The pandemic, four years later

Four years ago, these days, we were beginning to realize that something was not right.

News was coming about a distant virus with unpredictable behavior, and it is easy to forget now the extent of our ignorance: it took the media several weeks to reach accurate conclusions about the modes of transmission or ways to prevent it, and for a long time we moved in a sea of uncertainties whose damage was perhaps not inevitable.

At the end of February, after a brief trip through Spain and Portugal, I returned to my city infected without knowing it.

Only a couple of cases had been documented at that time in the press in my country.

I remember very well the expression of intense concern on the faces of the doctors who found aggressive pneumonia in my x-rays, and now I know that I will never be free of the strange sadness of knowing that the virus ended up killing the friend who gave it to me.

In the following months, while I recovered without sequelae, I followed the spirals of fear and suffering in which our societies were embarking on the screens of our confinement, and tried to reach a more or less reliable conclusion about the realities that would come upon us. when all this was over.

It was the third time, in this still young century, that we repeated that commonplace: this is going to change the world forever.

After the attacks of September 2001 and the economic crisis of 2008, the coronavirus pandemic disrupted everything once again, without even leaving us time to recover the lost stability, and rather piling its consequences on top of what we were already experiencing.

The phenomenon was so surprising, despite not being at all unexpected (many had announced it), that we did not know how to talk about it, and very soon we began to explain it with the languages ​​that we had used in previous crises.

Our governments talked about the pandemic as they talk about a war and about covid as if it were an unpredictable enemy: a terrorist.

The disastrous decisions that led to the financial debacle of 2008—the total absence of state controls, selfishness and greed becoming the driving force of the economy, the tensions between the interest of the individual and that of the markets—lent us the lexicon to discuss our current priorities.

The entire world launched into a frenzy of prophecies and speculations, of crystal balls and conspiracy theories, and that was a visible thermometer of our anxieties: these generations—ours, those of the living—had not yet faced a similar uncertainty, and we had to go back to the 1918 flu to get a more or less precise analogy of what we were experiencing.

“The future, by definition, lacks an image,” wrote Paul Valéry in a time of uncertainty.

“History gives it the means to be thought.”

But when we looked at history we found a relative void, since the 1918 flu, which according to some killed more people than the two world wars combined, has not been told as much or as well as the wars.

And of course: since we lacked the stories about that past moment, it was difficult for us to imagine precisely what would come after this present moment.

In April 2020, a Colombian magazine asked me to offer an opinion on what this crisis would leave us.

I have to be rude enough to quote myself so that readers can better understand my argument.

This paragraph was my response:

“I don't have high hopes: a quick reading of history suggests that humanity learns little from disasters or soon forgets what it learns.

Rich countries have spent recent years undermining public policies that could have helped them confront the pandemic, and less rich countries, lost in corruption and wars, have not even been able to invent them.

We will navigate between authoritarianism and fear;

To avoid the pain of the death of close beings, we will accept condemning millions of distant beings to hunger.

The destroyed economies will be the Petri dish of various violence.

We will see displays of heroism and solidarity every day, but that will not be enough, because the brave and the supportive will not be the ones who choose our leaders: they will be those deceived by populism, those misinformed by networks, those frightened by poverty.

They will elect the Trumps and the Bolsonaros and they will not throw out the Ortegas or the Maduros.

The question is not so much what lessons this crisis leaves, but how to prepare our societies, impoverished and confronted, for what we do not yet see.

It's like Sánchez Ferlosio said: more bad years will come and they will make us blinder."

I was wrong about Bolsonaro and Trump, who were not re-elected, but it would be unforgivably naive to think that their defeat was a consequence of the irresponsibility, incompetence or cynicism with which they faced (or not) the pandemic.

In any case, there we have Trump, virtually nominated as the Republican candidate for president;

and, in exchange for Bolsonaro, the Latin American tragicomedy has given us another clown of proud ignorance and profound antipathy towards science, knowledge and the public sector: Javier Milei.

No one can fail to remember that one of Trump's first actions, upon coming to power, was to destroy the mechanisms best prepared to confront a pandemic: in 2018, he dismantled a National Security Council program that had been created in the Obama years , when the Government received harsh criticism for its handling of the Ebola crisis;

and we now know that later, just three months before the first Covid infections, he eliminated an early warning program, Predict, and fired dozens of scientists who had managed to identify 160 viruses susceptible to causing a pandemic.

Milei, for his part, has promised to dismantle the State, starting with public health, and from very early on he put scientists in his sights: he promised to privatize Conicet, which manufactured antibody tests in record time, and then, referring to the scientists, he allowed himself to ask: “How productive are they?”

There was a moment in 2020 when the pandemic made us talk about solidarity, citizen responsibility, and taking care of each other;

Now we vote for those who explicitly make brutal individualism and even cruelty towards the most vulnerable their first electoral argument, and the one that sells best.

The pandemic, the idealists thought, demonstrated the usefulness of the cooperation of nations and interdependence instead of isolation, but what it left behind was an unstoppable rise of nationalisms and nativisms of various kinds.

(Epidemics have always had a close relationship with xenophobia).

The pandemic, finally, forced societies to consider again the influence on their lives of a solid and competent Government, with institutions capable of responding in case of emergency and repairing the damage to private economies with public funds.

All this is anathema to the champions of

every man for himself.

Four years ago, the most irritating of idealisms was the one that saw the pandemic as a rite of passage, a challenge that would make us better or from which our societies would emerge stronger.

Nothing of that has happened.

The pandemic is a territory of paradoxes, contradictions, and lost opportunities.

Perhaps the only possible lesson begins by realizing this.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

is a writer.

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