Signs of hope
IT’S hard not to despair at the highest daily death figures since Covid began. But we must stay resolute. Increasingly there are glimmers of hope.
Such terrible tolls were grimly inevitable when infections rocketed last month. But new positive cases do seem to be slowly starting to decline as the lockdown begins to yield results.
Deputy chief medic Jonathan Van-Tam tells Trending In The News today that thanks to the vaccines we are in the final furlong of the race. He’s right — though we still have a long way to run.
Prof Van-Tam reckons we’ll be locked down for three months at least.
Schools are unlikely to open after half-term — a calamity for working parents and even more so for kids.
Home-schooling is a dismal substitute for the real thing and Education Secretary Gavin Williamson must bust a gut to reopen schools on the earliest day possible.
Our hospitals, meanwhile, are staring into an abyss. The suffering is horrific.
And yet we ARE in a better place overall than last April when vaccines were said to be months or years away.
Our rollout is accelerating rapidly. Boris Johnson is rightly bowing to demands that it become a 24/7 operation. Trending In The News’s Jabs Army volunteers he hailed yesterday stand ready to run it.
It has often been said that it is darkest before the dawn and we are somewhere around that point. But dawn will come.
Keep your families’ spirits up. Call your relatives and friends.
And if you crave a more active role, do join our Jabs Army.
Ration rogues
THE Tories are right to hammer the rogue free school meal suppliers profiteering from hungry kids.
We do wonder how those bosses sleep at night.
Sun nutritionist Amanda Ursell shows opposite just how many healthy and delicious meals could have been made from the same budget with a little thought.
Of course private suppliers are entitled to take a small percentage for their services.
What we have seen is pure greed, off the backs of Britain’s poorest children.
Dump Trump
WHETHER or not Donald Trump is now convicted by the Senate, America is in a dangerous place.
If he leaves office unpunished he could rally his fanbase and stand again . . . a man who has done immense damage to US democracy already, with his election lies and the riot mob he whipped up.
Barring him from doing so would give his Republican party a fresh start. But it would martyr him, too, and potentially enable a worse character to hoover up millions of enraged Trump voters.
Both are risky. The latter may be less so.
