Face masks must not be the norm from June 21 as lockdown freedoms debated – Yorkshire Post Letters

ALL restrictions on our freedoms prompted by Covid must end on June 21 as planned (The Yorkshire Post, June 3).

The Indian variant did prompt a sharp rise in cases in some areas mostly as a result of a vastly increased testing, but hospitalisations and deaths did not rise commensurately, and the NHS now thinks the peak has passed.

Seventy-five per cent of the population have had one vaccine shot, nearly 60 per cent have had two, and many others have a measure of immunity through catching Covid and recovering.

There will always be new variants coming along, and “zero Covid” is impossible. Spanish flu ravaged the world in 1918, but variants of it are still around today, and it will be the same with Covid.

The longer the restrictions remain in place, the more businesses will close, jobs will be lost and lives destroyed. So from June 21 there must be no more mandatory distancing, no more mandatory (and ineffective) face masks and let us all try to go back to as much of our previous “normality” as possible.

From: Paul Muller, Wakefield.

NHS England now has a record 4.6 million patients waiting for routine surgery. The “bounce back” is still to come – a lack of surgeons means it is unable to treat those on the waiting list in a timely manner.

The plan is to operate on patients as rapidly as possible during overtime from early in the morning to late at night, and all weekends, in special hub hospitals. People will be sent home the day after their operation for GPs to continue their care.

From: Hilary Andrews, Nursery Lane, Leeds.

AM I the only person who feels no sympathy for those unable to go abroad for a holiday? Don’t they realise that it is not only people from the UK going to the country they want to holiday in, but people from all over the world?

Thereby they are risking coming into contact with a variant of Covid that could be resistant to the vaccines. There are beautiful parts of the UK, so why can’t everyone holiday here if they must go away?

From: Andrew Mercer, Guiseley.

IN response to Edward Grainger (The Yorkshire Post, June 4) over honourable resignations, Estelle Morris stepped aside as Education Secretary because she did not feel up to the job after succeeding David Blunkett.

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