Ricolfi asphalts in a viral way Conte, Speranza and Ricciardi
How and why the analyst and sociologist Luca Ricolfi criticizes the Conte government on anti-pandemic measures
It is quite amazing, at least for me who have been following the epidemic every day for a year, how much attention is focused on Draghi's choices in the economic-social field, and how little, instead, we ask ourselves about the future of health policy. As if speeding up the vaccination campaign was the only thing that can be expected of him.
It is therefore with a sigh of relief that I listened to the considerations of Walter Ricciardi, consultant to Minister Speranza, in a television interview granted on Tuesday night. In it, alongside a (very unconvincing) defense of Conte's policy during the first wave, Ricciardi supported three very strong theses, which deserve careful consideration. I summarize them briefly.
Thesis 1: in the second wave, by deciding late and too mild lockdowns, the Conte government made the wrong policy, ending up squandering the sacrifices of the Italians.
Thesis 2: we must completely change course, abandoning the European protocol, which is content to mitigate the epidemic, and resolutely move on to the protocol of the Eastern countries and the Southern hemisphere, which aims at the elimination of the virus.
Thesis 3: the main way to do this is a tightening and lengthening of lockdowns.
On the first two theses, having supported them for longer than Ricciardi, I can only agree (I even wrote a book, “The night of the water lilies”, to explain how the second wave could have been avoided).
The only thing I would have to add is: since the price of these errors, measured in thousands of human lives sacrificed, is enormous, and since – this must be acknowledged – it has been for four months that the consultant of Minister Speranza has been criticizing health policy of the government, how come neither he nor the Minister of Health ever revealed themselves in the only politically effective way, namely by threatening to resign? Is it possible that, in order to launch a frontal attack on Conte, it was necessary to wait for Conte himself to have lost power, thrown by Renzi?
But let's get to thesis 3: it takes a maxi-lockdown. On this thesis it is inevitable that everyone has their own opinions, mostly dictated by age (young people get very little sick) and by profession (the self-employed risk losing everything).
But there is one point that, in my opinion, we should all realize: once the surprise of the first wave is over, every long and unconfined lockdown is simply a certificate of failure of the policy. Why, by now it should be clear, when the government asks citizens to take on the fight against the virus with their sacrifices and sacrifices, it is precisely because the political and health authorities have not done everything in their power. to contain the epidemic. Do we want to remind you of these omissions and shortcomings?
Here is a succinct list: halving (instead of increasing) the number of tampons in the critical two-month period from mid-November 2020 to mid-January 2021; substantial renunciation of electronic tracking; weakness of quarantine control measures;
shyness in enforcing the rules in the summer; failure to strengthen local transport; failure to secure schools and universities in terms of ventilation and dehumidification of the premises; weakness of the border control policy and of tourist flows.
This is why the invocation of the lockdown, of a more severe and long lockdown, is not very credible, not to say disturbing, if it is not accompanied by the recognition that, after the first wave, the primary error of the Conte government was not having made a very hard lockdown in October (that was the secondary or derivative mistake), but it was not doing everything that would have allowed us to arrive in October in less critical conditions, making the use of the lockdown much less necessary .
Why, in the interview with Ricciardi, does all this not emerge with due evidence? Perhaps for the same reason that Minister Speranza's consultant considers the government's behavior during the first wave to be "unexceptionable".
Sorry to have to remind him, but also admitted (and not granted) that nothing was wrong in the timing of the March-April lockdowns, the fact remains that in the first wave he was at the forefront of the government's war against the Venetian tampon policy, accused of doing too many. And that, in addition to the error of curbing mass tampons, there were several serious and avoidable errors of the Conte government even during the first wave: because nothing was done, in January-February, to equip medical personnel with personal protective equipment. ?
Why did they wait so many months to make the use of masks mandatory in shops and indoor venues? Why was so little done to control borders?
In short, my impression is that the discreet fascination that the lockdown exerts on politicians simply depends on their awareness that on everything else, about which almost nothing was done when there was time, very little will continue to be done. And that at the end of the fair, in the messianic wait for the vaccine, their idea is still the same today: that the fight against the virus is not done from above, by building incisive health policies, but it is done from below, limiting our freedom.
It is as if politics, all politics, were perfectly capable of recognizing the debt accumulated by past governments when it is of an economic nature, but not when it is of a health nature. Yet today's drama, in which a new and severe lockdown appears to many as the only feasible measure, is the bitter fruit of the health debt accumulated over months and months of omissions and failed acts.
We just have to hope that, with this kind of debt, the Draghi government will begin to deal in the only possible way: today, finally, doing everything that was not done until yesterday.
(Article taken from the Hume Foundation website)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/luca-ricolfi-critiche-lockdown-conte-speranza-ricciardi/ on Sat, 13 Feb 2021 07:00:44 +0000.