I have written a letter to our first grandchild, aged just four months, whom the state has decreed I cannot cuddle or even take for a walk in his pram. It tells him about his family history in case I’m not around to do so myself once he is old enough to be interested.

I had been intending to do this before the coronavirus hit, but it has taken on a new urgency since I might be among those who succumb, though I am not in the risk categories so far as I am aware. But who knows?

The simple truth is that the chances I might die before he is 18 grow higher by the year, pandemic or not. We are all mortal and yet are unprepared to concede the fact in a way previous generations did, surrounded as they were by reminders of their vulnerability.

A former colleague just a few years older than me died from cancer recently. How many people unable to get to see their GP or reluctant to go to hospital in the current climate will nurse symptoms of something far worse than coronavirus and die as a consequence?

Public policy makers embrace a pernicious doctrine called the precautionary principle. This holds that all risk must be removed from our lives by regulation and that failure to do so is just about the worst thing any government can do.