Today I declined an invitation to join a ‘Coronavirus’ Facebook group. This is despite reading that last week an infected individual supposedly visited our city of Karmiel, Galilee.
I refused because the present panic is worse than the disease and alarm about the virus has – well - gone viral - via social media!
Like almost every other ill that besets us, the naïve public, hysteria and scaremongering are being sloshed wide, thick and slab by media outlets desperate for a devoted following which in turn is famished for want of something fresh to read. What better way of feeding us than via stories of war, starvation – and pandemic disease?
Here is the truth:
At time of writing, there have been 107,490 recorded cases of COVID-19 Coronavirus worldwide, causing 3,652 deaths but with 60,914 patients who have reportedly recovered.
Any patient, let alone any fatality, is one too many, but these numbers are miniscule compared to the ‘Spanish ‘Flu’ pandemic of 1918-1920 that killed as many as 100 million people “making it one of the deadliest epidemics in human history”.
There were few families who were not somehow affected and the untimely passing of my husband’s paternal grandmother from the virus in Manchester meant that her daughter became an instant ‘little mother’ to her siblings.
However the present pandemic started, it can be contained better than those in the past, first by us all taking care of personal hygiene and also by the medical authorities learning from the mistakes of their predecessors. I do not, for example, consider telling those of us aged 65-plus to stay at home, indoors, to be good advice!
So I repeat: The worst mistake is to cause unnecessary fear – especially here in Israel - where, whatever natural threats we face, we are anyway forced to live in a permanent state of preparedness for war.
© Natalie Wood (08 March 2020)
No comments:
Post a Comment