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Funeral of a corona victim in Moscow, May 15, 2020
Photo: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP
At the beginning of the year, the Geneva-based World Health Organization was still printing around.
Has the new virus that is making headlines in China, triggering new and draconian measures there, already reached the status of a pandemic?
Geneva long denied it, watched and watched.
A lot of time was lost, today we are smarter and more unhappy.
One million people have officially died from the virus, calculates the Johns Hopkins University.
A million people, most of whom at the beginning of the year probably had no idea of the looming danger.
This enormous number makes us who are healthy or recovered into survivors, contemporary witnesses and fellow sufferers.
It's not just the physical symptoms and the medical problems.
All those who follow the news - even if only from a distance - are burdened with worries that arise from the health risk of the virus, and then contaminate many other areas with possible misfortune: Will I still have a job soon?
Who will I still be able to meet?
When can I travel and party again?
The mundane everyday appears today as utopia
What began so quietly and vaguely now divides our historical consciousness into one before and one after.
It is a plague that affects all countries, all forms of society, economic systems and religions.
What was simply the banal present until a few months ago appears to us today as utopia and increasingly strange, risky and thoughtless.
You want to object to every film when the actors push their way through a full party maskless.
There is hardly any other topic.
People can cope with dangers that they can perceive with their senses, from which they must flee or which they have to fight, but a globally spreading, invisible and unpredictable virus is developing into an unprecedented emotional burden.
It manifests itself in an increase in mental illness and domestic violence, catching the weakest and defenseless.
The now often invoked life with the pandemic must also include a plan on how to protect the soul and curb domestic violence.
Corona is a test for communities.
The key resource for slowing the spread of the disease when a vaccine and effective drugs are not available is trust.
Cooperation, a sense of responsibility and reliability in society make life difficult for the virus.
And vice versa: It rages unchecked where a state breaks down into hostile milieus, where science and politics do not work together, where parties trick each other in a hostile way and where citizens deeply distrust their political representatives and the media.
The Spanish writer David Jiménez recalled this in an article for the "New York Times".
The reason for the particularly difficult course of the epidemic in Spain lies in the dysfunctionality of the political system in his homeland.
The parties would not have opened up or renewed, acting like a power-obsessed parallel society.
Whether you follow your analysis or not - Corona reveals what made a nation, what ultimately made the whole world vulnerable, namely through a lack of cooperation and trust.
Institutions for the joint transfer of information, for the exchange of effective prevention, for the detection of superspreaders and potential clusters - they do not exist or if they do, then they are underfunded, undersupplied and politically marginalized.
Corona uses the weaknesses of the community
Power is organized along national borders, but the virus doesn't care about them.
People will wonder why in some countries containment was so much better.
Will they put up with the fact that so many have to die because their respective politicians are in fact becoming rulers over life and death?
Until recently, politics was seen as an unattractive variant of show business in many countries, and the Berlusconization was not limited to Italy for a long time, the terrible comeback of untrustworthy men was seen in the news around the world.
That was no drama because national politics seemed less and less important, the economically globalized, liberal society compensated for the eccentrics the parties brought up.
One thought.
Corona has changed that.
It uses weaknesses in the community.
There is nothing new or surprising about the development of these months.
This danger has long been recognized and precisely described.
Shortly before his death in the spring of 1989, the British writer Bruce Chatwin wrote letters to his friends.
In it he warned: "We live in a time of new viruses, a time of Pandora's box."
Chatwin wanted to search for primitive forms of viruses and immune individuals in remote areas of the Sahel in order to develop vaccines.
But it never came to that.
He was himself being treated for a fungal infection he contracted in China.
His immune system no longer worked because Chatwin was infected with the HiVirus and died on January 18, 1989 in Nice.
Then he explained that "climate change" is changing Africa and that viruses that have lived in orderly fashion for thousands of years could prepare to "colonize the world".
The danger is now real, because after CoVid 19, further pathogens are waiting for human visits in as yet undiscovered host animals.
If we want to avoid further pandemics, we have to strengthen what weakens them.
Solidarity is our best chance
The economic order that dominated until recently encouraged the rapid spread of the virus, weakened public health care, and fostered paranoia in digital capitalism and social networks that grew out of non-cooperative game theory.
That it would be badly paid nurses and supermarket cashiers who save the world, that health authorities have to be at the forefront of progress and that social cohesion, i.e. the tired old solidarity, is our best chance to go on at all and not drown in illness and grief - in January you couldn't even convince a stoned evangelical youth group.
A million victims of this disease is a special date.
There is no longer any point in discussing Corona as a topic of national regulatory policy, football games and carnival events, all of which misjudges the conceptual efforts that must be made immediately so that the ghost is at least limited.
Not the vaccine alone, not relieving drugs - if we don't want another million to be killed in the pandemic, we need to build collaboration and trust, between neighbors and nations.
If we want to counter this and future, similar epidemics, then at the end of the changes there will be something like a world domestic policy, a globalization of care, cooperation and humanity.
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