CHARLES GRAHAM: Balancing act of recovery and keeping bug at bay

It’s only a matter of time, and it has been good to see photos of its pedestrianised areas far busier than at any time in the last three months. Some previous images had painted an apocalytpically quiet scene.

Not everyone has rolled up the shutters at the first opportunity and, sad to say, it is inevitable some will remain shut, irretrievable victims of too much lost trade.

We should still see this as the first green shoots though – just so long as a second wave of infections and deaths can be avoided.

Just how hard Covid-19 is to get rid of has been evidenced this week by its recurrence in two nations held up as role models in combatting it to the hapless rest of us: China and New Zealand.

Mind you, the latter’s two new cases were imported from the UK (Kiwis given a special dispensation to visit a dying relative) and the country still has an enviable record of just 22 deaths and fewer than 1,500 cases thanks to its swift and total lockdown the moment alarm bells began ringing. None of that shilly-shallying at the start with utterances like “we’d better not have too many restrictions straight off because folk will tire of them and breach them just when they need to be obeyed most.” Sound familiar?

Test and trace needs to cover far more people than it currently does in order to be really effective and folk still need to heed the social distancing rules (even if you believe, like I do, that we could halve the minimum space in line with WHO guidelines and so save plenty more businesses).

We should all be watching the daily infection and deaths figures like hawks in the weeks to come and praying that each phase of easing happens without pushing them up again.

“Normality” – standing at the bar in a busy pub or crammed into the Bridgewater Hall for a concert - still could be a long way off though. So too seeing our schools fully functioning again. More on education below, but I do welcome the successful campaign by England football star Marcus Rashford to get the Government to extend its free school meals to needy children through the summer.

It is a precious investment in our futures and, let’s face it: what’s “£120m when we are going to be hundreds of billions in the red for a century to come?