I wonder if life is going to change with this coronavirus that seems to have taken over our lives. I see some people, not many, wearing surgical masks but that’s about it. Despite the doctors’ advice that one should avoid crowds, try to maintain at least a metre distance between yourself and the next person and to cough or sneeze into a tissue or the elbow of your clothes, people still seem to be ignoring it. I’ve come across countless people sneezing out in the open.

It’s true that sometimes it’s impossible to stay away from crowds. For example, if you’re in a supermarket the only time to avoid crowds is to go at the point the shop opens. I often do that. But if I’m slow picking things up crowds do begin to build up at the checkout and then there’s no way to maintain that one metre distance. But when it comes to coughing and sneezing carelessly, there are no excuses.

I think until the world’s health authorities manage to get a handle on the virus, the way we go about our business might have to change, albeit temporarily.

Maybe, just maybe, in certain places, face masks might be very useful. For example, if you go into your local supermarket, perhaps put on a face mask before you go in. Now, according to local health advice, for the time being, we should avoid hugging each other, stop kissing each other’s cheeks and to avoid nose to nose greetings. We should also avoid shaking hands.

Now I don’t like engaging with the usual greeting niceties anyway. I don’t like hugging or kissing and I have always disliked the shaking of the hands even when there wasn’t a coronavirus. I was always wary of the person proffering their hand to shake it just in case they might have a cold, a flu or other infection that they don’t know about. Plus, maybe they went to the bathroom and didn’t wash their hands properly, or at all, or maybe they ate something but didn’t wash their hands properly afterwards.

Other cultures have their own ways of greeting that don’t always involve flesh to flesh contact. The Hindus have the prayer gesture as a greeting, the Koreans and Japanese have the bowing gesture and in the old days Muslims had the variation of the military salute where the fingers casually touched the forehead when meeting someone.

The military salute, or a variation of it, is one I wouldn’t mind seeing implemented worldwide. Perhaps not in the full back straight, stand to attention type but a variation of it. I once saw an entertainment documentary about David Soul, the actor who played the Hutch character in the original Starsky and Hutch series. In one clip he was walking along a street in Hollywood and gave a quick salute to someone he recognised walking past. I thought that was really cool.

But now people are trying to make another form of greeting cool too and that is the elbow bump as an alternative to the handshake. If you watch the news channels, you might spot MPs, local councillors, senators and congressmen now elbow bumping each other to greet each other. I don’t personally think it’s at all cool. To me it looks clumsy and, to be honest, it must be hard to pull off between two with vast height differences. For example, what if a child is being greeted by a six-footer. He’d have to bend down to the child’s level. Or what if it’s an obese six-footer greeting a child or someone who is vertically challenged, in other words, someone who is rather short. I think the obese person might have issues bending down and executing the elbow bump.

If it were up to me, I’d encourage a variation of the military salute because that would require no human contact at all.

In the meantime, the only advice that medics can give us, aside from that which I outlined earlier on, is to wash your hands with clean water and a good soap for at least 20 seconds. And if you have a hard time remembering to count 20 seconds then sing the ‘happy birthday’ song as slowly as you can. Some say to sing ‘twinkle twinkle little star’. I personally sing the latter in my head.