Kelly’s Eye

THE surreal air of an extended break at home continues – a bit like re-living the six-week summer holiday from schooldays.

Back on March 18 (how distant that sounds already), in the week before the lockdown came into force, I wrote: “Ultimately, we are going to have find ways to keep calm and carry on.”

So have we done so? Yes, if that means the widespread acquiescence towards lockdown, with 70-plus per cent of Britons wanting it extended. No, considering the 200,000 calls to police denouncing neighbours for supposedly flouting restrictions.

We have gone in less than two months from regarding Covid-19 as a particularly nasty respiratory virus to the modern equivalent of the Black Death, no matter what the evidence to the contrary, because “stay safe” fires the synapses in the deepest primeval corners of our brains.That is scarcely surprising when the broadcasters intone not just the death toll every day, but heartrending details of particular cases from grief-stricken relatives.

But thousands of people will still die every day from hideous illnesses long after this has passed – shall we continue the same logic then and report those statistics and individual cases on TV every day?

According to Cambridge statistician Professor David Spiegelhalter: “As a rough rule of thumb, if you get the virus your chance of dying is roughly the same as you have had this year anyway.”

And that’s if you get it. At present most of us are paying such calculations far less heed than more frightening scenarios. Perhaps it’s inevitable that basic instinct presently trumps reason. But I still fear we’ll come to regret that choice.