While everyone is panicking about their “impending death” from the new coronavirus, or COVID-19, we would like to shed some light onto all of this and help alleviate some of your fears.
Please note when reading this that we do not wish to downplay the tragedy of anyone dying; we simply want to put the fear surrounding the new coronavirus into perspective. Fear and panic can be extremely unhealthy for your mind and body. Reasonable precautions to stay healthy and disease free during this current viral outbreak have been covered in our previous article about explaining what you need to know about the coronavirus.
SARS had about 774 deaths during the period of infection.
We mourn all deaths for those who left us before their time, however we would like you to put the number of deaths from SARS and from the new coronavirus (which at the time of writing is around 3,000) into perspective. Compare the deaths from the new corona virus to the fact that poor diets were responsible for about 10.9 million deaths in 2017 according to an extensive study. Do you remember the news media hype about that? We simply wish to point out that the hype and news attention around SARS and around this latest outbreak has been far greater than the attention to the fact that our poor diet choices are killing so many more people than SARS ever did (and more than the new corona virus ever will) and it is continuing to do so year after year.
Doesn’t it make sense to pay more attention to what we eat as a more likely cause of death than the coronavirus?
A poor diet can lead to diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses. The worst part about a poor diet is that it slowly takes away your health and vitality, causing a gradual decline in health and a slow, often painful, death. We are what we eat and it affects our mind and our body.
Imagine if there was media hype about our diets killing us to the degree that there is about the new coronavirus. Would you change what you are eating? Think about that for a minute….
As we can see from the reaction of people to the news about the coronavirus, people respond to fear. You can use that to your advantage. A healthy amount of fear about dying a slow painful death from diabetes, heart disease, etc can help motivate you to eat the right things. Do not lose sleep over what you eat or stress about it. Simply take seriously that what you eat on a daily basis affects your health today and in the long term.
Yes, it’s important to take precautions to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus, but it would be prudent for people to be more aware of what they do for their health on a regular basis if they care about their lives. We are much more likely to die due to our daily decisions than we are from this virus.
Hopefully this perspective will motivate people to care enough about living to make daily healthier choices with what food and drink is consumed, how much exercise is done, how much sleep is taken, etc. Those positive daily choices will not only help prevent viral illnesses from becoming severe (healthy people get less severe infections) but they will help you to live a longer and more viral life.