UK needs to decide whether masks are key to curbing virus - Yorkshire Post Letters

I AM not surprised that the number of Covid-19 cases is so high, as are the deaths.

We, as a nation, have got to decide whether the wearing of masks does or does not cut down the spread of the disease.

The latest figure for the percentage of people who have had at least one vaccination stands at 75 per cent – or rather 25 per cent have not had one.

While in my local supermarket last weekend, those wearing masks could be counted on two hands and that included my wife and I. In the store were well over 100 people, maybe as many as 500.

An interesting observation was that most of those wearing masks were the elderly. It is the young who appear to be ‘throwing caution to the wind’. Not many days ago stores were insisting on customers wearing masks unless for a good reason they couldn’t. We mask-wearers accepted that. Now just a few seem to care. Even the supermarket staff appear to have the choice, some wearing a mask, some not.

It worries me that in the near future those nations with a far better record than ours will start saying ‘UK citizens not welcome here’.

In many people’s eyes we were slow off the mark at the beginning of the pandemic, and we appear to be getting it wrong now.

From: Hilary Andrews, Nursery Lane, Leeds.

SAD to read (The Yorkshire Post, October 30) that pupils are falling behind with their reading due to the pandemic. I have many friends who are teachers and they are unhappy with the limitations imposed by the Key Stage programme insisted on by the Department for Education. This severely limits the way they can tailor learning to the individual child. Maybe some of this reading delay could be eliminated if teachers were allowed to approach teaching reading in more innovative ways responding to all the ways that different children learn?

From: Henry Cobden, Ilkley.

NEARLY a year after the first Covid jabs were rolled out, why is the Government not utilising every pharmacy? Not only do they have the expertise – but it will help the high street too. Time for joined-up policy please.

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