Alan Walker calls on the media to keep the death toll in the public eye as the pandemic is not over, Marcia Heinemann is relieved that the official symptom list has been expanded and Jonathan Hauxwell is concerned about the lack of free tests
Adrian Chiles invites us to “pick your personal gripe about the state of the world” (When the same awful thing happens often enough, it ceases to be newsworthy – and that is a big problem, 30 March). Mine is the failure of most of broadcast and print media to report the continuing death toll from Covid. This plays into the hands of libertarians who care little about public health, still less about the hugely unequal distribution of those deaths, and fuels the myth that Covid is just another virus that we have to live with.
Chiles’s distinction between “interesting” as the basis for what is newsworthy rather than “important” is spot-on. But he omits examples of dogged journalism that do keep a story alive precisely because it is important, such as Amelia Gentleman’s outstanding work on the Windrush scandal. I hope that someone of her calibre takes up the Covid death toll and keeps it in the public eye. Last week it was over 1,000. Covid has definitely not gone away.
Alan Walker
Professor of social policy, University of Sheffield
