Living through a pandemic - some thoughts

After discussing a bit where we were in March 2020, now it is time to go through a silent, continuous, albeit immense, change experienced by our societies in the last decades. It is important to understand this change to be able to analyse the global response to the pandemic outbreak. Politicians as a mirror of society At the time the COVID-19 outbreak surprised the world, we had some political leaders that one could have never expected to be there (except the creators of The Simpsons). There was a generalised feeling that the people in charge were not prepared to respond to the challenge. [1] In politics, there is always a balance between the satisfaction to do something to have a better society (i.e., to do the right thing) and the own interest in getting re-elected to remain in power. In the last years, there seems to have been a shift towards the latter (power is addictive), and re-election has become the main objective of many politicians. That leads to a situation where “qu...