Coping with Covid-19

We need to keep Covid-19 in perspective, as the world did in 1957/58 when the H2N2 Asian flu pandemic, a China-sourced combination of avian and human viruses, swept the planet, killing more than a million people (“Viral spiral”, March 14).

I was infected as a 20-year-old RAF corporal and spent 10 days in sick quarters. I feared I was going to die on my first night with a fever so extreme my sweat-drenched pyjamas and bedding had to be changed at dawn the next day. When I was floored by flu for a second time in early 1959, it was again diagnosed as the Asian variety.

Fourteen thousand Britons died from that pandemic. Shops, offices, factories and schools were closed at various times and the Government paid out £10 million in sickness benefits – a huge sum back then. But the media weren’t fixated by the pandemic. People, hardened by their successive exposure to World War II, the Korean War and Cold