@keiracknightley Please read this URGENTLY.
Today several people in Halesworth saw you in our toy shop. There is something you can urgently do for our community about #coronavirus.
Today several people in Halesworth saw you in our toy shop. There is something you can urgently do for our community about #coronavirus.
This weekend, this area filled up with second home owners coming to Southwold and Walberswick and tourists staying in hotels, b&bs, holiday cottages, AirBnB.
This is DANGEROUS.
This is DANGEROUS.
The same is happening up and down the country today in tourist areas. The tourist industry, which has helped spread COVID-19 around the world at breakneck speed, is now helping it rocket to the remotest corners of the UK faster than a cruise missile.
I run holiday lets. My letting company, one of the largest in the UK, is desperately focused on keeping cottages open to keep money flowing in. This is a typical attitude. It is an attitude that will kill.
Rural areas do not have good health infrastructure. Halesworth is as far as anywhere in the UK from an A&E, yet it has an elderly/disabled population large enough to sustain a Rehability shop in the town.
There is a tourist surge in high season, but not usually in March. Our hospitals are not designed to cope with an insurge of people bringing #coronavirus to areas that so far have a relatively low level of infection.
The most blatant eg is the tweet posted today by MP @AngusMcNeilSNP of the field "hospital" in Barra made ready for COVID-19. Clinical staff seeing it say it is 3rd world.
Nor can rural areas cope with the inrush of tourists landing on their local Spars like locusts. The guests in my holiday let, the last who will come, had a Tesco delivery of 5 boxes for 2 people staying 3 days.
Small tourist providers - micro-businesses - have been given inadequate hygiene advice. There is no disinfectant in the shops to follow them. #coronavirus can live on surfaces for days. We don't have the time or training to deep clean.
But many of the big companies are not telling us to close. Many are not giving us or our customers the option to cancel bookings. We personally potentially face financial penalties of c £100 - 200 per booking if we cancel once the main season starts in April.
I know you are a good, decent woman. You are already here, so I am not asking you to go home. What I would like you to do instead is to front an immediate campaign to close down the tourist business from tomorrow.
If we don't, we risk crashing the NHS right across the country, even in places like Barra. Far from flattening the curve, the continued surge of second home owners & tourists will raise it like a tsunami.
There is a similar problem about transmission in shops but that is not my field of expertise.
I hope you love this part of Suffolk as much as I do. You have the potential to do something amazing for the communities here, and for similar communities all across the UK, because the people at the top of the tourist industry and the Govt are not listening.
