Picture Of The Day #43

“Hong Kong Flu-y, number one super virus,

Hong Kong Flu-y, quicker than the human brain,

Oh, it’s got style, a groovy smile and spread that just won’t stop,

When the going gets rough, it’s super tough,

With the Hong Kong Flu-y chop.” See here.

In March 1933, after becoming president of the USA in the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt declared..

“So first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself – nameless, unreasoning terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

The response to Covid19 appears to be the exact opposite of President Roosevelt’s injunction.

I am not downplaying Covid19 but, as I wrote in They Walk Among Us, we need to get a sense of perspective. The Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century killed up to 200,000,000 people and perhaps 60% of the European population. As I write (16/3/20) Covid19 has killed about 6,500 people worldwide.

During the Black Death, people looked for answers in the position of the planets, whipped themselves bloody to show ‘god’ they truly repented the ‘sins’ that had caused him/her/it to send the plague and murdered Jewish people who were accused of poisoning their water. Has the human race moved on in the past seven centuries?  In the past week, I have personally witnessed…

• people buying huge amounts of toilet paper to cope with a respiratory disease;
• idiots using anti-bacterial wipes on a chair and table as a defence against a virus;

And online…

• ostentatious displays of hygiene, for example Naomi Campbell…
• a nightmarish doom-mongering from the mainstream media who appear to want this virus to wipe out millions.

The ‘cure’ has become worse than the disease. The hysteria is feeding off itself. Time to get a grip.

(PS – The only positive I can see in all this hysteria is that if the football is cancelled, Liverpool will be denied the title for yet another season).