Four years ago, these days, we were beginning to realize that something was not right. News was coming about a distant virus with unpredictable behavior.

It took the media several weeks to reach accurate conclusions about the modes of transmission or ways to prevent it. The phenomenon was so surprising, despite not being at all unexpected, that we did not know how to talk about it. Our governments talked about the pandemic as they talk about a war and about covid as if it were an unpredictable enemy: a terrorist.