This edition of Rick's List appears on a day when I'm scheduled to be on a plane back to Connecticut after attending a wedding out of state, meaning that, as I type this, it's in fact several days before you'll read it. And I included that last part — about the wedding being out of state — even though it might seem unnecessary.

"Well, of course it's 'out of state,' Rick!" you'd say, chuckling at the preposterousness of making a flight within our  borders since one can easily drive perpendicularly across Connectcut in a few hours — stopping only briefly at Arby's because New London is a stupid part of the state where there aren't any Arby's or Round Robins.

Anyway, I'd tell you that, yes, I WOULD fly to and from towns within Nutmeg Land — even Stonington to New London if I could — because statistics tell us flying is safer than driving. On a related note, statistics should also tell us that, if there's a just God, whoever designed the entrance and exit configurations on I-95, particularly between Exit 71 and Exit 93, is spinning on a barbecue rotisserie in a white-hot hell for his or her idiocy in highway design. Let's hope.

Except ... maybe flying is NOT safest while this coronavirus thing is going around. We all now know airports are particularly dangerous in general and certainly once you're trapped inside a jet, where passengers from one hot zone or another mingle with one another in once-in-a-lifetime meetings — folks who will never see each other ever again except NOW because, after the plane lands, they'll share the same ambulance to the hospital.

This will happen not because the two people have become infected with the coronavirus, but because Passenger A didn't think Passenger B sneezed into the crook of an elbow, and a fight broke out. One was armed with a huge jug of hand sanitizer, and the other was using the cord from the drop-down oxygen mask as a garrote ...

This column, then, is a bit of a gamble for me because it's several days before you'll read it and, by that time, the virus could be gone or, more likely, there will only be 177 people left alive on Earth. If so, and YOU are one of those survivors, thank you for taking the time, as you wheeze blobs of germs that look like orange-brown mud gurgling out of a sewer grate, to read this.

In consideration, and to reassure my own raging hypochondria, let me just share a random list of things far more likely to kill us than the coronavirus.

1. Eating a jumbo can of live hornets.

2. Backing up across a room, lowering your head bull-like, and sprinting until the top of your skull hits the horn of the anvil you keep on a small table against the wall underneath the framed image of Monet's "Water Lilies" you bought at a poster show in college and, sorta pathetically, it must be said, haven't gotten rid of yet.

3. Flossing with a nail gun.

4. Transferring at the last minute from one airplane to another because you have the uneasy feeling that a passenger on Flight A has the coronavirus, only to find out THAT Flight B is transporting late-stage Ebola patients to the graveyard.