Are Britons losing their Blitz spirit?

J“DON’T panic, Mr Mainwaring! Don’t panic!” Never has the stricken cry of Dad’s Army’s Lance Corporal Jones been more in tune with our national mood. For despite the message, Jonesy was always panicking, and so are we as day after day the threat of a global “pandemic” is trumpeted in the media, and the voice of the virus is heard in the land.

Yes, coronavirus or the Wu-flu as I call it in an attempt to dilute its menacing aura (the bug started inWuhan) keeps hanging over us every day like a tidal wave in a nightmare – a towering, overpowering event that never quite delivers in its mission to drown the world.

As I wrote last week, the attempted quarantine on the Diamond Princess cruise ship was a pathetic failure.

Beginning with 10 coronavirus cases when the ship first anchored off Yokohama, the total number of victims on board by the end of the quarantine was nearly 700.

Surely someone should have realised that shared plumbing and air-conditioning on a ship with such an enormous number of passengers was bound to make the place a petri dish breeding disease. Now a hotel in Tenerife is doing the same thing.

As, to his credit, the BBC’s health correspondent Fergus Walsh keeps telling us, this virus is no worse than flu for the vast majority of people – although, sadly, the first Briton has died as a result of the crisis which has claimed nearly 3,000 lives.

But the terror-spreaders are having a ball. One man wrote to a newspaper this week, saying: “All international travel by air, sea or land, must cease… this travel ban must continue for at least four weeks or until no new cases arise worldwide… I for one will not consider foreign travel until the situation stabilises.”

Goodness, what a fun guy he must be.

Unless there’s some massive cover-up going on, and global authorities are sinisterly concealing some hideous truth about this virus, most of us unfortunate enough to get it will endure nothing more serious than a nasty bout of flu.

The pervasive panic seems to have made us lose our senses. Not exactly the spirit of the Blitz we’re all so proud of, is it?

To once more quote Dad’s Army, this time Private Frazer: “We’re doomed!” To which Captain Mainwaring would surely have replied: “You stupid boy.”