The importance of being prepared for coronavirus in Peterborough

In America, fear about the coronavirus has descended into outright quackery: a prominent televangelist suggested that drinking liquified silver might prevent the virus from spreading. The best advice remains the simplest: wash your hands for at least 20 seconds using plenty of soap and water. If you feel ill, stay at home, avoid contact with others, seek advice from the NHS helpline. Be concerned and vigilant, but not paranoid.

It would be easier to maintain calm if our government hadn’t shown a propensity to make our systems less resilient. For example, the government has allowed zero-hour contracts to continue.

We in the Labour Party believe these are exploitative. The coronavirus adds a new dimension to the problem: if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. This creates an incentive for sick people to come into their workplace, thus making it less easy to control the spread of the coronavirus or any other illness. I can’t imagine the customers or co-workers involved will be particularly grateful. But here we are.

This leads to the next question: what are we doing here in Peterborough? From my point of view, not much. The usual modus operandi for our Administration is to respond after a crisis hits. How are we going to deliver public services if the virus reaches our city and a significant percentage of employees are infected? How will our care services and hospitals cope? I believe the Administration is looking at central government which is looking back at them. Having exchanged these figurative blank stares, there appears to be a collective shrug.

Even governments less rich than ours, such as Vietnam, have launched effective public health campaigns: Vietnam deployed a music video to encourage people to exercise basic hygiene. It apparently has become a worldwide hit on social media. So: where is our public health campaign?

What are we doing to inform the public about the risks and what they should do? I don’t believe that it would cost a great deal of money to launch such an effective campaign.

Medical advice is readily available; we in the Labour Group are fortunate to have a medical doctor, Shabina Qayyum, as one of our councillors. I am certain, if asked, she would be delighted to provide the necessary information. The coronavirus, after all, doesn’t differ in its effect on rich or poor, Labour or Conservative, central Peterborough or its suburbs. Where we differ from the Administration, perhaps, is seeing this problem requiring a group effort; it says on every Labour membership card, “By the strength of our common endeavour, we achieve more than we could achieve alone”. Here we have an instance where that elegant philosophy is shown to be true. Perhaps it’s time for the Administration to acknowledge this and act appropriately.