Confusion and coronavirus

It’s a neat bit of alliteration but coronavirus and confusion are the twin perils sweeping the world at present. As more and more countries have in the past week reported their first cases of the now-named COVID-19 virus, it has become less and less clear what the health emergency will mean to us all.

How it will pan out is obviously uncertain, which leaves plenty of pertinent questions on people’s lips.

Will millions of people die of coronavirus? Will the disease lead to a world economic recession? How many toilet rolls are enough?

The answer to the last question would appear to be ‘‘as many as you can stuff into a supermarket trolley’’ if a video clip from an Australian supermarket is anything to go by.

You will probably have seen the footage of three women tussling over the last few toilet roll packages on the shop’s shelves. The altercation became so aggressive that store staff had to step in to separate the belligerent shoppers.

The police were called and they soon got to the bottom of it, so to speak, and two Sydney women were charged with affray. They will be served with court papers, which will no doubt come in handy if their toilet rolls run out.

I’ve yet to fathom why there’s been such a panic over the availability of toilet rolls. There isn’t a shortage (or at least there wasn’t until hundreds of people got their knickers in a twist) and supply isn’t threatened.

What’s more worrying is how much death and disruption will be caused around the globe before this COVID-19 finally abates.

The most important thing is to take the advice of Dad’s Army’s Corporal Jones: ‘‘Don’t panic, don’t panic.’’

First, it appears most people who contract the virus make a full recovery, which is not to say that the disease is not a serious risk to the elderly, particularly those with existing health conditions, but for the bulk of the population COVID-19 doesn’t seem to be any worse than a bad case of flu.

And by flu, I don’t mean Spanish Flu, which in a deadly pandemic in 1918 infected 500 million people worldwide, killing somewhere between 20 to 50 million people (records at the time were a bit haphazard probably because that year hundreds of thousands of people were concurrently dying in World War One).

What is certain is that Spanish Flu killed more people than the war did.

Nevertheless, we should take heart from the fact that many diseases that were once the scourge of the planet have now been brought under control and, in one case, completely eradicated.

Smallpox is probably the deadliest disease to have ravaged humankind. Nearly everyone exposed to it became infected and close to one in three of those people died. It is believed to have killed about 50 million people in the 20th century alone.

And, as infectious diseases go, it was in a league of its own.

In Germany in 1970, a young tourist, recently returned from Pakistan, developed smallpox and was placed in strict hospital quarantine.

However, he chose one day to open a window while he smoked a cigarette.

By doing so he inadvertently infected 17 other people, some of them two floors from his room.

The last known victim of smallpox was a medical photographer at Birmingham University, who died in 1978 after being accidentally exposed to one of the last smallpox samples left in existence.

Two years later the World Health Organisation announced the disease had been eradicated, the only human disease to be officially declared extinct.

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