For two years, on the pages of the Diário de Notícias and with some frequency, Filipe Froes, a doctor, specialist in respiratory diseases, and Patrícia Akester, a scientist in the field of law, wrote about the pandemic, and made what was complicated simple. They helped us to understand the state of the disease, what to do with it, and how to face everyday life during the hardest time of the pandemic. From these chronicles, results the book that is available from Monday, and that is distributed Tuesday with the DN. Two years after the beginning of the pandemic, there is talk of the future.
The Pandemia that Revealed Other Pandemics – Contributions to Knowledge is the title of the book, with a preface by Admiral Gouveia e Melo, who coordinated the vaccination task force against covid-19. What other pandemics does the book talk about, exactly?
Patrícia Akester (PA) – We talk about the pandemic in terms of health, that is the basic premise, but because of this pandemic we have uncovered others, of the social, economic, and political scope, they are pandemics in a metaphorical sense. In the political arena, because the existence of the pandemic and the establishment of certain measures by governments, led some totalitarian movements around the world, such as China, to take certain measures to curtail rights, freedoms and guarantees. We saw, for example, the issue of tracing apps that supposedly allowed to avoid chains of contagion, but also made it possible to know where people were at any given moment. Therefore, privacy issues were raised, but these are just a few examples, because other political issues also arose. In economic terms, and obviously with the economy at a standstill, financial problems arose, families became unemployed, many businesses went bankrupt, which also led to social problems.
In other words, has the pandemic, with the brutality of its impact, uncovered societies that were fragile?
PA – Exactly. There were social problems at many levels, in fact, in the first phase of confinement in Portugal, a blunt mistake was made that people did not realize, such as the lack of access to support centers for people who were victims of abuse. It is a phase where these people are given over to their abusers, which is clearly a social problem. Also, let’s not forget about the increase in mental health problems and the increase in the divorce rate. Being in confinement, people were forced to stay at home and live with each other. I happen to know this because I’m a lawyer, and I know that there were a lot of people with less work during the pandemic, but I also know that family law lawyers had a lot of work. I think that at that time, what was true remained and what was a lie fell apart.
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