Breathe
By Barbara Anderson
I am writing this column in bed, feverish and coughing off and on, as I try to get the congestion to go down and with it the heat in my eyes and the swelling in my joints.
On March 14, less than a week ago, I broke a three-year unbeaten streak and was Covid-19 fodder (in the 'N' thousand variant leading up to the date).
I am grateful to be awake, at home and writing. I am thankful to have three vaccines that reduced all the symptoms and effects of the virus to their minimum expression.
Days before, I met some friends who were angry with the excessive and disorderly traffic, "we haven't learned anything from the pandemic". Hours later, at the door of my children's school, some mothers were arguing because they saw that the subjects to be taught in the classrooms were too late, that the school was not as demanding as before the pandemic, "didn't the teachers learn what it was like to study at home? Why don't they take advantage now to set the maximum speed?
And I started threading all those comments with the movies (you can blame it on Mrs. Omicron's fever).
The names of the Oscar nominated and winning films were still ringing out last week and I thought: why wasn't there a single film, animated short, or documentary with the worst pandemic in a century that we are just beginning to fight?
In the Los Angeles theater, all the flashes were stolen by Pedro Pascal, the Chilean actor who stars in the blockbuster series 'The Last of Us'. Was it necessary to imagine a dystopian world of global contagion by a fungus when we are really living it because of a virus of still controversial origin?
What more genuine metaverse than the one generated in a few days by the Great Confinement where, as the title of the big winner of the year says, we had Everything everywhere at the same time in our house: the children's school, the office, relatives, social life and even duels?
Locked up, many of us, like Brendan Fraser(The Whale) himself, had to cope with the anguish and loneliness, not because of morbid obesity or depression, but for safety, for health because it was the right thing to do.
Nothing new on the front lines... was what we experienced firsthand, because neither the federal government, nor the Ministry of Health, nor Bienestar, nor the anti-covid czar - who preferred to become a leader and media prophet rather than an honest professional - would tell us the truth or guide us to a safer place with the right information.
In a few days it will be three years since the former Secretary of Education, Esteban Moctezuma, gave an early Easter vacation to millions of students, leaving them first for a few weeks and then for more than two years at the mercy of a cheap and inefficient plan such as "School at Home".
If we go by the only reliable data in Mexican records, which is the excess lethality, this pandemic claimed the lives of 793,625 people, almost 2.6 times more than the official count ('the other data') of the 4T government.
I understand that a lot of it has to do with protecting ourselves mentally.
As in cases of a violent event, the post-traumatic stress of Sars-cov2 seems to have made us forget the images of people selling their place in a long line at dawn to get an oxygen tank, the funeral services without supply in their crematorium ovens working 24/7, the people sitting on the sidewalks exchanging handicrafts for food, the shortage of hospital beds, the strenuous work of doctors and nurses, the early meal vouchers sold by restaurants to support their employees, the sanitary traffic lights by contagion colors, Doña Susana Distancia and the other cartoon heroines of the "Health Squadron" presented in the National Palace (Refugio, Prudencia, Esperanza, Aurora), the triage in the hospitals, the insane and careless lines for the swabs that had to be done because in a Secretariat they had divided the 'essential activities' from those that were not, in a metaverse (without Jamie Lee Curtis) called the 'new normality'.
Beyond saying, with more pride than dignity, 'I regret nothing' about the handling of the pandemic, days ago the Undersecretary of Prevention and Health Promotion, Hugo Lopez-Gatell has only responded for the VIP use of Remdesivir among government officials and their relatives (where he includes himself). He still owes us a 'pandemic deliverable', a map that shows us (as at the zoo entrance) where we were in March 2020, where we passed through and where we are headed now that the World Health Organization (WHO) itself considers Covid-19 as a seasonal flu.
Wouldn't it be appropriate to have a Pandemic Guide already written: a manual including only good practices, what worked, what would have been important to do before (or not to do), recommendations, what we learned from other countries, what should be taken into account from the social point of view (schools, jobs, support, controls, information, services, help, support) and the way in which a giant health system such as the Mexican one can be deployed to face a health crisis that at times -for a long time- is uncontrollable.
We are just getting our heads out of a wave the size of those of Nazaré in Portugal, a wave that left us on the coast tired, dizzy, in many cases sad and with after-effects.
We still ask ourselves "haven't we learned anything?"
What will happen in the next pandemic? Because there will be another one, say epidemiologists from all over the world, including those of the also stricken WHO.
Will it be like in earthquakes when everything is rushed while dust is still flying after the earthquake and then it takes years to fit out a building?
I believe that we should not forget what happened to us, no matter how traumatic it was.
We shouldn't look at The Last of Us as something out there in the future that will never happen or New on the Frontlines as something that happened 100 years ago.
Nothing is ever the same after a war, or a tsunami, or an earthquake... Or a 36-month pandemic.
There is still time for this not to be a historical memory (as shown in the movie Argentina 1985) and for us to save hundreds of thousands of lives with perhaps a little humility and asking for recipes from countries that have shown more order and effectiveness (and less lethality) such as Israel, New Zealand, Singapore or Canada.
We do not have to invent the black thread, we just have to get it, adapt it to our country, culture, budgets and keep it as that essential Guide that gives us peace of mind and certainty.
2020 is not so far away that we have already forgotten even to demand strong accountability from those who made decisions about the lives of 120 million Mexicans.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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