COVID-19

The fight against the new coronavirus is accompanied by several parallel fights, including the fight against fear, which can turn into panic—one of the most dangerous social phenomena.

As a teenager, I remember pasting a quote from Blaise Pascal on the wall of my room. It was a thought I resonated with, not without some arrogance: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

I open the window and breathe in the air, trying to guess the weather. Floating around, mixed, are scents and miasms alike; it's hard to decipher these intricate clues.

It will soon be two years since the virus known as COVID-19 started to roam around the world. The sad toll of this disease—over 5 million victims worldwide—is still incomplete, because we are far from seeing an end to the pandemic. It has been the largest public health crisis in the last century.

Discussions about the reasonable number of deaths in a pandemic, about whether or not the price for saving people is killing the economy and, ultimately, debates on a life’s value were brought to the fore by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch thinks that social distancing will have to continue, in one way or another, hopefully in milder forms and in correlation with other activities. Lipsitch is the author of a study suggesting that social distancing may be necessary, possibly intermittently, until 2022.

On any given day, a typical person checks the clock several dozen times.

The Spanish flu filled graves in almost every cemetery in the world. However, surprisingly, this tragedy had largely been forgotten until recently. A century later, the issue returned to the centre of attention, with specialists wondering if they can identify a pattern in the evolution of the COVID-19 health crisis based on the pandemic from a century ago.

Fines, military ordinances, police and army patrolling the streets – this is the reality we have suddenly found ourselves living in. It is a tightening reality, a rigid corset-like structure of rules.