THE challenge to supermarkets post Covid, the importance of getting vaccinated and border controls were the coronavirus conversations had by columnists and contributors in the newspapers.

The Guardian

Collin Wallace, co-founder of ZeroStorefront, said there had been a rapid growth in all kinds of app-based delivery services in the past year.

“Interest and investment in app-based delivery has exploded, with various fast-track services offering to have groceries at your door within a specified number of minutes,” he said. “Delivery apps sell access to supermarkets (and also to supermarket customers and their data). So, even though grocery delivery apps are still offering groceries on their platforms, they don’t have any of the infrastructure cost associated with the grocery business.”

He said grocery chains would have to find their own ‘unique ways’ to offer customer convenience, without compromising their own experience, supply chains, shopfronts and infrastructure.

“Investors are betting that grocery delivery apps represent an entirely new type of business, with fundamentally different margins and economics than the supermarket business.”

The Independent

Victoria Richards said she could barely haul herself to a standing position – her limbs weighted down like she was being crushed by a vice, her arm dead and aching - after her first Pfizer vaccine.

Would she do it again?, she asked. “In a heartbeat.”

“My jab may have given me a taster, but if it’s anything like the real thing, then I couldn’t be more glad that I had it,” she said. “I’ve missed “living”, and the people who make life worth living – my friends, my family, my colleagues, random strangers in pubs and parks and forests – and if the vaccine is a route back to some semblance of the lives we had before, then sign me up.”

The Daily Express

James Whale welcomed news that we are to get hi-tech border controls.

“We don’t know if [immigrants] have Covid or what their intentions are, so surely now is the time to get tough,” he said. “If we put up large places for them to stay, where they can be checked and assessed, then I have no problem. However, there aren’t any and when there have been, as there were down in Dover, they were set alight and complained about by the people who had been rescued from the sea.”

He asked why we were accepting asylum seekers from France.

“Tell the French government, which doesn’t seem very good at anything, to stop letting people into their country only for them to come out the other side. Maybe we all need to start thinking more globally. As we continue to fight against a virus that makes us wear masks and does not let us out of the country, allowing people in unchecked is just not acceptable.”