CAMERA mugging, window waving and educational reform were the aspects of coronavirus raised by columnists and contributors in the newspapers.
The Daily Mail
Jan Moir said some celebrities had clearly put effort into thinking about what effort to wear when getting their vaccination.
“Samuel L. Jackson kept his baseball cap on, Ruth Langsford was wearing a LOVE T-shirt and Dame Joan Collins did it in a floral mask to match her floral dress,” she said. “Is this the latest status symbol, a form of medical one-upmanship that involves giving it your best shot while getting the best shot?”
She said, however, she was calling for an amnesty on the ‘kind of fame-hungry stars who make every national or global event about themselves’.
“For once there is a serious message behind their shameless camera-mugging; theirs is an earnest attempt to persuade the wary and the worried to get their jab, along with the more problematic loony anti-vaxxers and vaccine refuseniks,” she said. “So thank you, Prue and Co. — every little helps. We truly are all in this together.”
The Daily Express
Kate Lee, Alzheimer’s Society chief executive, said she and her father went to wave at her 80-year-old mother through the window of a care home last year.
“I had no way of telling, but hoped that somehow the sight of our faces made a difference,” she said. “If you’d told me then that we would still be in this desperate situation now I wouldn’t have believed you. It is devastating that almost a year on, thousands of families have still been unable to hold the hand of the person they love, to look them in the eyes and tell them they love them.”
She said that waiting until May, when people have had both jabs, would be too late for some families.
“We welcome Care Minister Helen Whately’s indication that visits may resume soon but PM Boris Johnson must back this up on Monday,” she said.
“We must hear a clear plan and timeline to restart meaningful care home visits to avoid any further heartbreak for families.”
The Guardian
Simon Jenkins said not a week passes now without a teacher or politician calling for primary school SATs, GCSEs and A-levels to be abolished.
“Exams apparently now absorb half of all schooling time and have become a teaching and assessing tool, not an education,” he said. “Until online learning recently arrived of necessity, the structure of school life also remained as in Victoria’s reign.”
He said he liked to think young people would look back over the pandemic and be proud of how they handled it.
“Freed from the tyranny of the exam, they will have spent more time with their parents, family and neighbours. They will have learned new personal, domestic and practical skills. As lockdown eases, they will hopefully have experienced more of life in the street or countryside.
“Just perhaps they may turn out better adjusted to life as a result – even if no one is around to measure it.”
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