Victor Meldrew!

by Pseud O'Nym

Yesterday it was reported that so far, the confirmed number of coronavirus cases worldwide now stands at 1.5million. 1.5million? Is that all?

As good fortune would have it, a couple of days earlier a housemate had clarified what exactly a billion is. I’d always thought it meant a million millions but no, it seems that the accepted measure of a billion is a thousand million. So I was wrong by quite a wide margin, some 999,000 millions wrong, it would seem.

Anyway my point is that if a billion is a thousand million, then 1.5 million expressed as a percentage of that is 0.15%. I think. Maths was never my thing. So therefore it stands that if the global population totals over 7 billion, then that percentage becomes smaller still. I know, completely meaningless numbers, cold, factual and boring. So lets try and render it more relatable, something we can all understand.

It’s not likely to happen, but imagine if I presented LMS with a chocolate gateaux, a triple layered one with cream filling and raspberries and said to her “ Right, here’s the deal, if this cake represents the total population of the world, you can have as a slice of it that’s proportionate to the amount of confirmed coronavirus cases in the world.”

Happy she would not be.

It does rather astound me, this notion that human life is sacred, that all human lives are somehow equally important. It is both patently absurd, and in this new reality dangerously naive. Of course they’re not! For one thing a child of 8 or 18 has more life in them, more potential than someone who’s 88. It seems blatantly obvious to me, anyway. Just so you know, my Mum is 88 and she freely admits she’s had her life. And given how were constantly reminded of the need to protect the NHS, shouldn’t one the ways we can help it, is not to squander finite resources a finite amount of resources available to the NHS, shouldn’t these prioritised to be used on the most potential for life? This may seem unspeakably harsh to some reading this, but detached and rational thinking is what we need now, not emotion and sentiment clouding our decision-making capability.

Anyone over the age of, what do they say in the bible, four score and ten? Well however much that is then, anyone over that gets the virus well, lets just hope they’ve made a will!