Divisions and ‘forgotten’ pharmacies

Dominic Sandbrook compared the mood at the start of lockdown on March 23 to that on Sunday night and Monday following the Prime Minister’s revised guidelines.

“As he told us at the time, we were all ‘enlisted’ in a national campaign against coronavirus,” he said. “And for a few weeks, at least, old enmities were put aside, as the British people rallied to meet the challenge.

“But nobody could say the same about the reaction to his latest national address on Sunday night. Mr Johnson had barely finished before the whingeing and backbiting started. Monday’s airwaves, from the BBC’s news output to the glossier breakfast shows, were full of little else.”

He said ‘nothing was right’ for everyone - too fast for some, too slow for others which was, in many ways, inevitable.

“By its very nature, the virus has divided us by age, race, gender and even class,” he added. “It has also shone an unsparing light on the fault lines running through our political culture. To take merely the most obvious example, it seems barely believable that while the British government has moved on to the ‘Stay alert’ message, the Scottish government vociferously refuses to do so.”

Sandbrook claimed it was in Nicola Sturgeon’s nature to ‘foster division and rancour’ and that much of the same could also be applied to Labour leader Keir Starmer.

He admitted that we cannot rush out of lockdown but also have to bear in mind the damage being done to the economy.

“If we are fractious and divided even before we set off, then the journey will be a thousand times more difficult,” he said.

The Guardian

Caroline Molloy said that after Boris Johnson’s address on Sunday many felt as if he was sending blue collar workers to their deaths.

“Even before the lockdown started to fray, only half of workers were working from home, and one in four were still travelling to work,” she pointed out. “There was a widespread impression, given by some vague and rather unscrutinised talk by government ministers, that only “key workers” were allowed, or required, to go to work. And that every part of the economy, bar the “essential” parts of it, had been “closed down”. But neither of these things were true.”

She said there was no law laying down who could and couldn’t work and government messaging was now ‘catching up with the current legal reality.’

“Those of us lucky enough to still be able to work from home are now realising how ugly that looks. Take the call centre workers reported on by openDemocracy, travelling by public transport to workplaces with crowding, air conditioning and even hot-desking, carrying out entirely non-essential work such as telesales.

She said many workers felt terrified and furious that they were told to go into work while being able to work from home.

“It’s now clear that that these gaps in the protection for workers continue into stage two of the Covid-19 response, and will affect ever more workers,” she added. “A government spokesperson told me there would be “a number of legal cases” after this is over, about whether bosses were right to make people go into work or not. But that will be too late for some.”

The Daily Express

Andrew Lane, chairman of the National Pharmacy Association, said the importance of testing has been key from the outset in a message reinforced by the WHO.

He pointed out that countries like South Korea which had tested early had come out ‘relatively unscathed.’

In the UK, only frontline workers, carers and patients can access tests, he said.

“It is clear that ramping up to mass testing would overwhelm the current infrastructure and that new capacity must be found,” he said. “There is a ready-made delivery network for testing that reaches into every part of the country, and that has been stepping up to the plate since day one of this crisis. This is our 11,500 local pharmacies, the oft-forgotten part of the NHS frontline.”

He argued that the pharmacies could be the key to unlocking mass testing, providing home tests to those who need them and, in the long run, even administering a vaccine.