This is all completely crazy isn't it? I have been told not to come in to work tomorrow, and I imagine it will be months not weeks before we go back.

Meantime, collective idiocy and greed causes people to over-buy everything putting strain on supermarkets, while almost all of the rest of retail, restaurants, pubs and entertainment has in a matter of weeks taken a very sharp lurch towards insolvency. Airlines won't survive, nor will a lot of tour operators. Stock markets are falling in a manner rarely seen before.

And - statistically speaking - nothing has even happened yet. 1 in 44,000 people in the UK is known to have it. It is obviously awful that some people have died and more are ill, and I am not downplaying the extent of the threat to human life- clearly exponential growth will sythe that fraction down to the point where most of us have it in a matter of weeks. This isn't a criticism of any government, or global response. If anything it says a lot about the connectedness of the world now, not just that something like the virus can spread so fast and so absolutely, but also that the knowledge and fear of it can do the same and cause entire continents to effectively close for business, and with no end in sight. This whole thing is absolutely surreal.