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The paradox of the pandemic

2021-08-03T03:24:36.685Z


The same young people who are immune to the biological effects of the coronavirus are the main victims of its social effects


Several young people with masks at the Cruïlla festival in Barcelona held in July.Marta Pérez / EFE

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The effects of the pandemic on the age structure are paradoxical. The morbidity and mortality rate is concentrated in the elderly, especially in countries like ours where primary care services and nursing homes have collapsed due to their chronic under-staffing. But the social impact of the pandemic, in terms of relative impoverishment and loss of vital opportunities, is concentrated in the youth transition between family emancipation and adult integration. Hence the paradox that the same young people who are immune to the biological effects of the virus are the main victims of its social effects.

This is better understood with the metaphor of the pandemic as a war against the virus, since in any war, the main victims are young people who must renounce their own social integration to leave everything and go to the front to risk their lives. This is what happened in our civil war, when employment, marriage and birth rates plummeted, truncating the life cycle of an entire generation. And the same has happened now with the covid pandemic, which by strangling higher education and employment opportunities has destroyed the vital plans of family emancipation and social integration of an entire generation of young people, determining a 46% drop in 2020 in nuptiality and 6% in the natality. And as we know from the effect of abandonment of employment due to maternity, the cause of the gender gap,These failures of the vital careers of young people are veritable time bombs that exert multiple delayed effects on the rest of their life cycle. A blockade of youth emancipation that threatens to break the generational metabolism.

In this, it also rains in the wet, since the social effects of the pandemic on young people not only accumulate in those who already suffered from the euro crisis, from 2009 to 2013, but also affect young people like the Spanish who were already coming. being since the transition to democracy the most incapacitated in Europe to proceed successfully with her family emancipation and social integration. To do this, it is enough to analyze the European data compared to the Youth Development Index, where Spain always ranks at the bottom in terms of school dropouts, precarious employment and family dependency. Something now aggravated by the two ax blows suffered with the euro crisis and the covid.

With the added problem that this discrimination against youth is not denounced as such by any party and therefore not recognized and fought by any government. In Spain there has never been a youth policy worthy of the name, and that is why there are no youth insertion income or protected housing for rent. Something that should be reproached both to the Socialist Party, with so many years in power, and to Podemos itself, which was born precisely as the youth party, but which has never dedicated itself to being one, preferring to behave as a champion of the unions and the cultural wars.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-08-03

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