FORGOTTEN victims, vaccine hesitancy and continued cowering from Covid were the topics raised by columnists and contributors in the newspapers.

The Daily Express

The newspaper’s leader column said 500 days have passed since many care home residents were condemned to isolated loneliness by Covid restrictions.

“The dangers and uncertainty at the start of the pandemic made the situation understandable, though heart-breaking,” it said. “But it has been nearly five months now since restrictions were eased and care homes were warned they faced being blacklisted if they failed to allow relatives inside for visits without good reason.”

It said even now, after many people have received both vaccines, still tens of thousands of the elderly ‑ many possibly in the last months of their lives ‑ have been shut away for 17 months while denied the right to have a named essential caregiver and rationed on visits.

“You could be imprisoned for less time for drink-driving or common assault. As the rest of us gratefully reclaim our freedom and get on with our lives, care home residents too often remain the forgotten, lonely victims of the pandemic.”

The Guardian

Lara Spiri, a reporter at Tortoise Media, said it seems the health secretary would have us believe young people are now solely responsible for the consequences of his government’s pandemic response.

“Forget “freedom day” or the delayed India travel ban that helped the Delta variant gets its claws into this country,” she said. “Now it seems the real culpability lies with a vaccine-hesitant generation that just won’t play its part. We are encouraged to focus on the fact “just” 67% of under-29s have had a first dose, supposedly forcing the government to offer bribes to increase vaccination levels.”

She said that was a misdirection - instead we should be thinking about the urgent need to vaccinate the people of poorer nations, both to ‘prevent a humanitarian catastrophe and to suppress the emergence of new variants.’

The Independent

Sean O’Grady said a fortnight on from so-called “Freedom Day” and, in the memorable phrase of Sajid Javid, he was still (mostly) cowering.

“Network Rail say that their stations are sort-of Covid secure but I’m not convinced. It only takes only one of the many Covid-infected people still in circulation to have a good old mask-free sneeze all over me, and I’m a goner.”

I feel almost as frit of Covid as I ever did, even though I’m double jabbed, take frequent lateral flow tests, always wear a mask out and about, maintain social distance and use the hand sanitisers whenever I see them. I’ve given up disinfecting my groceries and no longer wear gloves, but that’s as far as my personal protocol as have been relaxed.”