From Mr Clark McGinn.

Sir, Pursuing analogies is as dangerous as following financial models blindly, but William Martello (Letters, November 3) is not right in saying that the patients cancelled the doctors' appointments. The doctors made regular house calls and spotted all the vital signs. They failed to act as they were in thrall to the Surgeon General (Alan Greenspan), who maintained that there was no point in trying to predict a pandemic (bubble flu) and so administering preventive medicine was pointless. Better to mop up the after-effects in hospital. Or, as it turned out, the morgue.