I probably should just wash my hands of the whole coronavirus business. We’ve become engulfed by viral hysteria to the extent that the nation has misplaced its rational compass. Let’s hope common sense kicks in before we do ourselves some serious damage.

And by that, I mean crippling economic carnage long after the last coughs and sneezes have subsided. We’re teetering on the edge of a renewed financial crisis of our own making.

The good ship UK has been boarded by a gang of bullshit buccaneers. Captain Pugwash? Captain Hogwash, more like. We’ve been overrun by poppycock prattlers. Palaver pirates.

Faced with the threat of the dreaded lurgi, a number of countries have adopted strategies of avoidance based on lockdowns and isolation.

Meanwhile in Brazil, Ronaldinho’s not too bothered by the prospect of any travel ban. His document game is strong.

The UK had to date taken a different tack, accepting widescale but largely harmless infection, adopting fact-based precautions, with the virus hopefully seen-off via a critical mass of immunity.

It’s a recognised strategy, supported by science. Naturally, it attracts unhinged keyboard-warrior venom for being out of step with the approach others.

You can’t cause any greater offence nowadays than by demonstrating independent thought. Not following the crowd is seen as inherently stupid. It’s a measure of how far we’ve fallen, but hey, better to be right and in a majority of one. What’s going to happen when the lockdowns end and reinfection occurs?

In the last 24 hours, I’ve received countless emails from organisations telling me what they’re doing about the virus. Well, I would hope that they are simply undertaking the best hygiene practices that we’d have hoped they’d always been.

You do wonder what fast food chains, coffee shops, and cinemas feel that they could add to the info-mosh that supplements official government guidance? Well, nothing really. If they were that serious about preventing infection, they’d close up shop.

It’s all designed for a self-serving purpose which is to take the moral high ground while still coining it in.

I’m not criticising the business-as-usual approach, just the bullshit spin. But too much communication and not enough factual substance is generating nothing but anxiety.

Paradoxically, the contagion will almost certainly support eradication of the bug, but don’t expect cool and calm rationales emerging any time soon.

And it’s now spreading to politicians, who are chopping and changing their approaches – replacing strategy with tactics – in order to pacify public mood. The UK for example is contemplating a ban on large gatherings of over 500. Let’s hope that this is actually more about not spreading emergency service too thin.

Whatever the case, now is not the time for politics, which would reflect post-fact at its most threatening. The growing anxiety has operationalised itself as a societally collective hoax call. This virus – while it might be contagious – isn’t going to wipe out the human race. And that’s the real issue. We’ve reimagined it into something it really isn’t.

Even the holier-than-thou EU who slated Trump for his bonkers travel ban is now backing the closure of the borders of member states. All these tossers just go whichever way the wind blows. This virus may be the final catalyst that allows a hefty slice of the globe to realise that they’re stagnating under piss-poor leadership.

It’s imperative to get back to facts and evidence and stick to the plan. All approaches will have their downside, but once indecision sets it, any initiated strategy will all start to fall apart.

Let’s hope we’ll start to see health authorities qualifying reports of deaths with specific citation of underlying serious health conditions. This will at least help to quell the paranoia that we are all hot-footing it to the morgue. Such fact-based reporting will be essential to prevent the viral spread of the panic.

There have been some benefits to the so-called crisis, though. Greta has cancelled a number of her public rants and has moved her offerings online. Long may that environmentally sound approach continue. Let’s hope her parents furthermore opt for some home-schooling in isolation.

But for all our sakes, we need to take a step back and get more clarity because let’s face it; it’s going to be painful once we’ve scuttled our own ship without ever having encountered any real pirates.

Unless of course you include in that any of the bonehead ideators who are incessantly spinning their strategy spirals for the needless escalation of our flight rather than our fight tendencies.

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