Covid 19

Thus began the sadly famous Angela of Mondello, who went to the news for having launched the denier catchphrase on Covid 19.

And instead Covid is there, and how if it is there and it is felt, it is perceived in the fears of the people, in the sense of powerlessness in the face of a pandemic that we could never have imagined even in the most catastrophic of films.

People get sick and die. And the dead now number in the millions all over the world.

I was lucky, I discovered that I had Covid by taking a swab to leave for the Maldives but I had no consequences, after 8 days the rapid test was already negative and after 12 days also the molecular swab.

Fortune? Lifestyle? Diet? I don’t know, nobody knows. The fact is that I did not have any symptoms except a fever of 37.2 in the first two days and that’s it.

A year later

A year after the onset of the pandemic, assumptions and hypotheses are still being made. Why do some individuals get sick and others are asymptomatic? Nobody knows… and there are the most disparate advice on miraculous remedies, who recommends vitamin D, whoever recommends Lactoferrin, Vitamin C and so on and so forth.Then of course there are also the advice of the usual vegan / vegetarian / fruitarian fundamentalists, etc. that magnify the benefits of a diet based on vegetables or even simple apples (oh well that an apple a day, as the saying goes, keeps the doctor away … but it’s a bit risky as a hypothesis of prevention, don’t you think? ).

It seems strange that nowadays, with our technology and our knowledge, a tiny virus can question all our certainties, our whole life.

Yes, because in the end this pandemic has literally upset our way of living.

The state of isolation and distance to which we have been subjected, the difficulty of predicting events and the fear of contagions, have forced us to change habits and lifestyles as well as to a different management of our “comfort zone” .

We are therefore led to make sacrifices, to review our priorities’ and to a forced social distancing that favors conditions of isolation and loneliness. All this for a health emergency. We would never have imagined it even in our worst nightmares.

We did not expect all of this; this pandemic that has led us to isolate ourselves from everything and everyone. In our homes even if superconnected with the world but still forcibly isolated.

This is a condition that we, people of the 21st century, are very close to because it not only deprives us of our freedom to do, move, relate, meet but reminds us every day of the reason why it is happening, fueling our phobias because ‘our most precious asset is at risk: health, life.

A consideration

Finally, I made a consideration. I believe that this Covid 19 pandemic has brought to light some curious paradoxes. Some only verbal, but incredibly heavy in meaning: do you think that never, like today in history, being “negative” is something “positive” (and vice versa). But there is more, something much more serious that goes beyond these puns.

So far we have believed that the internet could be enough to shorten distances; today if where to make a call with China I go to Zoom or Meet and in a few seconds we are facing each other. However, this did not lead to a decrease in transnational interactions. Quite the contrary. The current paradox of the globalization of trade and services has instead shown us that, precisely because we are still very close and connected, even physically (European, Asian, American and African), a virus now travels the world by traveling in business class by plane, and in ten hours he arrives from Shanghai to Milan.

We have seen the famous saying that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can generate a hurricane on the other side of the world come true in a plastic way, deciphered in the theories of Edward Lorenz and Alan Turing.

Never before have we been connected on this Earth, and therefore equally responsible for each other’s actions.