Many likely won't know Kenny Rogers as a bit before their time.

Famous and successful country music hit machine artist.

He died (this week) age 81, of 'natural' causes they said.

That got me thinking about what's natural when one's body is old.

Reckon it's pretty much worn out, especially the vital parts.

Not much'll change even if you recondition or replace one or two bits, unlike a machine eh!

Most people would probably prefer to die of natural causes, in their asleep.

So when I think about the pandemic panic and especially the most often quoted Italian statistics, I note that 99.2 per cent of those people (ISS Italian Institute of Health stats) were/are already slowly/quickly succumbing to natural causes and mostly combinations thereof.

Lombardy also has one of the highest levels of air pollution and concentrations of elderly in the world, ergo, one of the highest concentrations of elderly deaths due to natural causes.

That wasn't 24/7 news in previous years when thousands of them also died.

How come now?

Nor were the 2.4 million dead from starvation during ‘corona' time; 36 million this year.

Might the panic pandemic be something else entirely?

Peter Ehrlich, Tauranga