Even the most ardent animal activists are likely to end up disliking all kinds of animals because of the association between various forms of two- and four-legged beasts and as many forms of rather unpleasant diseases. From the avian flu onward it has been a succession of unpleasant animal/human associations, and only in some cases have we had the luxury of pretending otherwise. In others it has not been possible at all.
While waiting to figure out what the heck the Monkeypox is-in this mistakenly comforted by the fact how in many cases there are no monkeys in our gardens or on our menu-we are still forced to look back. To bring back to memory that absurd, unprecedented and terrible period that almost all of us have filed in the brain box called “lockdown,” the one that in “Inside Out 5” we might find in the island of things to forget.
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When the Sars storm Covid-19 began to generate dark clouds over the heads of millions of people who spoke Mandarin and bought live dogs at the market to take them to dinner (and not in the good sense of the word) we took time to understand, study and reflect. Only to react, for the most part the wrong way, and sketch out a strategy that ultimately turned out to be one of “let's wait it out and see who can survive.”
Once the crisis was over, as always happens in Italy, memory began to reset events, messages, evening announcements on the unified networks and every other aspect of that period. To be sure, health authorities have also stopped making public data on infections and deaths caused by Covid, to consolidate the illusion that that global health problem has been completely overcome and solved, thanks in part to the global vaccine campaign.
But has the problem really been solved? Not really. Anyone who has spent a few minutes in a general practitioner's or pediatrician's office over the past few months has heard about how many infections are still there, how symptoms and consequences keep changing, how much resignation now prevails in dealing with Covid, always along the lines of “let's wait it out and see who can survive.”
Bringing the virus back into the spotlight was the Paris Olympics, which as we have seen has also been the stage for a rather large series of controversies and political and disinformation campaigns. Indeed, during OJ24 some athletes had to skip or postpone their competitions and matches precisely because of infections that could be traced to Covid.
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The Olympic cauldron has resurrected the discussion about Covid and also its prevention, since net of the fierce diatribes and complaints that have arisen around the usefulness of vaccines-or their negative effects-there are no certain solutions as much as remedies to deal with the virus or “simply” to avoid the infection's deadliest consequences.
And in fact, according to the numbers and what the Sole 24 ore published, in the week of Ferragosto there were more than 16 thousand infections, 100 deaths, 14 ICU admissions and 144 hospitalizations. With Veneto, Campania and Lombardy leading the list of regions with the highest number of infections. Significant data describing a virus that is still active and will still carry thousands of deaths per year at the current rate. This is a conservative estimate, given that few swabs are done and only in the most severe and otherwise unexplained cases, and that consequently mortality may also be underestimated.
After this flurry of optimism the question becomes even more stinging: will we ever get rid of Covid? The answer is probably no, and we can only hope that by ignoring it again, the virus decides to go back to where it came from, returning to infect only chickens and ferrets. A scientific theory on which there is not yet unanimous agreement, however.
Illustration by Gloria Dozio - Acrimònia Studios
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