We asked one of the spokespersons of the Network Globalhealth – Dirk Brandl – to write a commentary for us on the end of this and the beginning of the new year.
Dear readers of the blog A Beautiful Health,
our time is somewhat reminiscent of the time of Boccaccio’s masterpiece Il Decamerone. In Florence in 1348, the plague is raging. 7 young women and 3 young men therefore retire to the seclusion of a country house, that is, they go into quarantine from the plague. To pass the time, they each tell a story each day for the next 10 days that they stay there. The Decamerone consists of these stories.
Of course, Corona is not the plague and our time cannot be compared to that of 1348, but I still feel reminded of that time in the transition between the two years.
Can you still remember how it all started? Nobody really knew anything. We had to learn from the virus first, not learn to live with it. Is it really that dangerous or just a new form of flu? as some – including doctors – have claimed. Do we need mask protection or not? which the Robert Koch Institute initially denied. Today we even wear FFP2 masks. How is the virus transmitted from one to the other? It was not until much later that aerosols were added to droplet infection. What is a cytokine storm? which caused the severe courses. And so forth.
Because of the hunger for more knowledge, a lot, and we mean a lot of studies (more than 10,000) have been published – often without the necessary review by colleagues who also know the subject matter as so-called preprints. This makes it difficult for us laymen to distinguish good studies from poorly done ones. The media prefer to supply us with horror, because that sells well now.
At first, we seemed to be coming through the crisis just fine, but Germany went from being a model student to last in the class with 30,000 deaths and a mortality rate like in the USA. What horror has befallen us? And we don’t even have a culprit to blame and therefore stone. Or can we blame everything on the lateral thinkers? And: Isn’t there a little lateral thinker in all of us, at least in thought?
The virologists and the power
It is in the nature of things that science meets society in this problem. Virologists and other specialists are studying the virus and its spread and have to adapt their opinions to the latest research, because we are still dealing with an unknown enemy. Those in power are trying to balance the social and economic disaster with the progressive spread of the virus. Unfortunately (or better thank God?) the virus is not a rational human being, not even a complete living being, because it cannot exist without a host. It cannot be reasoned with, nor can it be persuaded. It simply behaves as it must behave according to the rules of evolution.
And we just behave like human beings. While it’s understandable that politicians didn’t always follow the scientists’ suggestions, that’s ultimately what got us into this situation. Our often very sensible federalism became the catalyst (the chaos club) in October, which led to the virus being able to spread uncontrollably. But we also have to hold ourselves responsible, because after the summer we didn’t take the virus so seriously. The seriousness has returned to us at Christmas at the latest. I would like to champion for the virologist Christian Drosten here, who has provided us weekly through his podcast with information about the virus. He has always said even when a finding was not backed up, he has never been overbearing to politicians, he has often corrected or questioned himself. These are personal skills that have nothing to do with science, but with personal development, which we absolutely need in this crisis (should I say war?).
The politicians are not to be envied either. The sentence of Jens Spahn (whom, by the way, I personally do not like at all) that we will have to forgive ourselves a lot was good and right, because we were confronted with a completely unknown situation in which one could only act wrongly. Chancellor Merkel one noticed her scientific education, she would have saved us perhaps many deaths, if one had let her. The prime ministers: inside often behaved like roosters or startled chickens who lost sight of the whole thing, that was really bad. But not only the federal states failed, but also Europe (and the world?). The virus does not stop at our borders, so border closures are not a very effective measure.
The virus is already teaching us this: we can only overcome the crisis through cooperation and coordination; each country alone is powerless. Even the recent border closure to Great Britain was complete nonsense, because the virus – and also its mutations – cannot be stopped, at least not in a world like ours. Can one even speak of “failure” then? Have we not merely lost a battle, but not the war? We will be able to control the virus only when it is brought under global control, otherwise we will lose our freedom.
Unlike our chancellor, the United States had to deal with a president who did everything he could to ignore the virus, which he maintains to this day. What kind of crazy world are we living in that a man like Donald Trump could become President of the United States? Instead of courageously fighting the pandemic, he denies it to this day. How insecure and ignorant must many Americans, but also Europeans, be that these kinds of ideas take hold? That racism and lies determine the discussions? That important states fight against each other instead of acting together? You can’t put all the blame on Trump. We have all contributed to the fact that ideologies and fascist thoughts are becoming hopeful again by letting our society slide into this defenseless state.
