This competitive fear of not being fearful enough – or less well-protected than others - took me by surprise. Covid-19 is highly contagious, but so is panic. Overnight, I became obsessive. I bought rubbing alcohol to sterilise our electronic devices. I used my my sleeve to open doors. I lectured my family on washing their hands. The touching sight of a line of women at the basins in the John Lewis loos, all silently mouthing the first verse of God Save the Queen as they soaped fingers and thumbs, was proof that I was not alone. We were all doing our bit.

But it was more than that. Faced with this new threat, something atavistic kicked in. People started stockpiling food and medical supplies. Shortages meant higher prices. One London pharmacy was caught selling a £1.99 hand sanitizer for just under thirty quid. When I managed to bag a box of antimicrobial wipes at vast expense on Amazon, I actually found myself gloating. After all, antimicrobial is SO superior to antibacterial for combatting corona!

What on earth had got into me? I was behaving exactly like the kind of selfish, panic-stricken nightmare I usually despise.

The fact is the coronavirus presents us with a challenge that is as much about the duty we owe to one another as it is about preventing its spread. The two are intimately linked. To keep down the number of fatalities, those of us who are stronger are going to have to put the interests of the weakest first. Britons will need to show stoicism, patience and resourcefulness - virtues we may suspect are in short supply if not extinct. Is our selfish, highly individualistic, me-me-me society up to meeting that challenge?

Despite what you may have read, this is neither the Black Death nor one of those terrifying fevers that carried off Thomas Cromwell’s wife and small daughters in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Covid-19 may be making headlines, but what they don’t tell you is that many thousands who have already had it are now fully recovered. Seasonal influenza kills between 290,000 and 650,00 people worldwide each year. There are 90,000 coronavirus cases so far, with about 3,000 deaths.

The latter does seem to have a higher fatality rate, but some groups are a lot more vulnerable than others. Eight out of ten people who get corona will have only a mild illness. (Worth bearing in mind when you are engaged in a fight to the death for the last packet of Nurofen). Children rarely catch it, thank goodness. The people at the greatest risk are the elderly and those with compromised immune systems.

To be blunt, if a generally healthy person with symptoms of the coronavirus turns up at A&E demanding treatment, chances are they will infect a vulnerable person – perhaps someone undergoing chemotherapy - who won’t be able to fight it off. Such hospital places as are available should rightfully belong to the very sick and older people who will need all the help they can get. As Marc Lipsitch, the director of the US’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, puts it: “The emphasis has shifted from stopping them from infecting us to stopping us from infecting each other.”