Esta Europa cujos líderes nos falham

Uma vez isto acabado é preciso questionar: como se elegeram estas pessoas, é isto que queremos para o nosso futuro e como se muda este estado de coisas.

The Challenges Facing Concerted Coronavirus Action

In the face of the coronavirus threat, our governments have largely failed us. They have been too slow to recognize the dangers and too slow to act. Once it's over, it will be time to ask some uncomfortable questions.
By Ullrich Fichtner

The "Decameron" by Giovanni Boccaccio, written during an outbreak of the plague in the Middle Ages, is the product of a quarantine. The famous book, almost 700 years old and several hundred pages long, presents a series of scandalous stories told by 10 young nobles who had fled to the countryside from the Black Death in Florence.

The stories are of love and betrayal, perfidy and greed, sin and atonement. They are about fundamental principles, about the kinds of things that we, as humans, are made of. Such things become particularly visible in times of crisis. Such as now.

COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, isn't the plague, that much we have learned in the past months. But in the coming months, it will nevertheless trigger significant changes in our lives, perhaps dramatic ones. Wealthy countries in Europe will experience shortcomings in their health care systems, with frightening scenes in hospitals, doctors' offices and emergency rooms to be expected. It is entirely possible that doctors, just like on the battlefields of yore, will be faced with decisions about who to treat and who not to treat; who gets oxygen and who does not.

...

Ever since New Year's, when the first small news items began emerging from Wuhan, it was essentially all about mathematics. And about the fact that people tend to either take regulations seriously or ignore them all together, depending on their mood.

That is completely forgivable on an individual level, but governments and states can no longer expect much understanding these days. Their failures in the face of the threat posed by the coronavirus have already become indefensible.

Who, if not our leaders, should have recognized the danger hidden from the very beginning in the reports from China? Who, if not the responsible agencies and institutions in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Iran, the U.S. and elsewhere should have undertaken everything humanly possible to limit the consequences of this pandemic to the degree possible? They failed to live up to their responsibility.

...

On top of that will come the realization that on this occasion, the differences between Angela Merkel and Donald Trump were quite a bit smaller than usual. Neither of them took the danger seriously enough -- and that even though it had long since become apparent that decisive action was necessary.

If it is true that crisis reveals a person's true nature, then the current one, at least in its early stages, has revealed just how unable we are to show solidarity, at all levels.

Ignorant Recklessness

Reports that face masks and sanitizer was being stolen out of hospitals are shocking. Images of empty pasta shelves and shortages of toilet paper aren't much better. The wholly insensitive and supercilious discussion about alleged mistakes made by China in its battle against the virus has been shameful.

And now that the virus has made its way from Wuhan to Germany, France, Italy, Austria -- indeed everywhere -- now that there is a concrete threat to the lives of a huge number of primarily elderly fellow humans, there are still people happily coughing through their daily lives. People with fevers are sitting down in waiting rooms as though they were completely alone in the world and had the right to ignorant recklessness.
Unfortunately, things aren't much better on the international level. Europe's nation states are in the process of missing yet another chance to fill the European Union with meaning and purpose. Instead of seeing the current situation as one where a coordinated response could be useful, instead of understanding that this virus isn't interested in national borders, European countries are focusing almost entirely on national measures.

Once again, it appears to be every person for themselves. And nobody for the collective.

Just like the EU, the United Nations is proving itself unable to form an intelligible crisis response, even though it should be right in the middle of the fight....
...
Nobody yet knows how this story will end or when it will end. Boccaccio's "Decameron" closes with the return of the 10 young men and women to Florence. They told their stories over a period of 10 days. This time around, most of us will have more time than that.