Ben Lowry: Far from panicking over the coronavirus, we have been too laid back about the risks

I was thinking of coronavirus and took the car to avoid public transport which is often crammed on a route I use.

Already a notable minority of workers, in multiple different careers, are working from home, yet the car park that I sometimes use on the fringe of Belfast city centre was already full shortly after 9am.

Most days it is not full.

This suggests that there are other people who are still travelling to work, and normally use public transport, but are now avoiding close human contact by driving.

The message on coronavirus is getting through.

But it has taken a while, and there has been no shortage of people who roll their eyes and think it is clever to point out that there is no need for panic.

They will talk about the million or more people who die each year around the world annually from flu, or the risk of getting into a car.

It is true, that life is full of risk and there is no need to panic yet. But there is an obvious need for extreme vigilance, and there has been for weeks.

At the beginning of last week I travelled to an event in Dublin, and resolved not to shake anyone’s hand when I got there.

The first person I met had the same idea so that was fine. But most people were shaking hands and, after a short while, it became too awkward and stubborn-seeming to keep explaining that I was not shaking hands due to coronavirus.

It was the very same day that Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel offered her hand to her German interior minister, and was snubbed as an precaution against spread.

The political leader of one of the world’s richest and most organised societies still had not fully absorbed the risks as to have lost her instinct to extend a hand.

By this weekend, I tweeted out my surprise when handshaking was still commonplace in Belfast. By then it had been prominently reported that some experts were predicting hundreds of millions of infections globally and millions of deaths. One study said 70 million worldwide deaths is possible.

One person replied to my tweet accusing me of sanctimony and others dismissed it as if it was sign of panic.

The person who expresses anxiety about coronavirus is easily depicted as neurotic, and some people are neurotic. But such criticism itself can make erroneous assumptions about the worrier.

Plenty of us are not worried about ourselves, knowing that there seems to be a low death toll among middle aged people, and even lower among the young.

We are concerned about things such as economic collapse if widespread infection leads to a sustained moratorium on gatherings of people.

Restaurants will fold, independent traders too, and many businesses that run on tight margins. Potentially far larger entities such as airlines might collapse en masse.

There could be widespread house repossessions.

Personally I am most worried about the devastation it could wreak on older people.

A miracle of modern medicine is the stride in life expectancy, shattering the old three-score-years-and-ten. There are hundreds of millions of people aged 70+ who now have a real prospect of living fulfilled lives into their 90s, enriching their families and communities.

If the only bad thing coronavirus did was to reverse that then on those grounds alone it would be a global disaster. Imagine the horror of a rapid cull of the oldest people we know and love.

Then it becomes easier to see why we must do the small things that could help contain a virus that has probably penetrated these islands far more deeply than data yet shows.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor