Don’t be a nation of Corporal Joneses
THeY are scenes reminiscent of a zombie movie: photographs and Tv footage of people pushing trolleys up and down supermarket aisles in a frantic search for ‘necessities’, only to be confronted with empty or ransacked shelves.
But it’s not the desperate survivors of an apocalyptic invasion by the Walking dead who’ve swept through Tesco, Lidl or Sainsbury’s, but those living in fear of the rapidly-spreading coronavirus.
everything from hand- sanitising gel, loo rolls and kitchen towel to tins of baked beans and packs of bottled water have been snapped up as consumers stockpile in anticipation of a looming Armageddon.
enough already! We all need to calm down NoW!
even if the coronavirus, CovId-19, does become an epidemic in Britain, giving in to panic is never the sensible option.
As we’ve seen this week, it just makes us behave irrationally.
We human beings are incredibly bad at assessing risk — and good at giving in to panic.
We are complacent in the face of threats we’ve become accustomed to while we over-react to novel sources of danger.
I once hosted a birthday party for my mum in London a few years ago, shortly after a terrorist attack. A worried auntie called to tell me that she dared not risk coming to the capital. ‘It’s safer here,’ she said. This made me chuckle. Many more people die each year from falling down the stairs — more than 5,000 older people in the UK died as a result of a fall in 2017 — than at the hands of violent radicals. But, as we stand at the top of the stairs, we feel it’s less risky than exposing ourselves to the unknown dangers of the outside world.
What my aunt really meant was that the risk of a terrorist attack was unknown, unpredictable and, therefore, incredibly scary.
The same is true of the coronavirus. Measured against many other viral outbreaks and common diseases, CovId-19 appears — at least at this stage — to be less contagious or deadly.
Seasonal influenza, for example, results in three to five million cases of severe illness worldwide every year, and 290,000 to 650,000 deaths.
Yet the annual take-up of the flu vaccine is abysmal. People simply don’t see influenza for the killer that it is.
It couldn’t be a more different story when it comes to the coronavirus: instead of complacency, panic appears to be the preferred option.
People are calling up hospitals, GP surgeries and the NHS 111 switchboard at the slightest sniffle. dare I say it, but most of them are the worried well or looking for a bit of attention or two weeks off work.
And yet, the result of this selfindulgent worrying is that the health service risks being overwhelmed, while people who are genuinely at risk — because they have returned from a coronavirus ‘ hotspot’ abroad or been in contact with someone who was — can take hours to get through for the advice they need.
The lesson to be learned about panic is that people all too often get hurt, not by an actual threat, but by others’ fear of it.
It’s something we would all do well to bear in mind today. Of
CoUrSe, the prospect of a viral pandemic is worrying but listening and acting on official advice, taking precautions and looking out for others — particularly the elderly and frail — is far more productive than turning into a nation of Corporal Joneses.
And what if supplies of hand sanitiser are running perilously low in the shops; good old soap has been around for thousands of years — the Babylonians were the first to use it in 2800BC. It’s cheap and plentiful and washing your hands remains the most effective way of protecting us against infections.
If the worst does come to the worst and there is an epidemic in Britain, the vast majority of those of us who contract CovId-19 will recover because almost all the evidence points to it being a mild, self- limiting illness in most people. That knowledge alone should be enough to stop panic in its tracks.