No point in panicking in any situation. It always makes things worse than they otherwise would be. But there is good reason to think it likely that there are real dangers up ahead, and that this virus could become transmissable from human to human, with a resulting pandemic.

That doesn't mean we'll all die from it, or that we'll all catch it - it's an unfortunate word since it rather sounds as if it did mean that. It actually just means that it is very widespread across a country or between countries.

But clearly it makes sense to take precautions, such as getting a flu jab if we can, and pushing the people who run our society into acting responsibly for once.