It isn't the End of the World, but it is Going to Change

This is just the start of it.

Already there's a sense of panic spreading through the streets of the UK. Things like this don't happen to us. This is something that happens somewhere else. But let's buy lots of toilet paper and penne just in case.

There are going to be shortages in all kinds of crazy things. I reckon by the end of April there will be a bog paper shortage; the shops will fail to keep up with demand. There will be loads of shortages; everyday things that are rationed to prevent bulk buying and this will be because, at some point, we're going to stop getting deliveries from abroad. There is already a partial world wide travel ban and you can bet that before this blog sees a week in the world that it will probably be globally enforced. Countries will isolate; businesses will be destroyed and lives will be ruined and all with a background of a deadly disease cutting a swathe through humanity like it isn't really there.

Brexit may well have been a utopia considering what we're facing over the next few months. At the moment we're seeing a limited number of deaths - not even 10,000 or so, but that is going to grow exponentially over the next month and then even faster during May. I am going to be lucky to see this year out, especially with my underlying health issues. If I do, I'm going to see a world turned back almost 500 years in some cases - yes, the technology will still be there and it will be used, but trade between any country will become difficult; borders will be heavily guarded; deadly force will be used. Everyone will become the enemy, even if they come bearing wanted gifts.

It seems unlikely now and that might seem a tad melodramatic, but get used to your world for as long as you can because it is going to change. Hell, it's even going to change for the people in charge. Until COVID-19 is done with - and there's no threat of a COVID-20 - the countries of the world will quickly isolate from each other. If people are involved in physical transactions, it will stop or slow down to a snail's pace, at best. People will starve; diets and nutrition will be obliterated - we will eat what is available and learn to accept this because people we know will have died and many of us will be scared, literally to death.

All the while, people who haven't caught it will be panicking they will. There will be a weird self-isolation that will involve people mingling with each other on streets and in shops without wanting to share the same planet. Running the gauntlet of others will become generational. The young will disobey directives and they will find whatever means they can to circulate with each other under the knowledge they probably won't die. But for older people, paranoia will become a deadly form of reason and we won't fail in touching each other, whether in love or anger - everybody will be viewed as someone who might have come into contact with a carrier.

The safety of people will be forgotten about when mob rule takes over in isolated communities. When you limit who is allowed in or whether you'll be allowed back. The future is fucking scary.

There will be no entertainment except repeats; the film industry will dry up; it will shut down until it's safe not to. TV will be affected, as will the radio. Entertainment will become automated and regurgitated. No sport; no music events or festivals, no sitting in the park, no meandering round town window shopping, no going to the pub and subsequently places like pubs, clubs, venues, etc will shut up shop; close down, lay people off, adding to the problems. More work will be done from home; less emergency plumbing, heating and lighting will be done and everything will become slow, painful and fearful. Something going wrong will go from a minor inconvenience to something potentially very bad. Will a plumber want to come into your 'space' to fix your problem when you might infect him and he might infect his children or his elderly mother? Paranoia will become an excuse for lethargy, self-absorption and fear of the unknown person being worse than the known one.

Then perhaps a siege mentality will set in and many isolated areas with no sign of the virus will shut themselves off; only allowing deliveries while drivers still work. Because what if it got so bad there wasn't enough people to work in public places? Supermarkets that manage to stock enough might find they have no staff or no willing staff to face potential carriers by the truckload. People will self-isolate even if they have a cold and could end up self isolating until they actually catch it. Nothing will get done very fast and everything will begin to crumble. Even if the government throws enough money at it, people are shit scared and you need people to be involved in the usage of that money.

If 1% of the country die from it that's 700,000 give or take. If that figure rises to 3% that's over 2million people. The government's own health experts believe 80% of us will eventually catch the virus between now and probably the spring of next year. There are a lot of people who fall into the risk, high risk and very high risk categories and at least half of those won't make it. I have a lung condition, I'm high risk. My brother has high blood pressure, a heart condition and is nearly ten years older than me, he's very high risk. My other brother is a cancer survivor, he has a compromised immune disease; he's in his early 60s, he's fit and he's likely to get it first; he's still high risk like me, but of the three of us, I fancy his chances the best. I know too many people who fall into all three risk categories and that scares the shit out of me.

The other thing is, if the country effectively shuts down, like Wuhan was, not only will we struggle for everyday items and potentially large swathes of staff and a massive number of businesses shutting down; there will also be the boredom for the population. There will be utter financial turmoil and stock markets will be wiped out and a global recession like no one ever imagined will begin, which will last the length of the virus and about a year after. The knock-on effect of the virus's ability to instal fear and panic will be the dismantling of the world's economic value and causing a lot more deaths through association. Our NHS is not equipped for a pandemic and even if it was, what about all the other patients who need treatment; the people in hospital to get better, recovering or the ones who will need hospitals in the future, when the virus is at its peak? What happens when nursing homes are affected even if they're not infected, or retirement villages or anywhere that requires people to be helping other people with anything from occupational to physical.

The country will begin to look like those grainy black and white pictures of the Soviet Union with people queuing for bread rations, but with added paranoia and at least six feet between each person. and that is because society, for all it is built on is just dominoes. That's what society is. It's a precarious and complicated set of dominoes with failsafes built in to ensure there isn't a catastrophic collapse. Something like this doesn't acknowledge the failsafes; they don't exist as far as the coronavirus is concerned. Politicians might survive; businessman might get through this; but for the very average life's about to get very fragile and very very unsafe...