The virus and us
We should already ask ourselves what we have made of our freedom, that is what the virus teaches us in any case. If freedom means that we can party everywhere and rush from one party or vacation to the next in a life that is devoid of meaning and dominated by consumerism, then we are not losing very much. It has already amazed me what state our society is really in, you can only see that in such a crisis. Even today we see overflowing ski lifts and traffic jams in ski resorts, what a madness! The addiction to perpetual pleasure and distractions of every kind – hasn’t it obscured our view of the really important things in life? Doesn’t our life rather resemble that of decadent Rome before its final downfall from Fellini’s Satyricon?
Addiction is so great that, like alcoholics, we cling to their bottle at the dance around the golden calf and therefore can no longer care about others. I know I’m unfairly generalizing here, but forgive me, it’s just for clarity. I am not forgetting the people in intensive care units and nursing homes and their caregivers and doctors who ultimately face suffering and death every day. Nor do I forget many others who march through this time with discipline. In the summer, I visited the cemetery in Rimini, a medium-sized city on the Adriatic coast. There you could see what the virus was doing. A long row – several hundred – of graves without names, very much in contrast with the magnificent mausoleums that you can also see there. It was no longer funny, it was distressing. And Rimini is not Bergamo, where the virus raged much earlier – as we only now know.
Will we eventually be able to return to our old lives? Can the rapidly developed vaccines save us? Personally, I believe there will be no going back. The vaccines can reduce the number of deaths, but they will not be able to eradicate the virus. That is impossible. Herd immunity simply means that the virus can no longer spread so easily and uncontrollably, because it will no longer encounter so many people who have not yet developed immunity. Because it will certainly take several years until sufficient vaccine is available everywhere in the world. The mutations now under discussion also show us what strategy the virus must pursue, namely that of continually changing. Even if the previous mutations can still be controlled by the vaccines that have been developed, at some point there will be mutations that will require new vaccines. And how long do vaccines make us immune, for life or just a few months? Are we no longer contagious after a vaccination? No one knows yet.
And the virus taught us something else: once a year, on one of the back pages of our daily newspaper, we were told how many deaths the past flu had brought us. Sometimes it was only a few thousand, but sometimes it was 30,000 a year. That didn’t scratch our heads much. I believe that will change, we will no longer take off our masks in the fall and winter, whether by government mandate or because we have learned to do so: We can protect ourselves from viruses and their spread, including the influenza virus. And we can prevent ourselves from infecting each other by doing so. So does the virus teach us to be more compassionate and mindful of ourselves? Maybe, I hope so.
Hopes
No hope? Yes, even great hopes. The hope that the virus will teach us,
- that we live in one world and globalization applies to us as much as to viruses.
- that we recognize which compulsions and addictions dominate us, from which we may free ourselves.
- that we now have the opportunity to discover a new meaning in our lives.
- that we have to mobilize our best qualities in this crisis.
- that we must not abandon the big losers of this crisis, the cultural workers, gastronomers and hotels etc..
- that we all move on to new shores instead of returning to where we were before the pandemic.
- that we do not let ourselves be dominated by the virus and act purely emotionally, but confront it in a disciplined, cool and controlled manner, regardless of whether we believe in its dangerousness or not. Simply out of solidarity.
- that no matter how cruel and deadly it may be, we do not lose our humanity, our confidence and our cheerfulness.
In addition, a quote from the last chapter of the Decamerone, which summarizes quite well what could be at the end of our quarantine:
“As you know, tomorrow it will be a fortnight that we left Florence in order to grant ourselves some exhilaration for the preservation of our health and life, and to escape from the gloom, pain, and anxiety that have been constantly faced in our native city since this sad plague season began. This we have now done, in my judgment, in all honor.”I wish all readers a good and powerful 2021. I wish the blog A Beautiful Health to continue to provide us all with interesting and entertaining articles. Don’t let it get you down!