The generational fault lines over coronavirus are considerable – but there are some reasons to be cheerful

There are many difficulties for families living together, but the lessons learnt from the pandemic could help the world in the future, writes Matthew Norman

Older people are at greatest risk, so how do you get the young to take this seriously? (AFP)

In the midst of the horror and the terror over the coronavirus outbreak are reasons to be cheerful, and to those we will come in good time.

But oh my giddy aunt, this is gruesome. And this, to be indelicately frank, has barely begun. I type these tediously gloomy words from a north London household that might have been computer-designed by sadists to generate maximum filial neurosis.

In the sitting room below are my parents, who are in their mid-eighties and not necessarily poster folk for the immaculate immune system. A floor above, lounging in front of some typically mind-enlarging kill-em-all video game, is the 18-year-old grandson who lives with them, and goes to and from work via the London Underground.