At some point over the last couple of weeks I’ve stopped merely writing science fiction stories and started living in one. The Lord Chamberlain has shut the bawdy houses and we’re all meant to keep at least six feet apart, like magnets of the same polarity, if we want to avoid ending up six feet under.
Here in the UK, like many nations, there has been a swift ratcheting up of preventative measures. At the start of last week my 16-year old was revising for exams; he’s now had a muted celebration for the end of the academic year. My 14-year old left school on Tuesday lunchtime for the orthodontist, fully expecting to show off a mouthful of teeth devoid of braces the next day. She never went back, and nobody knows when she will.
We’re told to hope for 20,000 deaths but fear at least ten times that. My mind keeps flipping back to the fact that the infection rate is somewhere around 0.005%; in my area of Torbay last time I looked deaths and infections can still be counted on two hands. But is that because of the measures we’re taking, or evidence that those measures are disproportionate? I can’t help thinking that there appears to be some political one-upmanship internationally, no leader wishing to be seen to advocate anything more lax than the nation next door. Even if that mitigation is belt, braces and then some.
Seasonal flu takes an average of around 17,000 a year in England. That’s an average, of course; last year’s toll was more like 1700, so mere reversion to the mean suggests 20,000 this year could be expected anyway. And those figures quoted above include some who would have died anyway. You can’t die twice. If Coronavirus is twice as scary as seasonal flu, then do twice as much as you did to ward off that (what’s that I hear? nothing, you say? never heard it mentioned in the news?). Quarantine the sickly and isolate the vulnerable, sure, but can’t life go on for the rest of us? No? Really? I can’t help thinking that we’re acting like an immortal species that has discovered the possibility of death for the first time...
But rules are rules, and we’re watching more tellybox than usual. On the subject of which, I was slightly shaken by the claim made in Kevin McCloud’s Rough Guide to the Future (doesn’t pre-Covid 19 TV seem so... quaint) that we’re heading for 10 billion people on the planet within my lifetime. That, to me, is scarier than the coronavirus. The more rationally callous part of my brain can’t help thinking that the best thing for the human race in the long term is a bloody good prune. Indeed, HM the Q has urged us to come together for the common good, which I interpret as meaning wiping out the last of the generation that remembers the war. I may have misunderstood. I’d rather it were by lowering the birth rate rather than upping departures, but China’s bio-weapon development overspill (sorry, sorry... I meant Mother Nature) may have other, more efficient and effective ideas.
As for the future, who knows? The optimist in me says the so-called Spanish Flu was followed by the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties rather than a new Dark Age. The pessimist says than mankind may no longer be the planet’s apex predator. Whichever it is, I wish you well over the coming weeks and months.
Here in the UK, like many nations, there has been a swift ratcheting up of preventative measures. At the start of last week my 16-year old was revising for exams; he’s now had a muted celebration for the end of the academic year. My 14-year old left school on Tuesday lunchtime for the orthodontist, fully expecting to show off a mouthful of teeth devoid of braces the next day. She never went back, and nobody knows when she will.
We’re told to hope for 20,000 deaths but fear at least ten times that. My mind keeps flipping back to the fact that the infection rate is somewhere around 0.005%; in my area of Torbay last time I looked deaths and infections can still be counted on two hands. But is that because of the measures we’re taking, or evidence that those measures are disproportionate? I can’t help thinking that there appears to be some political one-upmanship internationally, no leader wishing to be seen to advocate anything more lax than the nation next door. Even if that mitigation is belt, braces and then some.
Seasonal flu takes an average of around 17,000 a year in England. That’s an average, of course; last year’s toll was more like 1700, so mere reversion to the mean suggests 20,000 this year could be expected anyway. And those figures quoted above include some who would have died anyway. You can’t die twice. If Coronavirus is twice as scary as seasonal flu, then do twice as much as you did to ward off that (what’s that I hear? nothing, you say? never heard it mentioned in the news?). Quarantine the sickly and isolate the vulnerable, sure, but can’t life go on for the rest of us? No? Really? I can’t help thinking that we’re acting like an immortal species that has discovered the possibility of death for the first time...
But rules are rules, and we’re watching more tellybox than usual. On the subject of which, I was slightly shaken by the claim made in Kevin McCloud’s Rough Guide to the Future (doesn’t pre-Covid 19 TV seem so... quaint) that we’re heading for 10 billion people on the planet within my lifetime. That, to me, is scarier than the coronavirus. The more rationally callous part of my brain can’t help thinking that the best thing for the human race in the long term is a bloody good prune. Indeed, HM the Q has urged us to come together for the common good, which I interpret as meaning wiping out the last of the generation that remembers the war. I may have misunderstood. I’d rather it were by lowering the birth rate rather than upping departures, but China’s bio-weapon development overspill (sorry, sorry... I meant Mother Nature) may have other, more efficient and effective ideas.
As for the future, who knows? The optimist in me says the so-called Spanish Flu was followed by the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties rather than a new Dark Age. The pessimist says than mankind may no longer be the planet’s apex predator. Whichever it is, I wish you well over the coming weeks and months.
