Three years of pandemic: some lessons to be learned

UPDATE DAY

These days we commemorate three years since the start of the pandemic and the confinements that accompanied it.

It is difficult not to take stock of this strange period, where our landmarks collapsed, where life was suspended to overcome death, where the individual had to cut ties with his family to ensure their survival. We can now return to this period in a dispassionate way.

But who says assessment says lessons. I suggest a few.

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Containments

The first: we know today, perhaps we have understood it in real time, confinement was a bad idea, a remedy worse than the disease it claimed to cure. There was something inhuman in this cloistered and informer society.

I have no doubts about the good faith of those who took the decision to confine. In the fog of history, we do not always know what to do. But this decision was clearly not informed.

The second: it was a very bad idea to stigmatize a whole section of the population, by equating the slightest reservation on the management of the pandemic with ” conspiracy”.

This term, which was somewhat equivalent, in the context of the health crisis, to “extreme right”, which is used and abused in public life, served to demonize those who saw the world from a different lens than that promoted by the authorities.

But what are we discovering today?

That the virus may indeed have come, as the Americans suggest, from a Chinese laboratory. At the very least, the hypothesis is seriously considered.

That the vaccine, without being useless, it goes without saying, perhaps did not have all the virtues attributed to it.

That youth was the great sacrifice of these repeated confinements imposed on everyone, because we refused to impose it only on the most fragile categories of the population.

In other words, those who were demonized weren't always wrong. Or at least, some have occasionally had legitimate hunches. Popular common sense was not always misdirected. Which is not to say that there weren't genuine conspirators who equated the pandemic with an evil conspiracy.

But those who wondered if it was normal to subject an entire population to this regime by turning us into masked hypochondriacs did not deserve so much contempt.

COVID, whatever one may think, has submitted our societies to an unprecedented form of social experimentation that will leave its mark.

Some ecologists today want to draw inspiration from the health passport to impose a transport passport, to limit our air travel, or a food passport, to limit our meat consumption.

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Freedoms< /p>

The management of COVID perhaps heralded, in other words, the transition from a society of freedoms to a society of authorizations.

Its management in the mode of maximum social control was initially Chinese, and our societies paid the price.

Our leaders certainly did what they could. I have absolutely no doubt about it. But from the outset they took a hazardous path. We have to admit it today.