[The international community—which never has any problem
committing great resources in the pursuit of war —has never done
anything to prepare for the possibility of pandemics. Nothing at all.]
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WE WERE WARNED AGAIN AND AGAIN – WE DID NOTHING  
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Nicoletta Dentico
March 23, 2020
Il Manifesto Global
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_ The international community—which never has any problem
committing great resources in the pursuit of war —has never done
anything to prepare for the possibility of pandemics. Nothing at all.
_

,

 

In both large cities and small towns, in Europe and across the world,
we are every day heading deeper into a scenario straight from a
dystopian film, as if empty streets, latex gloves, face masks and
self-isolation have become the new normal. 

Sunday in India, the first test of a total national shutdown in human
history took place from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., involving 1.3 billion
citizens, in a country where an estimated 1.8 million people are
homeless and 73 million don’t have decent living conditions. Never
before have the gears of the whole world been brought to a halt by a
virus. SARS-CoV-2 made the cross-species leap in an unknown place
somewhere in the city of Wuhan, and since then, it has been
unstoppable in crossing all the national borders that globalization
has been trying to erase as much as possible in recent decades.

While it reminds us of just how interconnected and interdependent we
are on this earth, despite our functional and existential frailties,
the first paradox is that multilateralism fell apart from the first
months of worldwide contagion.

The international community, which today is toying with its
commitments—always subject to postponement—to sustainable
development, has never learned from the signs of corrosion that it has
been seeing since the beginning of the millennium: the attack on the
Twin Towers in 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008, which never
truly ended.

It has never been willing to learn that it should thoroughly overhaul
the inefficient, fossil-fuel-exploiting foundation of the planetary
economy, which is progressively destroying the environment and
creating injustice. 

Even worse, in our age of knowledge, it has never appreciated the
value of the findings of the scientific community. WHO experts had
been warning for years about a possible new pandemic like the Spanish
Flu of 1918. 

The 2019 Annual Report on Global Preparedness for Health Emergencies
by the World Bank’s Global Preparedness Monitoring
Board highlighted
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very real threat of a rapidly moving, highly lethal pandemic of a
respiratory pathogen” which could wipe out 5% of the global
economy. 

Now that we’re in the midst of the crisis, SARS-CoV-2 looks like
precisely the virus they’ve been expecting. More difficult to
contain than the first coronavirus that managed to cross species this
century—SARS in China in 2003—COVID-19 has already caused 10 times
more infections in a quarter of the time.

Unfortunately, the international community—which never has any
problem committing great resources and many men in the pursuit of war,
with regular exercises and rapid intervention forces—has never done
anything to prepare for the possibility of pandemics. Nothing at all.
In the US, the last serious exercise simulating a pandemic dates back
to 2001 (the Dark Winter Exercise). Europe is in an even worse
position. It doesn’t have even a shred of a health policy at the EU
level, so there is no joint program for tackling a health emergency.

Instead, while the first outbreak of the virus was wreaking havoc in
Wuhan, European countries were looking at China from a distance,
somehow convinced—no one seems to know why—that the epidemic would
never affect the Western world.

They would have done better to study the epidemiological data shared
by China starting from Jan. 7 (the day an epidemic was officially
declared) onwards. They would have understood that the whole world was
likely to have to deal with COVID-19 at different stages of its viral
evolution. Instead, contrary to the bonds of cooperation called for by
the International Health Regulations adopted by the WHO in 2005 in the
aftermath of the SARS outbreak, European countries (just like the rest
of the world) have been taken over by a viral form of health
sovereignism, often tilted towards inaction.

One might call that the perfect formula to transform Europe into the
global epicenter of the spread of the virus.

COVID-19 had an easy time infecting Italy: here, the National Health
Service—founded on universal values—one of the most revolutionary
and effective institutions in Europe in the welfare sector, the public
policy initiative that has contributed more than any other to the
economic and social development of the country, had been brought to
its knees with round after round of cuts. In less than ten years, from
2010 to 2016, 70,000 hospital beds disappeared, 175 hospital units
were closed, and the autonomous local health offices were reduced from
642 in the 1980s to just 101 in 2017. All for the benefit of private
healthcare and the insurance industry, which offer no protection
against pandemics. Private sector health spending increased by 9.6% in
2017, forcing 7 million Italians into debt.

Now, with the COVID-19 outbreak, we are seeing everyone’s true
colors. In many countries, people have continued living as if nothing
had happened—even today, several northern European governments are
simply advising people to avoid mass gatherings, while “social
distancing” remains an ambiguous concept. Many have gone into
self-isolation by personal choice. 

The principles of solidarity are a distant memory—it’s enough to
think of the reactions of Germany and France to Italy’s requests for
medical supplies. And the old and violent tension between the right to
health and the logic of the economy has once again caused the pendulum
to swing too far towards the side of the market. It took no less than
three months after the WHO’s declaration of an international health
emergency for the European institutions to understand the magnitude of
the challenge. A few days ago, the ECB finally adopted the €750
billion emergency purchasing plan for the pandemic, plus €1.8
trillion for new loans for households and businesses. For its part,
the Commission has suspended the Stability Pact.

The post-COVID-19 period will be like a post-war period, with plenty
of rubble to sift through and, sadly, with plenty of casualties—but
also with the demand for a rebuilding. However, we will have new
conditions and a new awareness to reinvent the forms of politics for a
Europe that would be stronger, because it would be more just and
established on the foundation of real equality. With its shocking and
painful appearance on our continent, the silent and invisible
coronavirus is, paradoxically, our only chance.

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