Why public fury over ultra-cautious social distancing may grow – John McLellan

Last week I received a nice letter from a lady called Linda Pollock, the Scottish Government’s deputy director of healthcare quality and improvement, telling me that my healthcare quality had indeed improved and I no longer needed to be shielded from Covid-19.

I am apparently no longer considered to be high-risk and I don’t have to follow the shielding rules I was sent on April 14. “I am very sorry that you have been initially advised to shield and I apologise for any distress this may have caused you,” she wrote, and presumably to hundreds of other people too.

It really was no problem, Ms Pollock, because I ignored the original letter anyway after my excellent GP practice rang to tell me it was nothing to worry about.

At risk of having to stage a Dominic Cummings-like briefing in my garden for the Evening News and Radio Forth to explain myself – as I’d been in and out of a hospital which turned out to be suppurating with the virus for the previous six weeks – elected representative or not I’d already calculated the risk of catching the virus from daily exercise was much, much lower.

Had I spent the last 12 weeks locked in a room and fed only by thin-crust pizzas shoved under the door, or if I had been so spooked by the original letter that I didn’t conduct my dad’s funeral, I might not have been so unperturbed. No, I think I’d have been incandescent.

But at a time when the daily Covid death rate is in single figures, not as incandescent as I would be if I’d just been told my livelihood had gone because maintaining the ultra-cautious, police-enforced two-metre distancing rule had made my bar/restaurant/hotel/attraction/theatre/concert hall/sports ground unviable.

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