Coronavirus

Got to say there seems a very poor attitude to this from the very beginning. It is almost as though the global media reporting is largely based about accepting every new case and adding up each death. I know media tend to focus on ‘fear’ as their default tone for almost any topic of story covered….but in this instance they may have got it right.

I was surprised in the earliest days that there was not a lot more done to devise a policy of shutting down travel and free movement. It was spoken about in the first few weeks as being an unknown virus, which is always a concern.

It was weeks before the area of China were it started was identified, so many people went to and from the region which meant the virus was able to cross borders and countries and infect as it went.

I’ve no doubt that in the ‘bigger picture’ we are still in the infancy of coronavirus. It has shown its ability to affect any creed, colour, class and religion.

Science is working hard but there is no cure as yet and it could be that one never comes, like the common cold.

The concern now is that the advice from World Health or even on a country by country level is extremely inconsistent. We are now months into this and no definitive policies are really in place, nobody is saying exactly what to do and so consequently the spread continues across the globe. Three months on now, isn’t it time we get some hard instructions as to what to do? An example is that a colleague has just returned from Venice, his wife has been told by her employer not to come to work but he is at work and their child is at school.

SARS started in China too, was contained better but this time around all parties concerned seem to be not taking action until too long afterwards plus whatever anyone decides to do seems to be decided on a whim without measures to have stopped it travelling the globe.

If it really has the potential to kill huge numbers of the population shouldn’t we already be taking matters far more seriously and dealing with the issues that can cause it to keep spreading into new territories?

Should we be more cautious of going on holiday? It is nice to get away but would you go if you knew loved ones might sucumb? Why are mass sporting events still allowed to go ahead with thousands stood in close proximity to one another? The IOC is saying the Olympics in Japan are going ahead as planned but surely the virus needs to be prioritized and given the seriousness it should have gotten in the first place. Sport is not a matter of life and death.

It is a pandemic and should be labelled as such so the procedures that brings can then be given to those preventing its global distribution.