OF THE SHORT MEMORY AND THE DEATHS THAT DID NOT END

Five years ago, we started wearing masks, which we didn't have, as we didn't have a vaccine, we didn't have respirators, and the total surprise with what was happening. It was the beginning of COVID 19. A fatal epidemic, which to this day does not say where it came from. At the time it was speculated that the origin was China. Crowded hospitals, doctors and nurses working without rest, missing masks, medicines and cemeteries opening graves with tractors. One next to the other, without the presence of relatives, a precarious identification and the gravediggers in white looking like astronauts.

Stuck at home, suspended classes, companies without workers, empty planes, empty restaurants. Close, open, close. The government at the time saying it was a little flu, dismisses the minister of health who said that the thing was serious and took serious measures, puts a general intendant in place, and so a million people died in Brazil alone. Fear of going out, despair, concern for the elderly, vaccine from China, then the North Americans. And the international trips reached, with each country having a different rule, certificates, tests and vaccines. We live in a hell from which we are today thinking that we came out.

We didn't leave, because after the chaos in health, the governments of the acute crisis, not only in Brazil, no longer require new public health policies. Public health has become a fundamental item of our lives, but on the one hand it has to recover what was lost in the epidemic, on the other hand it has to invest in sanitation, vaccinations, research and more and more. But little of that happened. The impression you have is that, if there is another wave, because COVID is still there, with several types of viruses, we are as poorly prepared as it was five years ago. And there are still people who politically exploit the misfortune that hit us, insisting that the politicians of the time were right, it was a little flu.

In the economic area, COVID forced us into a new reality. Remote work, also distance classes, and distance personal relationships. By the way, during the epidemic, the families that had a good conviviality continued. But those who didn't, broke. The psychological weight and its consequences, including in education, children, and also in labor relations, have not yet been fully researched. Another activity, in addition to zoom, that grew a lot was home delivery. Quarantine, the word we are forgetting, but that we live.

The fact that scares me is how we don't improve the world we live in after this catastrophe. In the United States there is a rubella epidemic and a denying Secretary of Health until he says enough. And the frozen, diminished research funds, the WHO without Americans. We are, at least, strange human beings, promoting the devaluation of human life, instead of taking care of humanity. It's sad, but it's real.