Ignacio Miri
07/14/2021 5:48 PM
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 07/14/2021 5:48 PM
The forcefulness of the
round number
serves as a reminder and symbol of the fragility of the slogan that
the President
and some of the main officials of the Frente de Todos and
also of Together for Change
have been repeating for more than a year
. "If we had not taken measures, we would be worse off," argue Alberto Fernández, Axel Kicillof and their officials and, with some more noticeable nuance in recent months, also Horacio Rodríguez Larreta. The question that is spontaneously activated after hearing that phrase is:
"Can you be in a worse situation?"
.
For a middle-income country like Argentina, with a public health system that, despite decades of decline,
continues to function reasonably
and with extensive coverage of union welfare and prepaid medicine, it is not possible to imagine many situations worse than
having 100,000 deaths from the pandemic
, in the midst of a collapsed economy and with an education system perhaps irreparably fractured between the privileged students who accessed virtual education and those who
had to spend long months wasting their time
or who they directly ended up dropping out of school.
The vaccination campaign finally arrived, and it is
progressing as well as could be expected
in a country that has a long tradition in this field and in which anti-vaccine preaching caught on more in social networks and - because of the negative - in official speeches than in the reality.
In many other countries, governments took harsh measures, such as cutting face-to-face classes for a few weeks, forcing
travelers to
quarantine
hotels or closing restaurants and shopping centers, but it is difficult to find another example of such prolonged closings and with a such a large geographic dispersion.
The example of
last year's school closings
is paradigmatic in that sense: classrooms have been bricked up since March in provinces, cities, towns and places that did not have
any contagion
. It was an example of
delusional federalism
: a measure was taken for Santa Cruz and Misiones looking at what was happening in Nuñez, or, worse still, in Madrid.
Of course, life, as often happens,
was in charge of looking for other paths
and that unanimous quarantine on paper began to crack every minute and the restrictions could only be maintained in those places that the State still controls, such as the public schools themselves. and private, the Migration offices at airports or the public offices themselves, which
still operate at half-speed today
or which, a year and a half later, keep their doors closed.
It is in this context that that unfortunate phrase by Alberto Fernández of April 11, 2020, which every so often becomes more unusual:
“I prefer 10% more poor people and not 100,000 dead”
. The first term of the sentence is close to be fulfilled and the second will be widely surpassed.History has shown that, as the President also said, there is not necessarily a dichotomy between health and the economy:
you can fail in both at the same time
.