In this pandemic that we have been living in since last year, are we prepared to make an effort to build the dreamed “world of tomorrow”, rather than to widen the gaps in the world of yesterday? It seems that in most of Europe they have not yet understood that leaving the most precarious people in precariousness, contagion does not stop. For poor countries, the spread of the virus will never stop if there is no goat.
If we look globally, there have been three types of states in terms of the tendency to deal with the pandemic. Some chose the elimination strategy: take early action, isolate contaminants, do everything possible to prevent the virus from spreading, so that it can be opened as soon as possible. This strategy does not require vaccines, as the virus is eliminated with simpler techniques. Or that with so little virus, with a cheap vaccine (i.e. less effective than RNA-based vaccine) it would be enough. This strategy was used more or less by most Asian countries, as well as Australia and New Zealand, in Europe Iceland, Norway and Finland, and the Canadian Atlantic provinces.
At the other end, countries under a gunman leader: Until the United States leaves Trump, Brazil under Bolsonaro, the Philippines under Duterte, or India under Narendra Modi. These chiefs decided not to take protective measures and to underestimate the severity of the disease, while proclaiming aloud that they were not personally afraid. It could be laughed if it had not destroyed many lives of that lack of maturity (même pas peur as children) and of that lack of understanding (not realizing interdependence and immediate systemic danger). In Brazil, more than 500,000 people, Amazonian tribes and their languages and cultures are about to disappear, while the president continues to promote hydroxychloroquine (or sometimes chloroquine, or in others ivermectin, seems not to know it well, but anything serves him to say it is not serious).
Auzolan to combat social Darwinism
At the heart of this massacre, however, there have been many hopes, such as the favela Maré in the city of Rio de Janeiro. In auzolan, in collective responsibility, with the help of the NGOs, a care plan was elaborated by the neighbors themselves, gathering their needs and particularities. Large-scale tests were carried out and in the fourteenth edition of each person in a positive situation medical surveillance was organized, a telephone connection was secured and meals were taken home every day. Meanwhile, information about the spread of the flu was disseminated through a small magazine and on social networks. It has not been easy, with few resources, in the small homes in which all generations lived together, but they have achieved an incredible result. In July 2020 in the Maré favela there was a double mortality rate than in the rest of the city of Rio, while in November, after the surveillance plan in auzolan, in the Maré favela they died four times less of COVID-19 than in other neighborhoods of Rio.
Growth and authority
In addition to the two types of State mentioned, there is a third group that implemented the “de-escalation strategy”, or at least that, yes, but with many inadequate measures. We have known for over a year that this virus is mainly dispersed as an aerosol, but it seems that air renewal in closed areas does not matter yet, and they prefer to ban groups of people on the beaches rather than properly attend to protective measures in the workplace. Because all of this is not absolutely rational: a group of people who do not consume and are out of work is more suspicious than a group of workers or students who are in a workshop or in a school. Sending the former police and imposing fines, it seemed that the authority had done a good job, with the latter’s priority being to breathe the fresh air or, at least, that of the film. But to do so, management should take science into account. Since the second lockdown, the priority has been seen: going to work (without adequate protective measures) and making every effort in social life, in the name of parenting.
Not understanding interdependence
Unlike in the favela Maré, it seems that in most of Europe it has not yet been understood leaving the most precarious in precariousness, that contagion does not stop. They wanted a vaccine, but only for the rich, to travel thanks to their health pass (even sending rumors to Africa, to shape it, but without responding to their needs). They do not understand that if not all people around the planet are not properly vaccinated, the strains of virus that flee from the vaccine will be selected and the problem will continue, destroying thousands more lives.
In this matter, from the present point of view, we realize that those who followed the elimination strategy were the most direct: less dead, less sick, less unemployed and more understood by the community.
That's what we have to understand in this 21st century. Everything or no, everything or nothing, cannot be isolated.