Faced with what has been affirmed about the unpredictability of this pandemic, a kind of bad luck that we would have had to live through, it should be remembered that this is a crisis announced years ago, from the moment when epidemic cases were included in the strategic study programs of the main universities. Predicted last October, when researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies reported that the coronavirus would be the protagonist of the next global epidemic. The what was known but not the when. Until last January. The moment the Chinese authorities quarantined Hubei province and the virus was approaching the European Union. He made a vigorous stop in Iran and arrived in Italy, following a domino trajectory that will gradually travel the planet. However, despite the available evidence and information, the risk was denied until the last moment. Denied in this country by those who irresponsibly allowed and encouraged mass demonstrations. Nor are foreign dignitaries spared. Boris Johnson initially affirmed that it was enough to wash his hands to the song of happy birthday to protect himself from the virus, and Trump was close to hearing from the press about the seriousness of the events. Finally, in a more generalized sense, gravity was also denied by those who at first gesturally disapproved the feints of avoiding kisses and handshakes, despite the fact that Angela Merkel had made it clear.
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This behavior typical of Cassandra syndrome, a character in Greek mythology whose warnings about imminent dangers were ignored and ridiculed, highlights the distance between what we know and what we want to believe. A way of acting, rather of inaction, that partly obeys the attempt to avoid the economic and political costs derived from doing it. Now, as we are seeing, mobilizing at the wrong time is more expensive, both ways, than ignoring the alarm signals.
In the current epidemiological crisis we find a foretaste of what awaits us if we do not take climate change seriously. The two phenomena share, in addition to denialism, other particularities; a modus operandis - an abstract and diffuse threat that in a surprising turn takes on intimate tangibility and brutal material; or the approach to the cost of modulating the effects.
Even recognizing the role that fortune can play, this, Machiavelli said, resembles an enraged river that devastates everything in its path but whose destructive capacity can be mitigated if precaution has previously been taken to build levees and defenses. The disruptive nature of nature is already a sign of our time. We can choose to continue acting in accordance with yesterday's denialism or to anticipate and prepare for the future to come. We will save lives and money. @ evabor3
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