The last few posts have been a little inward looking, dealing as they did with my nervous start to querying my book, and myself and my wife, Tina's break away to the lovely city of Durham.
I guess it's kind of a pre-requisite of a personal blog to be, well, personal. This week, however, I would like to spread my net a little wider. Actually, I'd like to spread it a lot wider. Globally, in fact. Because the time has come to tackle the thorny issue of Coronavirus.
The End
Yes, as I'm sure anybody who's not been living a hermetic life, shored up in some cave or other, eating a nutritious diet of moss, lichen, and the odd beetle knows, the world is under attack by the most virulent, and dangerous virus since Boyzone split up.
In fact, if you have been living the solitary, beetle eating existence previously mentioned, I'd advise you to head back to the cave ASAP, and possibly look into a boulder or two to shut out any potential carriers, because the world is doomed! Doomed I say!
Or, you know, possibly not.
Now, this is not to downplay the effects of Covid-19. Not in the slightest. The disease has spread with alarming speed and managed to reach such varied destinations as Italy, the U.S., and of course, my own native U.K. infecting, on it's travels, over 100k people, and taking lives numbering in excess of 3.5k. Needless to say, these are serious numbers.
Spread-Em
It doesn't take a maths genius, to see that my hastily rounded numbers equate to a 3.5% death rate among the affected and, whilst this is grimly impressive, it is nowhere near the (admittedly much more containable) SARS, and is in fact much more along the lines of un-vaccinated and untreated Measles or Whooping Cough. No, what seems to make Coronavirus more of a worry, is how effective it is at spreading amongst the population.
The long incubation period of the disease means that it's easy for an unaware carrier to infect others, and for those affected to do the same. This, unchecked, would transform that 3.5% to a huge number of people across the globe, and that, understandably, makes it a scary son-of-gun.
Now this, has seemingly not been helped by a perfect storm of a brand new disease, a lack of effective initial preventative measures, and of course Chinese New Year, which saw potential carriers flung world wide. Cruises and other travellers, did not, of course, help.
These are still early days, however, and if the SARS outbreak of 2002/3 is anything to go by, Covid-19 should (should) be containable, eventually.
The SARS outbreak took some 6 months for us to even start to get a grip on, and although it didn't spread as far, or as fast, it seems to have reached it's end in 2005.
Wipe Out
Now to get to grips with Covid-19 we do, of course have to be wary. Cleanliness is indeed somewhere close to godliness in all this, and hand washing, surface disinfecting, and being cautious of those coughs and sneezes spreading a global pandemic, are measures we should all adopt pretty darn quick. These things will help.
What won't help is a 'Cabin Fever' style state of paranoia, as seems to be being whipped up in some of the popular (for some reason) press. The resultant panic buying of toilet roll in the face of a disease with no effect on the tummy, is particularly baffling. I mean if you're that worried buy a cloth and wash it out after a wipe. Buy a pack if you want to make doubly sure. I can't see it making that much difference unless for some reason the water gets turned off, and if we get to that point then a clean bum might be the least of your concerns.
No, I may be alone in this. I may be being far too lax in my response to the world's end, but thus far I'm not battening down any hatches, getting myself too worked up, or even considering buying a years supply of the double-quilted stuff. In fact, to date, my sole response to the outbreak has been a rather distasteful rendition of 'M-m-m-my Corona'.
It may be the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine.
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