The last time I remember seeing a high street so sparsely populated was on a Wednesday afternoon in the 1970s. Wednesday used to be early closing day in England, until someone realised that people actually wanted to buy stuff on Wednesday afternoons as well as all the other days. The number of cars parked along the road was reminiscent of the same era, when every household didn’t own even one car.

Driving along the narrow country lanes today I slowed to pass another vehicle, at the tightest part of the bottleneck the person driving the other car closed their window as I came alongside. Presumably it was so I couldn’t sneeze into her car as I passed.

There are people driving around in their cars, alone, wearing industrial dust masks, I am certain there is no rational reason for this odd behaviour. There is a level of hysteria at the moment that has infected the country and is worse than the virus. It makes otherwise normal people stockpile huge numbers of toilet rolls based on nothing more than a rumour on some social media platform. These same people take to Twitter and tweet ‘if you leave your house you are literally killing people, literally murdering them’.

The government line now is that staying home will save lives, a statement that has as little bearing on real truth as most of the Brexit campaign. It is a non-sequitur that does not stand up to reasonable scrutiny, I have left my house every day since things were ‘tightened up’ and no one has died as a result. This proves to me that they are not being completely honest.

The way that disease is transmitted is well documented and has been understood for a long time now. The days are long gone when it was thought that some magical ‘miasma’ caused cholera, and yet it seems many believe this virus is transmitted across open space by thought transference or osmosis, or even magic. Despite the government ‘experts’ talking about the water droplets that are sprayed out when the infected person sneezes, hence the two-metre rule, no one listens. The message I get is that you cannot give it to me unless you cough on me, ergo, if you’re not sneezing or coughing, I am safe.

Tonight there was a queue at the supermarket, people standing two-metres apart were waiting patiently until someone left so another could be permitted to enter. For the record, not one of those present was sneezing or coughing or even looked slightly ill.

Large groups within society are behaving in a bizarre and irrational way, they are not questioning the rationale behind the orders issued by Boris the Liar. When I make the point about how this virus is spread, and the pointlessness of these restrictions on movement, the vague response is that it’s better to be careful. Like sheep, they follow the one on Facebook with the most followers.

If there is an angry tone to this piece it is because I am angry. For no really good reason my home and business are being thrown into upheaval. The numbers that are quoted about this virus are not scaring me, in fact, if the figures were to be seen in context they would appear as they really are, nothing to worry about. 400,000 cases worldwide in a population of 7.8 billion is too small to even consider as a thing. In the UK, 400 deaths in two months in a population of 60 million doesn’t even figure. Between January and April in 2019 there were 185,000 deaths recorded in England and Wales combined, 400 deaths wasn’t even a high number of deaths in one small area in a four month period last year let alone the whole country.

Death is of course an emotive issue, and when you talk about death people get scared. It hurts when someone close to you dies. I have recent experience of this, one of my sisters died last year, it was quite devastating and I didn’t even like her. But the point is that people do die all the time, and it is good to face the fear of death and not be dominated by it. We are having all of the liberties that we have fought, and yes, died, for, removed wholesale by this minor health scare. Private businesses are being made to stop trading for no good reason, the police are enforcing this like some kind of fascist group might have done in the 30s.

Last year my eldest daughter caught a bug and lost 10kg in four days, she gave it to her two sisters, to me, and to her mum. None of us had it as bad as she did, which is only fair because she started it, but we were all struck down and were very ill. There is no way that this new virus is worse than what she had, and yet there was no huge scare about that. Flu kills many thousands every year worldwide, we know that it does and yet there are never precautions taken like this to stop a particular strain.

The media and social media have had a huge part to play in spreading this hysteria. China, where it apparently surfaced first, although it certainly didn’t, has now returned to ‘normal’ after having 3281 deaths, caused apparently by this disease. This figure equates to 2 people per million head of population, so close to zero it could almost disappear. Italy has had 7,500 deaths at a rate of 124 per million head of population, again, an insignificant number when looked at in context, and without the emotive ‘D word’ that gets everyone thinking about life without dear old mum. Of course we have to look at the figures from home, the UK has had 435 deaths so far, which equates to 6 deaths per million head of population, while not quite as low a ratio as China’s, still pretty petty numbers.

It is hard for me to think that we are not being played for fools here. The country closed down for something as minor and unimportant as this. An illness that wouldn’t even appear on the world disease league table if they hadn’t given it a name and whipped it up into this huge bogeyman. Last year, 2019, in the UK there were 1,870 deaths recorded from RTAs, and 27,820 serious injuries on the roads. Published figures show that 480,000 people died in the US last year from smoking, this includes 41,000 who succumbed from inhaling someone else’s smoke. Approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women die each year from alcohol in the US. These things happen year upon year, so now tell me how bad this fucking virus is.

I am not going to go into all the conspiracy ideas that I have heard relating to the WHO (led by Merck pharma), the IMF, the World Bank, or any of the myriad groups who stand to gain from the kind of tipping up of the Monopoly board that we are witnessing here. I will let you (if anyone ever reads this, after all, it’s one reader in as one comes out on this blog) decide for yourselves what is really going on. However, I will ask you not to be seduced by the emotional blandishments that are being thrown around about ‘the vulnerable’ in our society. We are all the vulnerable of society when it comes to the bullying by these world organisations.

DON’T BE FOOLED BY THE LIES