Permanent emergency and “zero risk” approach: democracy is changing
There is something wrong with our approach to the pandemic. For fourteen months we have been pursuing an unattainable goal, at least in the short term: “ Covid zero”. The idea that, sooner or later, the virus will go away. Unfortunately, history teaches that viruses are unlikely to vanish. If anything, they undergo mutations that make them more or less aggressive. A responsible government should focus on the vaccination campaign, trying as much as possible to limit the damage. In Italy, when Giuseppe Conte ruled with the media "support" of Rocco Casalino, the results were modest, if not dramatic. In the darkest moment of the health emergency, our country recorded the highest number of deaths in Europe. In addition to injury, they also insulted us: they kept us locked up in the house telling us, at every night press conference, that our economic and psychological sacrifices would have guaranteed a period of greater serenity. It was not so.
A year and a half after the start of the pandemic, the scientific parameters on which the government bases its decisions have not changed. Instead of keeping deaths and hospitalizations under control – as the governor of Veneto Luca Zaia suggested in an interview with Corriere della Sera – we continue to monitor the epidemiological curve, as if the number of positives (not patients) represented the data more important. And again: why extend the state of emergency to 31 December? Why continue to treat Covid as an emergency phenomenon? Pandemics have always existed. Think of the Black Death which in the fourteenth century killed a third of the European population or the more recent Spanish influence which killed 600,000 people in Italy alone at the beginning of the last century. Since the dawn of time, viruses have been born, evolved and periodically reappear under more or less threatening garments.
“Living with the virus”, so televirologists and mainstream media had intimated. A suggestion of apparent common sense that however hides a subliminal message, difficult to understand but no less harmful. In the coming years we will not have to get used to living with or viruses. We will have to learn to live with a new way of understanding society: not just politics, but every aspect of our life. The decision-making powers that we have entrusted to parliaments and other democratically elected bodies will be increasingly relegated to a formal representation, unable to influence the flow of events. Health authorities will acquire more and more importance, coming to override other institutions.
Antonio Martino, a great liberal economist, had seen us along:
"The use of scientific arguments aimed at diverting the perception of risk, terrorizing public opinion and inducing political authorities to adopt measures restricting individual freedoms (…) represents nothing more, in almost all cases, than one instrument of struggle that the latest generation statists are waging to the detriment of our freedoms. "
It is not a plot conceived by occult powers, as some no-vax would like you to believe. It is the practical consequence of the decisions taken by some European governments in these two years of ordinary madness. Perhaps this time we will be able to get away with it, postponing the fate that hangs over our democracies for a few years. Perhaps the closure line of Speranza & Co. will temporarily cease thanks to the reasonableness of Mario Draghi. But what will happen when, in twenty / thirty years, we find ourselves facing the next pandemic? Will we act according to logic or in the grip of the Great Fear? And if the death rate of the next virus is higher than that of Covid, how will we behave, taking into account how we have acted today? None of us are able to answer. However, we know that some historical precedents are very dangerous. At least as much as a river about to overflow.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/emergenza-permanente-e-approccio-rischio-zero-a-mutare-e-la-democrazia/ on Thu, 22 Jul 2021 04:02:00 +0000.