A very good aspect about the coronavirus disease, or Covid-19, is that I need not go to those very tedious meetings, which last three hours, during which I will be asked to advise on the project acoustics aspects for a two-minute period and will have to just listen for the rest of the time.

Further, if the Department of Public Works asks that I or my staff attend site meetings at distant contracts and refuse to pay for air flight, I can refuse to attend. My staff have regularly worked from home and only come to the office intermittently. Nothing much will change, but I can now ask clients to contact them by email and copy me in. I have much more control of their output when they work from home and they will, by the nature of this, not be disturbed as often and will do better. The danger is if their partner starts using them as a babysitter, but they can always say they are wanted in the office. Further away from home, air travel has taken a big knock in the European Union (EU), the UK and the US. All good, I say. It is, I feel, way time for this. Having package holidays where the air flight for a student to Mexico from the EU is only €200 or from London to Rome is £350 seems to me to be morally wrong – one person for a cheap holiday gets to pollute the atmosphere. Take a train, I say. Get on a boat.

And then, at home again, all those extramural activities the school cons you into for your children: ballet, music, karate, dancing, swimming – each with the end-of-term kicker of grading; orchestra performance, eisteddfod, pantomime, gala – each costing a further R500, which you cannot refuse to pay for fear of disappointing the children. Won’t happen now.

The airline industry will take a long time to recover. Good, I say. This forces people to take only urgent trips. I also think that the stock market crashes are a good thing. Right now, you can make hamburgers in South Africa and courier them to New York or London or Paris and sell them for a profit. This means that the rand:dollar and rand:euro exchange rates are wrong and are manipulated to being so highly different. Recall that before the current government, the rand was R5 to the dollar – and that was with civil disobedience to the max. The reason the exchange rates became so unfavourable was to support dollar imports from South Africa. The way to fix it was to use US stocks to make ours spring up and down. No more.

It may be argued that this is bad for us and people will die. Yes. But we are Africans. We will survive.

In Africa, drunk in a car will total you. A gangster will shoot you. You will die from malaria, tick bite fever, hepatitis B, yellow fever, encephalitis, meningitis, dysentery, cholera, Ebola, snake bite or spider bite, hippo attack, crocodile attack or being trampled by an elephant. This is in addition to the standard causes of death by heart failure, dread disease.

But on this continent we live. We live. We do not have safety police stopping us playing in the grass because we may stand on a tin and get cut or get stung by a scorpion. We do not live like sheep in lush meadows being taken safely home to our pens each night, guarded by a government-appointed shepherd with each day the same grass, the same place and the same sheep friends. When it rains, it rains with a passion. You can easily die in a severe hailstorm. Africa frees you. Take too many risks and you get taken out. But you are free.

On a continent where they performed the first heart transplant, children die of minor diseases. This virus may kill some of us. But we will survive, we always have. That’s very great.