REPRESENTATIVES of opposition parties had letters published in these pages last week to lambast the Government for its handling of the Covid pandemic. Fair enough, it is the business of opposition parties to oppose and their views should be respected (although it should be pointed out that the Labour administration in Wales do not seem to have done any better than the Tory administration in Westminster, so maybe the colour of your political rosette does not make a lot of difference).

I am not a member of any political party but having followed the news from around the world I would proffer my own answers to one of the questions posed, 'why is it that Britain has the ninth highest infection rate on the entire planet?'

The first thing to say is that this virus cannot be 'beaten', or 'defeated.'

We are probably stuck with it, and it's future mutations, for the foreseeable decades just as we have to deal with other less deadly viruses affecting the respiratory tract. Indeed in a normal year around 10,000 people in the U.K. die of influenza.

Hence it does seem that we will now have to embark on permanent rolling Covid vaccination programmes: once the whole population in the UK have been vaccinated by the end of the summer we will probably have to start all over again vaccinating those who have just received the vaccination recently.

Let us hope that the number who refuse to be vaccinated is small, otherwise the annual deaths from Covid will continue to be significant.

Another observation is that in most western democracies principles of personal individual freedom are paramount, and the relationship between state and citizen is balanced such that state intervention is a last resort.

Hence as I write other countries in Europe, and of course the USA, are experiencing the same if not worse problems than the UK. Despite us all admiring how Germany initially seemed to have a real grip on testing and tracing, they are now suffering over 1,000 deaths every day just like us.

In Ireland the infection rate is over 70 per cent higher than the UK from the data week ending January 13, probably as a result of mixing at Christmas.

The truth is therefore perhaps that in western democracies there will always be a minority of citizens who refuse to comply with guidance, who act through personal motivation rather than government dictate. And one of your correspondents is correct in implying that we, like nearly every other liberal western democracy, do not have the state apparatus to be able to suppress or manage effectively a pandemic of this nature.

To create such a state apparatus would require millions more taxpayer-funded employees compared to the existing five million or so Government employees, and would be simply unaffordable.

Richard Lowe

Skipton