The excessive and incorrect implementation of health & safety coupled with a blame culture have created a risk-averse society where warnings simply have to be issued for everything. Have you noticed that when a new office or shop is built and opens, the first thing that happens is lots of notices and signs have to be stuck to the doors and windows?
All that expensive and shiny, new design ignored in favour of sticking pieces of paper and plastic all over the glass. It is the same with the weather. It began with naming storms because the Americans name hurricanes and the Asians name typhoons and so if the British name storms they will sound scarier and more likely to make people feel afraid. Then the Meteorological Office came up with the idea of colour-coded risk-rated warnings as ‘heavy rain’ was deemed to no longer be accurate, instead becoming Amber Warning Of Death. Given that the Met Office couldn’t predict the weather in the first place, coming with more abstract ways of communicating ‘we don’t really know what the weather will be, just look out of your window for yourself’ was perhaps seen as an easy way of allowing them to be hopelessly wrong without any accountability.
On how many occasions have their Be Afraid colours been applied to the weather map like psychopathic killer crayons only for the rain to fall somewhere else? The relevance here is that official advice is usually wrong. It is a blunt, one-size-fits-all response, usually aimed at covering the behind of an organisation that is not fit for purpose in the first place, with some make everyone afraid thrown in for good measure.
Making people afraid is such a desired pastime for government agencies – or as they used to be called ‘the government’ before they were all privatised or subcontracted or executive agency-ised in order to make them unaccountable – as it makes people rely upon the source of the information and hopefully believe it, which means creating some trust in the government.
In these interesting times, do not believe the hype. Do your own research. Understand how a virus and disease function and – more importantly – how they do not. Understand that the majority of individuals who contract the virus are asymptomatic and the vast majority of those who develop the disease recover, having felt like (with actual descriptions from those of us who have had COVID-19) “a bit of a sore throat” “a mild hangover“, “crap for a couple of days then OK again” and “weird loss of sense of smell but that was it“.
Do not worry. Do not be afraid.