Heartfelt thanks from the NHS; we couldn’t have done it without you – Yorkshire Post Letters

HOW many times has it been said that 2020 has been a year like no other? At the risk of saying the same again, it certainly has been for the NHS staff in Bradford District and Craven.

We want to take this opportunity as we move into 2021 to offer a sincere thankyou to the people who live in Bradford district and Craven for their support of local health and care services throughout the pandemic.

To everyone who has followed the guidance, missed out on birthdays and religious festivals, all those who have given up so much to keep people safe and local services running, everyone who has volunteered – you’ve been marvellous.

We’d also like to thank all our partners working in health, care and voluntary organisations who have supported the NHS.

Our thoughts are with the families and friends who are facing a new year without their loved ones.

We talk a lot about families in the NHS, how we’re here to support people from before they are conceived right through to when their lives come to an end. The NHS is indeed a family in itself and it takes a family to care for families.

We couldn’t have done this without our own family support. The partner running the long bath after a busy shift, the son putting the kettle on while we work from laptops on dining tables, the nannas and grandads who ring up to see how we’re getting on, the children missing parents who are isolating so they can care for patients safely.

These people don’t get applause on the doorstep but are as much a part of the NHS family as those who work for the NHS.

We’re moving into a new year, we’ve started to deliver the biggest national vaccine roll-out in history, we’re continuing to work together with people in Bradford district and Craven to make sure this virus is stopped in its tracks.

Thank you for your part in this.

From the Bradford district and Craven NHS family to yours, we would like to wish you and your loved ones a happy New Year and best wishes for a peaceful and safe 2021.

From: Michael Green, Baghill Green, Tingley.

I HAVE no doubt that the Most Reverend Stephen Cottrell, the new Archbishop of York, had only the very best of intentions when writing his Christmas message (The Yorkshire Post, December 24).

I can certainly go along with his proposition that the spread of Covid-19 has been accelerated by “our endless travel around the globe”.

Though, interestingly enough, other recent epidemics originating in the Far East did not spread in anything like the same way.

But I do wonder why he sees the origin and spread of Covid-19 as being due, at least in part, to what he describes as “our insatiable appetite for what we want, when we want it, and all the environmental degradation that goes with this”.

That seems to me to have as little foundation in fact as the early American claim that the pandemic had its origin in some plot by the Chinese.

I wonder if he, too, is falling into the trap of seeking to substantiate his own prejudices – regardless of the evidence.

I did think that we had long moved on from the time when clerics sought to assert their authority by blaming every natural disaster on the ungodliness of humanity.

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