You can have my hand sanitiser, just don't take away my rugby
Sunday, 15th
March 2020
The messages start coming in on WhatsApp on Saturday
evening and then more on Sunday morning: B___ got a cough, won’t be playing;
A___ not available; M____ still not feeling well; My mum won’t let me play
because of Coronavirus.
So, when we arrive at the away venue for a friendly
match against local rivals, my son’s U15 rugby team look very short of numbers.
The away team are the same so we mix the two teams and play a reduced numbers
game so they all get to run around.
Afterwards, my son laughs at the fact they were told
to touch elbows with the opposing team players when they had just spent an hour
tackling, scrummaging, and handling the same ball. He has a point. The parents
are bemused by the absence of players due to worries over Covid-19. Presumably,
these boys will be going to school tomorrow and doing PE and high-fiving their
mates and so on and so on.
Following the news, Austria is now banning gatherings
of more than five people which makes me wonder what happens if you are a family
of six plus. Are you automatically breaking the law by being seen together?
Does one or more of you have to take turns standing in the garden to keep the
right side of the law?
Here in the UK, Matt Hancock, Health Secretary, warns
that over 70s will be advised at some point to self-isolate themselves from
society and this would be for ‘a very long time.’ If that doesn’t lead to more
panic buying in the supermarkets then I don’t know what will… On that note, one
of my sons shows me a meme with two images of the same supermarket: the toilet
roll shelves and the vitamin shelves. Only one of them is stripped bare which
shows the herd mentality rather than a more clear-headed, proactive approach to
the impending crisis.
The mood is strange; we’re still waiting for it to go,
well, viral but it’s clear already that people are going to react in very
different ways, not all of them helpful or positive.
Latest data for the
UK (as of 6pm):
Infected: 1,372
Deaths: 35
Celebrity Deaths: None (Tom Hanks is feeling better)
People I know who are
infected: 0
People I know who
have died: 0
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