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We know who you are

With reference to the supermarkets’ appeal to customers not to panic buy. They are quite able to identify their customers’ buying habits, so perhaps they should not pussyfoot about and name and shame the perpetrators, not just slap their wrists.

LH Carter, Dart Avenue, Swindon

Faith in humanity

I am over 70, without relatives around, so have to go out shopping now that the online shopping has closed. I was standing at the till in Coop, Old Town, talking to the cashier about the problem.

In front of me stood a young girl packing away her shopping. She asked to borrow a pen and wrote down her name and mobile number on a card and said to me to contact her if I get stuck. I tried to protest but she said she could not live with herself if she did not offer that.

I was so touched that my eyes filled with tears - and they still do when I write this. Her name was Emily and I hope she gets the same lovely treatment from all people around her. People like her put faith in humanity back!

Name and address supplied

Is it all a coincidence?

Now I’m not really one of those conspiracy theorists. I’m perfectly satisfied humans did walk on the moon and poor Diana almost certainly expired, without a seatbelt, in the hands of a drunk driver.

But I am somewhat bemused at the extent to which normally measured and conservative governments globally, are in such a flat spin over Covid 19. This hysterical behaviour has emptied our supermarkets, disrupted our travel and made people frightened to step outside their front door. Do they perhaps know something we don’t?

The UK faces a staggering increase in the cost of looking after elderly and frail people, with a forecast 25 per cent increase, in the next 5 years, in those who will require complex end-of-life social and medical care. Within this period there will be 2.8 million people over 65 needing such constant support, largely because of growth of dementia and an expanding, ageing population.

The perfect storm here, of course, is a declining working age population available to pay tax to fund the essential care.

But hey, what if it was possible to modify an influenza strain so that the young passed it around with no symptoms, the fit brushed it off like a common cold, but it precisely pinpointed the aged and infirm? Even at a stretch, could the unscrupulous view this as some kind of holy Grail, easily blamed on mother nature?

If laboratories are routinely working on such sophisticated and deadly pathogens, the likelihood of accidental escape at some stage is inevitable.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is a large and important research establishment under the direct control of the Chinese Academy of Science (i.e. the Chinese Government).

It is the first biosafety level IV Virology Unit in mainland China and was commissioned in 2015. It is situated in the Yangtze district of Wuhan, the heart of, and the epicentre of, the original Covid 19 outbreak. The Chinese Government have imposed a veil of secrecy around its operations, although today accuse the United States of originally planting the ‘man-made’ virus in Wuhan? I don’t know about you, but I’m utterly persuaded that all this is just an unhappy coincidence. I unquestionably believe and accept that the poor old wide-eyed fruit bat, just hanging out in a Yunnan cave, is without a shadow of a doubt, wholly and solely responsible for all this global carnage!

John Stooke, Havisham Drive