The “novelty”
of the pandemic

Is the pandemic that has broken out in recent months a unique and extraordinary fact? Certainly not: many have happened in recent history (for example in 1918, 1957, 1968) and many others would have erupted if they had not been confined in the countries of origin or resolved, partially or totally, thanks to the advent of some new drugs or vaccines. Think of HIV, never completely defeated but kept more or less under control in the western part of the world (in fact they are not so lucky in Africa: AIDS reaps avalanches of victims every year). Or think about the H1N1 flu (2009/2010) or the various versions of SARS, MERS etc.

An exceptional character of this epidemic, however, was the rapidity of spread and having hit all the world with unthinkable virulence only a few months ago.

In the initial phase, and despite the fact that many scientists and intellectuals had warned politicians and public opinion of the possible risks of a new pandemic, the measures taken to prevent or counteract the events were few and disorganized. But above all they have been tailor-made in order not to limit, or in any way hinder, the economic development of the various nations or companies. The priorities were different: a conservative sentiment prevailed, aimed at protecting the existing rather than concretely assessing the strength of the possible threat.

This approach has failed. It showed huge gaps and a scandalous discrepancy. But above all it has endangered the entire world population in the name of not well-declared public or private interests. In this case, it exposed the weakest and most defenseless part of the population to contagion: the elderly and the sick. Again, someone will be called to give an answer in the near future.

More generally, as it spread and for how much our system of certainties has crumbled, the Covid 19 epidemic has highlighted areas of shadow that we all knew but that struggled to put on the agenda. In the past few months or years we have simply “forgotten” to prepare for such scenarios, isolating the “cassandras” that warned us of the danger and which called for caution. Their opinions, the projections and the models that showed how much the catastrophe was upon us were of little use. Unable to make radical choices that would have had an impact on private interests and acquired positions, we closed our eyes and ears.

Finally the inevitable happened. And, as always happens, he showed how naked the king was. How weak our certainties were, how precarious our granite beliefs. For this reason too, the pandemic will have serious consequences for all of us. Starting from the way in which we will all perceive the relationship with others, the concept of work and freedom, individual and collective identity, the meaning of terms such as “democracy”, “security” and so on.

Waiting for a vaccine that can reduce the risks of contracting this infection – when it arrives, if it will be effective and timely, if it will still be necessary – we will have to take care of restoring a destabilized world. Subsequently, it will be necessary to set up infrastructures capable of averting or minimizing the danger of a new epidemic which – scientists still tell us – will certainly arrive in the future.

Because – it’s worth remembering – after all this time it went quite well. Beyond the algebraic sum of the victims, always excruciating, and individual and civil pain, there is a numerical reality that we cannot forget. Despite being a very pernicious disease, with profound health consequences, Covid 19 syndrome has a relatively low mortality rate (calculated to date around 2-3%). Other viral pathologies, on the other hand, have had – only for the affected population – far greater consequences. SARS (2002/2003) showed a mortality of 9/10%, while MERS even showed a rate of 35%.

Instead of a “simple” (let’s say so) acute respiratory stress syndrome, Covid 19 could have affected the whole body with far more lethal outcomes. It could have also raged on children and women (while it seems that both categories are quite immune to acute infections) causing a real massacre. With all the necessary distinctions, if we had run into an epidemic with a mortality rate equal to that of the spanish-flu of 1918, we could have recorded also tens or hundreds of millions of deaths. An order of magnitude lower than that – here is the “luck” we were talking about – we happened to experience.

Taking epochal measures because events of this kind do not happen again is not just a possibility. It is a planetary duty. Starting again with the same conduct of the past – conduct that, we will discuss later, was the main cause of the emergency – would be like ignoring the lessons that this experience could provide us.

Because, and this is another certain fact, although pandemics are a “natural” phenomenon, it is equally certain that the impact of human choices has determined and oriented both the way in which this epidemic took place and the speed with which it occurs. is propagated.

Following this reasoning, we can therefore identify some guidelines for the immediate future for the years to come. Elements that, we hope, will have to be the first item of the various political agendas once the emergency is over. The Agenda of the Future.

Let’s start with an overview. The consequences of this pandemic will have severe repercussions in many areas. However, all will refer to four macro-areas, intertwined with each other, which we will analyze briefly here and then resume them in the various sections of this site.

