It’s the worry list that worries me...
HOW WORRIED should we be? Every news report about coronavirus on the television or radio poses the question. So are you: a) totally indifferent to the pandemic raging around you? b) concerned enough to have handwashing routines in place. c) stockpiling lentils and getting your front door welded shut.
Most of us veer from one extreme to the other depending on what we’ve just seen or heard and psychologists agree we all tend to be muddleheaded about assessing risk. Unduly alarmed about some things but unduly complacent about others.
For instance, if you were asked which you were more anxious about – food poisoning or the coronavirus – you’d probably say coronavirus. Yet last month the Food Standards Agency reported that cases of food poisoning have doubled in the past decade. There are now 2.4 million cases every year, up from one million in 2009. Two-thirds of these cases were linked to takeaway or restaurant food and thousands had to be admitted to hospital as a result.
A whopping 60 per cent of British adults now have home-delivered food twice a month which comes from “dark kitchens” where we have no idea what sort of health and safety procedures are followed – if any are at all – either by the people who cook it or those who deliver it. Food poisoning can be debilitating and unpleasant and, at worst, deadly. These shocking statistics suggest that we ought to consider changing our lifestyles to combat this rise in food poisoning – as in, take the time and trouble to cook food at home rather than lazily ordering a ready-made curry or styrofoam plate of pasta.
But we won’t do anything of the sort. It’s a risk we’re prepared to take – we don’t even consider it a risk – because it’s so convenient in our busy lives to have food delivered. Meanwhile, like the man pictured in Milton Keynes last week, there are those who are so worried about covid-19 they they now refuse to travel on public transport unless they’re wearing a gas mask.
But if we change our behaviour as a result of an emergency then we don’t always do the right thing either. Look at what happened after the Three Mile Island nuclear panic in Philadelphia in 1979. For days the plant was on the verge of meltdown. Afterwards, though nobody actually died the frightened public demanded a return from nuclear power to fossil fuels.as a result the impact on air pollution over subsequent decades will have led to thousands of premature deaths.
Curiously, following the law of unintended consequences, Nasa satellite pictures show that nitrogen dioxide pollution in China has plummeted, an event that is “partly related” to factories being shut down in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. The reduction in pollution was first noticed near Wuhan city, the centre of the outbreak.
How strange it would be if in the longterm coronavirus actually saved lives that would have been lost to pollution.