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Delingpole: Fear of the Coronavirus Is Worse Than the Disease

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/03/27/delingpole-fear-coronavirus-worse-than-disease/

By JAMES DELINGPOLE

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has tested positive for Coronavirus, making him the first world leader known to have contracted the disease.

I’m glad that he has it — not because I wish him ill but because as I explain here you usually feel so much better once you have recovered, which I certainly hope and expect he will.

I had my own brush with Covid-19 at the beginning of February. Everyone’s experience is different, of course, but I’d say that as a rule the fear it engenders is worse than the disease itself.

Before you get it, it’s quite nerve-wracking. “Will I be one of the unlucky ones who needs hospital treatment? What if I get it really badly and there are no ventilators?”

Afterwards you feel more relaxed, smug almost, because you’ve developed a degree of immunity.

Because we live in such hysterical times, fuelled by a mainstream media with an insatiable appetite for “This is worse than the Black Death” anecdotage, lots of armchair experts become indignant and defensive about the very concept of acquired immunity.

“Ah, but what about the Japanese man who was re-infected? You can get it more than once!” they insist, as if totally affronted by the outrageous notion that this pandemic will ever end.

Perhaps that Japanese man — and the other small number of cited cases — really was re-infected. But that still more likely makes him an outlier than it makes him terrifying proof that we’re all going to catch this terrible disease again and again until we die.

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