This time last week, I was unpacking the Wii U I had bought off eBay. Now it feels like we’re looking down the barrel of a gun. Currently, Scotland has 121 confirmed cases, and 1 death. That number is expected to exponentially rise in alignment with the outbreaks in other countries.

Up until last week, Coronavirus was a bit like SARS, Ebola, H1N1 and Zika. All things that happened far away, and while sympathy was felt, it also didn’t seem like something likely to have any effect on us in Scotland.

Then there were cases in England. For a while Scotland was spared, but now it’s here and we’re seeing the same trends here as developed everywhere else: exponential increase. The average person infects 2-3 other people and you can be infectious for up to 2 weeks before showing symptoms yourself.

So it’s scary. Every person you meet could be harbouring a dangerous virus that kills roughly 1 out of every 142 people (0.7%). Until yesterday, we were all waiting for the government to unveil their plan. The USA has closed their borders to all of Europe. North Italy is totally quarantined, with people caught outside facing serious charges up to manslaughter in some areas. The Russians are enforcing a 2 weeks quarantine on anyone coming into the country from an “at risk” country, which feels like basically everywhere. So we were all expecting something similar in the UK, but it seems like the the basic plan here is as follows:

• This is too hard to contain, so let’s just try to control the spread of the disease.
• Once people have it, they’ll be immune, so we might as well just let people get it.
• A lot of people will die, but not much can be done about that.
• We could try isolation like every other country did but this thing can drag on for months and Brits will not take to quarantine culturally; might as well just get on with it.

Which led to infographics like this on the news.

So Plan A is to let over a quarter of a million people die. The internet is calling this the world’s largest experiment in herd immunity. I don’t think that’s true but the numbers above are based on 60% infection rate, whereas other commentators are suggesting that number could be much higher.

So how are people coping. Well there is a shortage of toilet paper for some unclear reason, which the internet is busy making memes about. At first this was the only shortage, and I was pretty happy that idiots were hoarding something people could live without rather than something essential like food.

Unfortunately that hasn’t lasted. The shops have been cleared out of tinned food and pasta. I went shopping for bread this morning and the tension in the supermarket was palpable. Everyone looked scared. Even in the car park people were parking spread out, rather than as close to the door as they could get.

We’ve got a little bit of extra food, but nothing wild and we’re certainly not hoarding anything. We’re also expecting to work from home for a while. My company has sent everyone home until April 6th. We’ll have to see what the world looks like by then. People online are calling this the “world’s biggest working from home experiment”, and they’re probably right about that one at least.

So right now things are looking a bit bleak. We’re all self-isolating at home trying to hide from a dangerous virus, while the stores are out of basic necessities and the official government position is “many of you will die”.

I’ll try to keep writing this every couple of days with the main developments and thoughts. Bear in mind that what I’m writing here might be totally wrong, because I’m writing it at a time when no-one really knows what’s going on.

I’m mostly just hoping that I don’t get it.