Today’s update includes:
- Requests & Offers from the Stroud Coronavirus Community Response team & beyond
- Summary of local news
- Key national & international news
Requests and Offers from the Stroud Coronavirus Community Response team and beyond
- We now have 4,284 members. Please invite your friends to grow this community.
- Please take a look at the Group Purpose and Guidelines if you haven’t read them recently.
- The SCCR admin team posted a jointly-written letter in response to misinformation being shared on social media and on public posters. The letter calls on “everyone in Stroud to work together to make sure we are helping those in need, addressing gaps and problems by sharing requests for help” and says that the team “encourage(s) people to hold authorities accountable and responsible, and [to] fact-check claims along the way… Sharing wrong and misleading information is not only confusing and disruptive, but can cause serious harm.”
- Group member Wendy Thomson posted to advertise her new 80% ethanol hand sanitiser. This is only available to buy in bulk orders. Please see the post for details.
- Angela Findlay shared her blog post about her perspective on being of both German and British ancestry, with the 75th anniversary of VE Day coming this Friday. An extract: “Covid-19 has ushered in a rash of startlingly rapid changes to our laws and freedoms. We are forcibly and necessarily being shaken out of complacency and into the realisation that civilisation as we know it is both fragile and reversible. So more urgently than ever, our World War anniversaries need to be reminders of this and opportunities for learning and growth to inspire collective vigilance against darker forces and a genuine sense of unity across borders.”
- And Stroud Rotary shared their appeal for more funds to support local organisations. They are giving grants of up to £100 to groups that are working to support the local community.
Local updates:
- Five more people with Covid-19 have sadly died in Gloucestershire, bringing the county’s total to 199. Of those who have died, 171 were being treated at Gloucestershire Hospitals while 28 were being cared for through Gloucestershire Health and Care NHS Foundation Trust. (Gloucestershire Live)
- As of Tuesday night, the total number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Gloucestershire remains at 1,243 (no change in the reported figure from Monday afternoon).
- The Foundation Trust also posted photos on twitter of illuminations at Cheltenham General Hospital and Gloucestershire Royal Hospital to celebrate the International Day of the Midwife.
National news:
- “As of 9am 5 May, there have been 1,383,842 tests, with 84,806 tests on 4 May. 1,015,138 people have been tested of which 194,990 tested positive. As of 5pm on 4 May, of those tested positive for coronavirus, across all settings, 29,427 have sadly died. (Department of Health and Social Care pinned tweet)
- In the last 24 hour period 403 more people have died in hospitals or care homes, and there were 4,406 more confirmed cases.
- Please do download this app to help track cases in your community. https://covid.joinzoe.com/
International developments:
- Confirmed cases of the virus have passed 3.6 million (3,640,835), and the number of confirmed deaths has surpassed 250,000 (255,096).
- There are nine countries, including the UK, with over 100,000 confirmed cases, and a further sixteen with over 20,000 confirmed cases and a further fourteen with over 10,000 confirmed cases.
- The UK is now the country where the second highest number of people have died (29,502), having just overtaken Italy (29,315), with the USA (70,272) having the most people who have died (via Johns Hopkins University tracker)
Notes
Please remember we have a (growing) list of resources to support your emotional and mental health during this time on our website. The following numbers may be useful:
- Samaritans: 116 123
- Domestic Violence Hotline: 0808 2000 247
- Mind: 0300 123 3393
- Age UK: 0800 169 6565
- Childline: 0800 1111.
Thanks to everyone who helped create this update through our Facebook group. If you submit posts, we will often decline posting them to the discussion directly and instead hold them till the single daily summary – to try to reduce the number of posts in the feed and make it easier for people to follow the information. Please continue to submit posts to admins for this purpose with a flag REQUEST / OFFER / UPDATE / QUESTION