My Latest Conspiracy Theory

Anyone who regularly reads this column will know that from time to time I've been forecasting a war. It seemed to be the logical outcome to all the madness and the rise of the Right, a group not renowned for being peaceful, caring types. However, over the last few months, the chances of war seem to have receded; not necessarily disappeared, just pushed back into the cold area of war rather than the blisteringly hot deadly version.

The thing is the world hasn't improved - regardless of what you might hear from the Union Jack flying geeza down the pub - it is still growing in divisions, inequality and is no longer a very safe place to be and that could be what a lot of the powerful world leaders want...

It's a long game. One that might benefit the children or grandchildren of your Johnsons and Rees-Moggs, but for the rest of us it will seem like the 2010s were the last good years any of us ever had. That long game, as I said, no longer involves war - it's just too complicated and there are far too many variables in wars; they're difficult to control and today's modern Right, like to control things.

What we do have is a growing worldwide population; a continuation of people living in specific places, increasing that problem exponentially. It has always been that the ultimate outcome of a war has been mass population decrease, but without wars how do you do that? How can you regulate society and its numbers?

How about spreading a virus - controlled - throughout the world, that will essentially kill off as many old, infirm and chronically ill people as possible with no one really taking the blame for it, even if we can blindly point the finger at the Chinese...

That appears to be what the Coronavirus or Covid-19 seems to be doing. From humble beginnings in Wuhan to full scale emergencies in Iran, Italy, cruise ships and isolated places that seemingly have had no contact with infected people or areas, this latest virus appears to spreading across the world like some apocalyptic novel by Stephen King...

Ask yourself a question: how many of you have seen a film or TV series or read a book about a plague? I should think there are a few of us. What is the underlying lesson that is steadfastly ignored? Make sure your quarantines are just that and make sure your plague stays in one place and not allowed to move all over the world. With Ebola, restrictions were so high that the few people allowed out of infected Africa were literally wrapped in plastic and kept in isolation wards, so isolated, that the experts treating the infected were literally boiled to ensure they were sterilized. The thing about Ebola is it doesn't discriminate - old, young, well or unwell, if you get Ebola then there's a pretty good chance you'll be dead or very ill for a long time with consequences to your long term health. With the coronavirus, it appears that the healthier you are the less chance you have of contracting it; so that makes me an obvious statistic if it continues to run rampant across the world killing more and more people.

Why then, for example, has the UK government been flying people out of China and stuffing them in a not-very isolated building on the Wirral (quite close to Liverpool, a constant thorn in the side of most Tory regimes)? I mean, if you had plague would you be housing the infected in a 'containment' unit as close to a large populated area or would you be saying to these people, the country it started is best placed to look after you, sorry, but the risk to everyone else is too great?

Yes, that sounds heartless, especially if you know someone who might be affected, but the UK government allowed Coventry to be obliterated during WW2 to ensure the Nazis didn't realise we'd broken their codes. The war might have gone a much different way had we defended Coventry and allowed the Germans to develop another code that we couldn't break...

The thing about disease is we know it mutates; it changes and develops in a way that confounds scientists and doctors; so the logical thing is NOT to pack loads of Brits on a plane, fly them home and then stick them on a coach and ship them to a place near a load of unaffected people. If that happened in a film, you'd be screaming at the screen saying 'don't be so fucking stupid!'

Now, I'm not suggesting this is a massive conspiracy perpetrated by the leaders of the world's biggest regimes, but we live in an age where a huge amount of us believe any old shit that's put in the papers or on TV. We live in an age where a failed supermodel can say her kid got autism from a vaccine so a huge amount of people would rather believe her than 99.99% of all health practitioners. We live in an age where people believe the moon landings were faked, despite all the thousands of people who worked on them never once letting slip they were paid or were threatened with their lives if they revealed the truth. The problem with any conspiracy theory is a) people want to believe them because they're either too stupid or lazy to research it themselves or b) once you start to question the logistics of one you realise that it's more about your personal belief than actual science fact.

Take flat earthers for starters. Personally, I think flat earthers are just people who want NASA to offer them a free trip into space. I know a flat earther and boy is she beyond barking mad...

But... spreading a virus around the world is actually less of a conspiracy theory and more of a 'look out of your window' kind of thing. It doesn't need hundreds and thousands of people to keep a secret; it involves one or two people working in a lab in a place like China or Kazakhstan, with access to all manner of nasty things. In a world where we have an awful lot of borderline psychopaths simply wandering the streets, what odds that one of these 'well, he seemed perfectly normal' people could actually just literally drop a bombshell in the form of bacteria?

Every day the coronavirus appears to be killing off more people, infecting new areas and, if the press is anything to go by - and they're usually not - it's now appearing in isolated places and could well be mutating, the way the flu has a habit of doing. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 killed between 20 and 50 million people worldwide... Just think about that: 20 to 50 million. The population of the UK is only 66 million and the Spanish flu hit the planet when the population of the entire world was less than 2 billion; we're close to 8 billion now...

Personally, if I had my way I'd shut all of our borders and stop people from coming in - not in a Brextremist kind of way, more in a let's protect our citizens until someone comes up with a vaccine way. Films might often be far-fetched nonsense, but in general they do moralise about the incompetence of mankind in situations such as this; it appears that we are indeed more stupid than we're portrayed in films.