I’ve been suspicious from the start. Back in March, when this novel virus first swept in from the East and countries across Europe started bolting their doors even before cases mounted, I remember saying to people, ‘Blimey, what aren’t they telling us yet?’
It was clearly killing people, but not in numbers that warranted the complete shutdown of society, I mused, as I cleared my desk and left the office for what would be – little did I know it then – seven months and counting.
We’ve had pandemics before during my lifetime. I cast my mind back to the 2009 swine flu outbreak. There was an initial flurry of panic; of media scaremongering, and yes, some deaths. But scientists quickly classified the foreign-imported pathogen as a new strain of flu and got to work making a vaccine. Life went on as normal.
Covid-19 was obviously proving to be a lot more virulent than swine flu, but even early on it was clear that the virus was sparing the vast majority of the population. Those I knew who caught it either suffered symptoms similar to a mild cold, or none at all. Bemused, as the Government set about building Nightingale hospitals that would hardly be used and Britain’s vibrant cities turned into ghost towns, I kept thinking to myself, ‘when are they going to tell us what’s really going on?’
I was waiting for a revelation that never came. Months went by and millions of tests were performed, revealing with increasing certainty that here was a virus with a very low death rate indeed. Exact approximations vary but the survival rate for Covid-19 is thought to be somewhere above 99 per cent, and maybe as high as 99.8 per cent.
The average age of someone who dies from coronavirus is 82.4, which, by the way, is nearly identical to the average life expectancy in Britain (81.1). Surely it is people in this segment of society we should be focusing on protecting, I thought, as schools closed and businesses went bust up and down the country.
It looked vaguely promising in July when restaurants, hotels and shops reopened, and when most of Europe opened its borders to international travel, but this break from the tyranny of lockdown was short-lived…
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