Pandemonium

He who becomes ill with serious symptoms is isolated from his family as soon as the symptoms manifest themselves. (EFE)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Juan E. Cambiaso, Buenos Aires , 6 June 2020 — To those who already have seven decades of experience and who have lived through other pandemics, it is surprising that today we suffer the exaggerated perception of the impact of the number of infected and dead on the total population of the affected countries. Just under six and a half million infected and three hundred and eighty thousand dead compared to a world population of approximately seven billion eight hundred million inhabitants. These are small numbers no matter how great the pain of those reached by the disease.

What happens, it occurs to me, is that is has put an end to the certainty that these medieval episodes were not possible because science and medical instruments protected us against everything. With the victory against cancer, which sounded possible and close, we were going to be potentially eternal. Molecular biology should help a little. We are Homo Deus defeated and, therefore, scared to death. All because one day a Chinese man ate a bat and turned the world upside down.

That uncertainty reminds us in a shrill voice that we are going to die. A truism that increasing longevity was blurring. Someone always has a grandmother over a hundred years old who is perfect, and from the exception we derived the rule. The novelty puts us all in the position of the heart attack victim who has died in his sleep.

The recreation of images that could well have been from painters from the 15th and 16th centuries, such as Memling and Brueghel, has effects that we thought were foreign to our times: the neighbors rudely expel a brave doctor from his home for fear of contagion. The return of lynchings in the face of a panic that we judged from distant centuries.

As with the black plague, clerics pray and ask for prayers for the pandemic to pass. The Church never had faith in science and prefers incense. A curative treatment or a vaccine would not leave room for the miracle.

There is a tremendous novelty. He who becomes ill with serious symptoms is isolated from his family as soon as they manifest themselves. Sick, he suffers, if it touches him, he dies in solitude and is cremated without his loved ones being able to see him. He leaves his home at risk of evaporating. The subconscious is not indifferent to it.

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