Coronavirus: 'Put kettle on - but please wash your hands first'

Maybe we could have stopped the spread of this virus if we had taken early enough action? Maybe not?

What concerns me is the apparent complacency of us Yorkshire folk.

Complacency in carrying on everyday life as if nothing was happening.

Refusing to take obvious and easily instituted individual steps to protect the greater community.

This week I have witnessed the serving of communion wine from collective chalices, the deliberate intention of organisers to carry on with non-essential meetings and social events, people travelling in packed public transport systems, people travelling necessarily but in some cases, unnecessarily, through packed transport hubs, people deliberately shaking hands to defy the disease's interference in their lives.

I even knew of a group upset because they had travelled to Northern Italy and had been refused permission to ski.

While all around them scores, then hundreds, of people were dying each day.

I have encountered all these things this week in the face of the calamitous outbreak among the Italians which must surely now be our wake-up call.

Then today, a friend showed me a social media circulation.

In the picture Compo, Cleggy and Foggy (from Last of the Summer Wine) are shown indifferently lounging about, hands in pockets, under the news headline; Coronavirus Crisis in Yorkshire.

Then, attached to the montage in quotation marks, the words: Time to put kettle on.

At first, I found it ironically and wryly funny; a social commentary on the staid ‘no panic here’ nature of Yorkshire folk.

Then I felt how dangerous this trait is when faced with the need to take collective community action to prevent the spread of disease.

And I laughed no more.

Come on Yorkshire folk; put ‘kettle on’ by all means. But please wash your hands first.

David Lewis, Hay Lane Terrace, Cloughton