How are you feeling about it all now?
After more than two months of lockdown, has your outlook changed?
For me, I started off hand sanitising, washing and worrying like a basket case.
In the first few weeks, I bought ice lollies as a treat for the boys as they waited in the car and I got messages at the garage, returning to disinfect their hands, my hands, the steering wheel, my water bottle which then tasted of said sanitiser, their ice lolly sticks and then – when home – every surface that came into contact with the outside world.
The terror was exhausting.
This week, I noticed a shift.
I didn’t care that a man squeezed past me apologetically in an aisle, almost touching me, let alone adhering to the 2m distancing rule.
I’ll still use hand sanitiser back in the car and do follow government guidelines – which, thankfully, are relaxing to allow us some company in the garden – but I am not living in fear 24/7.
Read more from Martel Maxwell here
Never should we forget this virus has claimed lives but neither should we succumb to fear when there is no need. Negative stories are everywhere, with media outlets searching for the one-off cases of healthy victims, scaring us half to death.
It sits at odds with the bigger, factual picture.
In Tayside, with a population of nearly 400,000 and with Dundee at its heart, no patients were reported as being in intensive care last week. That’s right, none.
Tayside was where the first case of Covid-19 in Scotland was detected, at the beginning of March. Within two weeks, as the rest of the country was abandoning its testing programme, we embraced it.
This decision has proven to be a massive success.
The programme has also been explained brilliantly here with Tom Fardon, a respiratory consultant at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, finding himself a Facebook hero for his descriptions of the lessons learnt.
This virus still exists but it’s time we heard more of the good news and common sense than scare-mongering.
If anyone is terrified to leave their home, the political message has worked – and perhaps too well, for there has to be a point where we get back to living.
We can’t choose many things but when lockdown relaxes, ends or limps on, we can choose how we choose to feel about it.
Like most people, I’ll have blind moments of panic but I am making the conscious decision to relax, to seek the positive factual stats rather than the end-of-the-world ones.
For life is only worth living if you can live it.
This article originally appeared on the Evening Telegraph website. For more information, read about our new combined website.