I’ve been staring at a blank page for a while, not quite knowing how to start this. It’s not normal is it? I mean, at this moment, things aren’t regular. Most of us are currently under some unusual restrictions about how we live our lives. The phrase ‘Social Distancing’ is something that 99.999% of us had never even heard until a few weeks ago, and now we’re living it. I know that for some of you out there in other countries this may have been your reality for a while but here in the UK we’re just getting warmed up. And yes I’m going to talk about videogames, but before I get to that (and why that’s important) I want to cover the basics:

We’re doing this because of a new virus. It’s something that most of us don’t have to worry about but it makes a small, yet significant, percentage of people really sick and, even with medical care, sadly there’s a small percentage of those people who aren’t surviving. The problem is not the percentages, but the actual numbers. As far as we know nobody has any immunity, so when you scale those numbers up there will be thousands of people who will need specialist hospital care to survive – something that our health system (or indeed any health system) is not designed to cope with. This means that if we just let it pass through the population unhindered, thousands of people who could survive this with the right care won’t be able to simply because of the huge burden on the system. 

This is where ‘Social Distancing’ comes in alongside increased hygiene and cleanliness. By dramatically reducing the contact we have with other people, we slow the rate of infection through the population giving our medical services the best chance to save the most lives. 

… And the big thing to remember is that this is a sustained effort. To be effective we’re going to need to keep these measures in place for months.  Continue reading “Things Aren’t Regular”