Doubt if  the letter will survive either.  Modern paper tends to disintegrate after a decade or so unless it's kept in ideal conditions   Maybe he should have  hand written them with  a quill on vellum

Ideally, we'd have restricted incoming flights to repatriating British citizens, and even then loojed to quarantine them all for 14 days.

But the numbers involved are mind-boggling, with anything upwards of 1.5m British citizens overseas at any one time.

We must learn lessons and put in place a detailed action plan for the next time something like this happens.

This has to be swiftly imposed and necessarily draconian. 

At least no calves died to produce the Boris letter.

The much maligned Chinese invented paper around 100AD - it's had a pretty good innings.

Well done for not backing down on this, despite some rather strange attempts to defend the indefensible.

I see that Saint has provided a precise and detailed chronology of the wilful actions taken by the Chinese government.  People complaining about our alleged mishandling seem happy to apply entirely different, less rigorous standards in assessing the catalogue of wilful obfuscation and deception conducted by the Chinese government.

As I've said before, they are adding insult to injury in now conducting a propaganda campaign to try to claim Covid-19 didn't even originate in Wuhan.

For the avoidance of doubt, I seem to need to keep reiterating that this isn't about the Chinese people but about their government and its associated corruption, secrecy and incompetence. But you can include the minority who seem to think persecuting wild animals is acceptable.

Sad roll call on the twitter thread linked to the below.

RIP NHS hero Jitendra Rathod. The heart surgeon at Cardiff's University Hospital of Wales is thought to be the first NHS worker in Wales to have died from Covid-19. #NHSheroes pic.twitter.com/NzTGDWa4Cp

— Sunder Katwala (@sundersays) April 6, 2020

Yes

Didn't bother to read it and its in the recycle bin now

The Chinese are primarily responsible for this whole sorry saga Peter, of that there is no doubt.

For all I and others have been critical of the way our government and others in Europe responded to the developing crisis a couple of months ago, the most that any western government can stand of is poor decision making and thus a degree incompetence, but certainly not wilful neglect or in any way trying to deliberately mislead people.

The Chinese government, as Saint explained very clearly in his excellent post earlier, knew that a problem was developing in their country as far back as mid-December, yet it wasn't until the latter part of January when the finally admitted to the seriousness of the situation. As Phil said, one thing they should have done once the problem became very apparent was closed all their borders, meaning no-one came into the country and no-one was allowed to leave. This could well and IMO, very likely, have been the difference between the disease being contained within China's borders and it becoming a global pandemic as it has done, sadly.

... and if he pulls through Trump will no doubt claim the credit in some way.