The situation we find ourselves in with the Coronavirus is serious but not half as serious as the panic that has come with it.
This has happened before with Swine Flu, Ebola, petrol shortages and any number of any times in the past.
We were even discussing the miners’ strike with the people who are old enough to remember and when there were power outages at 7 o’clock at night.
But now the panic has been intensified a billion times over and particularly by social media and the instant access to news and spurious data.
The difficulty is that everybody panics when they read anything and then one of two things happens: you either descend into depression and paralysis or you're spurred into action.
If you descend into depression, you repeat the cycle, going back into the media, back through panic and back into depression. If you go into action, you don’t have time for the media because you’re in the action.
It’s essential for us now to take a breath, to have very calm heads and to find cool leaders, people who’s flag you can run to and gather around and help as many others as we can.
Say hello to every single person in the street and ask them if they are well and if their parents or elderly loved one’s are well.
Gain community as much as possible in face to face (from a distance) or individual discussion with people that you trust; who are not panicking, try looking at information is beautiful . This is something that medics are looking at which is updated every 3 days. That’s probably often enough to look at the data in a situation like this, if you are working in-between.
The difficulty is that your knee-jerking to every single post on BBC news and it’s making me feel sick and you’re paralysed.
Tomorrow night, Chris Barrow will be hosting the first webinar for the COVID-19 Business Confidence Forum, if you want to find out more then click here.
We were hosting our own webinar for our local referring dental practitioners to sensibly talk about strategies to deal with this and to share information but in the first instance what Chris has put together is more valuable than anything that we are doing here.
I would advise you to sign up to this and listen and contribute where you can.
Undoubtedly more discussions, more webinars and more conversations will emerge from this but not from a sense of panic and madness but from a sense of action,collaboration, care and empathy. Heads up and do the right thing, anyone reading this who is a dentist, signed up to be a healthcare professional whether you like it now or not.
You’re in the army and you’ve been called up, so be a healthcare professional now.
“A chance for Faramir of Gondor to show his qualities” there is a blog of mine called 'Faramir' , it's a blog that I did quite a while ago but certainly has some relevance in a time like this.
Also a special mention to Andy Legg for creating the graphics for today's blog!
Blog Post Number - 2309
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