Business
Martial comparisons are generally best avoided. But, as in wartime, the coronavirus has brought out the best and the worst in people. We have had to endure black marketers selling protective masks and even basic foodstuffs at exorbitant prices, unprovoked attacks on vulnerable shop staff, and disinformation from the White House.Yet the crisis has also brought forth many unsung heroes. Selfless hospital staff serve their fellowman to the point of exhaustion. Others have volunteered to be human guinea-pigs in the search for a vaccine. Simple, hard-working people with their own families to care for have still found the time to shop for the old. Meanwhile the young are generally as feckless as they have ever been since time immemorial. They persist in 'hanging out' unmasked at super-spreader events. Marketers and sociologists have long tried to define them with such terms as Generation Y, Generation Z or The Millennials. Perhaps we should simply call them the Covid-19 Generation.The young would not perhaps be so bright and gay if they inhabited a world of rationing with long queues for such basic commodities as pasta, water, milk or toilet paper. The fact that they don't is due to the tremendous speed and flexibility with which suppliers have met unprecedented spikes in demand...