1 – New concept of distance

From interpersonal and relationship distance to a different use of contents

Drastically reduce the proximity of people and moderate contact areas. Reduce travel, be it tourism, business or cultural. Have an infrastructure that allows you to build and distribute content through systems that disregard (or limit) physical presence. These seem to be the main guidelines that will guide our immediate future.

That the virus moves with goods and people is now established. Only social isolation can reduce contagions and dissolve outbreaks. This simple principle – which is applied today, as if it were a panacea, by all governments on a planetary basis – is the only remedy that seems to work. The fact that there are no viable alternatives, or no more effective proposals, certifies this thesis. Maintaining a strict social distance (and perhaps even a strategic stop for many goods) will be the scenario that we will face in the coming months, perhaps years.

To cope with this new induced distance, one of the first strategies to be put in place will undoubtedly focus on the development of new digital communication technologies. By expanding, accelerating and evolving the systems already available, it will approach shared protocols, fully digitized, as an alternative to the physical presence of individuals.

These innovations will affect all fields of social interaction by creating new forms of work (a sort of extension of the concept of smart-work) and study (with new experiments in digital learning and remote teaching). Together, new and more immediate tools for online shopping, money exchange, sharing and signing documents and so on will emerge.

2 –New role of technology

From widespread automation to the impact on work dynamics

The drastic closure to which a large part of the world population has been subjected has shown an unequivocal fact. How much the usefulness of technology cannot be confined to the role of youthful tinsel, nor to that of a pastime reserved for technicians of the subject.

Technology – communication tools above all – until today was considered a vector of the distance between people. We remember well the unbearable lullabies of the “experts” who sanctioned how much technology had “pushed generations away” (fathers from children, peers among themselves, etc.) and in some way, thinned human contacts.

Paradoxically, on the other hand, and throughout this lockdown, it was technology that was the vector of union, proximity, friendship. Portable devices brought families together. The web has allowed us to continue working, albeit with many limitations. Some applications have allowed to do the shopping (keeping a semblance of domestic normality) while others have reported contagions, risk areas, emergency situations.

For a strange alchemy of human processes, a large part of the world’s population has made peace with technology in this dramatic phase. Showing among other things how much a certain instrumental contempt for new digital devices is a sort of intellectual luxury (“bourgeois”, it would have been said once) granted to those who do not know the weight of physical or spatial limitations.

Not only that: the pandemic has forced to rethink the entire economic lintel based on the strategic importance of technology. In fact, the industrial system as a whole has arrived completely unprepared for an event of this magnitude. Many companies (or entire supply chains) have been stopped with explicit legislative measures since they are not considered safe for workers. Others were allowed to continue, but only to meet citizens’ supply needs. In any case, the companies were asked to take responsibility for their internal security in order to avoid the plague of workers and to transform the workplace into potential epicenters of the disease.

In one case or another, it is clear that the industrial system has not held up. It was not possible to guarantee continuity in the management of goods and a stalemate occurred which spread like wildfire, regardless of the economic sector.

The only strategy useful to stem problems of this type will consist in rethinking the industry in the light of new technologies. To begin with, a process of tight automation of production processes (widespread robotisation) and a digitization of the entire production chains will be the only tools capable of guaranteeing a constant flow of production despite the evolution of this and other future crises.

Of course, this will upset the entire working sector, forcing endless crowds to a mass relocation in different productive sectors. Of this aspect, two processes will be important: the loss of centrality of the worker (and his representation tools) and the consequent need to imagine a form of universal income that protects the weakest part of this part of the population.

3 –New consumption dynamics

From the centrality of soil protection to a revision of the concept of globalization

Almost all of the world’s companies, drunk by the insane delocalization process that has taken place over the past thirty years, have made low-cost labor and ease of transport the centerpiece of the competition and the lock pick through which to make stellar profits.

The choice to produce following the only logic of low wages and transport on a global scale required the need to disembowel and urbanize large areas of the planet, build invasive and polluting logistics platforms, populate the planet of ships, planes, trains for the sole purpose of moving goods produced to other places.

But the obvious ecological disaster that we all know well does not only have a logistical motivation. The growing demand for raw materials and products of animal origin (we will dedicate a chapter to this topic) has forced many countries to privatize and sell immense green areas to replace intensive farms or land to be nourished for these same animals. The role played by the environmental depletion, the heavy deforestation, the violation of the great world ecosystems is central to understanding how Covid 19 has developed and propagated.

