital’s great and good, let alone its history departments, seem by their silence to accept it.

John Birkett, St Andrews, Fife

Hard to swallow

Andrew HN Gray’s letter of 22 November was a cruel, sarcastic attack on those who take part in BBC1’s Celebrity MasterChef. He was shocked to find that contestants “couldn’t pronounce the letter ’T', unless it was at the start of a word”. He also scorns his wife’s taste of viewing, since she watches this programme. I hope she gave him a good, loud utterance of the well used retort, “mind your own business”.

What kind of person puts proper pronunciation before kindness and tolerance?

Carolyn Taylor, Broughty Ferry, Dundee

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