You think the coronavirus is scary? Locusts are swarming!

Just in case you aren't freaked out enough by the coronavirus, consider this: Billions of locusts are eating their way across Africa and Asia.

Yes. Locusts. And India has a low-tech solution that is either crazy or brilliant.

First, though, the coronavirus. I'll grant you that it's scary. I've seen "Outbreak" and similar movies enough to know that we just a week away from an ominous map showing the explosive growth of a deadly, zombie-creating virus. I've seen the empty grocery-store shelves where hand sanitizer is supposed to be. This is scary.

But it could be worse.

In Africa and Asia, swarms of locusts have destroyed crops. In Africa, locusts descended on Kenya and are moving toward Uganda. In Asia, locusts infested Pakistan and are moving toward China and India.

It's the worst swarms of locusts in 70 years, meaning . . . (checks statistics) all of our remaining presidential candidates were already alive the last time this happened. So maybe it wasn't that long ago?

Anyway, the swarms of locusts are hitting the most vulnerable parts of the world. In Africa, for instance, locusts are threatening South Sudan, where people don't have enough to eat due to crop failures and a brutal civil war.

Keith Cressman is the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organizations' senior locust forecasting officer (talk about a specific job. Seems like he might not be busy for months at a time, then he's incredibly busy. But I digress). Cressman says that a medium-sized swarm of locusts can eat the same amount  of food as everyone in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York.

That's a lot of cheese steaks and pizza slices, am I right?

We can joke about it (OK, I can joke about it), but this is horrifying. Imagine living somewhere and suddenly the sky is blackened and billions of locusts swarm in and eat everything.

The swarms have come because of unusually heavy rains and a December cyclone, which carried the locusts from the Arabian Peninsula to Africa. More rains are coming and experts say there could be 500 times more locusts by summer.

Five hundred times the billions of locusts. I'm no math expert, but that's a lot.

I've seen enough end-of-days movies to know that this doesn't end here. The locusts will somehow (airplanes? boats? wind storms?) make it around the world and attack us.

This happened before. In America.

In 1874, locusts swarmed in Kansas, blocking the sun for as long as six hours and covering every plant in site. After eating all the crops, locusts invaded farmers' houses, devouring everything they could find. The infestation covered Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas and Missouri.

In Pakistan, though, they have a plan. They plan to import 100,000 Chinese ducks (I presume the ducks just come from China. I don't think they're ethnically Chinese) to eat the locusts. A duck can apparently eat 200 locusts a day (my math says that 100,000 ducks would then be able to eat 20 million locusts a day, meaning it would take them 50 days to eat a billion locusts), so it's a long-term job.

While we fight the coronavirus by washing our hands frequently and stocking up on supplies, people in other parts of the world are combating billions of locusts. The chief weapon is a bunch of  hungry ducks.

If anyone needs me, you can find me hiding in my bomb shelter, trying not to hyperventilate.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.