To avoid a new epidemic – which is not only possible, but close with an increasing probability rate – it will be necessary to act deeply to change this state of mind. A profound reflection on the dynamics of consumption, together with draconian measures in this sense, will represent the test bench that will allow to remove the danger of a new pandemic. Pandemic that, in the absence of structural responses, we risk to experiment closely once the present emergency is over.

More: the correlation between the spread of the virus, particulate pollution and the circulation of air masses has now become clearer. This evidence – which would also allow to explain some strident statistical elements including the incidence of the virus in highly productive areas such as the Po Valley, Lombardy, Italy – will have to lead to a profound rethinking of the over-urbanized and drastically populated areas.

Many will pay the bill for this pandemic. Among all, the tourism and mass transport sectors. A vertical collapse of tourism-related activities (catering, hospitality, experiences, etc.) will be only the first element. Afterwards we will see a foreseeable contraction of all mobility systems, especially low and medium cost ones, relating to the airline sector. The large companies that deal with transport, of course, will not disappear: but they will offer more expensive services, oriented according to priority criteria and mediated by checks and procedures to validate the health of the traveler.

4 –New public priorities

From different immigration policies to new sources of public funding

Among all the measures that the various States will be called upon to take to face the consequences of the pandemic, we cannot forget three fundamental points. First of all, the review of immigration policies. And this – it must be said immediately to defuse misunderstandings and low-league affiliations – without any regard for the nation from which people come.

Then we will have to discuss the health system and its strategic importance. Strengthening of local hospitals, investments in research, analysis of strategies to prevent mass contagions, emergency plans, training of extraordinary personnel, procurement of health materials through the foundation of nationalized industries. These are the first steps.

Finally – not by chance – we will talk about the sore point. How to supply and feed the state cash, called to an enormous effort during this emergency. A national income recovery strategy that should be grafted onto targeted planetary measures, of course. Measures designed to grant that room for maneuver that each country should allow itself without necessarily feeding a public debt that would sink national economies and reduce States to puppets without real sovereignty.

We will talk about all this in the next pages. Starting from these four areas of analysis, in fact, we will try to imagine what the post Covid 19 future will be like. A future whose sign is not yet possible to investigate but which will certainly lead to a life diametrically different from the one we know.

Big changes

This long premise – necessary to introduce such a vast topic – would suffice to highlight the profound differences that will affect the human community in the immediate future. Hence the need to rethink tomorrow, especially in the characters that until a few months ago appeared “normal” and, in some way, definitively acquired.

We are aware that big changes usually struggle to impose themselves effectively and immediately. The resistance and friction of the many actors involved (fearful of losing their income positions or having to use new efforts to maintain them) usually allows to mitigate the renewal action.

But in this case, we can think that the post-epidemic period will see substantial changes that will not be imposed from above through muscular measures and perceived as forcing. On the contrary, the populations themselves will require an important change of course, in the emotional wake of the events that have just happened and under the threat of new lockdown periods on the horizon.

Understanding the scope of these requests – including the philosophical, moral and human drifts that choices of this type will entail – will be the only useful tool to defuse all the dangerous authoritarian drifts that presuppose the domination of the “few over the many”.

As you will understand by reading these pages, the prospect of a new pandemic could be on the horizon and not behind us. The scientists assure us that it will be so: they have solid arguments to affirm it. Faced with the certainty that events like this simply happen again, understanding the “when” and the “how” and no longer the “if” puts us all in front of the possibility of being actors aware of the developments underway. Our role will be that of remaining vigilant and influencing future choices with the diffusion of knowledge and the election of leaders strongly motivated to change, because if the centers of economic and political power acted blindly and deafly, as they did in the past, the large communities world championships would be relegated to the role of passive spectators to be convinced or, and it would be worse, to that of voters / users to be enrolled.

Here ends this long introduction, these are the premises that we can put at this point. The hand of cards we see right now, at the height of the epidemic, on the eve of new controlled openings. So let’s close with a clarification: this site does not represent a series of news told with descriptive or chronicle intent. On the contrary, it is a reflection free from prejudices on what will happen: a gamble, a hypothesis, a bet. But a bet that is worth making so as not to find oneself unprepared and not be stunned by what the news, the economy and politics will hold for us. This site represents the desire to reflect looking to the future; good or bad, it doesn’t matter.