Covid.
Covid, covid, covid... Let's see... What was that?
It's hard to remember, isn't it?
Now that the old normality has returned, we feel distant in time that time of empty avenues and hidden faces.
It is surprising to remember how recently the pandemic was declared, that joke of nature that ended up condemning
almost the entire world population to lock themselves in their homes
and submit to all kinds of restrictions, impositions, and limitations on freedom for more than two years.
Could it be that we respond to the Freudian impulse of denial, to the psychological need to erase traumatic episodes from memory?
Or will our amnesia hide a feeling of having made a huge fool of ourselves?
Of having been accomplices in a colossal nonsense?
It hurts to ask the question.
It means questioning the dogma to which almost all of us submit that lockdowns and plastic masks and gloves in supermarkets and the ban on touching surfaces in public places and the obsessive application of hand sanitizing gels were obligations of life
or death,
and that to doubt its efficacy was heresy.
Well, it has already been seen that the gloves, surfaces and gels generated wealth for the few and a waste of time and money for the others.
As for the value of the two measures that more than anything else defined the post-apocalyptic world of the covid,
the confinements and the chinstraps,
there are many doubts, as many studies show in countries as disparate as Denmark and Bangladesh.
The results of the most recent research, based on the largest global database there is (the Cochrane Library), say the same thing.
The leader of the investigation, an epidemiologist at Oxford University named Tom Jefferson, said
there is "just no evidence"
that the masks have made
"any difference."
There are many medical eminences who disagree, of course.
Governments relied on them, on "science" that they considered to be the most credible.
But they were also based on the public's demand to show that they were doing something visible.
Mandating everyone to wear a face covering offered an easy way to respond to this political imperative.
The debate about chinstraps goes on for a long time
.
Also, and more bitterly, that of confinements, the cause of much more collateral damage, absolutely justified damage according to some, grotesquely unjustified according to others.
What is certain is that the lockdowns have led to a dramatic rise in mental illness, especially among young people;
thousands of deaths from cancer or cardiovascular problems because they could not be diagnosed on time;
to tremendous economic losses;
to the immeasurable pain suffered by those millions of people who could not say goodbye to their loved ones or even attend their funerals.
Was it worth the ordeal to which more than half of humanity was subjected?
For the vast majority of people, non-experts like me, the answer boils down to a question of faith, which in turn depends on one's temperament or philosophy of life.
As in politics, we choose to believe the information that reinforces our way of thinking, we discard the one that calls it into question.
I, who lean towards the skeptical side, choose to opt for the current of opinion distilled in the Great Barrington Declaration, a document published in October 2020, just seven months after the start of the pandemic, and signed by 10,233 scientists and 27,860 doctors. in 44 countries.
The statement said that
the policy of indiscriminate confinement was producing
"devastating effects on public health in the short and long term"
,
that the correct response to the pandemic was selective confinement, focused on the sector of the population most vulnerable to covid, mainly older people.
Several more scientists said the same thing, based on the irrefutable reality that people aged 50 and under were more at risk of dying in a traffic accident than of the virus.
More recent has been a study by the venerable Johns Hopkins University in the United States, which estimated that lockdowns saved perhaps 5,000 lives in Europe and 2,000 in the United States, little compared to the thousands more who have died from other causes as a result of movement restrictions.
The researchers identified more than 18,000 studies on the question and focused on 34. Their conclusion:
“Lockdowns are not an effective way to reduce mortality during a pandemic.”
As an example of this we have Sweden, a country that challenged world orthodoxy.
I wrote about its citizens with envy a couple of years ago.
The government recommended – not forced – that the elderly stay at home, and that the young do the favor of not visiting them.
Meanwhile, bars and restaurants and businesses and schools and gyms and hairdressers and even some cinemas remained open.
Today it is more than proven that
covid mortality rates have been much lower in Sweden than in countries that applied fierce lockdowns such as Spain, the United Kingdom and Argentina.
To those who insist on believing that confining us all was an essential antidote to the pandemic, I would ask a question: if the Covid reappeared tomorrow with the same force and with the same characteristics as three years ago, would you demand that your governments impose the same measurements one more time?
Recognizing that I have my prejudices, that my way of seeing life is conditioned like everyone else's by circumstances beyond my control, I have convinced myself that repeating the policy of mass house arrests would be more than nonsense, it would be criminal madness. w
