NOT THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

A month or so ago, I’d put the radio on and listen to the number of fatalities in China. I distinctly remember a day when it was 6. Then 22. Then there were cases of Coronavirus outside China; then later, deaths in Asia, and eventually of course, Europe.

It felt a bit like the opening montage to a zombie movie: the news reporters go from bemusement, to mild panic, to apocalypse... before anyone has chance to count how quickly the numbers are going up. Now it’s global, the tidal wave reaches us. So far there have been 3 deaths in our country, and over 300 infections.

We’re at the stage where there’s no toilet roll in the supermarkets.

Oh, not because this virus makes you... any more fluid... (heavens above)... but more because the government have told us to self-isolate for 14 days if we get the sniffles - just to contain this thing. It will impact everyone, though 95% of us will simply shake it off.

And everyone everywhere here has had the same predictive nightmare of running out of ‘essentials’ (toilet rolls and pasta, apparently) during our ‘inevitable’ two-week house arrest. Airing cupboards in the UK are popping open with tumbling packs of Charmin Ultra.

Meanwhile, as a precaution, work have asked us all to try working from home on Wednesday, like a sort of enforced snow-day. They want to see whether that the infrastructure will fall over if we’re all of us self-isolating. It’s pretty serious then.

I do not wish to self-isolate. I can barely survive a Saturday in my own company; two whole weeks of nobody is going to send me potty. What will I do?

It’s worth it though, if it saves some lives. The latest figures show a less than 1% chance of serious consequences for me, but the over 70s have a much higher probability, at something like 8% - two weeks of barmy-living in the porthole cabin of a first-floor maisonette with a set of pencils and a piano isn’t a hardship. Not if it can reduce that 8% significantly.

And it isn’t the zombie apocalypse. It’s just a really horrible bug. There are no stumbling, half-eaten monsters wailing through the streets, seeking out the uncontaminated en masse.

If there were though, it’s good to know that we’d all be stocked up enough to fend them off with toilet roll.