“We are past the peak of this disease” announced our bombastic Prime Minister at the UK Government coronavirus daily briefing on Thursday, his first such briefing in nearly a month.
Certainly if one ignores the majority of deaths associated with Covid-19 outside of hospitals – including deaths in care homes, where the unfolding calamity may admittedly be in part due to the unpreparedness and slow actions of private care home bosses as well as of the UK Government – this statement may be true.
READ MORE: Boris Johnson says UK is 'past the peak' of coronavirus
However, how do we know that when considering overall numbers this is not simply another opportunistic claim from a person who has not shied away in the past from making bold statements that subsequently turned out to be false?
On Wednesday evening during ITV’s Peston, a graph was shown indicating that while Covid-19 deaths in hospitals may now be declining, deaths outside of hospitals, primarily deaths in care homes, are increasing across the UK.
READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon refuses to join PM in saying we are past coronavirus peak
This is not “news” in Scotland, where deaths in care homes, including suspected deaths not confirmed via testing, have apparently been tracked more closely and more openly than in the rest of the UK. But as ONS data for England and Wales follows NRS data for Scotland, as well as data from across Europe, in highlighting the continuing major Covid-19 issues around care homes, it could be premature to talk about being “past the peak” of even the first phase of this coronavirus infection cycle.
Looking wider still, unravelling the additional numbers of “excess deaths” (relative to previous years) attributable to possibly preventable deaths from cancer, heart disease and other illnesses will take considerably more time, but perhaps in the meantime all our politicians should resist the temptation to seek headline-grabbing soundbites!
Stan Grodynski
Longniddry, East Lothian
IN late February 2020 it was widely reported and subsequently denied by the British Government that Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to Number 10, allegedly said at a private event that government policy on the Covid-19 virus would be “herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”.
We have subsequently learned that Dominic Cummings and another Number 10 adviser, Ben Warner, were sitting on the SAGE committee that gives supposedly independent scientific advice to the British Government on the coronavirus. In truth they were politicising the science with this herd immunity nonsense which, if left unchecked, could have caused 510,000 deaths (Imperial College London), hence why the British Government then did what most other European nations had already implemented –
a full lockdown on March 23, very late in the day. The UK has been playing catch-up ever since on PPE, mass testing and tracing and other related matters.
In the meantime Scotland has been treated like a colonial possession through this pandemic in that our Chief Medical and Scientific Officers were in attendance at SAGE meetings as observers and NOT allowed to speak, NOT allowed to ask questions,and NOT allowed to vote on any matters. No wonder there has been no divergence on policy throughout this pandemic and hence we in Scotland have suffered nothing but the carnage of death of our elderly in our care homes just like the rest of the UK.
If you look to small independent nations such as New Zealand and the Irish Republic you see that their being independent helped them act earlier and saved a lot more lives, instead of Scotland suffering more fatalities than we needed to if we had been an independent nation during this pandemic.
Sean Clerkin
Barrhead
THERE is an irony in a letter disparaging the term nationalist being published in a paper called The National (The Long Letter, May 1). Hello, my name is Linda, and I’m a Scottish nationalist. I’m a Scottish nationalist because I’m a member of the Scottish nation and I am compelled to affirm that precisely because the English regime and its collaborators are pathologically determined to deny my nationhood.
READ MORE: It’s time for Yes movement to stop calling its cause ‘nationalist’
You don’t discard key terms because your enemies demonise them as part of an agenda to suppress your national identity. You claim them and use them with a positive voice, which is, in fact, what the vast majority in the nationalist movement do. You could not see a starker comparison than that between Scottish nationalism on the one hand, and the V For Vendetta regime south of the Scottish border on the other.
Linda Horsburgh
Dundee
WJ Graham’s long letter prompts me to raise a question that’s been on my mind for some time. Given that the word “nationalist” is readily employed by the yoons, why doesn’t the SNP simply drop “al” and rebrand itself the “SCOTTISH NATION PARTY”? Everything else stays the same, so surely that wouldn’t derail the party’s momentum, while taking some of the steam out of No messaging.
WE Bryan
Inverness
LORD Sugar has been castigated for tweeting false news from a person he doesn’t remember (perhaps it was Mr Trump) and naming a scientist he didn’t try to contact to get the truth. The real mystery is: why would anyone want to follow the ramblings of Lord Sugar? Unfortunately it is people like him who make social media dangerous.
Mike Underwood
Linlithgow
SINCE David Mundell thinks there is no border between Scotland and England, can we assume that Berwick is now back in Berwickshire and not in Northumberland?
James Arthur
Paisley
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