As a hypochondriac, I’m strangely calm about coronavirus
My friends are very patient people. With some regularity, they have to put up with me wringing my hands, asserting that I definitely have a fatal disease, have just experienced a symptom that points to imminent collapse, or have something wrong with me that is never going to get better. I always appreciate their reaction. Which is laughter, often of the knee-slapping type. Here she goes again…
And yet, here we are, several weeks into panic stations about coronavirus, on the cusp of what could be the next Spanish flu, and I find myself calm, unmoved, even complacent.
Two weekends ago, I was in the airport jostling through security with hundreds of people racing for Chinabound flights, some – but not all – wearing masks. I thought “Meh…”, tried not to breathe through my nose, and promptly forgot all about it.
Increasing numbers of commuters on the London Underground are now wearing face masks, twitchily keeping watch on the respiratory condition of those nearby. You can see them flinch at every sniffle. They have helped send global demand rocketing.
The savvier of my friends began buying stock in protective gear weeks ago. Because pandemic panic turns out to mean huge business.
The demand for medical face masks in China means its producers – among the biggest in the world – can no longer supply international clients and hospitals as normal. So producers in other territories are racing to fill in.
Companies such as Medicom are straining to exponentially increase outputs. One plant near Angers in France usually makes 170million masks a year. It’s currently working to meet orders for half a billion.
Well, I for one have no intention of purchasing a mask – yet. But why not? My blasé attitude is partly a quirk of temperament, purely random, and certainly out of character. But as far as I can come up with good reasons, they are along these lines.
First, humans are both complex, capable of amazing reaches in imagination and deeply parochial. The flu isn’t on my doorstep, or in front of my nose, so I find it hard to worry. I know that cases have been reported in several western countries, including the UK – as I write, a third case has been diagnosed in Britain. The patient is said to have picked it up while travelling in Singapore, and was quarantined at home in Brighton before he was taken to a specialist unit at Guy’s Hospital in London. A further five Britons have been diagnosed in France after being infected on a skiing holiday.
Secondly, it’s very hard to know what we’re actually dealing with. What is alarmism, or a manifestation of panic about a universal nightmare, and thus purely psychological, and what is epidemiological? The headlines are made to terrify, but the numbers aren’t that horrendous – yet.
At this moment there have been 34,958 confirmed cases (possibly a few more by the time you read this) of coronavirus worldwide, affecting just 0.00037 per cent of the world’s population. The Spanish flu of
1918 affected a third of the world’s population within the space of a year. Obviously, a pandemic even a fraction of the size and devastation of the Spanish flu would be disastrous – but, none the less, the 1918 flu puts present hysteria into perspective.
Indeed, the reported death toll from coronavirus so far is less than 750, around 2 per cent of confirmed cases. I’m probably safe. And so are you.
I admit such cheery reliance on reported figures may be foolish. It is clear we don’t know the whole story: Beijing has played down the virus from the start to keep up appearances.
Last week, within hours of the death of Dr Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor killed by the coronavirus he’d tried to warn the world about, only to be accused by the local Public Security Bureau of “making false comments”, President Xi Jinping rang Donald Trump to assure him that China was “fully confident and capable” of defeating the outbreak. The fight to contain the virus, said Xi, was a “people’s war”.
And yet, even in the face of such “reassurances” from the Chinese Communist Party, I find myself staying calm. When it comes to understanding contamination and infection control, Britain is a world leader.
I find soothing the repetition by Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, that we are “well prepared”. All NHS hospitals have been ordered to put in place secure “priority assessment pods” to handle suspected coronavirus patients. I’m also confident a vaccine or antiviral will soon be found, made and mass-produced.
My heart goes out to the population of Wuhan, sick or in fear of becoming so. Yet the mind boggles, and sometimes slides into a neutral fog, when bombarded, 24/7, with global catastrophe and panicky headlines.
Just as it can be hard to get wound up in London about freak weather in the southern hemisphere, it testifies to a human failing (or at least in me) that panic in a city 5,000 miles away, however terrible, is simply too remote to activate my panic buttons.