I don’t know why people are saying there is a risk that the NHS will buckle; it already has (Hospitals in England draw up plans for significant Covid staff absences, 17 December). This Christmas I hope some children get to enjoy the National Theatre’s Peter Pan, in which I played Wendy, online. I, however, having sustained a very nasty double break in my ankle, have just been told that the critical surgery necessary to ensure I will be able to walk properly again is delayed because a whole major surgery ward at King’s College hospital has closed due to Covid.
The staff are making heroic efforts to get those of us who are on their emergency lists into surgery. To do this they have to make agonising decisions, cancelling elective surgery. If I can’t ever go on the flying wires again on the Olivier stage, or walk properly, it will be a tragedy for me, but nothing compared to the incalculable deaths sustained because there aren’t enough ambulances or ICU beds for people with fatal conditions.
Every member of staff has been extraordinary. The edifice has already buckled around them. One of them told me: “Excuse my language, but we’re screwed.” And so are the rest of us if people don’t immediately go back to restrictions to protect the NHS. I’m not sure why Conservative backbenchers find this very simple truth so hard to comprehend. Perhaps their constituents won’t, when they find that no ambulance, operating theatre or bed is available.
Madeleine Worrall
London
Might the rebel MPs defending their “liberty” reflect on those whose freedoms their actions have already trampled and whose quality of life is now further violated?
My mother lives in a care home. She has been in virtual imprisonment for two years. I have visited her when permitted in various degrading and dispiriting circumstances – sitting 4 metres apart, separated by smeary Perspex outside, wearing masks and unable to hear each other over a roaring extractor fan; through glass speaking via a microphone; and once in person in her room (officially restricted to one hour).
Lockdowns, Covid outbreaks and the rest of the chaos inflicted on us by this government have restricted my mother for almost two years to her room or to one floor of her care home.
Surrounded by harried staff rushing from task to task, with no access to nature, no effective exercise or spiritual stimulation, the impact on her mental and physical health is dire.
Matt Hancock’s early disregard for care homes has now produced a situation in which care-home policies aim merely at avoiding adverse statistics.
The Tories have led us blithely across a Rubicon in privileging nightclubs over care for old people. But then, to most of the population, the everyday anguish in care homes is out of sight and out of mind.
Helen Hills
York