By Ellie Broughton
As a former newspaper reporter, I’ve always been a news junkie and events like 9/11, the financial crash of 2008 and the London riots in 2011 made me devour everything going in a frenzy of horror and excitement . However, since 2016 I’ve sometimes felt overwhelmed by the news - it was too upsetting, too close to home or too final and at times I’ve wanted to stick my fingers in my ears and sing LALALALA loudly to the world.
This coronavirus pandemic has elicited even more extreme reactions in me than the 2016 deaths of David Bowie to George Michael et al. and the whole Brexit fiasco put together. I began to worry about it approximately one month before any of my friends or family started to be concerned and I’m probably the most scared of it, now that it’s started to show its true colours.
Covid-19 is affecting my ability to sleep and I wake up at anything between 3am and 5:30 feeling wide awake and automatically reaching for my phone. I know that’s the worst thing you can do but I’m powerless to stop myself. It’s like watching a horror movie that permeates your dreams and leaves you wondering how long it’s going to be before you or your family are sucked into the storyline.
Extreme boredom leads to creativity?
For all the ‘fake news’ out there, it is the reputable national press that I find the most terrifying of all. The Sunday Times last weekend was positively apocalyptic, with experts describing Covid-19 as an incredibly impressive virus for its ability to spread and mutate and generally wreak havoc on humans. I subscribe to The Times and am drawn to their personal tales of younger, healthier people than me, fighting for their lives having been ravaged by the virus.
Many times a day Guardian alerts ping up on my phone with the latest death tolls etc. In the last couple of days these have been absolutely hair-raising for those living in Spain. This lunchtime alone, the number of cases had risen by 5,000 to just under 25,000 and deaths had leapt by another 324 in one day!
The statistic that most terrified me this week (in El Pais) was that 52% of Covid-19 sufferers in Spain have to be hospitalised - this fact alone will ensure that I #quedateencasa (stay at home) and try to avoid catching it at all costs.
But this is the dangerous thing about the news, it very often doesn’t tell you the whole story. So while this 52% statistic may be correct, in fact in Spain it is ONLY the people being admitted to hospital who are being tested for Covid-19. So you could look at it another way and say, of the people admitted to hospital with suspected coronavirus, only half of them actually have it!
Meanwhile on social media, which has been blamed for most of society’s ills, there’s a fight back going on. WhatsApp groups, facebook groups and Twitter have all been trying to cheer us up again with a whole host of funny, silly and creative posts to help us unite in our shared difficulties.
I love all the brilliant videos coming out showing how parents keep their little ones entertained now that schools are closed by building extreme assault courses in their living rooms. The ideas about how to kill time in constructive ways or just downright silliness show that the sense of humour of those currently suffering or constrained around the world has not been crushed but lives on.
The human spirit rises up in the face of adversity and it’s not just in Britain but all over the world. This blog post is a homage to those who try to make the world a little bit brighter for us all. We hope you enjoy this collection of social media posts as much as we did.
And finally, here’s my favourite of all (a facebook advert for Joe Biden):
REAL QUOTES from Trump:
January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
February 2: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”
February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
February 25: “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”
February 25: “I think that's a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”
February 26: “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
February 26: “We're going very substantially down, not up.”
February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
February 28: “We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”
March 2: “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”
March 2: “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”
March 4: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”
March 5: “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”
March 5: “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”
March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”
March 6: “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”
March 6: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
March 6: “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”
March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”
March 9: “This blindsided us."
March 9: "The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant.”
March 10: "It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away."
March 13: National Emergency Declaration
November 3: Elect Joe Biden- the only Cure