In times of pandemic, a little fear never hurts

With anguish as company, not even the most isolated among us can stay alone in quarantine. It’s still difficult to digest how it all happened, serial events that changed lives around the globe.

It was no different here. Just over 20 days ago I was preparing for a series of trips, when, one after another, the commitments were cancelled. I confess that I faced the change in plans with relief: facing the coronavirus on the road was something I definitely didn’t want to do.

As is to be expected in a company whose focus is tourism, when they shut down travel, closed borders and disappeared flights, our livelihood also disappeared. I have no expectation that it will reappear in the coming months – and, even when it does, I think it will do so timidly, in a world with more distances and far fewer travelers.

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Budgetary concerns? Of course, several. At this time, with the pandemic imploding the economy, the only people who have money to spare don’t have them. Lucky beings who, if they agreed to follow isolation measures, could even cross items off the list of collective anxieties. Instead, some prefer to increase them: they were seen in droves, I mean, motorcades, fearless in their luxury vehicles and asking for the return of a world that no longer exists. At the same time, unemployment knocks on the door and the lack of money to eat forces those who really want to isolate themselves to take the risk of being on the streets.

As the caravan passes, the dogs bark and the pandemic deepens, many of us haven’t had time to mourn what was lost, whether it’s our hard-earned money, our years-long job or our plans carefully laid out over months. If there’s one thing that adult life quickly teaches you, it’s that the anguish caused by bills isn’t even compared to that involving health.

There are those who say that it is all just hysteria. And it is even true that fear, this indomitable being, spreads faster than the virus, infecting far more than two or three people on every corner. But, at this moment, those who lack fear also lack wisdom. And that’s not being an alarmist. I know that Covid-19 leaves 80% of people without serious symptoms – many of them even without any symptoms, a battalion of healthy people who, if dequarantinated, infect many others. But are you going to tell me that that alone isn’t reason enough for anguish?

Amidst so many infections, the tip of the iceberg in a sea of ​​contagion, hospitals are filling up, fearing they won’t be able to keep up with demand. And deaths, already counted in the thousands, tens of thousands, some researchers promise hundreds of thousands. After all, the fatality percentage may seem low, but it is definitely not negligible, especially when the number of infected people grows exponentially.

The English writer John Donne taught that the death of any person diminishes us, because we are all part of the human race. When they occur in the plural, collective even in the impossibility of a wake and the prohibition of mourning, those who have a soul also die collectively, even when they survive.

“And therefore ask not for whom the bell tolls; they will bend for you”, he teaches us, in a phrase immortalized by Hemingway, who used it as an epigraph in one of his greatest works.

A phrase that could very well be adapted for times of pandemic: don’t ask who that elderly person was who died alone in an ICU, without even the right to a procession of hugs from the bereaved family; Don’t want to know who the young man was who, even though he was 26 years old and had no other health problems, left this world due to a flu virus. The same goes for low-income workers who, now without a job and abandoned by their boss and with the government’s delay, are left at the mercy of hunger and the virus. Every death is his, it’s mine, it’s ours.

When army trucks start carrying bodies for solitary farewells, as happens in Europe, the corpses of our civilization will be there.

Thinking about it, those who lack fear and anguish lack empathy. And beings like this will never understand a quarantine, after all, they are always alone, even when surrounded by crowds.

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