It’s odd how art sometimes imitates life, but it’s much, much worse when life imitates art.

I mean, in a sense, it’s good that life imitates Star Trek because we need lasers to ward off unfriendly aliens when they finally arrive, as well as having intergalactic warp speed vessels.

But it’s very, very bad when a contagion like COVID 19 pops up, and the scenario that follows is right out of the script for the movie Contagion.

Or Outbreak, not that any President would ever nuke a US City, which was the premise in that film.

Or follow along the lines of The Omega Man, where a virus turns everyone into a zombie-like creature, with the last surviving human finally running out of luck.

There’s been quite a few doomsday scenario films, the most interesting one involving walking plants (The Day of the Triffids) but scary as they might be, what’s happening now is equally scary.

And it had been predicted.

But, that’s not the worst of it.  Half the population wants to believe its no worse than a cold, that despite the ease in which it is transmitted, they will get it, and then it will magically disappear.

You know the drill, you get the disease once, you beat it, and you don’t get it again.

Maybe.  There are factual accounts of people getting it again, but they don’t know they have it, and of course, those people happily transmit it to a new group of people.  It doesn’t go away, you don’t beat it, it just lurks in cold dark corners, waiting to pounce.

It’s an insidious virus.

And if you recover, you might think you’ve recovered, but…

Lung scarring, loss of smell, migraines, memory loss, blood clots are just a few of the side effects.  Doctors are only just discovering this because someone is finally getting down to charting the course of the disease, and what happens after recovery.

Up till now, there hasn’t been time, everyone is too busy fighting it.

Perhaps, when I apply my thriller writing mind to all that I have read over the last few months, the real aim of the virus hasn’t materialized yet, that the aim of whoever invented it, if indeed it was invented, was not to seriously affect the 15 to 40-year-olds in this iteration, but the devil is in the future, say 30 years from now when a whole generation that had been consistently bombarded with conflicting information about the virus not being dangerous and that young people had no worries about getting it, suddenly find themselves dying of lung-related respiratory problems, blood clot induced heart attacks and aneurysms, or just forgotten who they are.

A whole generation!

It’s why you can speak to one person and they’ll tell you that you need masks, you need to isolate.  Of course, this is true, if that person is over 60, overweight and suffering from diabetes, or another debilitating disease.  These people make up a large percentage of the population.

It’s why if you speak to another person, under 50, they’ll tell you it’s nothing to worry about, and they will believe the misleading information that masks are un-necessary, if you get it, it’ll go away, some quack medicine with defeat it, even if the scientific tests say otherwise.  They’ve got better things to do than to worry about a silly invisible virus, like going to COVID 19 parties to see who the first person who contracts it is.

Can you see how good a novel this would make?

You would read it, and then put it down and think it could never happen here.

Like Contagion.

Like the Outbreak.

Like The Omega Man.

It couldn’t.

Could it?