Puzzled

10 Ramadhan, 1441

One day we'll know a lot more about the virus currently afflicting so much of the world and we'll be able to assess the extent of the damage it accomplished. But today is not that day, nor even close. Which is why it's both puzzling and fascinating to hear and read of a number of people with no medical expertise at all talking with a strange certainty about the outcomes involved. It must be reassuring to know so much about what is at this point of time fundamentally unknown.

For myself, the single most puzzling feature of the outbreak on these shores is the extraordinarily low incidence of mortality, as things stand. Of course, this is, in its way, something to be celebrated and we're praying it remains as low as it is: just 18 deaths, yet more than 18,000 known to have, or have had, the virus. The numbers are surely significant, yet in the maelstrom of information related to the virus remain curiously unexamined.