One to 10 on coronavirus

The first thing is that it’s no joke. It’s a respiratory illness like pneumonia that chokes and kills. At the time of writing dozens have died. By the time this is printed it will probably be hundreds. The second thing is that we’ve never seen it before. It is a new-minted life form that has developed by exactly the same process as we did. God didn’t send it. It evolved.

However, the third thing is that effectively we have seen it before. Viruses are forever mutating and evolving and every so often a new and deadly one erupts. The flu virus of

1918 killed twice as many people as World War I. In my lifetime alone we’ve seen Aids, Sars, Mers, Ebola, bird flu, swine flu, Hong Kong flu, lots-of-other-places flu, and now this.

Yet it is true, four, that we are now more vulnerable to viruses than we used to be because we have become so numerous. Since

1950 the human population has tripled, so we are packed more closely together. Viruses love that.

Furthermore, five, we’ve become more vulnerable because we fly. When I was a kid there was a class of people known as the jet set. They were few and greatly envied. But just 50 years later, air travel’s got cheap, people have got rich and the jet set now includes most of us. At any one moment there are a million human beings airborne. Viruses enjoy that as much as we do. They get to go to new places.

Nevertheless, six, overall we’re good at beating viruses. In 1918 scientists were impotent because the electron microscope was still 15 years away and they couldn’t see what they were fighting. Today boffins have studied millions of viruses and have decades of experience of thwarting them. Science overcame Sars, Mers and the rest, and it is all but certain it’ll contain and defeat coronavirus. So why is it attracting so much attention?

Well, seven, despite being nothing new and despite our being likely to control it, coronavirus chimes with the times. It feels like one more piece in the jigsaw of apocalypse. Australia’s burning, the ice is melting, the reefs are dying, the monsoon’s failing, the locusts are swarming, the forests are falling, the oceans are rising and now the plague is coming and we’re all going to die.

But, eight, people always think we’re all going to die. Every religion has its doomsday myth. The Christian one as laid out in the Book of Revelation is typical. It has war, fire, famine, plague and the ever-popular Rapture up to heaven of the goody-goods who sing hymns. Doomsday may be a projection of our awareness of our own mortality, or a form of species guilt, but the point is it hasn’t happened yet.

All the same, nine, the nutter in the city centre with his placard announcing the end of the world only has to be right once. And we have plenty of cause for foreboding right now. It is clear that by becoming the unprecedentedly dominant species on the planet we are causing great changes to the natural world. And there are no instances in nature of any species increasing exponentially as we have done and not meeting a catastrophic come-uppance in one form or another.

So, 10, though coronavirus is most unlikely to wipe us out we would do awfully well to start limiting human numbers of our own free will before something else rolls up to do it for us. Will we? Oh dear, I seem to have reached my word limit.