The longer lockdown continues, the more imperilled we become

Comically, Chinese Communist party officials have speculated that Covid-19 was planted by the US army. Yet a respectable conspiracy theorist would deduce that a virus sending the rest of the world into an hysterical, wholesale economic shutdown has ‘Made in China’ written all over it. After all, China didn’t flat-line its entire economy to contain the contagion. At the end of this debacle, then, China could rule the world — although it won’t have many solvent customers left to buy its products. The only other countries calling the shots in future could be South Korea, Japan and Sweden, having thus far resisted the stampede to lockdown.

In my 1994 novel Game Control, a rogue demographer named Calvin Piper attempts to design a virus that will kill two billion people overnight, thereby arresting runaway population growth. I don’t imagine my friend Calvin would think much of Covid-19. In his quest for a seriously nasty bug, I bet he’d pour a vial of the new coronavirus right down the sink. For as fatalities are broadcast even for Italy and Spain, I shout at the TV: ‘These numbers are ridiculously low!’

If a headline ran tomorrow, ‘British deaths in 2020 to reach 600,000’, we could expect widespread popular anxiety. Likewise, the forecast ‘Global deaths to exceed 58 million by year’s end’ could drive governments to yet more draconian measures to defeat this plague. But 600,000 Britons did die last year, and so did more than 58 million people worldwide. We’re under-aware of it, but scads of people are dying around us all the time. Hate to break it to you, but we’re mortal.

Hear Lionel Shriver read out this article on the Spectator’s Audio Reads (8:25):

We’ve been through alarmist projections of viral mortality before, and I don’t mean just Sars or Mers, but HIV.