Readers' Letters: New strategy is needed to keep Covid at bay

With Covid cases doubling in a week and again approaching record levels, we must ask why the UK and Scottish governments continue to pursue a policy of herd immunity when hospitals are forced to delay more and more potentially lifesaving operations in the run-up to winter.

New Health Secretary Sajid Javid has some big decisions to take (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Each peak has seen cases top out higher, from 1,500 per day in October to 2500 in January, 3500 in June, so potentially 4500 this time? The recent relaxations, unrestricted tourist mixing and the return to classes have all played a part. But the main factor has been that successive variants have been allowed to enter the country by UK governments failing to manage foreign travel and adequately test those coming in. Other countries have far stricter testing and quarantining systems which allow their economies to continue operating effectively and their health and education services to be unaffected.Meanwhile, our government has chosen to rely on vaccines, but few thought back in the spring, when cases were low and the roll out was going so well, that six months on we would be facing the biggest crisis in NHS history as cases rise towards record levels in a fourth wave.The only conclusion we can draw is that the race between the virus and the vaccine has been won by the virus for the most vulnerable, who continue to die in their dozens each week, suffer long Covid or wait even longer for essential operations. Meanwhile our politicians still fail to heed the lessons of past failures. With the virus seemingly growing resistant to vaccines let’s hope that our new health secretary takes a more strategic approach now to save the NHS from paralysis this winter.

Neil Anderson, Edinburgh

We’re doomed?

Piers Torday (“Turn up heat on climate change”, Perspective, 21 August) is correct: even if we all deployed all the green measures available to us “it would be but one drop in the ocean” while China, the US, India, Russia and Japan “continue to pump billions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere”. “The global temperature will steadily climb towards 1.5C”.

Even if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped today, global warming would continue due to the existing excess of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere and is likely to exceed the rise of 1.5C. We should encourage a reduction in emissions and whatever steps can be taken to absorb them, but let's not pretend that this will stop global warming. A more drastic remedy is required.Global warming has two causes: the excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the heat from the sun. If the first cannot be altered then the second has to be ameliorated by geoengineering. We engineered this crisis and we can engineer our way out of it.One possibility is refreezing the Arctic Ocean as proposed by Prof Sir David King's Independent Sage group, deploying the marine cloud brightening method explained by Prof Stephen Salter of The University of Edinburgh. That would give us more time to deal with the greenhouse gas problem. If we don't do something like this we are doomed.

Steuart Campbell, Edinburgh

Sensible move

Dr Malcolm Brown is probably getting himself into a lather unnecessarily about the the letter from the Electoral Commission saying 14-year olds can now register to vote. The legislation clearly states that young people cannot vote until they are 16 or 17. And with the next scheduled election being the council elections in May 2022, this is actually a sensible piece of forethought.

Gill Turner, Edinburgh

Blair’s folly

The Scotsman reports the verbal diarrhoea of Tony Blair’s misconceptions about Afghanistan by saying allied troops, “could have held firm for some considerable time and helped the Afghan people through the next stages of their progress”. I do not have to remind him that Colonial powers have been trying this since 1834, the first Afghan war. Is his “considerable time” longer than 187 years?

What have Imperial powers given Afghanistan in this time? The Salang pass and three roads, but also poverty, inflation, migrants, thousands of deaths, and made it so hundreds of thousands of young people do not wish to stay in their own land.

Hasan Beg, Kirkcaldy, Fife

Fly by nights

Would someone in the Scottish Government explain the sudden regular number of large military helicopters heading over our house towards Glasgow Airport daily over the last week, including at 2am?

This wouldn't have anything to do with having loads of Afghan refugees wished on us, would it?

Mark Boyle, Johnstone, Renfrewshire

Monied mouths

SNP MPs Stewart McDonald and Alyn Smith demand that the UK must take in more refugees from Afghanistan (your report, 23 August). What a cheek they have. It is alright for them on their £81,932 salary plus gold-plated pensions and a lump sum of 50 to 100 per cent of their salary on retirement or being thrown out by the electorate. The electorate of Stirling and Glasgow South should petition for their removal. There is a real world out here where tens of thousands of people do not have a permanent home yet these two MPs want the Afghans to get permanent housing ahead of them. McDonald and Smith should take a refugee family into their own homes and finance them – or will they be like Nicola Sturgeon, who vowed to take a Syrian refugee family into her own home but did nothing?

Clark Cross, Linlithgow, West Lothian

Skewed priorities

Reports that the SNP administration plans to charge ahead with their plans to alter the law to allow self-determination of gender by anyone over the age of 16 will horrify many women. Other countries have hesitated and after consideration thrown out similar proposals. I suppose on the plus side it could be said they are interested in something other than breaking up the UK, and they do have their new Green partners to please.

Meanwhile, there are enough specifically Scottish and very pressing problems to keep any normal and functioning group of decision makers busy for many years. They are being left untouched. I mean, who really cares about fixing the ferries problem? The islanders involved vote SNP anyway. The shipyard nationalisation calamity? Again, who cares? Covid? What’s that? But facilitating the choosing and changing your gender at random is clearly high priority and comes only behind grievance-peddling and scheming and plotting to bring down the UK.

Alexander McKay, Edinburgh

Standards role

Boris Johnson has probably faced more accusations of incompetence, mendacity and dishonesty than any other PM. The Standards in Public Life Committee, which has the role of scrutinising the behaviour of members of the government, including Mr Johnson, has recently appointed two new members.Out of 173 applicants, one of the appointees just so happens to be an old chum of Mr Johnson, an ex-comrade from the Bullingdon Club, those highly esteemed upholders of civic decency and honourable standards.So I’m sure that we can all now be confident that there will be nothing untoward in the affairs of state with such a fine upstanding, and undoubtedly completely unbiased gentleman keeping a keen eye on the conduct of Mr Johnson and his administration.

Les Mackay, Dundee

Costly power

There was a technical factor missing from the latest Perspective column by Brian Wilson (21 August ). For a large number of days in July and August wind energy has only been supplying less than 4 per cent of consumer demand, which means around 96 per cent of electricity is being imported from English gas turbines. Fortunately, the UK grid ensures there is no additional cost to Scottish households.However, the point not included in Mr Wilson’s article is that independence would end the UK grid market and Scots would have to pay to import any shortfall in demand. During a warm autumn evening in 2016, plant failures meant that Grid Control offered around £6,000 per MW hour to ensure there was sufficient generation to keep the lights on in the UK. However, a week of high pressure over a Scottish winter when the wind fails to blow and the rain falls as snow would meant importing the maximum capacity in the English/Scottish interconnector (currently around 10,000 MW).

Following independence a demand by an English operator for an export price of £6,000 per MW hour results in a weekly hit to the Scottish economy of over £1 billion per week – a cost not included in the SNP Growth Report!

Ian Moir, Castle Douglas, Dumfries and Galloway

Compromise time

Scottish Green co-leader Patrick Harvie is already claiming to have altered SNP policy (your report, 23 Augus). Why did Nicola Sturgeon not actively seek a deal w ith a more mainstream Scottish party? She claims they were not interested but she could at least have tried a little harder. By picking the Greens in what is a coalition, no matter how the SNP spin this, Ms Sturgeon has committed Scotland to the best part of five years of terribly one-sided policies that will benefit very few but will harm an awful lot. It seems independence is still front and centre in Ms Sturgeon's thinking.

What a way to run a country, by excluding the current pro-Union majority on the altar of a pet project that common sense dictates would have little chance of being successful especially right now. In a time of crisis, compromise is the answer, antagonism is not.

Gerald Edwards, Glasgow

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