Lockdown until vaccine

The year of the Coronavirus has added a lot of new words to our vocabulary.

If you’d asked me around January – I’d have bet that Covid 19 were a boy band who had reached the finals of the “X Factor”!

But there’s one word that I’m starting to get a little fed up with . . . and it’s ‘ epidemiologist’. Last week, I counted more epidemiologists on our TV screens than chefs – and that takes some doing!

There’s now a pandemic of experts on pandemics. I’ve got to the stage where I can spot them right away.

If there’s a man or a woman giving one of those ‘ big face’ laptop interviews –

and the backdrop is an impressive display of shelves filled with neatly stacked books – it will be an epidemiologist! I just hope my wee grandson Max isn’t watching any of it.

Imagine the horror of being told “Grandad – I don’t want to be a fireman anymore . . . I want to be an epidemiologist!” On the subject of experts in pandemics, even Boris’s Downing Street bookends – Professor Twiddle and Sir Doctor Twaddle – are wearing a bit thin. Maybe it’s time they showed us a graph of how many people actually listen to them anymore!

No- one seems prepared to be honest enough to admit that lockdowns are the simplest way to stop the NHS being overwhelmed. And they will be with us – three weeks on, three weeks off - until a vaccine comes to our rescue.

I just wish one mad scientist would come up with the discovery that Covid 19 can be cured instantly by ingesting large amounts of rancid, out- of- date Guinness. I’ve got gallons of the stuff!