For the last time, the coronavirus doesn’t operate along racial lines – nor does any pandemic

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I recently cared for a 20-year old patient born in Zimbabwe with a sports injury sustained during a push off for a basketball shot. She hurried to put on a face mask on before having her ankle put in a cast and being given crutches, for fear of being exposed to the Wuhan coronavirus contagion.

I, an emergency specialist of Australian-Chinese descent who had no signs of respiratory illness, was perceived as an infectious disease risk.

How the pendulum swings to race-based irrational fear amid pandemics like these. Not long ago, when Ebola posed a prescient and global threat, I defended several dark-skinned patients from disease-free southern Africa when a teenager complained to me about being cared for in close proximity to them.

Identifying the source of a potential pandemic based on racial characteristics dehumanises us all. Infection outbreaks necessarily emanate from one epicentre. As coronavirus accelerates to pandemic status globally, anti-China and anti-Chinese impulses will be calmed, as then any person with respiratory illness becomes suspect.

Joseph Ting
Brisbane, Australia

Poverty in the valleys

Has everyone forgotten the valleys of south Wales? In the Rhondda around half of children live in poverty (Loughborough University, 2019). Because constituents are still socialist and vote Labour they are the truly forgotten people. The valleys comprise many of the poorest towns of Britain.

I am getting tired of hearing of the north and their “rewards” for voting Conservative, from both sides of the political divide.

Mary Strode
Clyro​

Class war

In the film 1917, all the soldiers at the front line reveal very broad working-class accents, all except the main character, who speaks “very well”. He is sensitive; he questions the war to the extent of swapping his medal for a bottle of wine. And while those around him left school at the age of 12 to enter factories, shipyards, and mills, our hero is able to, on the spur of the moment, bring to mind and quote Edward Lear at length. Yes, you’ve guessed it, he’s got middle class written running through him, like a stick of Blackpool rock. It would be nice to watch a “war film” which gives the working class their due credit, one in which they don’t have to “rely on their betters”.

Frank Kenny

Liverpool

We’re fighting to save ourselves

Why does the media, including some science magazines, refer to the fight against the effects of climate change as a fight “to save the planet”? The planet has been spinning through space for over four billion years totally indifferent to the life forms that have lived, died and gone extinct on its surface. We are not fighting “to save the planet”, we are fighting to save ourselves from self-inflicted extinction. After the lemmings leapt over the cliff edge the cliff remained unaffected. So too will the planet long after we are gone.

Eric Allsop​
Newbury

A tail to tell

Much relieved that plucky cat Blitz (who used up his nine lives and had a tail to tell) survived his London Underground ordeal (“‘Nothing short of a miracle’: Cat survives seven hours stuck on London Underground tracks after 250 trains drive over him”). It was also very fortunate that his astounded owner, Mark Piggott, was able to be located because he was chipped – according to your report!

Linda Calvey ​
Northampton

Mea Culpa

Much as I love John Rentoul’s Mea Culpa, I think he has it wrong on one point this week. The term “built environment” doesn’t just concern buildings but everything around them. As such, it includes walls, fences, post boxes, street furniture and the like. It is much more widely descriptive, therefore, of an area than using buildings alone.

Peter Hardy
London W4