TheTimes8April2020

the times | Wednesday April 8 2020 2GM 13

News

The Times

Coronavirus

charity appeal

The Big Issue Foundation

Working to end poverty

and exclusion for

The Big Issue sellers

6 £50 will buy a voucher for food,

toiletries and necessities

6 £100 will cover a vendor’s gas and

electricity bills

6 £200 will buy pots, pans, linen, a

microwave, kettle and radio

Family Action

Supporting families in

poverty, disadvantage and

social isolation

6 £50 will buy a month’s nappies,

wipes and baby clothes

6 £100 will supply five children with

books, activities and crafts

6 £200 will provide a family with

daily hot meals for a month

To donate call 0151 284 2336 or

visit thetimes.co.uk/timesappeal

T

When The Big Issue suspended street

sales of the magazine last month

Richard Todd lost his livelihood.

Three days later he fell ill with

coronavirus and feared for his life.

Despite his desperate bad luck, he

considers himself fortunate. He has a

room in a Salvation Army house into

which he retreated for 14 days, living

on tinned soup, curry and chilli con

carne cooked in a microwave oven.

He avoided the shared kitchen so as

not to infect others.

“I had a choky feeling around my

throat, fever, a headache like a lot of

pressure on my head, fatigue and my

arms were achy. When it got quite

bad my chest was feeling tight and I

was feeling short of breath,” he said.

“I had three or four days when it

was quite bad. I would feel all right for

a bit and then it starts getting worse

particularly as it gets towards bed

time, and it gets scary and you don’t

know how bad it’s going to get. At

times, I thought I could actually die

from this.”

The Times Coronavirus Charity

Appeal is raising money for The Big

Issue Foundation, which is giving

food vouchers, paying bills and

offering support to 2,000 vendors of

the magazine such as Mr Todd who

have lost their incomes.

Mr Todd, 54, had sold The Big Issue

for 14 months outside Boots in Exeter

High Street, where he had befriended

pigeons that ate from his hand. In

isolation he found support with a

virtual self-isolating bird club hosted

by the presenter Chris Packham.

“It has been a nice sanctuary,” he

said. “I didn’t log on for a couple of

days and when I did I had over 1,

people wishing me well.”

He soothed his throat by eating a

clove of garlic a day and sweating

onions. “I did a thing my dad showed

me — you slice up some onions, put

them in a saucer, put sugar over the

top and put another saucer on top of

it and get the juice out,” he said. “It

did actually help my throat.”

In the months before the lockdown

News

‘I lost my job and fell

ill three days later’

Mr Todd’s magazine sales, from which

he earned £1.25 per copy sold, were

sufficient so he did not receive any

benefits. “There is going to be a gap

which I think I could fill but I would

really appreciate a food voucher. Like

many vendors we have lost our

lifeline as it were and there is a bit of

a vacuum to fill,” he said.

“I know there are people worse off

than me, there are homeless vendors

who might have been put into

accommodation but we have lost our

livelihoods basically.”

On his first day out of isolation

yesterday he was already thinking of

volunteering to help others in the

same position.

“People like myself who have

recovered from it are well placed to

do it. I am biting at the bit to go out

and help. It’s not like I am going to be

selling The Big Issue so I have time on

my hands.

“That’s my instinct — to see what I

can do. It’s good for my own mental

health as well and will give me

something productive to do.”

coronavirus

charity

appeal

T

Greg Hurst Social Affairs Editor

A newly qualified junior doctor is work-

ing alongside his paediatrician father in

the same hospital to treat coronavirus

patients.

Tayyib Mubashar, a first-year junior

doctor at Torbay Hospital in Devon,

was inspired to follow in the footsteps of

his father, Yahya, who moved to the UK

from Pakistan about 20 years ago.

Tayyib said the pandemic had been a

“baptism by fire” for his junior doctor

colleagues but also for more experi-

enced staff such as his father.

He told BBC News that at every hos-

pital where his newly qualified friends

were working there was a sense that

“everybody has come together”. He

added: “We are working with a lot more

different people than we would have in

the past and so it’s not only a baptism by

fire for us [junior doctors], it’s a baptism

by fire for everybody. However, that is

exactly what pulls everyone together.”

Yahya, who has worked at Torbay

Hospital for 17 years, is proud to have

his son working on the same wards as

him.

“I always taught him that being a

doctor is not a job, it’s a duty and we

have to fulfil our duty that we have been

privileged to serve,” he said.

Father and son doctors

work the wards together

Will Humphries

Southwest Correspondent

Yahya Mubashar with his son Tayyib

accept payments by phone. “There may

be a few things that need ironing out.”

Mark Buttifant, 55, who works for

Sussex police, was told to call a woman

who needed a pharmacy delivery. “It

wasn’t so much that — it was more of a

reassuring chat. What struck me was

that there are these people in the com-

munity who don’t see people from day

to day and this scares them.”

