The world has now lost count of the coronavirus victims

I hate to say this but every day the newspapers are logging the steady rise of coronavirus-infected victims and it's all total nonsense, if not downright deceptive. The UK total has been climbing fairly rapidly but the number bears absolutely no relation to the real figure. It's the same in the US, Spain, and elsewhere in Europe. Why? Because only those being tested are being put down as sufferers. The mass of people now with the virus are not getting listed at all because they can't get tested. The doctors are not doing mass testing. No one is. Except for South Korea which has an unbelievably efficient testing programme going on 24 hours a day. But here in UK and elsewhere in Europe and I assume the US, if you suffer the symptoms, or some of them, you are told to go home, stay there for seven days and don't go anywhere near the rest of the family if there is a family. Provided they don't all develop terrible breathing problems, then fine. Like flu, you wait until it's over. But please what is the point of the UK, for example, saying at the end of each day, the number of people with the virus has climbed from 599 to 702 or from 702 to 799? It just isn't true. The figure is meaningless because it doesn't take into account the thousands of people who right now are self-isolating but don't know whether they have the real thing or not. In other words, no health service in the world can cope with a pandemic on this scale. So the only way to deal with it is by counting only those who HAVE been tested, like famous footballers and government ministers and Hollywood film stars. Or am I being too cynical? What I do know from personal experience is that those who are self-isolating because they have made the judgment that they MAY have coronavirus are in a sort of limbo world, not one of the official statistics, not being seen by a doctor because no one is available and counting on someone to leave a bit of food outside the door if they're lucky. Trump is due to make another big announcement later today, apparently to declare a national emergency, whatever that will entail. Probaby shutting the country down and banning all flights in and out. Yet the UK government has put off that sort of drastic action, insisting that it's not only unnecessary but somehow self-defeating. Why do we here think the opposite to the rest of the world? I'm not saying Boris and his health advisers are wrong. I haven't a clue whether they are right or wrong. But with Italy shut down, South Korea testing pretty well anyone who comes by, the US declaring a national emergency, all schools and colleges being closed in Spain, France, Belgium etc etc, how come the UK is standing alone? As I write this, planes are still going over my house like they always do. Where are they coming from and how many of the passengers will be coronavirus carriers and will any of them be tested at the airport and sent into quarantine if necessary. And if not, why not? Political leaders are desperately trying to look like they are in charge and on the ball and omniscient. But really they are like the rest of us, making decisions in the dark and doing things because they hope it might make a difference. The only people who really knew what it was all about were the few Chinese doctors in Wuhan, Hubei province who recognised coronavirus when they first spotted it in November and tried to raise the alarm only to be arrested or told to shut up for fear of causing panic. Now, when the virus in China, having taken its deadly toll, is subsiding, Beijing looks around at the rest of the world and smugly thinks it did all the right things including building a show-off hospital in two weeks from scratch though it was never used, and can now begin to return to normal. If those brave doctors, at least one of whom died, had been listened to and respected for their professionalism, perhaps the pandemic would never have happened. I don't think China should ever be allowed to forget that!