Coronavirus is a warmup
But a warmup for what?
While there are still people who say that the world is overreacting to Covid19¹, the majority of us are swept up in either the actions of our governments, the people around us and the voices in our heads.
Clearly, this is not a drill. It is the real thing, but is also a warm-up. A warm-up for what? There are a lot of opinions about this. I will cover two, and leave you with a positive one at the end.
The people who talk about this all being over reaction currently still have an argument. At the date of writing the known mortality from COVID19 is 8972 deaths in about three months. By contrast, mortality from snakebite over this period is likely to be about 20000, and 650000 from diarrhoea of which a high proportion were under 5 years of age. Compared to these figures COVID19 seems lightweight.
However, we are also seeing a pretty much 25% increase in cases per day in many affected areas. We can expect the mortality figures to go up pretty fast.
The difference is that we have become used to those other mortalities. They are slowly decreasing, and mostly ‘over there’. Personally I am not concerned that the country I live in will be flooded by Russell’s Vipers² sneaking onto planes. However, this is not the place to debate the strange maths by which we are concerned…
