It might have worked when the bombs were falling, Bud Flanagan was singing about sticking two fingers up to the Führer and the BBC Home Service was the news medium of the day. But calm has disappeared along with ration cards, and carry on is now the fuss over how many toilet rolls you can stuff in your supermarket trolley.

We are truly in a new age of panic sparked off by the threat of a new virus we don’t understand, but which so far has an extremely low mortality rate – or, as the US Surgeon General put it, in marked contrast to British medical experts, you are 1,000 times more likely to die from flu than coronavirus.

But when every news bulletin leads on the latest twist, with the latest count of the diagnosed, film of cruise ships with sufferers moored offshore, sporting events played behind closed doors, no kissing or touching, the Queen in gloves, when the advice is to just wash your hands – when such dramatic events warrant an equally dramatic response – it seems utterly inadequate. We panic because it feels like we’re doing something, or even if we’re not it feels like we should be.

One response is to panic buy. People are setting up “pandemic pantries” to stockpile goods. Australia has all but run out of toilet rolls to the extent that one newspaper printed several blank pages so that buyers could use them in an emergency, which seemed more like a successful PR stunt than a solution. One clip from a Tesco store in Aberdeen showed racks normally filled with hand gels and sanitisers completely empty. When the media runs these stories about panic buying it exacerbates panic buying – a shelf-fulfilling prophecy, you could say.

In the Second World War there were few media outlets. Social media was something you scrawled on a gable end or in a close mouth, and those that existed were tightly censored, so that every setback, barely reported, was trumpeted as a new beginning. For newspapers, like any incontinent Aussie today, paper was rationed so the news was thin. Nowadays any crackpot computer jockey or scaremonger can trigger a digital snowball effect. In 2018, when some KFC restaurants ran out of chicken in Britain, people were even phoning the police, and probably the Samaritans for all we know.

Hysteria needs an audience, even if it’s only others staring at screens somewhere in cyberspace. Panic is a bit like laughing in an empty room – it makes one feel a little foolish – whereas battering out crazed messages on a keyboard seems almost therapeutic.

Graham Greene said that writing, like composing a painting, was a kind of therapy – an escape from panic and fear. Ralph Waldo Emerson described panic as the terror of ignorance surrendered to the imagination, which is about as a cogent a summation as you can get. So that when experts are at odds over coronavirus, as is understandable when it’s such a new one, their ignorance feeds the fear and frees the dark wings of imagination. I said that.

There have been panics, most of them unnecessary, since the earliest humans, from which fig leaf to wear to heart flutterings over whether that dinosaur really was a vegetarian (sorry, historical licence there – we all know dinosaurs lived long before vegetarians). When the Black Death struck it would have taken weeks for the news to filter to the far reaches of the country, probably a lot slower than the disease got there.

The most newsworthy, because of the society we live in, have been the panics engendered by economic jolts and crashes, like the Great Depression of 1929 or the global financial crisis of 2007/08, although these didn’t affect most people.

Even last week one US financial commentator was arguing that everyone should be deliberately infected with coronavirus to get it over with quickly, so that the markets would recover ... never mind the thousands or millions who perished.

Predictions about the end of the world – and there have been thousands – did not evoke the level of fear this virus does, probably because so few people heard about it at the time and for each wrong one the next was taken less seriously.

Nostradamus put the end of the world at July 1999, Rasputin (lover of the Russian queen as Boney M put it) pinned it more precisely to August 23, 2013. Jehovah’s Witnesses keep getting it wrong – 1975 was their last shot.

The recent viruses, like Sars, Ebola and Zika, didn’t take such hold on the imagination probably, and sadly, because they were overwhelmingly infecting other people in other countries. The HIV/Aids one, properly identified in 1981, caused a spike of unease but did not cause wholesale fear outside the gay community – largely widespread support and sympathy – because once the nation got over the you-can-catch-it-by-kissing-or-shaking-hands thing, there was a clear and avoidable cause.

Nonetheless, there was a massive publicity campaign, in the way there hasn’t yet been for the coronavirus, featuring doom-laden voices and tumbling tombstones. Perhaps that’s to come.

Remember the Y2K problem, the millennium bug, which was going to crash all computers and programs, cause aircraft to drop from the sky, trigger famine and pestilence, unleash ICBMs from their silos and generally cause a spot of global mischief? Well, not only did it not happen, it passed with a yawn.

In 1964, a food scare in Aberdeen, supposedly by contaminated corned beef causing a typhoid outbreak, caused as panic ripple. The Medical Officer of Health, Ian MacQueen, even claimed – wrongly – through the media that the outbreak was caused by tinned meat from a stockpile the Government kept in case of nuclear war. You don’t see much corned beef being sold nowadays so the stigma maybe stuck.

Edwina Currie did the same for eggs in 1988, declaring that most carried salmonella (although the fact that some chicken does today doesn’t seem to have the same impact). It took 30 years for the poultry industry to recover.

In 2001, the foot-and-mouth outbreak only stopped after over six million cows and sheep were slaughtered. Tourism dropped by around 10% and it took the European Court of Justice to force France to eventually restock British beef.

Panics past, what of the present? Judging by the emptying shelves it’s on a new and higher level, out of reach of reality. By comparison, the massive death toll from flu and associated illnesses in the winter of 2015 was more than 30,000 but I don’t recall similar hysteria. In Scotland, the winter death toll in 2017/18 was over 23,000, the overwhelming causes being flu and pneumonia. Neither provoked the fear of this one.

Is it justified? Too early to say. The coronavirus appears to be less deadly than Sars, which killed around 10% of people who became infected, as against about 2% so far. Because the latest outbreak is still unfolding globally, scientists don’t yet definitively know the virus’ true fatality rate.

However, it has killed nearly three times as many people in eight weeks as Sars did in eight months. There are now more than 100,000 people infected across the world, with 11 in Scotland as The Herald on Sunday went to press.

It’s in our nature to worry, and

the 24-hour news, and fake news, media are doing a great job in playing it up. There are moments totally free from worry. We call these panic.