This spring, anxieties were born. They were born and grew up with the mandatory confinement to which the world was subjected. Personal, collective anxieties, by country, by continent, all over the world.
We are still not all in the same phase of the pandemic (I don’t mean paranoia). There are those who are already rehearsing the lack of definition and those who are still struggling against the impetuous growth of the covid-19.
In the political discourse, the notes of normality, for the sake of the economy, live with the imposition of strict rules felt by all who intend and need to use public space. It seems that nothing is right. We can no longer be “entrenched” at home to fight the virus at the window, but neither can we show our faces on the street, without the protections that make us “lose face”.
Personally and professionally, we kept costs down, but we lost the revenue that guided us in our daily routine. We are overwhelmed by the apparent strength of numbers. Ten million people infected worldwide, an apparent worrying growth in China, which leads the Beijing authorities to confine 1.5 million people, the increasing deaths in Brazil and the growth in the region of Lisbon and the Tagus Valley, which dirty the photography of Portugal as a provident and organized country. This last fact allowed “El País” this week to make a title severely condemned and criticized by the Portuguese government. That newspaper wrote: “Portugal reconfina la Gran Lisboa”. This led the minister of foreign affairs, Augusto Santos Silva, to remember that this is “totally false”, asking, in his style, “the correction due with the urgency and publicity that this falsehood requires”. What ended up being done by “El País”.
In view of this, there are those like me who seek refuge from science. Even then – this spring – uncertainties grew. Experts are ensuring that the pandemic is progressing normally, almost arm in arm with those who seem to announce a second wave. And there are even experts from the World Health Organization who are predicting the worst for the coming months. That’s what Ranieri Guerra, WHO’s deputy general director, did when he admitted that covid-19 could be like the Spanish flu that “lost strength in the summer and came back ferociously in September and October, causing 50 million deaths during the second wave”.
The media is reporting sociological changes (we still don’t know if they will last), such as the increase in the number of divorces, domestic violence, the needs of the most needy, the number of people without work and even one or another act of despair like that of actor Pedro Lima.
“I think about the death of the human race,” Bob Dylan said recently, in a rare interview… we all think, I think, that with this pandemic the human race may at least need a lot of care, not necessarily – not only – from world health services .
*Director of Plataforma
