The scandal of the empty car park

There have been numerous images of the coronavirus pandemic and the way it has changed us all and where we live. Here are a few: the total emptiness and lack of bustling people and boats and gondolias in Venice, the empty streets of Manhattan, the white-masked population of Wuhan, the loading of bodies wrapped in blue plastic bags into the back of lorries, the worn-looking and dishevelled face of Boris Johnson in self-isolation in his flat at Number 11 Downing Street, the gendarmerie standing alone at the end of the Champs Elysses, Italian families singing from their open windows in northern Italy, totally deserted Las Ramblas in Barcelona, the parks scattered with lonely couples, the empty buses, the packed tube trains in London in the early days, the Pope saying Mass to an empty St Peter's Square, the sombre Italian prime minister spelling out the latest doom figures of fatalities, the skies no longer filled with planes, the exhausted-looking doctors and nurses in intensive-care wards, and the face of the 13-year-old boy in the UK who died of the virus. All never-to-be-forgotten pictures of what this crisis is about. But no image was more shaming for the government and for health chiefs in this country than the photograph of the newly set up instant drive-through virus-testing facility in the huge car park at Chessington World Adventures just outside London in Surrey. Apart from some bloke in a yellow high-viz jacket it was totally absolutely without question EMPTY. Outside in the road leading up to Chessington World Adventures, a real fun place for kids in normal times, was a traffic jam of cars filled with health workers desperate to know whether they had the virus or not so that they could go back to work if found to be negative. But none of them made it to the testing facility because they hadn't booked an appointment beforehand. Doctors and nurses who had taken time out to drive to the spanking new facility were turned away UNLESS they had a pre-arranged appointment. I'm assuming that to get an appointment you had to ring a certain number and it was impossible to get through. But many of the health workers probably just jumped into their cars to take advantage of this wonderful new scheme. Total unbelievable bureaucracy prevented them from getting the test they needed. Thus the empty car park at Chessington. Whoever was responsible for this scandal - and of course one department is blaming another deartment etc etc - should be fired and given a one-way ticket to China.