John Taylor, 47, the head teacher of

two primary schools in Oldham, said

that he was shocked when the alert

came in. “Suddenly I hear this very loud

siren going off. I had a look around to

see if there was an alarm in my area and

realised it was my phone.”

His alert was from a woman in her

sixties who was looking after her father,

who is 90. “There was clearly a lot of

deadly to community

Some US churches continued to hold

services in defiance of lockdown orders.

Rodney Howard-Browne, pastor of a

large evangelical church in Florida, was

arrested last week for violating public

health emergency orders. He had en-

couraged worshippers to shake hands,

saying: “This has to be the safest place.

If you cannot be safe in church, you are

in serious trouble.”

A south London church that is a reg-

istered British charity promoted its

own miracle shield. Anyone willing to

pay £91 for a bottle of “divine plague

protection oil” and a “special scarlet

yarn” was promised that “every corona-

virus and any other deadly thing will

pass over you”. The oil, a mixture of

cedarwood, hyssop “and prayer”, is the

creation of Bishop Climate Wiseman,

head of the Kingdom Church in Cam-

berwell. He said that his oil was “based

on the Bible” and claimed that his

church, which is under investigation for

promoting the oil, had made no finan-

cial gain.

To communicate health warnings in

the insular world of Stamford Hill’s

ultra-Orthodox streets is a challenge.

Televisions are generally prohibited, as

is the use of social media. The common

language in many homes is Yiddish.

The rabbi’s word carries huge authority

and in Stamford Hill, as in Israel and

New York, it is feared that a higher inci-

dence of early coronavirus infections in

ultra-Orthodox households may have

resulted from a slowness in appreciat-

ing the severity of the outbreak.

A young man from an ultra-Ortho-

dox family in Stamford Hill said yester-

day that it was only when their friends

and relatives started to fall ill, and some

died, that the importance of social dis-

tancing measures finally hit home.

“At first they thought it was all a bit of

a joke, something that wasn’t going to

affect them. Now most people are

scared, but some are still not abiding by

the rules,” he said. “All the synagogues

are closed but groups of ten men gather

in back yards to pray and last week 20 to

30 men were crammed inside a small

room hand-baking matzah [an unleav-

ened flatbread for the Passover meal].”

In Israel police enforced a lockdown

on Friday to restrict access to and from

Bnei Brak in Tel Aviv, an ultra-Ortho-

dox area that is the country’s worst

virus hotspot. Attempts to enforce

quarantine orders have led to assaults

on police and paramedics. A member of

New York’s ultra-Orthodox commun-

ity told how the virus swept through her

family. Six of her siblings are infected

and two are in hospital, as is her elderly

father. Nine nieces and nephews have

mild symptoms.

She is convinced that the Purim cele-

brations led to a cluster of cases and is

frustrated that people are still taking

risks. “When I try to tell people what’s

going on and how careful they have to

be, I’m accused of fear-mongering,” she

said. “It’s like they want to stay in denial

because that feels safer.”

Marie van der Zyl, president of the

Board of Deputies, said that although

death rates in the Jewish community

were worrying, “the sample size is far

too small for any definitive conclusion”.

“The UK Jewish community lives

predominantly around London and the

main urban areas, which have been

centres of the virus,” she said. “It also

has a higher age profile than the gener-

al population. These factors may influ-

ence the figures.”

Public Health England and NHS

England do not categorise Covid-

cases and deaths according to religion

and ethnicity.

Letters, page 26

Purim brings

joy — and

now fear —

to Stamford

Hill, north

London, left.

Police in

Jerusalem

arrest an

ultra-

Orthodox

Jew. Friday

prayers are

broadcast

live from a

north

London

mosque

HENRY NICHOLLS/REUTERS; MAHMOUD ILLEAN/AP; DINENDRA HARIA/LNP

need for human contact and for deliver-

ies. We had a good natter about things.”

Although volunteers have been told

not to give out their own numbers,

many have done so to make it easier to

respond to future requests.

All of the volunteers who spoke to

The Times said that alerts came from

people within a hundred metres.

Mr Sheppard said that there were

issues with the app, including a confus-

ing instruction about when to “drop” a

call. He discovered that dropping the

call deleted all of the contact informa-

tion from the person needing help. He

has arranged to do pharmacy runs in

future for a man living near by. “It’s the

only alert I’ve had, which is still more

than everyone else, it seems,” he said.

The Duchess of Cornwall, president

of the Royal Voluntary Service,

thanked the 750,000 volunteers on

Monday and said that she had made a

call to an elderly woman who was self-

isolating. Camilla, 72, has now reunited

with the Prince of Wales after he tested

positive for Covid-19. The duchess

tested negative.

She made a “check in and chat” call

with Doris Winfield, 85, from Rick-

mansworth, Hertfordshire, who has

spent two weeks on her own. Ms Win-

field said the chat “meant the world to

me”, adding: “I’ve been incredibly

lonely over the last couple of weeks and

it was wonderful. We talked about life in

isolation and shared hobbies. She was

very interested in my family and how I

was coping without them. It’s really

cheered me up.”