I am in Devon, close enough to Cornwall that I can see it.
I help a charity who support vulnerable people & families here not just with food but with all sorts of other things.
They work with Social Services amongst other organisations.
Some of the people they are delivering help to right now are quite sick with Coronavirus but still left at home because the hospitals are full & they are not 'bad enough'.
I could only give half of what I normally do to help feed people this week because tourists & second home owners have been through the local shops & supermarkets like locusts, going from one to the other taking as much as they can from each one.
Just one example of what tourists & second home owners are personally responsible for....
A care worker who deals with disabled people has not been able to get so much as a slice of bread this week.
Her children have been living on nothing but school dinners & a few bits teachers slipped to them.
On Saturday when she had a food parcel delivered she had not eaten for 2 days.
I know what we were able to give her wasn't enough to make it until next Saturday.
She had NOTHING in her home except her teenaged sons who are now at home for the foreseeable future.
She has been told her children can't go to school because she is not 'essential staff' so they won't get their school lunches.
Vouchers are no help when there is nothing to buy.
She can't shop when NHS staff can because she isn't NHS.
She doesn't personally count as vulnerable so she can't shop then.
She can't afford the £40 minimum spend + delivery cost to try to shop online & the earliest slot available is in almost a month even if she could.
By the time she finishes work the shops are empty because they are handy to stop at on the way down to Cornwall.
This lady is just ONE of many selfish tourists & second home owners are taking from.
I was only able to pass on a fraction of what I would have done even though I added some things from my own preps & stayed up half the night baking bread because my home delivery was mostly missing with no suitable alternatives & the shops are empty.
I count as vulnerable myself & have always had my shopping delivered so luckily have my delivery slots booked already.
We have waiting lists several years long to get on to an NHS dentists list, we have lost at least half a dozen NHS surgeries in the past few years so we don't have enough doctors even for the normal population levels here & the hospital is already massively under stress.
Our pharmacies are smaller, they hold stock to deal with the local population.
If you fill a prescription you could be the cause of someone else who is local dying when they cannot get their medication.
If you visit a doctor, you endanger the life of a local who cannot have that appointment.
If you enter a hospital you are taking it away from someone who lives here who has NOWHERE else to go (unlike you)
We don't have better facilities because once you bought a second home (along with your hundreds of besties) the area started to die.
Small businesses cannot succeed because they have no customer base unless they cater to tourists & eke out a living the rest of the year.
There are not enough locals to keep many businesses open the rest of the year.
Second home owners destroy communities even when times are not so bad.
The lack of locals means e.g. the bus service is weekly - 1 trip to the nearest city & 1 return trip the same day a few hours later.
You miss that bus, you wait until next week to go.
Hospital & other services are designed to cater to the normal population levels, not 'just in case' all the second home owners & tourists turn up sick.
So is the amounts of food held in the shops.
If you buy so much as a single pint of milk as an incomer, you are literally taking it away from a deprived child, or an overworked carer, nurse, doctor, homeless person etc...
Before the influx of these people, our supermarkets & pharmacies were not being cleared out.
Please, stay away.
Go back where you came from & stop murdering our vulnerable people down here just because you can.