Keep calm in loo of panic – and avoid the paper chase
Oh, hello there, fellow Joe Public representative. How are your stress levels? How about your confusion meter? Are you quietly panicking and hoping to be proven wrong? Or are you sort of wondering what all the fuss is about, while vaguely pondering whether you should add an extra couple of packets of toilet paper to your shopping trolley?
Coronavirus is now officially a pandemic, according to the wise folks at the World Health Organisation, and that definitely seems like a column A occurrence – quiet panic stations – to a regular Joe like me.
I still can’t quite convince myself that we should be freaking out, though – and I think toilet paper is part of the problem.
Loo paper has become the symbol for pandemic preparation, and that’s a pretty hard thing to take seriously. Why loo paper?
Well, there are some weird psychological underpinnings, apparently. Toilet paper represents cleanliness. It’s cheap and, in saner times, abundant. Unlike the seven murky tins of Watties stew that languish in the bottom of our emergency kit, it’s something that we will eventually use, so stockpiling doesn’t feel wasteful.
As humans, we have a need to take action so that we don’t become paralysed by our panic, and stashing a personal supply of toilet paper is a small but tangible accomplishment.
I read somewhere that Covid-19 has been mentioned 1.1 billion times in the media (make that 1.1 billion and one), and that figure is swelling exponentially every day.
My news feed reads coronavirus, coronavirus, coronavirus, Bernie Sanders, coronavirus, Billie Eilish. What I’m still struggling with is whether this shows the scope of the problem or is largely a sign of the insta-information times in which we live.
Globally, in recent years we’ve had SARS, swine flu (our last pandemic), bird flu, and the Zika virus. They were unsettling and uncertain times, and then we moved on. It’s worth noting that on the scale of wide-eyed naivety to dismal doomsdayer, I err on the side of Pollyanna, but I very much hope that this will be the same.
Nationally, it’s already had an impact, though.
Economically, the virus is giving the world a battering. The headlines tell us that stock markets are plummeting. My Kiwisaver performance graph, which was trending erratically upwards, has now taken a sad little dip into the negative returns. The orange line just kind of fades off into nothing at the end, in an apologetic fashion.
This doesn’t particularly concern me – I did not win any part of Lotto’s recent $50 million jackpot, so I’m in Kiwisaver for the long haul. Markets fall, and then they recover. There’ll be many more international crises to test my retirement savings between now and whatever the official retirement age will be by the time I get there.
However, that’s just the stock market. If your job depends on trade with China or tourism from just about anywhere, you’re probably hurting right now. Even without any cases in the South Island (yet – I’m not that naı¨ve), the forestry industry is suffering and tourism is being squeezed, so the virus has farreaching effects beyond threatening people’s health.
The strange thing about an event like this is that it doesn’t feel like there’s very much that we can actually do about it. In some ways, our kindergarteners are probably the best prepared of all of us.
Yes, they’re walking vectors, but thanks to all that careful ECE guidance, they’re also well trained to cough into their elbow crooks rather than their hands. They are used to being reminded and reprimanded about washing their hands for 20 seconds (apparently, most adults only do eight).
That’s the equivalent of singing two rounds of Happy Birthday while working those suds over every part of your digits (or for my kids, one round with a long pause in the middle while they decide which lucky family member shall be bestowed with the day’s imaginary birthday honours).
Mostly, it seems that besides maintaining the hygiene basics we should have been heeding in the first place, there’s not a lot more that we members of Joe Public can do. That whole wartime ‘‘Keep Calm and Carry On’’ catchphrase that spouted a thousand terrible memes and coffee cup slogans may finally have found a useful reincarnation.
If coronavirus hits New Zealand hard, there will be tricky and awkward decisions to make. When do we start keeping our kids home from school and kindy? How plausible is it to take time off work? How vigorously do we avoid crowds? In the meantime, I’ll wash my hands a little bit more mindfully, and fight the urge to buy extra loo paper.
If this seems to be a feeble underreaction, you could always buy a real live copy of the newspaper and save this page. Then, when the toilet paper shortage progresses from hypothetical to a genuine three-ply emergency, you can take your revenge. Just don’t substitute your iPad – the swiping implications could be dire.
If coronavirus hits New Zealand hard, there will be tricky and awkward decisions to make.