INCREDULITY at Donald Trump’s “cure” suggestion, confusion over face masks and the decision to listen to the public, and not the private, sector were the latest coronavirus conversations held by newspaper columnists and contributors.

Daily Mail

Piers Morgan said the US President has turned his two-hour daily briefings into “self-promoting rallies”, criticising the media and his opponents, and ‘rewriting history’ as he tries to ignore all the mistakes he has made since Covid-19 first appeared.

But, he said, by far the most dangerous thing he has done is to air his “batsh** crazy theories about how to beat the virus”.

“Last night he stooped to a shameful new low by suggesting people suffering from Covid-19 should be injected with toxic disinfectant,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine a more stupid thing for a President to say than publicly float a completely unsubstantiated ‘idea’ like that which will inevitably make some Americans believe having bleach inside them will cure the virus.

“Yet that’s exactly what he did.”

His claim came after William Bryan, the Department of Homeland Security Under-Secretary For Science And Technology, indicated bleach can kill the virus within five minutes.

READ MORE: Coronavirus LIVE: Latest news and updates as world battles global pandemic

“I see the disinfectant where it knocks out in a minute,” Mr Trump mused. ‘One minute. And there is a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So, it will be interesting to check that.”

Morgan is incredulous. “I just see a President pretending to be

a medical expert and spewing theories that might have disastrous consequences,” he said, telling the President that “to use your platform to fly absurdly delusional and dangerous medical ‘cures’ during this crisis is an outrageous abuse of your position. As Dr Irwin Redlener, the director of the Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, said: ‘The fact the President actually asked somebody about injecting disinfectants or isopropyl alcohol into the human body was kind of jaw-dropping’.”

The Guardian

Babak Javid, consultant in infectious diseases at Cambridge University hospitals, said more than 30 countries have mandated face coverings outdoors for the public yet the UK Government is adamant there is not enough evidence to support such a move here and asked why there is such divergence on the issue.

“In the field of infectious diseases, stopping a contagious patient infecting others is known as source control,” he said. “For respiratory infections, source control would include wearing a mask when not under isolation.”

He pointed out that tests have shown the number of people who test positive for the virus but show no symptoms is half those who test positive.

“While we don’t know for sure how contagious a truly asymptomatic Covid-19 patient might be, evidence suggests that around 40 per cent of cases of transmission arise from people without symptoms,” he said.

He argued masks seem subject to a different standard of evidence than other measures, such as hand washing and social distancing. He said hand washing studies yielded disappointing result and the two metres apart advice had “no trials at all”.

“As the Government equivocates, unlike our European neighbours, the British public may end up being the “control group” for the face mask experiment the government has been demanding all along,” he said. “But do we want to be?

Daily Express

Frederick Forsyth said the UK’s response to the coronavirus has left us in a “complete shambles” because there was no fast and accurate analysis at the start.

“Why should my 40-year-old neighbour be condemned to solitary confinement as his small company crashes?,” he said. “To save whom? Not me. Neither he nor his company will ever recover.

“The key error at the outset was when our Government turned for counsel to the public, not private, sector. The private sector – trade, commerce, industry, banking

– is staffed by people who know that if they fail they go into receivership.

“So they have dynamism, a

can-do outlook, a let’s-get-stuck-in attitude. When did a department of bureaucrats last go bankrupt and all lose their jobs? The private sector contains our country’s go-getters and they were

ultra-keen to help. But the jobsworths prevailed, the country was locked down and the economy has been crashed.”