I wrote this two years ago today

Thursday 5th March 2020

The Coronavirus is serious.

Irrespective of what you hear on Fox News or via keyboard warriors, it is serious and will kill a lot of people. And not necessarily those you thin. Such viruses can mutate and turn on the young and healthy. If the infection and mortality rates are correct, then over one million American will die. Far from being under control, it is everything but.

My employers are taking it seriously: they issue a weekly update from International SOS and that is advocating cutting out any air travel, face to face meetings, and that advice is a week old. It is likely that there will be no international travel for months, and that my audits for the summer will all be scrapped.

Coronavirus is a variant of the flu, but not like any flu you have seen. It has a mortality rate ten times that of normal flu, with the serious symptoms, a rasping cough and shortage of breath coming after the first flu-like signs.

News and advice changes on a daily basis, so any kind of planning is impossible. People have trained their whole life for a situation like this, there are plans and algorithms that people have learned and will act upon. Trump tells the US population to go to work if infected.

If followed, hundreds of thousands more people will be infected, and thousands more will die. Tonight it emerged some countries like Italy and Korea has tested tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, the US has tested 1,895 people in the 50 states. Missouri has tested nearly 17 people.

It is madness.

But with the other madness let lose, how can tell?