Bestselling author Lionel Shriver calls coronavirus 'oversold': 'I'd like to sign on with COVID's agent'

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The author of the bestselling novel "We Need to Talk About Kevin" has described the coronavirus pandemic as "so oversold."

"There’s nothing unprecedented about Covid-19 itself," Lionel Shriver wrote in the British weekly magazine The Spectator. "Globally, the Asian flu [of 1957] was vastly more lethal, causing between two and four million deaths.

"The Hong Kong flu of 1968-69 also slew up to four million people worldwide, including 80,000 Britons," she added. "Yet in both instances, life went on. What is unprecedented: never has a virus been so oversold. Why, I’d like to sign on with Covid’s agent. What a publicity budget."

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Shriver's piece is the latest contribution to a fiery debate over whether local and national governments have overstepped their authority by ordering certain businesses to close and issuing mask mandates during the pandemic.

The author suggested that the longest-lasting effect of the pandemic would be "a new intolerance for the nature of biology that could prove long-lasting.

"When I was a kid, there was no MMR vaccine, and children were expected to get measles, mumps, chickenpox and rubella as a matter of course," she wrote. "Naturally, I’ve also contracted flu and colds throughout my life, and I’ve been resigned to the fact that these disagreeable ailments were due to contact with other people. Abstractly, I’ve known that other people could also infect me with more deadly pathogens ... Yet hitherto it’s never occurred to me that I should therefore wrap myself in cling film, tie a sanitary towel across my face and lock myself in a cupboard."

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Shriver also criticized the media coverage of the pandemic, accusing them of creating the impression that far more people have died from coronavirus than the true number.

"In a recent Kekst CNC poll ... Americans believed that Covid has killed [9%] of their compatriots, or almost 30 million people! The real US [sic] total has indeed crossed the milestone of 150,000, but for pity’s sake, ‘only’ 20 million people died in the first world war.

"So folks convinced that in five meager months they’ve lost a tenth of their fellows — the literal meaning of the word ‘decimate’ — need only drop a digit to realize how absurdly their bloated estimate compares with familiar figures on the news," she wrote.

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"[L]et’s instead take those exaggerated impressions of lethality as proof of a stupendously successful propaganda campaign," added Shriver, who went on to raise the specter of lockdown, which had once applied only to prisons became the established kneejerk response to any new contagion.

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"There will be a new contagion, too, and a new one after that," she concluded. "How many times can you send the national debt soaring, devastate small business, paralyze government services — including health care — and cancel for months on end the civil liberties of an erstwhile ‘free people’? In preference to this repeated carpet-bombing, a literal nuclear option might at least get the agony over with fast."

As of Friday, Johns Hopkins reported 309,796 confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.K. 46,498 deaths from the virus.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.