Urgent Update Regarding New Mutant Strain of Covid-19 and Our Business
On the 4th of January 2021, at 8 pm, the British Prime Minister, in a live television address to the nation, placed England into a high new level of lockdown – Tier 5. The other devolved national governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland also have implemented significant new measures, amounting to a UK-wide total lockdown.
This was done because a new highly-infectious strain of the Covid-19 virus has now become dominant in mainland Britain. To save the NHS from collapsing from the overwhelming strain, these measures were taken without warning.
In the UK now, bookshops are closed as ‘non-essential’ and citizens are ordered to stay indoors, except for essential brief journeys for food, medicine, essential work, exercise, or to leave domestic abuse situations. This has major impact on us as a small business, in many ways, personal and professional, but we will do our best in these difficult and worrying times to serve our readers, authors and customers, with grace under pressure. We ask for your patience. Thank you for understanding, and we hope the situation where you are is better or improving at least!
The UK government is to review the new major lockdown again by February 15th, 2021, and there may well be a relaxing of strict cordon sanitaire rules on logistics, freight and shipping, in the days ahead.
For the moment, book orders are being handled by our distributors in Scotland, BookSource, AND Amazon; and in the USA by SPD; we also work with Ingram. However, we expect serious delays for book orders between now and the end of March.
