Be afraid, be very afraid! After all the years of terrorising us with fake news, hysterical over-reactions and blatant lies, now the media are rubbing their hands in glee, delighted to be ramping up the fear and terrorising the nation with the 'deadly virus Covid 19' woooooo! From paedophilic bogeymen hiding around every corner, ready to snatch away your children, to the shadowy world of global terrorists, waiting for any opportunity to kill or maim or the global threat of a ‘climate emergency’ and a world about to go up in flames, they just can’t find enough to frighten us with and keep us in a state of constant fear and anxiety.
So, just to help keep a sense of perspective, these are the number of deaths from flu in the UK from 2014 - 2018
2014/15 28,330
2015/16 11,875
2016/17 18,009
2017/18 26,408
As you can see some years are worse than others depending on the strain of flu but globally, the World Health Organisation estimates that between 290,000 to 650,000 people die from the flu every year.*
The number of deaths overall in the UK for 2018 were 541,589 and the most concerning figure in these statistics is the 6507 deaths from suicide in England and Wales, a rate of 11 per 100,000 of the population but which rises to 16 per 100,000 in Scotland. As a matter of fact, males in the age bracket of 45 – 49 years are more likely to die by suicide than anything else, now that is a concerning figure; yet mental health services are starved of funding and unable to cope with the numbers seeking help with people waiting up to a year to see a counsellor.
I don’t know about you but I, for one, am sick to death of being terrorised by the media which is doing nothing to help the real mental health crisis in the country. I think most people will give it a couple of weeks and then start demanding that life get back to normal. Two weeks stuck at home with nowhere to go, is going to place an enormous strain on people especially those with children. Couple that, with the money worries of being laid off work, and you are looking at a potentially volatile cocktail of stress.
Luckily, for me, I live alone and have plenty to occupy me at home and I’m still working at time of writing or maybe not so lucky, I'd love a couple of weeks off!
In my previous post where I mentioned that I thought I already had this virus, my daughter has just told me that a girl she works with had pneumonia at Christmas and the doctor told her it was probably coronavirus, and I was speaking to a man yesterday in the supermarket queue and he thought he already had it too and knew of others who thought the same. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, will our lives be changed forever or will be another case of an hysterical media crying wolf.
And for some advice on coronavirus without the hysteria, follow the link below and I want to draw your atttention to this paragraph - Even when a coronavirus causes MERS or SARS in other countries, the kind of coronavirus infection common in the U.S. isn't a serious threat for an otherwise healthy adult. If you get sick, treat your symptoms and contact a doctor if they get worse or don't go away -
https://www.webmd.com/lung/coronavirus#2 e
*https://www.health.com/condition/cold-flu-sinus/how-many-people-die-of-the-flu-every-year