Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer on the lessons of the lockdown: it was impossible to do the right thing

Stella suggested that I write a diary for a Dutch newspaper to inform my carefree, tough and casual compatriots of the seriousness of the situation here in Italy. They had to be warned, Stella thought. On March 8 I have NRC called and the first episode of my viral diary appeared on March 9. Today the ninety-fifth and final episode is in this newspaper. It is June 27 and we live in a different world. I want to try to express here what exactly has happened in the past period and what we could learn from it.

What made this pandemic unique was not that it was a pandemic. Mankind has suffered from many epidemics throughout history. Many of them were more dangerous and deadly than this. But this is the first time in history that we have responded to a pandemic with a global lockdown. That is unique. That’s why we made history.

One of the most recent pandemics was the Hong Kong flu, which killed an estimated one million people in Europe in the 1969s and 1970s alone. The same horror scenes occurred as this spring. Hospitals were overcrowded. People died from lack of care capacity. The cemeteries couldn’t take it anymore. But nowhere in the world was there ever thought of a lockdown. The pandemic barely made it to the newspaper. They shrugged at death and organized Woodstock.

The fact that a banal, miniscule virus lost all control of us was unacceptable to us.

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

The question is what has changed between 1969 and now. What explains our draconian, disproportionate, violent and irreconcilable response to a simple viral infection, when we let it run its course earlier in history as yet another superfluous proof that life is unbearable?

In part, it’s because of our recent obsession with control. We have regulated and boarded up every part of life with procedures and safety regulations. We have even recorded death. The fact that a banal, miniscule virus lost all control of us was unacceptable to us. We have made every effort to regain control. The lockdown was our show of power. We might just let the goddamn virus know who’s the master on this planet.

Another part of the explanation lies in the fact that spiritual values ​​in our neoliberal universe have literally become worthless. It is said that man is the only animal species that is aware of its own mortality. For many millennia, human thought has been dominated by attempts to give meaning to our mortality through religion or philosophy. Our mortality as such was a given, but it was about designing a narrative within which this mortality took on a meaning. Today we consider mortality as a technical problem, as a design flaw in the hardware, for which there must be technical solutions.

After millennia of fruitless philosophizing about the meaning of life, in this neoliberal heyday we have finally discovered what we humans are on earth for. The purpose of life is to consume. That is our job. In fact, to consume, we only need our bodies. After abolishing spiritual values ​​we have been reduced to the fragile mechanisms of our bodies. The afterlife takes too long. We don’t believe in that anymore. We claim the right to realize paradise here and now on earth. Every day again. In order to live eternally beautiful and eternally young with our Instagram smile against a heavenly background, we must have the bodies of angels. The arrival of the virus was an attack on everything that we think is sacred today and threatened to disturb the fairy tale of our consumption paradise in the submarine.

We did it to protect the elderly. Yes it is. And I can be proud of that too. For the first time in our history, we have lurked the evolution that clears weaker specimens of the species with this type of disease. That is civilization. We have been willing to make heavy personal sacrifices out of solidarity with the weak in our society. That is impressive.

But the price we have had to pay and still have to pay is enormous. And I am not just referring to the economic damage of the global lockdown, which is astronomical. The International Monetary Fund has adjusted its forecasts this week. The global economy will shrink more sharply than was thought in April. A fall of 4.9 percent is now expected. The total damage from the pandemic and the lockdown to the global economy is estimated at $ 12 trillion. Globally, the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs will disappear. Poor, brave Italy is one of the hardest hit countries. The forecasts predict a contraction of 12.8 percent for the Italian economy.

Someone in a slum doesn’t even have running water to wash their hands with, like the WHO has told us to

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

The lockdown, despite all good intentions to limit the health damage, has also resulted in massive damage to public health. Other medical procedures and treatments have been postponed. Checks have not taken place. A reservoir has been created for overdue emergency medical care. It will take a long time before that is eliminated, with all its consequences. People die from things like this, just as they die from poverty. To this we can add a whole chapter about the psychological damage, especially in the elderly, that we were protecting so hard that we let them spend their last days in solitude for their own sake because we have forbidden them to harm their children. see.

The damage caused by the lockdown has not been shared fairly among the population. The poor and the less educated are more affected by the economic consequences than the rich and the more educated, after they were also more severely affected by the virus. A bricklayer cannot work at home. Someone in a slum doesn’t even have running water to wash their hands with, as the WHO has told us to. And most of the lockdown bill ends up with the young. Their future is at stake. They are allowed to pay off the debts we now incur to revive our economy.

Although I have been thinking about the virus and the lockdown every day, thanks in part to the ninety-five episodes in this newspaper, I still don’t know if we did the right thing. The only correct conclusion may be that it was impossible to do the right thing. Both responding to the pandemic, as we did, and not responding to the pandemic will lead to unacceptable damage. The only scenario that would not have been disastrous is the scenario in which we had prevented the pandemic.

That must be the main lesson for the future. And to prevent such pandemics in the future, it helps to prepare us with all the measures that specialists have been calling for for decades, but it is not enough. We will also have to do something about the causes, which lie in our way of life and in the way we treat animals, their habitats and our planet.

Here in Italy, the question is now beginning to arise, how on earth was it possible that the sanitary system of the Lombardy region, which is among the absolute best in the world, has not been able to cope with the virus and the answer to that question is starting to be painfully clear? to become. There are excellent clinics for highly specialized care in Lombardy. Hospitals have increasingly focused on the global avant-garde of treatments. That makes money with gold and that is necessary, because care in Lombardy has been privatized. At the same time, hospitals have cut back on basic care and their regional function, because these are cost items. They draw wealthy patients from all over the world for specialist care and close their first aid posts. And you can’t even blame them, because that was the intention of the privatization: that they started playing for a company. That is another lesson for the future: privatization of healthcare is not part of the solution, it is part of the problem.

The real picture now comes: the rescue of our planet

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

This lockdown taught us something else and that is perhaps the most important lesson. If the urgency is felt, it is apparently possible to take very drastic measures in the short term. It is said that this was actually our dress rehearsal for the real performance that we have to perform now: the rescue of our planet. Before the beginning of March this year, you could hear government leaders, policymakers and CEOs argue that it was of course impossible to stop air travel, that the economy had to run and that we could not change our lifestyle. They can’t say that now. So it is possible. A price has to be paid for it, certainly, but it is not impossible. We have now proved that. As soon as we feel the same urgency for combating global warming as for fighting the spread of a virus, a great deal is possible. I consider the fact that we have now experienced it personally.