ACCORDING to an article in The Argus (Mar 14th) a total of 798 people, as of 9am on last Friday, had tested positive for coronavirus in this country,

That is a fact, but where are the others?

For instance, how many of this number had relatively mild symptoms which had little effect on their daily lives?

How many, although they were more badly affected, have now recovered and are back living quite normal lives?

If questions like these, and other similar ones, were being addressed by those in authority there would be a lot less chance of this pandemic

finishing up as a 'panic-epidemic', signs of which we are already seeing in our shops as 'wildly unthinking behaviour' - part of the

definition of the word panic - has led to people like the lady I saw in Aldi yesterday, clearly struggling to carry seventy two rolls of toilet

paper through the checkout.

If the situation continues whereby we only hear the bad news about the effects of this virus, without being told anything positive, then panic will prevail and its effect will be far, far worse than the illness itself.

Today's shortage of toilet rolls would be nothing when compared with shop shelves being stripped of anything and everything that was life-sustaining, all caused by 'uncontrollable anxiety', two words that also define the word 'fear'.

American President Roosevelt once said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself", something, I would have thought, that should be uppermost in the minds of those who lead our nation at this time in its history.

Eric Waters, Lancing