On 31st December 2019, a new disease emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Its pathogen was a novel virus, eventually named Covid-19. It was present in animal species, but managed to jump the species barrier to humans, who have no natural immunity against the virus. Over a period of weeks, 80,000 people in China contracted the virus, and 4,000 died. A world-wide spread was only a matter of time, and as I type this, the numbers of people known to have contracted Covid-19 in Europe is in the thousands, with Italy topping the league table with over 12,000 cases. Containing, delaying, mitigating the spread of the disease is the order of the day. In the majority of cases, the virus only causes mild illness. Those who are badly affected required intensive care in hospital, something that is straining the Italian health service almost beyond breaking point. That lies in waiting for countries like Spain, France, Germany - and the UK - in a matter of weeks. The government in the USA has handled the outbreak with a mixture of denial, incompetence and blame laying, with a travel ban imposed to travellers from Europe, except from the UK (which has nearly 600 cases confirmed).
I take the liberty of stating that Covid-19 will prove to be the biggest challenge of our time, and will most likely disrupt society as we know it at least temporarily, if not permanently. Air travel seems to be suffering very badly, as does tourism, with bookings in the Isle of Skye (50 miles south of my position) down 50% from previous years.
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