Coronavirus

We've had SARS, we've had MERS and we've also had swine flu and bird flu amongst the regular influenza that we all know and want to avoid at any cost. We seemed to get through it all without as much as a whisper, but now? COVID-19 seems to be in a different league.

There was a game I used to play as a teenager, called 'Pandemic'. The objective of the game is to create your own virus and kill off the human race by acquiring attributes such as symptoms, whether it becomes airborne etcetera etcetera. At one point it was just a game. Now it's real life.

You see, I was complacent. "It's just flu", and sure, for 28-year old me, it might well be but there is something about this latest outbreak that scares me. It's been four whole months since this mysterious new illness sprung out of the bat caves of Wuhan and only in the past week have I appreciated how dangerous this could be.

There is no immunity, there is no vaccine or cure and we have gone from a few cases on the other side of the world to an increase of 100% per day on cases and deaths. Yes, death. Governments around the world have put their countries on lockdown, closed borders, cancelled events en masse and quarantined huge swathes of the population. This is bad.

But what makes it worse is that our Government, the British Government have taken a typically stubborn and stoic stance on the whole thing and with over 1,000 confirmed cases and 21 deaths as I type this, we're still at the point where the official advice is to wash our hands.

Think about that for a second. Countries across the globe are closed for business and our government is saying, "Wash your hands". There is even debate about letting the virus pass through the population to make it quick, and while on paper that may sound like a logical argument, let's break it down into numbers.

67 million people live in the United Kingdom, and the mortality rate based on figures around the world is at 2%. That's 277,000 people. And our Government are contemplating sacrificing them to speed up the economy. I can't think of anything more ghastly.

But that's not it. 10% of the people who catch this illness will be critically ill, (6.7 million if you let the illness roll freely) and our NHS is fatally underfunded as it is. We are in no position to deal with this, and frankly, I'm a bit nervous of going to work on Monday morning. I think it's inevitable I'm going to catch it.

There are numerous and wide-ranging factors that I simply haven't got time to talk about in fear of turning this blog post into a thesis, but one factor I do want to speak of is self-isolation. Official advice states we need to self-isolate for 7 days, which if you're a Netflix and/or Football Manager fan sounds great, but the impact on ones mental health is not good when you're locked inside for a whole week on your own. Maybe I fear that more than the actual virus.

But what else can we do but carry on? Trust that what we're being told is true. I may be reading back on this in a decade's time, like I have recently on old posts here, and wonder what all the fuss was about.

Or maybe I'm the last human alive and lamenting the lack of action and purpose when it was vital we weren't so God damn British about the whole thing.

We don't know. And maybe that's what I fear the most.