Letter: Difficult for any government to handle pandemic

First week: Stay at home to protect pensioners (while moving untested-for-Covid-X old, sick people into old people’s homes, with retired owners of second homes – on which they pay either full or discounted rates and council taxes – exercising their unselfish right to increase their social distance from their neighbours by a facade’s width and move away from crowded city centres, thus giving their neighbours more room to avoid crowds of single, or possibly two, people);

Second week: Stay at home to protect the chronically sick;

Third week: Stay at home to protect families;

Fourth week: Stay at home to protect everybody else;

Fifth week: Stay at home and monitor your neighbours;

Sixth week: Stay at home and protect yourself.

Seventh week: Go back to work to pay for the increased taxes and your own wages for your imposed quarantine (because the business model is for no increased payments).

It would be unfair to blame any particular government party for its handling of a completely novel situation, but it was perhaps unwise to give reasons for decisions taken for our benefit in circumstances where increased information is so sparse.

On the other hand, imposing fines for either not following (or “refusing to follow”) guidance (not “law”) on keeping our distance (“social distancing”) in order to reduce the potential spread of infection is unlikely to prove popular when it is realised that releasing onto overcrowded streets with three-feet-wide pavements and normal traffic flow, packed railway platforms or in jammed bus stations the same numbers of people as were there six weeks ago raises the prospect of another army of volunteers, whose unenviable job is to approach crowds of two, stand next to them and give