This isn’t Armageddon – wise precautions and common sense will see us through this crisis

The advertisement on my inbox offers me “step-by-step” funeral planning guides.

Heigh-ho. I suppose whoever posted it may do more than usually good business just now. Then I read elsewhere that the government is proposing to buy more land ”to free up room for extra graveyards”. This news was in The Mail on Sunday. So it must be from the horse’s mouth. Next it seems that we old folk may be put under what may in effect be house arrest for four months – for our own good of course.

Then, just as I wonder if we are all going mad, which may of course be the case, I read a jolly piece by Hunter Davies in which he cheerfully reports that, ignoring gloomy warnings from his nearest and dearest, he took a train from Euston to Keswick to give a talk about Wordsworth. He doesn’t say how many turned up to listen, but I would bet there were quite a few. Wordsworthians know about the mutability of fortune. The Old Sheep of the Lake District, as Rumpole used lovingly to call him, having remarked that “full many a glorious morning have I seen” turn into a dirty afternoon – or something like that. Good for Hunter anyway; he’s even older than I am.

Now I know that we all love a drama and a crisis, those of us in the media, or connected with it, especially. Politicians likewise. I recall President Kennedy’s excitement when he was about to okay the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Inviting Richard Nixon, as the de facto leader of the Republican Party, into the Oval Office for a briefing, he said, “this is the real thing, isn’t it? I mean who gives a shit about the minimum wage and that sort of thing when there’s stuff like this going on?.”

All right, the authority for this is Nixon – it’s in his memoirs. Nevertheless, I believe it. It rings true. Who indeed?

Our Prime Minister has told us, doubtless with a tear in his eye or tremor in his voice, that many of us will suffer the loss of loved ones.

Indeed, yes, that’s the way it goes. Last month – February, that is – before the Coronavirus got going here, 4,715 deaths were registered in Scotland. In 2018 there were 616,014 deaths in the UK, the daily toll being around 1400. Some doubtless, if sadly, weren’t much loved or mourned.

Nevertheless, Time, the old Grim Reaper, cuts a swathe through loved ones every day. At the moment of writing there have been 55 deaths from Coronavirus in the UK.

The number will rise of course, probably quite steeply, and it will continue to rise for weeks, perhaps for several months. But let us keep a sense of proportion. It’s not bubonic plague, the Black Death, which in the 1340s is estimated to have killed about a third of the population. So far, the evidence worldwide suggests that 97 or 98 per cent of those who contract the virus recover. Almost all of people’s loved ones will have a few days in bed feeling rotten, and then be up and about again. Any of us, any of us oldies especially, may be in the unlucky  2 or 3 per cent who die, but most of us already know our days are numbered.

Of course, it makes sense to take precautions and many of the recommendations from the government, health authorities and other experts are sensible, even if some seem to break the bonds of reason. Ministers speak of requiring people over seventy to go into purdah. Does this really seem necessary? Who, one immediately wonders, is going to walk the dog? And what if we meet other dog-walkers and chat with them as the dogs insist we do?

As for talk about the Spirit of the Blitz, this is merely tiresome and silly. There is no Luftwaffe raining bombs on our cities and we are not going to cram into bomb-shelters or sleep in the Underground. Nor are we under siege. Better advice would be to keep calm and smell the flowers. Instead, the more politicians speak of this epidemic as the most severe crisis we have faced since I don’t know when, the more likely it is that common sense will reassert itself and rebel.

In Scotland, the First Minister has already banned gatherings of more than 500 –a number that seems to have been plucked out of the air. It’s quite probable that you will find yourself in close contact with as many people in a  crowd of 500 as in one of a thousand or ten thousand. It would be interesting to know how many people were infected at Cheltenham on Gold Cup day last week.

Again, it may be sensible that people should work from home when this is possible. For many this can’t be done. You can’t clean the streets or work on a building-site from your kitchen or sitting-room. Supermarket shelves can’t be filled from home. A racehorse trainer at Kempton Park on Saturday pointed out that horses have to be fed and exercised by stable-staff. One of his owners, aged ninety-two, remarked that he thought we had all gone soft. At his age, he, unlike Messrs Johnson and Hancock, actually experienced war and wartime conditions. He may have a point.

Be sensible, certainly. Restrict your social activities certainly. Take such precautions as seem advisable. But don’t let’s exaggerate. We are experiencing an epidemic which won’t directly affect millions, an epidemic which, on the evidence we have, will kill at most three out of every hundred people who contract the virus, most of whom so far are reported to have “pre-existing conditions”. It’s worrying and, for some, understandably frightening. But it’s not Armageddon.