The country is playing a numbers game and the numbers are making my head spin. 87,022 cases in England, 114,217 cases in the UK, 510 healthy volunteers for vaccine trials. 16,509 UK deaths. These are the numbers in the face of which I am helpless. The numbers I concentrate on are the ones I can do something about and need to know in order to to keep us safe.One thing I need to know is how long Covid-19 lives when it is no longer in its human host.

Take paper, for example. We haven’t opened our post for weeks. It falls through the letterbox and lies on the floor in heaps, while we pretend we haven’t seen it. I admit I’m given to not opening post at the best of times and this, being the worst of times, gives me the perfect excuse. However, suppose there’s a Premium Bond win in the pile or a summons we haven’t seen for a bill we haven’t paid because we haven’t opened the post. I decide to find out for certain how long we have to leave it before it is safe:

“Some strains of Coronavirus live for only a few minutes on paper. Others can live for up to five days”. So I now have to sort the post we haven’t opened for weeks from the post we haven’t opened for days. I make separate piles and open the oldest: One Premium Bond for £25. How come it’s always £25 , charity appeals (That takes care of the Premium Bond), bills, of course. The best things we find are two home- made Easter cards from Trisha and Tod’s grand-daughters. How sad that they’re young enough to look forward to some acknowledgement of their hard work and thoughtfulness and we’re old enough to be protecting ourselves so carefully as to be unaware of what they’d sent. I email our belated thanks and they seem to accept the fact that, though Easter, which we usually spend with them, was 12 days ago, we’re delighted to hear from them at any time.

Milk cartons harbour Coronavirus for 2 to 3 days, as do lift buttons and the outside of fridges. (What about the inside of fridges?). For cardboard boxes, it’s 24 hours (72 some say), drink cans 2-8 hours, mugs, plates and doorknobs 5 days and fruit and vegetables don’t “seem” to retain the virus at all, though we are advised to wash them thoroughly and I have heard it’s not a great idea to disinfect apples and tangerines with alcohol wipe, as I have been doing. Apparently that particular kind of alcohol is better not ingested.

However, all this is academic, since nothing gets through our front door without being sanitised so thoroughly I’ve occasionally rubbed away cooking instructions on the ready- meals we are eating increasingly often.

Radio and television spew out increasing numbers of numbers to buzz in our heads. It’s all the journalists have to hold on to and it becomes a mantra for listeners and viewers to repeat to themselves and one another: 400,000 gowns trapped in Turkey, 3 more weeks of Lockdown, 18 months for a vaccine, 2 years before it’s widely available, 12 months “shielding” for people over 70. Of course, none of these is necessarily accurate. We are 100 per cent certain of nothing.