THERE appears to have been problems both with the availability of tests for Covid-19 followed by issues with the distribution and use of tests, there being an estimated half a million unused tests in Scotland this past week.
When the Chinese were short of tests for Covid-19 they overcame this problem by CT scanning the lungs for confirmation of all suspected of the infection. Why was this not the practice here when we were short of tests? Is the cost of scans an issue?
Abroad a CT scan costs around £50. In the UK CT scan costs of up to £800 have been quoted and one questions why? Are our medical services and patients being grossly overcharged? Does cost inhibit doctors using scans?
There appears to be a shortage of people trained to interpret scans in some places: one learns of CT scans sent to India by the Welsh NHS for interpretation. Is there also such a bottleneck in Scotland? The wide-scale availability of the CT scan in multiple locations is required as an essential medical diagnostic tool to improve our health service, not only for Covid-19, but for many other conditions. Can Scotland’s public be assured this will be expedited?
Elizabeth Marshall, Edinburgh EH6.
ANENT the loss of a few months of schooling under Covid-19 restrictions, I recall hearing stories about thousands of children from the cities being moved to country areas at the beginning of the Second World War. Given the traumas of re-location and being housed with strangers schooling must have been difficult to say the least. Since many thousands of male teachers must have died in the First War and many thousands more had been called-up or volunteered in the Second, added to which married female teachers were not allowed by law to teach until 1940, class sizes must have been enormous at a time when teaching resources were very scarce.
Yet we now look back at the 1960s and 70s when these children became the working population as some sort of golden age. Surely this current generation can survive a few months of home schooling.
David McGill, Edinburgh EH9.
I READ with dismay about the possibility of air bridges so that people can travel abroad and not quarantine on return ("Air bridge plan ‘needed quickly’ as thousands flock to UK resorts", The Herald, June 26). It stinks of being a Trojan horse for the return of Covid-19.
You just need to look to New Zealand, a country which closed its borders, cleared the country of the virus and had more than three weeks with no cases. It now has 17 cases and rising, all brought in from overseas. Do the powers that be in this country not think free travel to and from Europe will be a direct route for the virus to travel? Do they not remember consequences of our slow initial lockdown? I hate to say it, but a second spike is coming and the finger will point at those who opened the door to let it in.
Douglas Jardine, Bishopbriggs.
IT would appear from the tone of his letter (June 26) that Dr RM Morris is quite content to stay in lockdown indefinitely. Well, as far as I'm aware, there is nothing to stop him from doing this if he so wishes.
Meanwhile, those of us who are perhaps less risk-averse and who would prefer not to see our country become an economic disaster area will welcome the opportunity to at last get back to something approaching normality.
Dave Henderson, Glasgow G12.
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