A retired GP has gone viral on social media after sharing a post on why he broke Covid distancing rules to comfort a grieving widow.
Dr Prit Buttar, who lives just outside Dundrennan, took to Twitter to share his story following allegations of lockdown parties in Downing Street.
The 61-year-old was working at a vaccine clinic in Annan last year when he hugged a woman who had come in shortly after her husband had died from cancer.
He said: “This poor person just dissolved into tears and as she sobbed, she told me that I was the first person who had embraced her since her husband had died.”
His tweet has since been shared more than 14,000 times and attracted replies from people sharing similar stories.
Dr Buttar said: “Many people felt terribly guilty that they had broken the rules. There’s the contrast between that and the behaviour that is being reported from Downing Street and the cabinet office.
“Some heartbreaking stories have emerged. There is a huge amount of pent up grief and sorrow and for many people it has just opened the floodgates.
“There are tragic stories and some very heart warming ones. There is a beautiful story of a lady who lives next door to a family of Iraqi refugees. Her children made a hole in the fence so they could speak to the children and teach them English.
“Occasionally some of these stories do reaffirm your faith in your fellow humans. The contrast between this and what was happening in Downing Street is so terrible.
“When you have politicians appearing on radio and TV saying they understood how people suffered - if they understood they would all be submitting their resignations, they would not be attempting to defend this.”
Dr Buttar, who moved to the region from Oxfordshire in 2016, worked as a locum GP in Kirkcudbright and Stranraer before retiring three years later.
He volunteered to return to work when the pandemic began.
Dr Buttar said he felt “incredulous anger” when revelations of parties at Downing Street during lockdown began to emerge, which then changed to “a sense of almost resignation and exhaustion at the whole thing”.
Last week Prime Minister Boris Johnson admitted he had attended a gathering in the Downing Street garden during lockdown in May 2020 but thought it was a work event.
Dr Buttar said: “The thread was never intended as a criticism of lockdown.
“The comments broadly fell into two categories. There are some who say yes they bent the rules in order to show a bit of humanity to someone. Then there are those who say they stuck to the rules to the absolute letter and watched their loved ones die over an iPad or through a window and are now bitterly angry they didn’t break the rules while other people were going out into the garden to enjoy the sunshine and have a drink after work.
“It’s not something you can just say sorry for and it’s fine. In my working life-time, if I had shown that sort of level of poor judgement the General Medical Council wouldn’t have hesitated to have taken my licence away.”
