How can a strong, healthy man be taken so quickly? Not an overweight or an elderly guy, but a Park Run regular, a lycra-clad cyclist, the bloke you ask to shift that heavy table or open a stubborn jar. How are men with years, decades maybe, of active, productive, non-doddery life ahead just being snuffed out?

Sue Martin, a Cardiff civil servant, spoke of her bafflement this week that her husband, Mal, 58, well enough to walk out to the waiting ambulance, now has scant chance of survival. My friends with much older male partners are terrified, forbidding them from shopping and slathering them in anti-bacterial gel. Others with fit, middle-aged husbands were aghast when our force-of-nature, 55-year-old PM entered intensive care. We are more