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Where we were in March 2020

After the first entry introduced some basic notions on how viruses work and emerge, I want to start talking in this entry about where we were, collectively, in March 2020. I am sure that, when times goes by, we will all remember what we were doing when the COVID-19 hit us, in the same way that most of us remember what we were doing on September 11 2001 (in my case, I was doing some examinations for a job).

Collectively, as mankind, we were in a very fragile situation, like the pandemic showed us. I focus here on taking things for granted, leaving for a future post the issue of the shift in values in society and public health and education.

Taking things for granted

In the evolution of our society over the last decades, we collectively developed a thinking where many things were taken for granted, making us less aware of the effort necessary to keep them working and moving us towards the fulfilling of our own personal needs exclusively. We got used to having our consumption needs immediately satisfied without thinking on the effort of others to make it possible (apparently, many children cannot believe that milk is coming from cows). 

The pandemic came to hit us right in the face in this aspect.

One critical example of this societal trend can be found, unfortunately, when considering public health. The last world pandemic occurred in Hong-Kong in 1959-1960, with the Spanish flu fading in the memory. Besides, the Western world has become immune to the troubles of certain countries in the (badly-called) Third World in fighting against some diseases. Furthermore, the relative success (or luck) with the SARS outbreak provided a false sense of safety, that made the area of virology look like an uninteresting and unimportant place to go. The accepted presumption was that progress had made it possible not to have a pandemic in our lifetime for the first time in history.

At the same time, the existence of a public health system made us care less about our health, since the public health system would care about us, for free, in case we had some health issues. When somebody had a small pain anywhere, the main action was running to the doctor to get some medicines to defeat that pain. Not much time was spent on understanding the origin of that pain. Here I strongly recommend going through the work of Dr Gabor Maté (books or videos in YouTube).

In plain words, we forgot that our health is our primary responsibility, not of doctors. In economy, this behaviour is called “moral hazard” and unfortunately is observed in many other fields.[1] An extreme example, which unfortunately is not only theoretical, is the person who wants to travel to an African country, but does not care about the diseases he/she can get there because he/she is presuming that the government will rescue him/her if in trouble.

There is no "I" in "us"

Simultaneously, we also cared more about our rights and our freedom, and less about the others. Everybody had all types of rights and freedoms that could not be curtailed under any circumstance. Coming from a period of fascism and totalitarian regimes (which did not allow freedom of thought) in Europe, we probably moved to the other extreme, as all opinions and values needed to be equally considered, even if some of them were clearly inappropriate. The fact that some people could get a driving license with a bowl of spaghettis on their head, claiming to be a religious symbol, is a great and ironic evidence of this trend.[2]

The immediate consequence of this trend was a lower and lower consideration for the needs of others. We were asking for cheaper and cheaper goods and services, without considering the consequences for those working to provide them to us. We were demanding low-cost flights, but did not consider at all the working conditions of the pilots and flight attendants. The same can be said about clothes, most of them produced in Asian countries in conditions that would make Charles Dickens faint. But our cheap T-shirt was worth that, for sure.

Issues around climate change, quite trendy today, provide further evidence of this. While we were aware of the increase in pollution (maybe not entirely, thanks to the good work of many lobbies), we were not prepared to make any sacrifice. We did not see any issue in flying non-stop around the world, driving everywhere with our car or filling our houses with more and more electric devices. Instead, we relied on “silver bullets” of little impact to solve the problem without any change on our side, or we asked others to do something or, even better, to be banned from doing something. [The current debate on climate change probably deserves its own entry in this blog]

Selfishness may sound a bit tough, but it defines this behaviour quite accurately.

To sum up, the cocktail in which we were in March 2020 contained (i) a false sense of safety as regards the potential for a pandemic to emerge, and (ii) a population focused on its own needs and immune to the needs of others. That implied that, at the macro level, the outbreak of a pandemic was seen as a tail event (as black as a black swam can be), for which society was little prepared (as it was perceived to be so unlikely). At the individual level, we were not prepared to make any sacrifice in our lifestyle to ensure a common good (a successful fight against the pandemic).

It does not look good, and I still need to discuss about the shift of values in our society and the role of politicians…


[1]  Moral hazard can be defined a situation in which one party gets involved in a risky event knowing that it is protected against the risk and the other party will incur the cost. For example, the assumption that the government would rescue a bank in difficulties, as a result of its size or importance, can make bank managers take more risk than they should.

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