The global pandemic we are currently experiencing has brought us all low in many ways. The fear of becoming measured as a statistic, dying a particularly disturbing death, the lungs filling with mucus which are own immune system has manufactured
in response to the virus is not pleasant. It's also emotionally challenging to recognise that whilst this is a war of survival, unlike a conventional war where the enemy is identifiable as the enemy here the enemy could be a neighbour, a friend or a member
of your own family.
It's this sinister all pervasive aspect which frightens us most. We see on our televisions the destruction and loss of life in Syria and Yemen but it's a conflict between men and these conflicts have gone on since time began. Of course our war with infection
has always been with us. The lives lost in tropical countries due to unsanitary water or bugs inflict a terrible price on anyone living a poverty stricken life but it all usually flies under our radar, other than when we see the terrible pictures issued by
the charity industry in search of donations.
The Spanish flue pandemic in 1918 infected 500 million people and killed 50 million.
In World War One there were 40 million casualties of whom 20 million died but this pales in comparison to the 70 million who were killed in the Second World War.
Death on this scale often loses much of its significance through time and the fact that in war the combatants are recognisable as other men usually seen as a collective from another country. Virus's loses that collective identity and become indiscriminate.
Cholera, Bubonic plague, Smallpox are some of the most brutal killers seen on earth with Smallpox fore instance racking up an astonishing death toll of 300 to 500 million people over the decades it's been around. On this scale our virus is relatively benign and given the
strides in modern medicine we are confident we can disengage it by use of a vaccine. In the days of the bubonic plague no one knew what was causing the deaths and still less how to overcome it, now a days we have the confidence that mankind will find solutions
and we generally leave it to the experts to do just that.
The damage to the economy is also repairable but in the course of repair many businesses will die and not recover. Our collective memory will mark this time, I hope not only as a time when we lost the opportunity to do the things we expect to be able
to do but also we will gain the realisation that much of what we do is inconsequential and hedonistic. Perhaps being able to reassess our perspective is a small price to pay
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