Like most other folk, I am not a specialist in medicine, or health care, let alone in immunology, let alone a speciality in SARS or these other very particular viruses. I scour the newspapers, serious programmes like Andrew Marr this morning, flick through social media and read a variety of posts trying to get a sense of what this thing that is impacting my daily life is, and how best to respond. And I find this is true for friends in the USA and Tunisia, Italy or Bethlehem. We simply don't know really what we are dealing with. It's confusing, we are having to second guess and it's understandably driving us nuts.

This morning I went to Mass, the early one which isn't crowded, and chose a seat where there was no one within two metres of me. I didn’t touch anything with my bare hands, not a hymn book (there weren’t any) but no door handles either. Came, prayed, received Communion on the hand, left. All very calm, sensible, reassuring, safe.

I then popped into Sainsbury’s on the way back, the local high street branch. Not many folk there... but NO TOILET ROLLS. The last time I bought a pack was in November, and I have just two rolls left. So, I thought to replace it. Nothing doing. It's just fortunate that I have a bidet! Perhaps my neighbours will have developed a new found spirit of togetherness and pulling together and give me a roll of theirs?

I try to avoid the tabloids and the sensationalists. That’s not easy. We are all worried, and some people are very afraid. My mother is elderly and my step father has a weak chest prone to pneumonia. For him and a lot of others like him this could be terminal. Death is very much up close and personal. The Prime Minister has said we will lose many loved ones before their time. And as a society we ‘don’t do death’. Its something we prefer not to deal with, and when we do we throw a blanket of sentimentality over it as few really know what to make of death. Green fields, light, niceness – saccharine comfort that gets us through another funeral and then back into the usual world where death just doesn’t impact.

Then there is the conflicting science. Leave the armchair pundits for a while, and just read the scientists and immunologists and the SARS specialists and you find real disagreement among them about what we are dealing with and how best to deal with it. France, for example, has warned people not to take anti-inflammatory medicine such as Ibroprufen, while one researcher claims that the process where the virus enters the system is the same as that used by medicine used by diabetics among others to reduce blood pressure, which would explain why diabetics are among the highest risk groups. But neither of these are on the UK or Chinese or Singapore official responses, but they are scientific and they do make sense but there is no consensus and the information is not widely available.

All of this sort of information presses this crisis into our domestic space where we expect to feel safe. Suddenly we don’t even know if there will even be enough toilet paper. Its very basic, and fear breeds fear. This epidemic is really, really unknown and scientists are not on top of this thing scientifically. There is a lot of ifs, buts, maybes and that doesn’t make us feel very safe. In fact, it can make us feel very insecure indeed.

Looking at social media posts you can see that we all respond to type, to the ways we respond to other scary realities. Fear makes us even more ‘reactive’ and we hunker down into what feels most familiar, however unrealistic or appropriate it is to the problem we are facing. Acute situations reveal our deeper fault lines, the schemas out of which we deal with any crisis. The way in which our personalities have been formed in our childhood and those catastrophes that sometimes crash into our lives along the way all spring into action. We are not just dealing with a disease of the body, we are dealing with a situation that crashes into our mind and emotions, unleashing the demons that lurk there. Fear in a whole host of forms springs to life as much as the microbes in our blood system and we scramble to respond to what feels very threatening and de-stablising out of some very basic neurological pathways. And for those of us with very deep traumas our responses tend to be passionate and that can be very ‘infectious’ because if feels so convincing, even more reassuring when the people that really do have expertise are so unsure. Hence people get into long queues for toilet paper and we go into panic mode.

Does this help, knowing this? Well depends on your approach to knowing anything. Looking at social media posts we all react to this like we do to everything else. Those who want to blame someone do so, quick to find fault with ‘them’, especially politicians and especially politicians from opposing tribes. Lots of talk about coming together, but it hasn’t seemed to have penetrated the tribal mentality that is so deep in our public discourse. People manage to stay silent at best, and few are breaking ranks to show appreciation and support for those having to bear the enormous responsibility for taking these decisions with enormous implications for all of us, the politicians, the civil servants, the Establishment. It's easy to appreciate the doctors, nurses and others who are already high in our estimation and emotional register of ‘good people’. Empathy for the ‘other’, those who are not ‘our’ people is where compassion and empathy as a virtue seem to regularly fail in our society and its telling now. Without a more developed ability to reach beyond our tribes then solidarity and togetherness is all hot air.

Knowing as much as we can informs how we behave. Infection containment, controlling how fast it spreads, managing risks demands information and being informed. It is not about waiting to be told not to do something. We are not school children, but people with responsibility for our own lives and those of the people with whom we live. If the science is saying stay 2m apart then don’t stand close behind people in the supermarket queue. If the science says the disease spreads through touching with hands, then don’t just wash them, avoid touching door handles with your bare hands. If you know that people are panic buying hold back and buy responsibly from what is available, leaving some for others. We have a responsibility to apply what we know, not just run round in a mad panic. We have a duty to handle our fears, not ignore them but handle them, and to hold onto reality.

On that note, perhaps it's time to abandon the toilet paper hunt, stay indoors and binge watch Dad's Army for a little sanity.