Antonio Navalón
In these difficult times, it is not only that the truth is kidnapped – which usually happens – but in these moments even death is kidnapped.
I don’t know what is more tragic if the bewildered face of the world’s leaders promising solutions they don’t have or a society permeated by collective fear and terror that the last clause of the job of living, which is to lose one’s life, will comply. Actually, as we were not there and there were no media with the current technologies and capacities, it is difficult to know how the crises of the first pandemics such as the Black Death or the Spanish flu were truly experienced. But what is clear is that what is currently happening in the world in which we are unfolding is terrifying. There is data that, inevitably, we have to start adding one after the other. Not so much as the reflection of this moment in which, over and over again, we are unfolding in a kind of butterfly effect and in which the flutter or the possibility of having an adverse reaction when receiving any of the vaccines, hope is fading away. When we begin to divide the world between vaccinated and unvaccinated, it will be essential to recovering the lines of what we knew before this time. And it is that when this happens, we will inevitably have to establish and develop the foundations to be able to build the post-pandemic world.
In these difficult times, it is not only that the truth is kidnapped – which usually happens – but in these moments, even death is kidnapped. If you realize, since Covid-19 exists, it seems that very few people die from a heart attack, cancer, or diabetes. Currently, the only deaths that seem to matter are those caused by this pandemic. This is understandable from the level and contagion capacity of the virus born in Wuhan, China, but, above all, due to the inability, we have to defend ourselves against this virus. Despite having the certainty that we will all die at some point, this enemy that lives within us constantly lurks and can come and go in waves, as if it were a gigantic tsunami. Covid-19 has been able to take away our peace of mind, certainty, security, freedom, but, above all, the ability to delay the conclusion of our lives.
Meanwhile, while we fight against all this and while we have to decide whether or not we will live in a world where the vital dividing line is between those who have been immunized by a vaccine and those who have not – establishing selection criteria depending on who has been able to access vaccines – we will have to define how viable it is to have a world with the moral conditions established so far. Concerning this, it is convenient to see the real damage, supported by the numbers and statistics, that the crisis has caused, especially because – as happened with the survivors of the Nazi death camps, where the problem was not, not having died in Auschwitz, but to have survived this heartless experience – we will have to see if we will be able to re-engage life.
The data on the cost of this first year of Covid-19 give a world’s structures to be invented. A world in which, to begin with, more or less half of the population will have to get used to living in a closed circuit, where their way of life will not consist of getting up in the morning, going to their workplace, living with his companions and then return home. No, for better or worse, that routine will cease to exist in much of the world. The new way of living after this pandemic will consist of living in a kind of a closed circuit in which people will wake up at home, work from there, see themselves in their bathroom mirror, and have to build a relationship – if they live with someone – with those around; hence I hope these relationships are good.
Another particularly frightening situation is the reality that surrounds the real estate sector, especially in cities like New York, where there are innumerable square meters that, until before the pandemic, were destined to house offices or work centers. So far, one of the main costs of Covid-19 is the fact of knowing that in New York City, there are more unoccupied square meters than there are, as a whole, in Houston, Dallas, and Los Angeles. Only the amount of money that New York has stopped receiving this year in taxes or in terms of the cost of maintaining completely deserted buildings exceeds 6 billion dollars. And this is just the beginning.
The great element behind this whole situation is found in the fact that – except for the big technology companies like Facebook or Apple – all the other corporations are disentailing their square meters, and very few are managing, with great difficulty, to stabilize their rents and spaces that they had and sustained as offices. The 6 billion dollars in losses derived in this sector as a cause of the pandemic are only a small expression of the disastrous world panorama, and it is an amount that, to measure the magnitude of the problem, it is necessary to counteract with everything that the US government has invested this first year of the crisis.
In this case, it is true that – except for institutions such as the European Central Bank – the governments of Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have an advantage that other countries do not have. This significant and powerful advantage is that you have unlimited access to the machine to print dollars. In addition to the inevitable fact that the United States Congress and its Executive Branch are approving, one after another, development and stimulus packages to combat the crisis’s depth. With the machines running at full speed, the American government is doing everything possible to prevent the country’s economy’s general collapse. But make no mistake, these are only preventive measures to avoid bleeding, but in no case is this a guarantee to preserve more important things such as life itself or the establishment of a structure that allows defining what existence will be like once we overcome this crisis.
There is the first forecast that, in the span of one year, more than 114 million people in the world have lost their jobs, while more than 120 million people have returned to live below the poverty level, in other words, under the underworld of total need and all this as a consequence of this first year of the pandemic. In a country like Mexico, the data is not only terrifying; it also shows how unprepared it was for an event like this. More than a million businesses have definitively closed their doors in a country that already had a problem in structural terms regarding economic activity and formalization. But the situation and the outlook are darkened when the current government, led by President López Obrador, instead of helping companies survive and in this way reactivate the economic engine, constantly opts to provide support to those most in need, disappearing any possibility of increasing the quality of life and hindering the economic reactivation of the country.
The dead are another statistic that terrifies, first because of the Covid-19 monopoly on death. It strikes me that we are so clear about how many have died from the coronavirus, but so confusing how many have continued to die from other diseases. But assuming that indeed the deaths from Covid-19 can be counted, once again, Mexico shamefully returns to be at the head of a tragic event. And it is that although the official figure in the country is around 203 thousand deaths, it is estimated that the real figure is at least 60 percent higher, which would be surpassing Brazil and ranking only behind the United States as the country with the most deaths from Covid-19. However, the population of Mexico – with around 126 million inhabitants – is much smaller than that of the United States, which has more than 300 million people, which, proportionally, places Mexico as the leader in deaths from the coronavirus.
Mexico is such a surreal country that, as of the February 13 cutoff date, it had the highest excess mortality on the planet, unsurpassed by any other nation, and yet there were images of crowded beaches from the first day of Mexico’s Holy Week vacation. If this is so and if these data – which the Mexican government itself has not denied – were taken as good, we would find ourselves in a situation in which, in reality, between the number of deaths, the lost jobs, and the disappeared companies, the socioeconomic and health crisis is in dire proportions.
We are afraid. All the inhabitants of the planet are afraid. The problem is that what we really have to be afraid of is contagion or the possibility of dying, which was naturally always possible in the exercise of the profession of living. What we really should be afraid of is knowing that when all this is over – when it happens – and those of us who have the opportunity to witness the overcoming of this moment, the accounting and the so-called public finances will have to stop being called ‘healthy,’ since they will find themselves – as they already are today – deeply ill. Debts are unpayable, and we have to choose between having a healthy accounting or having towns that do not die of hunger or abandonment.
The global figures for what has been invested are staggering. The total sum of the stimulus packages approved so far by the US government to combat this crisis exceeds 5 trillion dollars, a figure that has to be added to the nearly 2 trillion euros that the European Union plans to allocate to rebuild the post covid Europe. But the most daunting of all this is what remains to be invested. When all this happens, the problem will be to define what will come after this crisis. We will have to define what the new concept of normality will be like, what life will be like, what we will teach our children, but, above all, who and how will pay for their education and provide them with the minimum health conditions. No, we will not be able to tell our children only about the remains of this shipwreck. And it is that after having spent more than 600 years and all the experiences that we have lived as humankind, it is not conceivable that the only thing we have to suggest to the next generations is to wash their hands and hide in their homes.
