Deja Vu
Nearly three years ago, after dropping my children at school I stopped at a supermarket to buy some milk. As I walked into the empty shop with my trolley (it’s never just milk), my phone pinged with a message. ‘Do you think the children and I should leave now? I’m worried they’ll stop flights to UAE’ asked a friend whose parents lived there. Having no idea what she was talking about, I called my husband who said that several of the countries surrounding Qatar, where we lived, had just announced an embargo. With 90% of the food sold in the country imported, most of it transiting through ports in Dubai, this had the potential to make life very uncomfortable although my husband believed it would blow over quite quickly. Still considering his words as I placed a bottle of milk in my trolley, I decided that it might be smart to buy a couple of extra bottles for the freezer - this was effectively my desert island moment and I knew fresh milk was the one thing my children wouldn’t accept a substitute for. I also added a loaf of bread and two packs of chicken (one for dinner, one for the freezer) to my trolley then headed to the check-out, where it was immediately apparent that we’d underestimated the impact of the news. In the time it had taken to gather my few groceries there must have been a surge of customers because at the previously empty checkouts there were now queues of people with two and even three overflowing trollies apiece!
Panic-buying customers managed to clear the supermarket shelves within three days; fortunately for us the Qatari government got creative and, recognising their need to be more self-sufficient, imported 40,000 dairy cows so my children’s supply of fresh milk never really suffered. More importantly, everything we saw in the local media about the situation was positive and reassuring so pretty quickly people stopped panicking and their shopping habits went back to normal.
Over the last week my eldest daughter has been obsessively following the British news as it reports the spread of COVID-19 (the new coronavirus) and giving me regular updates. Whilst I’m not dismissing the danger this virus poses to people with compromised immune systems, based on all the information available so far I reason that the risk to my healthy children is fairly low so am doing little more than continuing to encourage good, sensible, hygiene which will help protect everyone. If I’m honest, I’m far more concerned about the hysteria which seems to be spreading like wildfire and which is a far more dangerous. Ignoring the supermarket shelves already empty of food staples and personal hygiene products (seriously, like toilet roll will save you?!), what concerns me and what my impressionable young people are starting to notice around them are the worrying words and actions of otherwise intelligent adults. Yesterday the same daughter came home from college slightly distressed about a friend of hers. The friend suffers from asthma and was in a maths lesson when she started coughing. Possibly because of her ethnicity, rather than checking that she was OK the teacher’s immediate response was to suggest the girl might have Coronavirus and should self-isolate! He then asked for a show of hands from the other students to support his decision to exclude her from the class.
The pan-ic-demic is likely to have a far worse impact on our lives than this virus ever could (80%, or more, of cases are mild) because it’s easy to get swept along when the news is full of irresponsible headlines about police reducing their focus on ‘lesser crimes’, articles about the wave of hand sanitiser thefts from hospitals and photographs of normal people wearing surgical masks. As I said before, I’m not overly concerned about the virus but I am absolutely terrified of what this experience might be teaching our future leaders about greed, prejudice and selfishness.